Civilisation and Informalisation

Civilisation and Informalisation PDF Author: Cas Wouters
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030007987
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Over the last century and a half, manners and formalities in the West have become less status-ridden, stiff and rigid. Debates around Norbert Elias’ theory of civilising processes gave rise to questions of a change in direction of these patterns. The concept of informalisation, which describes these transformations, was first used to analyse the tumultuous changes of the 1960s and 1970s. This increasing informality, leniency and flexibility, comes hand-in-hand with a growing demand on individuals to self-regulate their emotions. This book will stimulate debate around the changes in the standards of manners and emotion regulation, and will generate new avenues of enquiry that focus on issues involving informalisation. The chapters shed light on a variety of such moral and political issues over the last 150 years, offering a new and broader scope on the present social condition of humanity. Civilisation and Informalisation will be an important addition for students and scholars of figurational process sociology, and of broader interest to academics across sociology, social psychology and social history.

Civilisation and Informalisation

Civilisation and Informalisation PDF Author: Cas Wouters
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030007987
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Get Book Here

Book Description
Over the last century and a half, manners and formalities in the West have become less status-ridden, stiff and rigid. Debates around Norbert Elias’ theory of civilising processes gave rise to questions of a change in direction of these patterns. The concept of informalisation, which describes these transformations, was first used to analyse the tumultuous changes of the 1960s and 1970s. This increasing informality, leniency and flexibility, comes hand-in-hand with a growing demand on individuals to self-regulate their emotions. This book will stimulate debate around the changes in the standards of manners and emotion regulation, and will generate new avenues of enquiry that focus on issues involving informalisation. The chapters shed light on a variety of such moral and political issues over the last 150 years, offering a new and broader scope on the present social condition of humanity. Civilisation and Informalisation will be an important addition for students and scholars of figurational process sociology, and of broader interest to academics across sociology, social psychology and social history.

Informalization

Informalization PDF Author: Cas Wouters
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 141293575X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This highly original book explains the sweeping changes to twentieth-century regimes of manners and self. Broad in scope and deep in analytic reach, it provides a wealth of empirical evidence to demonstrate how changes in the code of manners and emotions in four countries (Germany, Netherlands, England and the US) have undergone increasing informalization. From the growing taboo toward the displays of superiority and inferiority and diminishing social and psychological distance between people, it reveals an 'emancipation of emotions' and the new representation of emotion at the centre of personality. This thought-provoking book traces: " The increasing permissiveness in public and private manners, such as introductions, the use of personal pronouns, social kissing, dancing, and dating " The ascent and integration of a wide variety of groups - including the working classes, women, youth and immigrants - and the sweeping changes this has imposed on relations of social inferiority and superiority " The shifts in self-regulation that require manners to seem 'natural', at ease and authentic " Rising external social constraints towards being reflexive, showing presence of mind, considerateness, role-taking, and the ability to tolerate and control conflicts, to compromise " Growing interdependence and social integration, declining power differences and the diminishing social and psychic distance between people Continuing the analysis of Sex and Manners, this book is a dazzling work of historical sociology and a fascinating read.

The social significance of dining out

The social significance of dining out PDF Author: Alan Warde
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526134772
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Dining out used to be considered exceptional; however, the Food Standards Authority reported that in 2014, one meal in six was eaten away from home in Britain. Previously considered a necessary substitute for an inability to obtain a meal in a family home, dining out has become a popular recreational activity for a majority of the population, offering pleasure as well as refreshment. Based on a major mixed-methods research project on dining out in England, this book offers a unique comparison of the social differences between London, Bristol and Preston from 1995 to 2015, charting the dynamic relationship between eating in and eating out. Addressing topics such as the changing domestic divisions of labour around food preparation, the variety of culinary experience for different sections of the population, and class differences in taste and the pleasures and satisfactions associated with dining out, the authors explore how the practice has evolved across the three cities.

In Pursuit of Civility

In Pursuit of Civility PDF Author: Keith Thomas
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1512602825
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Keith Thomas's earlier studies in the ethnography of early modern England, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Man and the Natural World, and The Ends of Life, were all attempts to explore beliefs, values, and social practices in the centuries from 1500 to 1800. In Pursuit of Civility continues this quest by examining what English people thought it meant to be "civilized" and how that condition differed from being "barbarous" or "savage." Thomas shows that the upper ranks of society sought to distinguish themselves from their social inferiors by distinctive ways of moving, speaking, and comporting themselves, and that the common people developed their own form of civility. The belief of the English in their superior civility shaped their relations with the Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish, and was fundamental to their dealings with the native peoples of North America, India, and Australia. Yet not everyone shared this belief in the superiority of Western civilization; the book sheds light on the origins of both anticolonialism and cultural relativism. Thomas has written an accessible history based on wide reading, abounding in fresh insights, and illustrated by many striking quotations and anecdotes from contemporary sources.

