Society Explained introduces students to key concepts in sociology through engaging narrative examples. After an overview of the history of sociology, the book walks readers through subjects that include individualism; culture; socialization and imagination; values, money, and politics; marriage and family; religious diversity; and education and social change. Nathan Rousseau engages readers with personal examples and those drawn from wider society. Each chapter covers leading thinkers and critical concepts, and chapters build on each other to helps readers acquire a holistic view of society and their role in it. This concise book is an ideal introduction to the sociological imagination.

How historically rooted power dynamics have shaped the evolution of civil society globally. The civil society sector—made up of millions of nonprofit organizations, associations, charitable institutions, and the volunteers and resources they mobilize—has long been the invisible subcontinent on the landscape of contemporary society. For the past twenty years, however, scholars under the umbrella of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project have worked with statisticians to assemble the first comprehensive, empirical picture of the size, structure, financing, and role of this increasingly important part of modern life. What accounts for the enormous cross-national variations in the size and contours of the civil society sector around the world? Drawing on the project’s data, Lester M. Salamon, S. Wojciech Sokolowski, Megan A. Haddock, and their colleagues raise serious questions about the ability of the field’s currently dominant preference and sentiment theories to account for these variations in civil society development. Instead, using statistical and comparative historical materials, the authors posit a novel social origins theory that roots the variations in civil society strength and composition in the relative power of different social groupings and institutions during the transition to modernity. Drawing on the work of Barrington Moore, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and others, Explaining Civil Society Development provides insight into the nonprofit sector’s ability to thrive and perform its distinctive roles. Combining solid data and analytical clarity, this pioneering volume offers a critically needed lens for viewing the evolution of civil society and the nonprofit sector throughout the world.

The Das Kapital of the 20th century,Society of the Spectacle is an essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's, in particular the May 1968 uprisings in France, up to the present day, with global capitalism seemingly staggering around in it’s Zombie end-phase, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. This ‘Red and Black’ translation from 1977 is Introduced by Notting Hill armchair insurrectionary Tom Vague with a galloping time line and pop-situ verve, and given a more analytical over view by young upstart thinker Sam Cooper.

This classic novel of a perfectly engineered society is “one of the most prophetic dystopian works of the twentieth century” (The Wall Street Journal). Half a millennium from now, in the World State, the watchword is that every one belongs to every one else. No matter what class of human you are bred to be—from the intellectual Alphas to the Epsilons who provide the manual labor—you are a part of the efficient, well-oiled whole. You are nourished, secure, and blissfully serene thanks to the freely distributed drug called soma. And while sex is strongly encouraged, the old way of procreation is forbidden, eliminating even the pains of childbirth. But when a man and woman journey beyond these confines to where the “savages” reside, and bring back two outsiders, the cracks begin to show. Named as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century by the Modern Library, Brave New World is one of the first truly dystopian novels. Influenced by the historic events of Huxley’s era yet as relevant today as ever, it is a remarkable depiction of the conflict between progress and the human spirit. “Chilling. . . . That he gave us the dark side of genetic engineering in 1932 is amazing.” —Providence Journal-Bulletin “It is a frightening experience, indeed, to discover how much of his satirical prediction of a distant future became reality in so short a time.” —The New York Times Book Review

A cashless society defines an economic environment in which financial transactions are not performed through money by way of bank currencies or coins, but rather by exchanging digital data (typically an electronic expression of money) between the transacting parties. Cashless societies have had come into being since the time of the evolution of human civilization, based on barter and other trading practices, and cashless transfers have now become viable in modern times, leveraging digital currencies, including bitcoin. However, one tends to explore and focus on the concept of a cashless society in the context of moving towards a society where cash is substituted by its digital counterpart, i.e., legal tender money, which is captured, and only transmitted in digital electronic format. Such a theory has been discussed at length, notably as the world is undergoing a substantial and phenomenal use of digital ways of capturing, controlling, and transacting in trade, investment, and day to day life in several parts all across the globe and transactions that would have traditionally been conducted with cash are now often executed electronically or digitally.

Meaning, Discourse and Society investigates the construction of reality within discourse. When people talk about things such as language, the mind, globalisation or weeds, they are less discussing the outside world than objects they have created collaboratively by talking about them. Wolfgang Teubert shows that meaning cannot be found in mental concepts or neural activity, as implied by the cognitive sciences. He argues instead that meaning is negotiated and knowledge is created by symbolic interaction, thus taking language as a social, rather than a mental, phenomenon. Discourses, Teubert contends, can be viewed as collective minds, enabling the members of discourse communities to make sense of themselves and of the world around them. By taking an active stance in constructing the reality they share, people thus can take part in moulding the world in accordance with their perceived needs.