Series Editor: Anthony Elliott, University of South Australia
Designed to complement the successful Key Sociologists, this series covers the main concepts, issues, debates, and controversies in sociology and the social sciences. The series provides concise and accessible overviews on central topics as well as new departures in social science, such as community, power, work, sexuality, inequality, mobilities, class and the family. Books in the series develop strongly original perspectives, as critical engagements rather than literature surveys, offering lively and original treatments of their subject matter. The books will be useful to students and teachers of sociology, political science, economics, psychology, philosophy, and geography.
The Series Editor is especially interested in commissioning titles in the following areas but is open to proposals covering other new areas of development in the social sciences and sociology:
To discuss a proposal, please contact the commissioning editor Rebecca Brennan ([email protected])
By Nick Stevenson
May 16, 2023
This accessible introductory text offers an engaging and thought-provoking discussion of class in relation to several cultural, sociological and political schools of thought and draws upon the works of a broad range of key theorists as well as contemporary thinkers to restate the ongoing importance...
By Jeffrey Weeks
December 30, 2022
Sexuality is the fifth revised and updated edition of the classic text for understanding human sexuality. This new edition brings the arguments and evidence fully up to date and explores their implication for many topical controversies, around LGBTQ+ rights, the trans experience and gender fluidity...
By John Storey
October 18, 2022
This book provides a clear and wide-ranging overview of consumption as a sociological concept. Arguing that consumption is both an unavoidable part of life and an ongoing dialectical process, it gives a critical assessment of a range of theoretical approaches to the study of consumption and the ...
By Lars Jensen, Kristín Loftsdóttir
September 28, 2021
This volume crucially provides an analytical and comparative approach, investigating the meaning and uses of the concept of exceptionalism, while demonstrating the ways in which it manifests itself in different historical and geographical settings. Exceptionalism offers comparative case studies ...
By Lars Jensen
February 26, 2020
This book presents an overview of the direct and indirect ways in which Europe continues to be influenced by its entrenched postcolonial condition. Exploring the notion of postcolonial Europe as it characterises a Europe caught at a number of crossroads, it considers the distinctly European ...
By Robin Cohen, Nicholas Van Hear
December 10, 2019
This is an unusual book. Combining social science fiction, utopianism, pragmatism, sober analysis and innovative social theory, the authors address one of the biggest dilemmas of our age – how to solve the problems arising from mass displacement. As early versions of the solution proposed by Robin ...
By Brian McDonough, Jessie Bustillos Morales
December 03, 2019
Universal basic income is a controversial policy which is causing a stir amongst academics, politicians, journalists and policy-makers all over the world. The idea of receiving ‘money for nothing’, with no strings attached, has for a long time appeared a crazy or radical proposal. But today, this ...
By Charles Turner
October 18, 2019
‘Secularization’ sounds simple, a decline in the power of religion. Yet, the history of the term is controversial and multi-faceted; it has been useful to both religious believers and non-believers and has been deployed by scholars to make sense of a variety of aspects of cultural and social change...
By Shaun Best
June 14, 2019
This book explores the concept of the stranger as a ‘modern’ social form, identifying the differing conceptions of strangerhood presented in the literature since the publication of Georg Simmel’s influential essay ‘The Stranger’, questioning the assumptions around what it means to be regarded as ‘...
By Beth Watts, Suzanne Fitzpatrick
May 14, 2018
Welfare conditionality has become an idea of global significance in recent years. A ‘hot topic’ in North America, Australia, and across Europe, it has been linked to austerity politics, and the rise of foodbanks and destitution. In the Global South, where publicly funded welfare protection systems ...
By Gerard Delanty
March 29, 2018
The increasing atomization of modern society has been accompanied by an enduring nostalgia for the idea of community as a source of security and belonging in an increasingly insecure world. Far from disappearing, community has been revived by transnationalism and by new kinds of individualism. ...
By Thomas Pfister, Martin Schweighofer, André Reichel
February 12, 2018
Sustainability as a reference frame for dealing with the interconnection of environmental, economic and social issues on a global scale is not only characterized by complex problems and long-term strategies but also by differences and disagreements with regard to its meanings and how they should be...