The Anthem Companion to Norbert Elias

The Anthem Companion to Norbert Elias PDF Author: Stephen Mennell
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1839986662
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
The book presents an authoritative assessment of Norbert Elias (1897–1990). It recognizes Elias as one of the major contributors to the development of sociological tradition in the past century and charts the continuing relevance of his conception of sociology for contemporary society. Only toward the end of his career as an academic did Elias’s work begin to attract the attention of English-speaking sociologists, historians, and scholars of cultural studies. The book provides an authoritative and broad representation of Elias’s oeuvre and work inspired by it. While Elias is best known for his major study of The Civilizing Process, the reach and subtle depths of Elias’s conception of process sociology has been cemented more recently by the English-language publication of Elias’s collected work of 18 volumes. The baton of process sociology is being passed on to further generations of sociologists. Chapters from leading contributors outline the nature of the sociological practice of Elias and address fundamental questions of historical sociology, democratization, gender, racialization processes, and embodiment. Later chapters highlight the contribution of process sociology for understanding developments in nation, state and global sociology, criminology, art, and education.

The Precariat

The Precariat PDF Author: Guy Standing
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755637097
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
This book presents the new Precariat – the rapidly growing number of people facing lives of insecurity, on zero hours contracts, moving in and out of jobs that give little meaning to their lives. The delivery driver who brings your packages, the uber driver who gets you to work, the security guard at the mall, the carer looking after our elderly...these are The Precariat. Guy Standing investigates this new and growing group, finding a frustrated and angry new underclass who are often ignored by politicians and economists. The rise of zero hours contracts, encouraged by fat cat corporations as risk-free employment, and by silicon valley as a way of outsourcing costs and responsibility, has been exacerbated by the COVID pandemic. At the same time, in its experience of lockdown, the western world is realizing the true value of these nurses, carers and key workers. The answer? The return of income security and meaningful work - the principles 20th century capitalism was built on. By making the fears and desires of the Precariat central to economic thinking, Standing shows how concepts like Basic Income are not just desirable but inevitable, and plots the way to a better future.

Climate Change, Moral Panics and Civilization

Climate Change, Moral Panics and Civilization PDF Author: Amanda Rohloff
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136741275
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
In recent years, interest in climate change has rapidly increased in the social sciences and yet there is still relatively little published material in the field that seeks to understand the development of climate change as a perceived social problem. This book contributes to filling this gap by theoretically linking the study of the historical development of social perceptions about ‘nature’ and climate change with the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias and the study of moral panics. By focusing sociological theory on climate change, this book situates the issue within the broader context of the development of ecological civilizing processes and comes to conceive of contemporary campaigns surrounding climate change as instances of moral panics/civilizing offensives with both civilizing and decivilizing effects. In the process, the author not only proposes a new approach to moral panics research, but makes a fundamental contribution to the development of figuration sociology and the understanding of how climate change has developed as a social problem, with significant implications regarding how to improve the efficacy of climate change campaigns. This highly innovative study should be of interest to students and researchers working in the fields of sociology, environment and sustainability, media studies and political science.

Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation

Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation PDF Author: Dieter Reicher
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3658378492
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
In 1962 Norbert Elias was invited as a temporary professor at the University of Ghana in Legon, Accra. He taught, employed fieldwork, travelled, and met many people in postcolonial Africa. When Elias left Ghana in 1964, he had laid the basic groundwork for a fundamental sociological argument on human societies. The volume on hand is a selection of his unpublished writings based on these experiences. Together they touch upon not only the well-known criticism of Eurocentrism and a developmental perspective but also what could be considered the core of Elias’s work: the concept of civilisation. In a foreword, Dieter Reicher and Adrian Jitschin have endeavoured to explain and break down the relations of Elias’s African experience to the rest of his work and biography. They also clarified some misleading interpretations of Elias’s time in Africa. Finally, Arjan Post has uncovered the previously unknown fascinating story of Elias’ encounter with Malcolm X in an epilogue.

Sex and Manners

Sex and Manners PDF Author: Cas Wouters
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9781412929189
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
`This is a highly original and in many ways brilliant text. It is a model of how historical/process sociological research ought to be conducted and written-up. The author's subtle blending of theory and data is outstanding' - Eric Dunning, Professor of Sociology, University of Leicester `Wouters has written a book both broad in scope and deep in analytic reach. Exploring changes in courtship norms over the last century in English, Dutch , German and American books of manners, he discovers changes which confirm the theory of informalization. Relations between the sexes are, he shows us, less regulated from outside and more from inside. This change calls – paradoxically – for both an emancipation of emotion and an ever sharper cultural eye on ways of managing emotion. The book carries Elias’s classic, The Civilizing Process one giant step further. An important contribution and a fascinating read' - Arlie Russell Hochschild, University of California This dazzling book examines changes in American, Dutch, English and German manners, regarding the changing relationships between men and women. From the disappearance of rules for chaperonage and the rise of new codes for courting, dates, public dances and the work place, it shows how women have become their own chaperone by gaining the rights to pay for themselves, to have a job and be a sexual subject. This original and thought-provoking book: · provides empirical evidence showing how younger generations removed their courting from under parental wings and how the balance of power between the sexes shifted in women’s favour; · monitors changes in codes regarding sexuality by focusing on the balance between the desire for sexual gratification and the longing for enduring intimacy; · documents the balance of controls over sexual impulses and emotions shifting from external social controls to internal ones; · compares nationally different trends, particularly between the USA and Europe, focusing on the American dating system and its resulting double standards; · argues that the initial greater freedom of American women has turned into a deficit. Cas Wouters teaches Sociology at Utrecht University

Theorising Transition

Theorising Transition PDF Author: John Pickles
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415162661
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
Contains 20 essays which discuss the differing forms of capitalism emerging in former socialist economies. Examines, inter alia, industrial restructuring, social and political movements and agrarian reform, and social transformations.