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Leon Mayhew describes a 'New Public' which has replaced the modern public of the Enlightenment with an unstable social order subject to the rhetorical workings of mass communications cultures. Bridging Parsons and Habermas, he offers a new discursive theory of social influence in the age of advertising, lobbying, and media manipulation.

Laura Desfor Edles takes a distinctively culturalist approach to Spain's transition to democracy after Franco. She uses textual interpretation of Spanish newspapers to examine the 'strategy of consensus' deployed at this time and uncovers the processes of symbolization and ritualization behind the political transition.

This is the first book to explore how lesbians and gay men use history to define themselves as social, cultural, and political subjects. Analyses of historiography, ancient Greece, Stonewall, and postmodern historical texts show how historical representations inform and reflect queer subjectivity.

This book provides a powerful theoretical framework for understanding cross-national cultural differences. Focusing on France and America, researchers from both countries analyse varying attitudes on a diverse range of topics from racism and sexual harrassment to identity politics, publishing, journalism, the arts and the environment.

This book challenges the myth that individualism necessarily weakens commitments to the common good. Examining environmental and other activist groups in which individualism enhances political commitment, it invites us to rethink understandings of commitment, community, and individualism in a post-traditional world.

What is the morally acceptable response to images of starving children, bombed villages and mass graves brought to us by television? Luc Boltanski discusses the ways in which spectators have tried to respond to what they have seen and asks if there remains a place for pity in modern politics.

This book examines the effects of poverty and class through the personal testimony of the people living in the industrial area of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, England. It argues that the themes and problems identified in this book will be familiar to marginalized groups everywhere.

Chandra Mukerji challenges the association of state power with socials structures alone in a fascinating cultural analysis of how Louis XIV used Versailles to equate lawlike land control with the order of nature, showcasing distinctively French skills and design in a formal paralleling of military feats of engineering.

The first comprehensive account of the development of the African-American Press in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, this book compares 'mainstream' and African-American media coverage of racial crises such as the Watts riot, Rodney King, the LA uprisings and the O. J. Simpson trial.

To Rule Jerusalem is a historical and ethnographic account of the twentieth-century struggle for Jerusalem. The volume examines how Jerusalem is doubly divided, between Israelis and Palestinians and, within each community, between religious zealots and secularists. The book is based on hundreds of revealing interviews.

Challenging Diversity looks at the key issues facing social, political and cultural theory. Taking examples from religion, gender, sexuality, state policy-making and intentional communities, it maps new ways of understanding equality, explores the politics of its pursuit, and asks what kinds of diversity does a radical version of equality engender.

A unique and vivid study of American civic life which shows how citizens talk politics in private, while avoiding politics in public. Nina Eliasoph challenges received ideas about culture, power, and democracy and exposes the hard work of producing political apathy.

Building on their studies of sixties culture and theory of cognitive praxis, Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison examine the mobilization of cultural traditions and formulation of new collective identities through the music of activism. They combine a sophisticated theoretical argument with historical-empirical studies of nineteenth-century populists and twentieth-century labour and ethnic movements, focusing on the interrelations between music and social movements in the United States and the transfer of those experiences to Europe. Specific chapters examine folk and country music, black music, music of the 1960s movements, and music of the Swedish progressive movement. This highly readable book is among the first to link the political sociology of social movements to cultural theory.

Piotr Sztompka presents a comprehensive theoretical account of trust, explaining its meaning, foundations and functions. Professor Sztompka supports his claims with an impressive empirical study of trust, carried out in post-communist Poland. Trust: A Sociological Theory is a major work of social theory.

The Making of English National Identity is a fascinating 2003 exploration of Englishness and what it means to be English rather than British. Drawing on historical, sociological and literary theory, Kumar examines the rise of English nationalism and issues of race and ethnicity from the Norman Conquest to the present day.

Matters of Culture, first published in 2004, is an introduction to some of the best theorizing in cultural sociology, focusing in particular on questions of power, the sacred and cultural production. Contains a major theoretical introduction that lays out the internal structure of the field and contributions from leading academics.

A pathbreaking study, based on extensive interviews, which examines the place of Holocaust memory in the identity and sociocultural adjustment of Jews born and raised in Germany since the Holocaust. Lynn Rapaport considers modern Jewish identity and how collective memory affects ethnicity.

American patriotism is a civil religion organized around a sacred flag. Its citizens periodically sacrifice their children to unify the group. Using an anthropological approach, this groundbreaking study explains the rituals of American nationalism, and analyses the malaise pervading post-war American society.

This book is a comparative study of the interaction between monasticism and society in Theravada Buddhism and Medieval Catholicism. It investigates the forces that shaped the ideological power of religious elites in the historical framework of the Great Traditions.

Kenneth Tucker examines the evolving productivist discourse of the Confederation Generale du Travail at the turn of the century and offers a Habermasian twist to the recent linguistic turn in labour history. His study makes an eloquent case for using history as a cultural resource in confronting our own fin de siecle.

Suzanne Kirschner traces psychoanalytic theories of the self back to biblical and neoplatonic roots to show that religious themes and values still influence how modern psychologists make sense of the human condition.

This volume brings together seminal work in an important intellectual tradition in sociology. Sections on Culture as Text and Code, The Production and Reception of Culture, and Culture in Action contain theoretical and empirical contributions addressing the key debates in cultural sociology.