In Retail and Social Change Steven Miles, presents a cross-disciplinary analysis of the evolution of retail and how in both its material and virtual guises it has come to reframe our relationship with the social world. Retail has become increasingly influential in homogenising the urban experience. And yet in reacting to trends in virtual consumption retailers are also becoming more and more conscious of the need to engage with consumers in more sophisticated ways. Retail and Social Change will interest students and scholars in geography, cultural studies, sociology, marketing and business studies interested in how and why retail pervades both our physical and emotional lives in increasingly unexpected ways. It will provide a lively, comparative and thought-provoking contribution that interrogates the implications of retail change, for what it means to be a citizen of a consumer society in the twenty-first century.

Gabriel Tarde was a highly influential figure in 19th century French sociology: a prolific and evocative writer whose understanding of the social differed radically from that of his younger opponent Emile Durkheim. Whereas Durkheimian sociology went on to become the core of the social scientific canon throughout much of the 20th century, Tarde’s sociology fell out of the picture, and he was remembered mostly through a few footnotes in which Durkheim dismissed him as an individualist, a psychologist and a metaphysician. The social sciences and humanities are now being swept by a Tardean revival, a rediscovery and reappraisal of the work of this truly unique thinker, for whom ‘every thing is a society and every science a sociology’. Tarde is being brought forward as the misrecognised forerunner of a post-Durkheimian era. Reclaimed from a century of near-oblivion, his sociology has been linked to Foucaultian microphysics of power, to Deleuze's philosophy of difference, and most recently to the spectrum of approaches related to Actor Network Theory. In this connection, Bruno Latour hailed Tarde’s sociology as "an alternative beginning for an alternative social science". This volume asks what such an alternative social science might look like. This second edition has been expanded to include, alongside the original chapters, two key essays by Gabriel Tarde himself - Monadology and Sociology and The Two Elements of Sociology, as well as a significantly revised and extended introduction by the editor.

The financial/social cataclysm beginning in 2007 ended notions of a “great moderation” and the view that capitalism had overcome its systemic tendencies to crisis. The subsequent failure of contemporary social formations to address the causes of the crisis gives renewed impetus to better analysis in aid of the search for a better future. This book contributes to this search by reviving a broad discussion of what we humans might want a post-capitalist future to be like. It argues for a comparative anthropological critique of capital notions of value, thereby initiating the search for a new set of values, as well as identifying a number of selected computing practices that might evoke new values. It articulates a suggestive set of institutions that could support these new values, and formulates a group of measurement practices usable for evaluating the proposed institutions. The book is grounded in contemporary social science, political theory, and critical theory. It aims to leverage the possibility of alternative futures implied by some computing practices while avoiding hype and technological determinism, and uses these computing practices to explicate one possible way to think about the future.

Is sociology best understood as simply chipping away at our ignorance about society, or does it have broader roles and responsibilities? If so, to what—or perhaps to whom—are these responsibilities? Installing humanity as its epistemological and normative start and endpoint, this book shows how humanism recasts sociology as an activity that does not merely do things, or effect things, but is also self-consciously for something. Rather than resurrecting problematic classical conceptions of humanism, the book instead constructs its arguments on pragmatic grounds, showing how a pragmatic humanism presents an improved picture of both the nature and value of the discipline. This picture is based less around the claim that sociology is capable of providing authoritative revelations about society, and more upon its capacity to offer representations of the social in epistemologically open, transformative, ethical, and hopeful ways. Ultimately, it argues that sociology’s real value can only be disclosed by replacing its image as a discipline aimed towards disinterested social enlightenment with one of itself as a practice both dependent upon, and at its best self-consciously aimed towards, human ends and imperatives. It will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences, and to those working in social theory, sociology, and philosophy of the social sciences in particular.

Examining the interdependent nature of substance, space, and subjectivity, this book constitutes an interdisciplinary analysis of the intoxication indigenous to what has been termed "our narcotic modernity." The first section – Drug/Culture – demonstrates how the body of the addict and the social body of the city are both inscribed by "controlled" substance. Positing addiction as a "pathology (out) of place" that is specific to the (late-)capitalist urban landscape, the second section – Dope/Sick – conducts a critique of the prevailing pathology paradigm of addiction, proposing in its place a theoretical reconceptualization of drug dependence in the terms of "p/re/in-scription." Remapping the successive stages or phases of our narcotic modernity, the third section – Narco/State – delineates three primary eras of narcotic modernity, including the contemporary city of "safe"/"supervised" consumption. Employing an experimental, "intra-textual" format, the fourth section – Brain/Disease – mimics the sense, state or scape of intoxication accompanying each permutation of narcotic modernity in the interchangeable terms of drug, dream and/or disease. Tracing the parallel evolution of "addiction," the (late-)capitalist cityscape, and the pathological project of modernity, the four parts of this book thus together constitute a users’ guide to urban space.

The question of consumption emerged as a major focus of research and scholarship in the 1990s but the breadth and diversity of consumer culture has not been fully enough explored. The meanings of consumption, particularly in relation to lifestyle and identity, are of great importance to academic areas including business studies, sociology, cultural and media studies, psychology, geography and politics. The SAGE Handbook of Consumer Culture is a one-stop resource for scholars and students of consumption, where the key dimensions of consumer culture are critically discussed and articulated. The editors have organised contributions from a global and interdisciplinary team of scholars into six key sections: Part 1: Sociology of Consumption Part 2: Geographies of Consumer Culture Part 3: Consumer Culture Studies in Marketing Part 4: Consumer Culture in Media and Cultural Studies Part 5: Material Cultures of Consumption Part 6: The Politics of Consumer Culture

One of the biggest political stories of the past few decades in the United Kingdom and elsewhere has been the growing divide between the working class and the mainstream liberal left, which historically has spoken for them. This book offers a close analysis of that phenomenon by showing how the political scene looks to underemployed white men who have seen their standards of living fall in recent years even as their communities have fractured around them. Rather than cast aspersions or mount arguments about the larger success of society as a whole, The Rise of the Right takes these men and their concerns seriously, showing where their opinions are factually wrong but arguing powerfully that liberal politics must find a way of acknowledging and addressing their legitimate fears and frustrations.