Hidden Technocrats

Hidden Technocrats PDF Author: Hansfried Kellner
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412825092
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In the early 1970s many social scientists and critics noted the emergence of a new elite based on the "Knowledge Industry" and pitted against the old business-based middle class both politically and culturally. This work attempts to delineate the features of the New Class phenomenon and map its structural location in contemporary American and Western European societies.

Hidden Technocrats

Hidden Technocrats PDF Author: Hansfried Kellner
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412825092
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In the early 1970s many social scientists and critics noted the emergence of a new elite based on the "Knowledge Industry" and pitted against the old business-based middle class both politically and culturally. This work attempts to delineate the features of the New Class phenomenon and map its structural location in contemporary American and Western European societies.

Peter Berger and the Study of Religion

Peter Berger and the Study of Religion PDF Author: Paul Heelas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134608683
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Peter Berger is the most influential contemporary sociologist of religion. This collection of essays is the first in-depth study of his contribution to the field, providing a comprehensive introduction to his work and to current thought in the study of religion. Themes addressed include: * Berger on religion and theology * Religion, spirituality and the discontents of modernity * Secularization and de-secularization A postscript by Peter Berger, responding to the essays, completes this overview of this major figure's work.

Mobilizing Regions, Mobilizing Europe

Mobilizing Regions, Mobilizing Europe PDF Author: Sebastian M. Buettner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113645943X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Regional development strategies are becoming more similar all around Europe, even though regional differences are more pronounced than ever and many European regions have become more autonomous actors. This thesis of a peculiar standardized diversification of sub-national space in the modern European Union is the point of departure of this book. Based upon the analytical premises of Stanford School Sociological Institutionalism, Sebastian M. Büttner studies regional mobilization in contemporary Europe from a new and innovative perspective. He highlights the importance of scientific expertise and global scientific models in contemporary regional development practice, and exemplifies their significance with the example of region-building in Poland in the course of EU integration. This new wave of regional mobilization is not just conceived as an effect of local, national or European politics, but as an expression of a larger conceptual shift in governing society and space. This well researched and clearly argued book not only provides fresh insights into region-building and regionalization in contemporary European space, but also contributes to the new sociology of Europeanization. It will be an illuminating read for scholars and students in Sociology, European and EU studies, International Relations, Cultural Studies, Geography, Regional Science, Polish Studies and related subject areas.

The Waning of the Welfare State

The Waning of the Welfare State PDF Author: Anton Zijderveld
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351289780
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
The welfare state in postwar Western Europe has been extended and intensified in a spectacular manner. Today, "welfare" represents a complex mix of services covering health, education, welfare, the arts, leisure, and social security. Anton C. Zijderveld is of the opinion that Europe's vast, comprehensive welfare state is becoming leaner and meaner, heading down a more sober path toward decentralization and deregulation, which only, but not merely, secures order for its citizens and shields society's vulnerable. As the millennium approaches, Zijderveld believes Europe is experiencing a cultural renaissance and a socioeconomic and political reformation in which the market will flourish and civil society will prosper. The Waning of the Welfare State focuses on the transformation of the welfare state in Europe over a four-decade period. Zijderveld employs the democratic triangle theoretical model, in which democracy is viewed as a system in which state, market, and civil society are held in precious balance. If one component supersedes the other two, democracy is endangered. In its 1960s and 1970s heyday, the state took center stage at the expense of the market and civil society; social democracy was the prevailing ideology. In the 1980s the market triumphed, often at the expense of both the state and civil society; this was the decade of liberalism. Today, civil society prevails, albeit at risk of being injurious to state and market. Ideologically, this is the decade of conservatism. Zijderveld sees a future "Americanization" of European social policy producing a fortuitously balanced coalition of social democracy, liberalism, and conservatism; a place where safety and order, prosperity and economic participation, and social participation and meaningful interactions flourish equally. This transformation carries many risks. But it will, in the end, strengthen Europe's political, economic, and sociocultural stamina. If it also draws the Atlantic partners closer together, as Zijderveld believes it does, the chances of another European communist, libertarian, or fascist Gtterdommerung will remain remote. Zijderveld presents useful concepts in a highly organized fashion. He has produced a very important book for American readers who will, hopefully, discover, beyond the often vast differences, some basic similarities of structures and developments within the European welfare state.

History Without A Subject

History Without A Subject PDF Author: David Ashley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429968566
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This book, beginning with an analysis of how changes in the global economy are affecting the lives of ordinary Americans, suggests that the postmodern condition can be likened to the balkanization of culture and society and the "Brazilianization" of politics and the economy.

