The notion of capital has enjoyed a rich career in the social sciences, its use across a range of subjects and in diverse academic and professional contexts having served to establish its conceptual status as 'given'. With particular attention to human and social capital - including cultural capital - this book traces the roots of this theoretical and conceptual trend to economics, revealing the proliferation of various forms of capital to be based upon an encroachment of the conceptual apparatus of economics into other social sciences. Offering an in-depth, critical analysis of the concepts of human and social capital, as well as their surrounding theories, Anti-Capital: Human, Social and Cultural proposes an alternative theoretical framework, whilst better explaining the realities that they mask in economic terms. A rigorous exploration of the most popular forms of 'capital' in the contemporary social sciences, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of sociology, political and social theory, demography and economics.

This book offers an in-depth analysis of sociology, e.g. such classics as Weber, Parsons and Homans, and its adjacent social sciences with special reference to economics, including public choice theory, property rights theory, the Austrian school and others. This discussion submits many fresh observations; giving the theories under consideration their due, it at the same time exposes their flaws. In addition, the book contains a constructive programme of the research field in question, termed socio-economic structuralism, which involves many theoretical innovations, notions of ownership and class. This positive theory draws on, but is far from mimicking, achievements of the thinkers considered in the remaining parts of the book.

From Ancient Greece to the present day, Trivium 21c explores whether a contemporary trivium (Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric) can unite progressive and traditionalist institutions, teachers, politicians and parents in the common pursuit of providing a great education for our children in the 21st century. Education policy and practice is a battleground. Traditionalists argue for the teaching of a privileged type of hard knowledge and deride soft skills. Progressives deride learning about great works of the past preferring '21c skills' (21st century skills) such as creativity and critical thinking. Whilst looking for a school for his daughter, the author became frustrated by schools' inability to value knowledge, as well as creativity, foster discipline alongside free-thinking, and value citizenship alongside independent learning. Drawing from his work as a creative teacher, Robinson finds inspiration in the Arts and the need to nurture learners with the ability to deal with the uncertainties of our age. Named one of Book Authority's best education books of all time.

Borrowing terminology from the economic discipline—specifically the concept of "capital"—has led to an abundance of new terms in the social sciences: human capital, social capital, and cultural capital, to name the most prominent representatives on an ever-growing list. In this interdisciplinary transaction, the concept is borrowed and the original meaning extended until the new concepts often have nothing left in common with their initial referents. Here Jacek Tittenbrun offers a critical analysis of human, social, and cultural capital on the basis of their uses and misuses across a wide range of social sciences, simultaneously revealing the source of conceptual diffusion in the real world. He presents a two-pronged analysis of an intellectual fashion popular in the social sciences and offers a critical analysis of a range of concepts constructed around the common core of "capital." The analysis is innovative, as it is underpinned by a theoretical framework rooted in economic sociology and the concept of ownership in particular. The approach is one of the sociology of knowledge coupled with a substantive critique-application of the given concepts. The volume reveals a range of processes in the real world that account for the conceptual diffusion. The general reader will be drawn to the discussion in the second half of the book, a study of a variety of relatable real life situations that illuminate privatization and commodification in our lives.

This book, from one of international social work’s leading radical educators, provides a richly compelling argument for the profession to become more critical and dissenting. Addressing the troubled times in which we find ourselves, Garrett’s book examines a broad range of theoretical frameworks and draws on diverse writers, such as Marx, Foucault, Brown, Zuboff, Rancière, Wacquant, Arendt, Levinas, Fanon and Gramsci. The author’s panoramic vision encompasses Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Algeria, Israel/Palestine and China. Timely, lively and accessible, this book speaks directly to some of the main preoccupations of our era. Readers will be encouraged to relate developments in social work to key themes circulating around migration, the threat of neo-fascism, surveillance culture, colonialism, the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic. Imbued with a sense of hope for a brighter future, this book encourages a new generation of social work students to recognise and examine the importance of critical theory for understanding the structural forces shaping their lives and the lives of those with whom they work and provide services. This book is vital, indispensable and essential reading for social work students and other readers, throughout the world, seeking to make the connection between social work, social theory and sociology. Paul Michael Garrett—probably the most important critical social work theorist in the English-speaking world—is a remarkable and very productive critical thinker. In this book he deals with issues of migration, the threat of neo-fascism, surveillance culture, colonialism, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the COVID-19 pandemic... Insightful and inspiring, thought-provoking and comprehensive in addressing timely critical issues for social work globally. (Filipe Duarte, International Journal of Social Welfare, 2021)

In Jews, Confucians, and Protestants: Cultural Capital and the End of Multiculturalism, Lawrence E. Harrison takes the politically incorrect stand that not all cultures are created equally. Analyzing the performance of 117 countries, grouped by predominant religion, Harrison argues for the superiority of those cultures that emphasize Jewish, Confucian, or Protestant values.