What can sociology tell us about our personal lives, families and intimate relationships? This book explains how key theoretical perspectives and relevant contemporary research in the discipline can shed new light on even the most familiar areas of our everyday worlds. From friendships and pets, to political engagement and social legislation, the text shows how distinctions and connections can be drawn between our public and private lives. Each chapter explores a familiar topic that illustrates how individual relationships and lives can be shaped by social contexts, and how personal choices shape the wider social world. Using vivid case examples drawn from topical areas of debate, such as marriage rights and the role of social networking, the book is clearly laid out and easy to read. It gives useful explanations of theory and invaluable advice on how to carry out research on personal lives and relationships. This is essential reading for students of sociology interested in family, relationships and beyond. New to this Edition: - Pre-existing chapters have been fully re-written - Includes a number of new chapters on topics such as the body, home and personal life in public spaces. - Reformulated 'questions for discussion' at the end of each chapter.

For more than a decade, Carol Smart has been at the forefront of debates about the sociology of the family. Yet she has become frustrated by the fixation of many commentators with the supposed decline of commitment, and even the decline of the possibility of family life. In this exciting new book, she puts forward a new way of understanding families and relationships. Breaking with conventional wisdom, her book offers a fresh conceptual approach to understanding personal life, which realigns empirical research with theoretical analysis. She gives emphasis to ideas of connectedness, relationality and embeddedness, rejecting many of the assumptions found in theories of individualisation and de-traditionalisation by authors such as Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Bauman and Giddens. Instead, her approach prioritises the bonds between people, the importance of memory and cultural heritage, the significance of emotions (both positive and negative), how family secrets work and change over time, and the underestimated importance of things such as shared possessions or homes in the maintenance and memory of relationships. This ground-breaking text will be essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of families and personal relationships, and who wants to understand this most intimate area of social life.

Family relations are undergoing dramatic changes globally and locally. At the same time, certain features of family life endure. This popular book, now in a fully updated second edition, presents a comprehensive assessment of recent research on 'family', parenting, childhood and interpersonal ties. A Sociology of Family Life queries assumptions about a disintegration of 'the family' by revealing a remarkable persistence of commitment and reciprocity across cultures, within new as well as traditional family forms. Yet, while new kinds of intimate relationships such as 'friends as family' and LGBTQ+ intimacies become commonplace, such personal relationships can still be difficult to negotiate in the face of wider structural norms. With a focus on factors such as class, gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality, this new edition highlights inequalities that influence and curb families and personal life transnationally. Alongside substantial new material on cultural and digital transformations, the book features extensive updates on issues ranging from demography, migration, ageing and government policies to reproductive technologies, employment and care. With a global focus, and blending theory with real-life examples, this insightful and engaging book will remain indispensable to students across the social sciences.

This short book deals with a sociological concept: love-agape. It is an attempt to demonstrate that love-agape resists, indeed insists, as a fact that cannot be reduced or concealed. Its simple goal is to introduce agape into the vocabulary of sociological analysis by demonstrating its potential to demarcate and to interpret social phenomena. Love-agape is presented as a critical concept. On the one hand, love-agape denounces the risks linked to the needs of closed groups, often absolutist and fundamentalist. On the other hand, it represents a concrete reality, lying at the root of a particular type of sociality. A sociality that, rather unconventionally, recognizes differences and distances, but also characterizes their condition of being together, as community founded on the recognition and respect of subjectivity.

This edited collection uses the concept of 'displaying families' as a new way to understand contemporary family and personal life, addressing how, in a world of fluid relationships, family life must not only be 'done' but also be 'seen to be done'.

Illuminating Social Life has enjoyed increasing popularity with each edition. It is the only book designed for undergraduate teaching that shows today's students how classical and contemporary social theories can be used to shed new light on such topics as the internet, the world of work, fast food restaurants, shopping malls, alcohol use, body building, sales and service, and new religious movements.A perfect complement for the sociological theory course, it offers 13 original essays by leading scholars in the field who are also experienced undergraduate theory teachers. Substantial introductions by the editor link the applied essays to a complete review of the classical and modern social theories used in the book.

This accessible book addresses one of the twenty-first century's most important issues: the increasing lack of connection between political institutions and the social reality of our everyday lives. A gulf between popular expectations and formal politics has widened continually since the revolts against authority of 1968, the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 and the growth of new social movements. Today, popular disillusion with politics is ubiquitous. Enormous social transformations on a global scale since the 1970s have produced no fundamental change in what are considered normal political institutions such as the state, or in mainstream political ideologies and parties. This book provides tools to understand the apparent irrelevance of formal political institutions and practices to social life. In order to enable us to begin to rethink the relations between politics and society, Michael Drake ably synthesises the new theoretical developments that social transformations have produced, including the analysis of power, representation, social identities, social movements, sovereignty, statehood, globalization, revolution, risk and security. Ultimately, the book explores the emergent potentialities and problems of this new politics in a world of continuous transformation, where the parameters of the political are continuously shifting.