In Visual Culture the 'visual' character of contemporary culture is explored in original and lively essays. The contributors look at advertising, film, painting and fine art, journalism, photography, television and propaganda. They argue that there is only a social, not a formal relation between vision and truth.

Product Description: In this book Chris Jenks looks at what the ways in which we construct our image of childhood can tell us about ourselves. After a general discussion of the social construction of childhood, the book is structured around three examples of the way the image of the child is played out in society: the history of childhood from medieval times through the enlightenment 'discovery' of childhood to the present the mythology and reality of child abuse and society's response to it the 'death' of childhood in cases such as the James Bulger murder in which the child itself becomes the perpetrator of evil...read more

The manner in which we variously come to an understanding of our world presents problems for us all, but the unified method by which we ought best to acquire such knowledge represents the particular problem of contemporary education. This important book seeks to explore some of the underlying practises and assumptions that go to produce and sustain both such sets of activities. As a result of its concerns with the social organization of knowledge at all levels, the sociology of education has become a central form of much contemporary sociological theory. All the papers in this collection are formulations of a ‘reflexive’ method of theorizing within sociology of education. This is a mode of address, deriving partly from social phenomenology, which seeks to display the grounds of the theorists’ speech as itself an essential feature of any informative dialogue. Major themes in education and in sociology are considered in this way, including the social form of rationality, the constitution of curricula, normative beliefs about Learning, the nature of literary study as liberal education and the character of scientific knowledge in the social world.

Offering a critique of the humanist paradigm in contemporary social theory, Qualitative Complexity is the first comprehensive sociological analysis of complexity theory. Drawing from sources in sociology, philosophy, complexity theory, 'fuzzy logic', systems theory, cognitive science and evolutionary biology, John Smith and Chris Jenks present a new series of interdisciplinary perspectives on the sociology of complex, self-organizing structures.

Product Description: Culture is a concept that has remained on the top of the agenda within the social sciences for two decades. It incites controversy and debate and always appears fresh. This book, updated throughout and with new sections on visual culture, urban culture and subcultures, argues that to understand the concept we need to locate it within traditions of thought and appreciate its political and ideological bases...read more

(view table of contents)

Offers various views on the concept of culture, including articles by such authors as Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, T.S. Eliot, and Bronislaw Malinowski.

The idea of cultural reproduction was first developed by Bourdieu (1973) who sees the function of the education system as being to reproduce the culture of the dominant classes, thus helping to ensure their continued dominance. Through his concepts of "cultural capitalism" and "habitus", Bourdieu's influence spread into other areas of socialization and high culture. However, despite the complex of influences that contribute to Bourdieu's method, sociologists of culture and students of cultural studies seem to have picked up on the negative and critical elements in the work. In particular, they developed the metaphor of reproduction as copy or imitation rather than reproduction as regeneration and synthesis. As a consequence "cultural reproduction" has become part of the orthodoxy of studies in the theory of ideology and neo-Marxism. While still addressing this well-established theme of ideology and structural determinacy in cultural reproduction theory, this collection of original essays seeks also to explore other possibilities, in terms of ethno-methodology, Durkheimianism, structuralism and post-structuralism.

(view table of contents)

(view table of contents)

This volume develops key links beween the study of childhood and social theory, exposing its historical, political and cultural dimensions. The authors set out the theoretical contexts within which more empirical studies of childhood are embedded.