Polity Press - Böcker

The pace of modern life is undoubtedly speeding up, yet this acceleration does not seem to have made us any happier or more content. If acceleration is the problem, then the solution, argues Hartmut Rosa in this major new work, lies in resonance. ...

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Mans best friend, domesticated since prehistoric times, a travelling companion for explorers and artists, thinkers and walkers, equally happy curled up by the fire and bounding through the great outdoorsdogs matter to us because we love them. But ...

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In our busy and hurried lives, we are losing the ability to be inactive. Human existence becomes fully absorbed by activity even leisure, treated as a respite from work, becomes part of the same logic. Intense life today means first of all more pe...

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If youre woke, youre left. If youre left, youre woke. We blur the terms, assuming that if youre one you must be the other. That, Susan Neiman argues, is a dangerous mistake. The confusion arises because woke is fuelled by traditionally leftwing em...

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Throughout the world, democracy is under assault from various populist movements and ideologies. And, throughout the world, the same enigma: why is it that political figures or governments, who have no qualms about aggravating social inequalities,...

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Politicians invoke grand ideas: social justice, democracy, community, liberty, equality. But what do these ideas really mean? How can politicians across the political spectrum appeal to the same values? This fourth edition of Adam Swift's hig...

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Existentialism: An Introduction has established itself as the most comprehensive and accessible book on the subject available. In this fully revised and expanded second edition, Kevin Aho draws on a wide range of existentialist thinkers from both ...

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Ditching the stuffy hang-ups and benighted sexual traditionalism of the past is an unambiguously positive thing. The sexual revolution has liberated us to enjoy a heady mixture of erotic freedom and personal autonomy. Right? Wrong, argues Louise P...

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Our media systems are in crisis. Run by unaccountable corporations and dominated by agendas and algorithms that are shrouded in mystery, these formerly trusted sources of information and entertainment have lost their way. As consumers, we have ple...

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Few of us have been spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we're abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming ...

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The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nigh...

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Disasters kill, maim, and generate increasingly large economic losses. But they do not wreak their damage equally across populations, and every disaster has social dimensions at its very core. This important book sheds light on the social conditio...

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The second edition of Mildred Blaxter's successful and highly respected book offers a comprehensive and engaging introduction to the key debates surrounding the concept of health today. It discusses how health is defined, constructed, experie...

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Building on three decades of comparative research on marginality, ethnicity, and penality in the postindustrial metropolis, Loc Wacquant offers a novel interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu as urban theorist. He invites us to explore the city through ...

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Capitalism appears to be endlessly in crisis but without ever loosening its hold on our lives. New modes of racism and exclusion emerge, but the old ones never go away. We continue to struggle to live and survive in its wake but are unable, still ...

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The emergence of modern sciences in the seventeenth century profoundly renewed our understanding of nature. For the last three centuries new ideas of nature have been continually developed by theology, politics, economics, and science, especially ...

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Western thinking has long been dominated by essence, by a preoccupation with that which dwells in itself and delimits itself from the other. By contrast, Far Eastern thought is centred not on essence but on absence. The fundamental topos of Far Ea...

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In the early hours of 24 February 2022, Russian forces attacked Ukraine. The brutality of the Russian assault has horrified the world. But Russians themselves appear to be watching an entirely different war one in which they are the courageous und...

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In times of entrenched social upheaval and multiple crises, we need the kind of social theory that is prepared to look at the big picture, analyze the broad developmental features of modern societies, their structural conditions and dynamics, and ...

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'Globalization' is a word that is currently much in use. This book is an attempt to show that there is far more to globalization than its surface manifestations. Unpacking the social roots and social consequences of globalizing processes...

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This is the fifth and final volume based on the lectures given by Pierre Bourdieu at the Collge de France in the early 1980s under the title General Sociology. In these lectures, Bourdieu sets out to define and defend sociology as an intellectual ...

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For over twenty years, Beverley Clack and Brian R. Clack's distinctive and thought-provoking introduction to the philosophy of religion has been of enormous value to students and scholars, providing an approach to the subject that is bold and...

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Right now, someone, somewhere is being cancelled. Off-the-cuff tweets or "harmless" office banter have the potential to wreck lives. The Left condemns the Right and the bigotry of the old elites. The Right complains about brain-dead poli...

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The driving cultural force of that form of life we call modern is the desire to make the world controllable. Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world only then do we feel touched, moved and alive. A wor...

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Employment relations in advanced, post-industrial democracies have become increasingly insecure and uncertain as the risks associated with work are being shifted from employers and governments to workers. Arne L. Kalleberg examines the impact of t...

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We live in an age of artificial intelligence. Machines think and act in ever more complex ways, making suggestions and decisions on our behalf. While AI might be seen as practical and profitable, issues of data surveillance, algorithmic control, a...

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This book does to sex what other sociologists did to culture: it shows that sex, no longer defined by religion, now plays a role in the economy and can yield tangible benefits in the realms of money, status, and occupation. How do people accumulat...

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Social work is the profession that claims to intervene to enhance people's well-being. However, social workers have played a low-key role in environmental issues that increasingly impact on people's well-being, both locally and globally....

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Searching the internet for health information or using health apps on mobile devices has become part of our daily routine, yet can be just as disempowering as empowering. This engaging overview critically examines the theoretical underpinning of d...

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This exciting new book presents the field of social demography, animating the study of population with a vibrant sociological imagination. Gregg Lee Carter provides multiple demonstrations of how taking a demographic perspective can give us a bett...

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