This argues that many forms of domination today cannot be fitted into traditional theories and shows the applicability of Weber's theory of social closure to the empirical case of language conflict in Quebec.

Laying the foundations of a theory of ‘international social closure’ this book examines how actors compete for a seat at the table in the management of international society and how that competition stratifies the international domain. In a broad historical survey from the ‘Family of Civilised Nations’, through the Great Powers’ club, to the G7 and G20 today, Naylor investigates the politics of membership in the exclusive clubs that manage international society and ensure its survival, providing us with a new way to think about how status competition has changed over time and what this means for international politics today. With its sociologically grounded theory, this book advances English School scholarship and transforms the study of contemporary summitry, providing a ground-breaking approach rooted in archival research, elite interviews, and ethnographic participant observation. This book is of interest to international relations scholars interested in the ‘expansion’ and globalisation of international society, the history of international summits, and transformations in international order, as well as to those examining concepts including stratification, hierarchy, and networked governance. With its emphasis on non-state actors in global governance, scholars and practitioners alike working on/for civil society will also find this research of great value.

In his book On Social Closure, Jürgen Mackert seeks to reinvigorate the idea of social closure and bring it back as a basic sociological concept for understanding the strategies and processes powerful groups use to improve their life chances at the expense of the less powerful. To do this, he puts forward a mechanism-based explanatory approach that makes it possible to empirically study social closure through exclusion in the context of neoliberalism; exploitation within global capitalism; and elimination in the ongoing legacy of settler colonialism. Further, he identifies two critical social mechanisms to explain how human beings are denied access to resources, rights, or critical networks and to bring power dynamics into closure analysis.

Do nation-states act to facilitate or limit immigration and integration, how and why? How do nation-states themselves transform in understanding and interpreting rights respond to immigration? Does the European Union make a difference in terms of how immigrants are perceived or how they act as stakeholders in liberal democracies?

Social Capital, the advantage created by location in social structure, is a critical element in business strategy. Who has it, how it works, and how to develop it have become key questions as markets, organizations, and careers become more and more dependent on informal, discretionary relationships. The formal organization deals with accountability; Everything else flows through the informal: advice, coordination, cooperation friendship, gossip, knowledge, trust. Informal relations have always been with us, they have always mattered. What is new is the range of activities in which they now matter, and the emerging clarity we have about how they create advantage for certain people at the expense of others. This is done by brokerage and closure. Ronald S. Burt builds upon his celebrated work in this area to explore the nature of brokerage and closure. Brokerage is the activity of people who live at the intersection of social worlds, who have a vision advantage of seeing and developing good ideas, an advantage which can be seen in their compensation, recognition, and the responsibility they're entrusted with in comparison to their peers. Closure is the tightening of coordination in a closed network of people, and people who do this do well as a complement to brokers because of the trust and alignment they create. Brokerage and Closure explores how these elements work together to define social capital, showing how in the business world reputation has come to replace authority, pursued opportunity assignment, and reward has come to be associated with achieving competitive advantage in a social order of continuous disequilibrium.

Explains how actors control access to international resources, creating a stratified international system of political equals and unequals.

Max Weber is one of the world's most important social scientists, but he is also one of the most notoriously difficult to understand. This revised, updated, and expanded edition of The Max Weber Dictionary reflects up-to-the-moment threads of inquiry and introduces the most recent translations and references. Additionally, the authors include new entries designed to help researchers use Weber's ideas in their own work; they illuminate how Weber himself thought theorizing should occur and how he went about constructing a theory. More than an elementary dictionary, however, this work makes a contribution to the general culture and legacy of Weber's work. In addition to entries on broad topics like religion, law, and the West, the completed German definitive edition of Weber's work (Max Weber Gesamtausgabe) necessitated a wealth of new entries and added information on topics like pragmatism and race and racism. Every entry in the dictionary delves into Weber scholarship and acts as a point of departure for discussion and research. As such, this book will be an invaluable resource to general readers, students, and scholars alike.