Darren Thiel – författare

Building workers constitute between five and ten per cent of the total labour market in almost every country of the world. They construct, repair and maintain the vital physical infrastructure of our societies, and we rely upon and trust their achievements every day. Yet we know surprisingly little about builders, their cultures, the organization of their work or the business relations that constitute their industry. This book, based on one-year’s participant observation on a London construction site, redresses this gap in our knowledge by taking a close-up look at a section of building workers and businessmen.

By examining the organizational features of the building project and describing the skill, sweat, malingering, humour and humanity of the building workers, Thiel illustrates how the builders were mostly autonomous from formal managerial control, regulating their own outputs and labour markets. This meant that the men’s ethnic, class and gender-bound cultural activities fundamentally underpinned the organization of their work and the broader construction economy, and thereby highlights the continuing centrality of class-bound culture and social stratification in a post-industrial, late modern world. Thiel outlines the on-going connections and intersections between economy, state, class and culture, ultimately showing how these factors interrelated to produce the building industry, its builders, and its buildings.

Based predominately on cultural and economic sociology, this book will also be of interest to those working in the fields of gender and organizational studies; social class and inequality; migration and ethnicity; urban studies; and social identities.

Building workers constitute between five and ten per cent of the total labour market in almost every country of the world. They construct, repair and maintain the vital physical infrastructure of our societies, and we rely upon and trust their achievements every day. Yet we know surprisingly little about builders, their cultures, the organization of their work or the business relations that constitute their industry. This book, based on one-year’s participant observation on a London construction site, redresses this gap in our knowledge by taking a close-up look at a section of building workers and businessmen.

By examining the organizational features of the building project and describing the skill, sweat, malingering, humour and humanity of the building workers, Thiel illustrates how the builders were mostly autonomous from formal managerial control, regulating their own outputs and labour markets. This meant that the men’s ethnic, class and gender-bound cultural activities fundamentally underpinned the organization of their work and the broader construction economy, and thereby highlights the continuing centrality of class-bound culture and social stratification in a post-industrial, late modern world. Thiel outlines the on-going connections and intersections between economy, state, class and culture, ultimately showing how these factors interrelated to produce the building industry, its builders, and its buildings.

Based predominately on cultural and economic sociology, this book will also be of interest to those working in the fields of gender and organizational studies; social class and inequality; migration and ethnicity; urban studies; and social identities.

Comprehensive, critical and accessible, Criminology: A Sociological Introduction offers an authoritative overview of the study of criminology, from early theoretical perspectives to pressing contemporary issues such as the globalisation of crime, crimes against the environment, terrorism and cybercrime.

Authored by an internationally renowned and experienced group of authors in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, this is a truly international criminology text that delves into areas that other texts may only reference. It includes substantive chapters on the following topics:

• Histories of crime;

• Theoretical approaches to crime and the issue of social change;

• Victims and victimisation;

• Crime, emotion and social psychology;

• Drugs, alcohol, health and crime;

• Criminal justice and the sociology of punishment;

• Green criminology;

• Crime and the media;

• Terrorism, state crime and human rights.

The new edition fuses global perspectives in criminology from the contexts of post-Brexit Britain and America in the age of Trump, and from the Global South. It contains new chapters on cybercrime; crimes of the powerful; organised crime; life-course approaches to understanding delinquency and desistance; and futures of crime, control and criminology.

Each chapter includes a series of critical thinking questions, suggestions for further study and a list of useful websites and resources. The book also contains a glossary of the criminological terms and concepts used in the book. It is the perfect text for students looking for a broad, critical and international introduction to criminology, and it is essential reading for those looking to expand their ‘criminological imagination’.