Beyond the Global Culture War

Beyond the Global Culture War PDF Author: Adam K. Webb
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135442592
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
"Beyond the Global Culture War" presents a cross-cultural critique of global liberalism and argues for a broad-based challenge that can meet it on its own scale. Adam Webb is one of our most exciting and original young scholars, and this book is certain to generate many new debates. This timely volume probes many of the key challenges we face in the new millennium. This is essential reading for all students of politics and globalization.

Theories of the Information Society

Theories of the Information Society PDF Author: Frank Webster
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317964942
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Information is regarded as a distinguishing feature of our world. Where once economies were built on industry and conquest, we are now part of a global information economy. Pervasive media, expanding information occupations and the development of the internet convince many that living in an Information Society is the destiny of us all. Coping in an era of information flows, of virtual relationships and breakneck change poses challenges to one and all. In Theories of the Information Society Frank Webster sets out to make sense of the information explosion, taking a sceptical look at what thinkers mean when they refer to the Information Society, and critically examining the major post-war approaches to informational development. The fourth edition of this classic study brings it up to date with new research and with social and technological changes – from the ‘Twitter Revolutions’ of North Africa, to financial crises that introduced the worst recession in a life time, to the emergence of social media and blogging – and reassesses the work of key theorists in the light of these changes. More outspoken than in previous editions, Webster urges abandonment of Information Society scenarios, preferring analysis of the informatization of long-established relationships. This interdisciplinary book is essential reading for those trying to make sense of social and technological change in the post-war era. It addresses issues of central concern to students of sociology, politics, geography, communications, information science, cultural studies, computing and librarianship.

Science and the Good

Science and the Good PDF Author: James Davison Hunter
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300240406
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Why efforts to create a scientific basis of morality are neither scientific nor moral: “Important and timely.”—The Wall Street Journal In this illuminating book, James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky trace the origins and development of the centuries-long, passionate, but ultimately failed quest to discover a scientific foundation for morality. The “new moral science” led by such figures as E.O. Wilson, Patricia Churchland, Sam Harris, Jonathan Haidt, and Joshua Greene is only the newest manifestation of that quest. Though claims for its accomplishments are often wildly exaggerated, this new iteration has been no more successful than its predecessors. But rather than giving up in the face of this failure, the new moral science has taken a surprising turn. Whereas earlier efforts sought to demonstrate what is right and wrong, the new moral scientists have concluded, ironically, that right and wrong don’t actually exist. Their (perhaps unwitting) moral nihilism turns the science of morality into a social engineering project. If there is nothing moral for science to discover, the science of morality becomes, at best, a feeble program to achieve arbitrary societal goals. Concise and rigorously argued, Science and the Good is a definitive critique of a would-be science that has gained extraordinary influence in public discourse today—and an exposé of that project’s darker turn. “Science and the Good is a closely argued, always accessible riposte to those who think scientific study can explain, improve or even supersede morality . . . A generous and thoughtful critique.” —The Daily Telegraph

Cultural Economy

Cultural Economy PDF Author: Paul du Gay
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 144622578X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
Phrases such as `corporate culture′, `market culture′ and the `knowledge economy′, have now become familiar clarion calls in the world of work. They are calls that have echoed through organizations and markets. Clearly something is happening to the ways markets and organizations are being represented and intervened in and this signals a need to reassess their very constitution. In particular, the once clean divide that placed the economy, dealt with mainly by economists, on one side, and culture, addressed chiefly by those in anthropology, sociology and the other `cultural sciences′, on the other, can no longer hold. This volume presents the work of an international group of academics from a range of disciplines including sociology, media and cultural studies, social anthropology and geography, all of whom are involved not only in thinking `culture′ into the economy but thinking culture and economy together.

White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism

White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism PDF Author: Roger Hewitt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139443524
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The murder of Stephen Lawrence led to the widest review of institutional racism seen in the UK. Sections of the white working-class communities in south London near to the scene of the murder, however, displayed deep hostility to the equalities and multiculturalist practice of the local state and other agencies. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, this book relates these phenomena to the 'backlash' to multiculturalism evident during the 1990s in the USA, Australia, Canada, the UK and other European countries. It examines these within the unfolding social and political responses to race equalities in the UK and the USA from the 1960s to the present in the context of changes in social class and national political agendas. This book is unique in linking a detailed study of a community at a time of its critical importance to national debates over racism and multiculturalism, to historically wider international economic and social trends.