This volume offers insights into ongoing global socioeconomic transformations by directing attention to the significance of labour, work, craft, community, social institutions, social movements and emergent subjectivities in different parts of the world. This is in contrast to theories that project globalisation as a process driven exclusively by global capital and technology, a scheme in which some parts of the world forever will be ‘peripheries’ supplying labour and natural resources, the lives and work of those people purged of originality, meaning and value by the very construct that describes them. Together the chapters in the book present a nonessentialist and non-linear reading of global transformations by examining the relations and adaptations between economy, polity and society, which remains a fundamentally unresolved question in the social sciences. Combining a wealth of conceptual and empirical investigations, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of sociology, globalisation studies, anthropology, economics, development studies and area studies.

This book shows the important links between social conditions and health and begins to describe the processes through which these health inequalities may be generated. It reviews a range of methodologies that could be used by health researchers in this field and proposes innovative future research directions.

Before the advent of synthetic fibers and cargo containers, jute sacks were the preferred packaging material of global trade, transporting the world's grain, cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee, wool, guano, and bacon. Jute was the second-most widely consumed fiber in the world, after cotton. While the sack circulated globally, the plant was cultivated almost exclusively by peasant smallholders in a small corner of the world: the Bengal delta. This book examines how jute fibers entangled the delta's peasantry in the rhythms and vicissitudes of global capital. Taking readers from the nineteenth-century high noon of the British Raj to the early years of post-partition Pakistan in the mid-twentieth century, Tariq Omar Ali traces how the global connections wrought by jute transformed every facet of peasant life: practices of work, leisure, domesticity, and sociality; ideas and discourses of justice, ethics, piety, and religiosity; and political commitments and actions. Ali examines how peasant life was structured and restructured with oscillations in global commodity markets, as the nineteenth-century period of peasant consumerism and prosperity gave way to debt and poverty in the twentieth century. A Local History of Global Capital traces how jute bound the Bengal delta's peasantry to turbulent global capital, and how global commodity markets shaped everyday peasant life and determined the difference between prosperity and poverty, survival and starvation.

Can the needs of capital ever be reconciled with the needs of people? To what extent can social policies bridge the gap between social rights and human welfare, and economic competitiveness in a global world? Building on his previous writings on political economy and human need, Ian Gough throws new light on these perennial questions in a series of penetrating and original essays. The conclusion is upbeat: social policy still has the potential to narrow (though never close) the gap between the drive of capital and the universal needs of people.

This work presents an introduction to the concept of social capital - a term which refers to the social networks, informal structures and norms that facilitate individual and collective action.

1. Theories of Capital: The Historical Foundation. 3. 2. Social Capital: Capital Captured through Social Relations. 19. 3. Resources, Hierarchy, Networks, and Homophily: The Structural Foundation. 29. 4. Resources, Motivations, and Interactions: The Action Foundation. 41. 5. The Theory and Theoretical Propositions. 55. 6. Social Capital and Status Attainment: A Research Tradition. 78. 7. Inequality in Social Capital: A Research Agenda. 99. 8. Social Capital and the Emergence of Social Structure: A Theory of Rational Choice. 127. 9. Reputation and Social Capital: The Rational Basis for Social Exchange. 143. 10. Social Capital in Hierarchical Structures. 165. 11. Institutions, Networks, and Capital Building: Societal Transformations. 184. 12. Cybernetworks and the Global Village: The Rise of Social Capital. 210. 13. The Future of the Theory. 243. . References. 251. . Index. 267.

This collection of essays on Trans-Mediterranean Francospheres offers an original examination of cultural production and the flows between urban capitals and capital in and of a selection of Mediterranean cities and sites. In three parts, the book covers both familiar and overlooked terrain, in chapters which examine writing the city, the transit between different poles, film and EU designated cultural capitals. The collection therefore brings together texts and their critical readings in new comparative ways. Following Jacques Derrida's peregrinations in L'Autre Cap (1991), the volume interrogates the what of Europe; the when or where of Paris; the who of the Mediterranean. Or might the Mediterranean fall under the rubric of paleonomy, that is, as Michael Naas recalls Derrida's words in Positions: the 'strategic' necessity that requires the occasional maintenance of an old name in order to launch a new concept. Taking this forward, we understand the Mediterranean as an old name to launch a new concept and the essays in the book each reflect on this in different ways. Issues concerning identity are challenged, since a Metropolitan, European, Arab or African identity may be preferred over a Mediterranean one. As borders become reinforced in the region, trans-Mediterranean bridging narratives may be thwarted, especially by those who write across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, in the face of the contemporary refugee crisis. Finally, chapters explore what it means to define a Mediterranean city-such as Marseille as European Capital of Culture-and interrogate how this feeds into the cultural production of a city whose multi-ethnic identities are as outward-looking towards North Africa as they are inward towards the French capital.