Product Description: 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...read more

This book is the first intellectual biography of Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), the father of modern ethnology and a leading early figure in the French school of sociology. Mauss left a rich intellectual legacy in the social sciences, influencing the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and others. His masterpiece, the 1925 essay The Gift, on reciprocity and gift economies among archaic societies, remains required reading in anthropology, and his work more broadly resonates today with students and scholars in fields from the history of religion to sociology. Mauss taught the first generation of French field researchers in anthropology and helped secure the legacy of his uncle, émile Durkheim, the founder of modern sociology. In Marcel Mauss: A Biography, Marcel Fournier situates Mauss's ideas in their biographical context, focusing not only on the details of Mauss's life but also on the people and the academic milieus with which he was associated in early twentieth-century France. He shows how Mauss--through his writings, teaching, and socialist politics--found himself at the center of the intellectual and political life of his country and of Europe through two world wars. The book addresses, among other topics, the effect of the Dreyfus Affair and the First World War on Mauss's thought, and the inner dynamics of the group of scholars around Mauss and Durkheim at the journal they helped establish, Année Sociologique. The fruit of vast research, Marcel Mauss: A Biography is the life story both of a legendary scholar and of the institutionalization of sociology and anthropology.

Product Description: Bourdieu’s theory of social fields is one of his key contributions to social sciences and humanities. However, it has never been subjected to genuine critical examination. This book fills that gap and offers a clear and wide-ranging introduction to the theory...read more

Product Description: Baudrillard is widely recognised as a powerful new force in cultural and social criticism, and is often referred to as the ‘High Priest of Postmodernism’. This study presents a detached assessment of his social thought and his reputation, challenging the way his work has been received in postmodernism and proposing a new reading of his contribution to social theory...read more

Product Description: 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 ‘everything is a society and every science a sociology’. Tarde is being brought forward as the misrecognised forerunner of a post-Durkheimian era...read more

This work traces the work of Jean Baudrillard, the postmodernist intellectual who has been hailed one of France's most powerful theorists. His style and assaults on sociology, feminism and Marxism have exposed him to accusations of promoting a dangerous new orthodoxy. The book presents his claims that reality has been replaced by a simulated world of images and events ranging from TV news to Disneyland. It provides accounts of his work on pornography, obesity and terrorism, and traces his development from critic of mass consumption to prophet of the apocalypse. It invites thoughts and discussion on whether Baudrillard is a cure for the vertigo of contemporary culture, or one of its symptoms.

Using real people, real stories, real examples, and real situations, Selling: Building Partnerships, 6/e, delivers an exciting new approach that will help your students develop the partnerships that will promote success in their careers and in their lives. Selling presents selling theories and skills and gives students plenty of opportunity to apply them, showing how salespeople operate in real-life selling situations. This gives students a solid foundation for the more specific sales training they receive on the job..

Product Description: This major reassessment of the work of Emile Durkheim is presented in the context of a French philosophical tradition that seriously misread Kant by interpreting his theory of the categories as psychological faculties. Durkheim's sociological theory of the categories, as revealed by Warren Schmaus, is an attempt to provide an alternative way of understanding Kant...read more

Drawing on several of Baudrillard's key writings which are still only available in French, Gane provides an introduction to Baudrillard's cultural theory, particularly the conception of modernity and the complex process of simulation.

Product Description: How is it that the most radical cultural iconoclasts of the interwar years-Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Michel Leiris-could have responded to the rise of fascism by taking refuge in a "sacred sociology"? This is the question that Michèle H...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This appraisal of Durkheim's sociological theory shows how his arguments can be developed to extend our understanding of social and political change. Since a major concern of the book is to develop a more adequate picture of the parameters within which a feasible socialist society could operate, there is a continual reference to the manifest and latent socialist elements of Durkheim's thought...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The author paints a highly charged portrait of this ubiquitous "savant", denouncing his militancy, hypocrisy, elitism and shallowness. This controversial and impassioned attack by a fellow French scholar is more than a gauntlet thrown, it's David taking a shot at Goliath (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Pierre Bourdieu is one of the world's most important social theorists and is also one of the great empirical researchers in contemporary sociology. However, reading Bourdieu can be difficult for those not familiar with the French cultural context, and until now a comprehensive introduction to Bourdieu's oeuvre has not been available.David Swartz focuses on a central theme in Bourdieu's work—the complex relationship between culture and power—and explains that sociology for Bourdieu is a mode of political intervention. Swartz clarifies Bourdieu's difficult concepts, noting where they have been misinterpreted by critics and where they have fallen short in resolving important analytical issues. The book also shows how Bourdieu has synthesized his theory of practices and symbolic power from Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, and how his work was influenced by Sartre, Levi-Strauss, and Althusser.Culture and Power is the first book to offer both a sympathetic and critical examination of Bourdieu's work and it will be invaluable to social scientists as well as to a broader audience in the humanities. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This text re-examines Durkheim's "science of morality" as it is illuminated by Aristotle's philosophy. The author demonstrates, by examining previously unappreciated aspects of Durkheim's moral sociology, that the latter's theory can be compatible with postmodernism.

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Product Description: Self-described "intellectual terrorist" Jean Baudrillard is one of the most important and provocative writers of the contemporary era. Widely acclaimed as the prophet to postmodernity, he has famously announced the disappearance of the subject, political economy, meaning, truth, the social, and the real in contemporary social formations...read more

Product Description: 'Community, ' 'tradition, ' 'the individual', stand out prominently in today's intellectual landscape. In social and political theory and in religious studies they figure in the ongoing debates between liberals (champions of the individual) and communitarians (champions of the common good)...read more

Product Description: This book, the latest addition to the aclaimed Past Masters series, provides a compact and readable introduction to the work one of history's most important thinkers and social theorists. Durkheim's sociology is a brilliant exploration of the forces that undermine social order, forces that need to be countered if anarchy is to be held at bay...read more

Product Description: Aiming to introduce readers to the scope of Bourdieu's work while preserving the spirit of his endeavour, this book traces the development of Bourdieu's thinking, from the early "Sociologie de l'Algerie" (1958) to "La Noblesse d'Etat" (1989)...read more