Product Description: First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Product Description: Increasingly in the West, horror is experienced only through television and cinema screens. Tester looks at the moral possibilities and implications of this, and also addresses the pressing concern of whether or not this is a time of moral decay...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Zygmunt Bauman is one of the leading figures in contemporary social thought. His work ranges across issues of ethics, culture and politics. It never forgets that social thought ought to help men and women make sense of their lives and aspire towards something different...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

* Why do the reports and representations of suffering and misery move us?* What are we likely to do about it and why?* Why do people take part in telethon appeals?Most of us have watched television or read newspapers and been moved to compassion by the suffering and misery that we see. We know that many people suffer thanks to war, famine or environmental catastrophe. But what do the reports and representations of the suffering and misery of others actually mean to media users?Compassion, Morality and the Media seeks to answer this question and offers an engaging narrative through which it becomes possible to think about the role of journalists as moral agents. The author explores the tensions between the intentions of journalists, the horizons of the audience and the priorities of media institutions. This is a book which deals with important issues that have been relatively neglected in the academic study of the media. It is accessible and relevant and opens up a new terrain for research and teaching on the media as a moral force. Students taking undergraduate courses on the media and others with a wider interest in media morality will find it to be compelling reading. (view table of contents)

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

'Postmodernity' is often claimed as a great transformation in society and culture. But is it? In this book Keith Tester casts a cautious eye on such grandiose claims. Tester draws on a series of themes and stories from European sociology and literature to show that many of the great statements from 'postmodernity' are misplaced. 'Postmodernity' is not the harbinger or expression of a new world. It is a reflection of the unresolved paradoxes and possibilities of modernity. The author establishes a clearly expressed and stimulating model of modernity to demonstrate the stakes and consequences of 'postmodernity'. This book uses a wealth of sources which are usually denigrated or ignored in the debates on 'postmodernity'. As such it sheds new light on old claims. But it never fails to acknowledge the profound insights of sociologists and other authors. The Life and Times of Post-Modernity is a continuation of the themes which Tester raised in his earlier books with Routledge, The Two Sovereigns and Civil Society .

Product Description: What is the role of sociology in society? How can - and should - sociology contribute with insights relevant and useful to the outside world? Is sociology attuned to accommodate the demands of the wider public and of surrounding society? Who benefits from the knowledge produced and provided by sociology? What are the social implications and cultural effects of the knowledge sociology provides and creates? All of these questions, and many others, concern and centre on sociology's relationship to the surrounding society, in short to the ´public´...read more

Product Description: This unique and original collection by internationally renowned scholars uses critical engagements with Baumans sociology to identify and better understand the challenges that face globalized human societies at the start of the twenty-first century.

Product Description: It seems paradoxical that in the West the predominant mode of expressing concern about suffering in the Third World comes through participation in various forms of popular culture—such as buying tickets to a rock concert like Live Aid in 1985—rather than through political action based on expert knowledge...read more

Product Description: This book is invariably stimulating, containing many interesting and provocative ideas on issues central both to social theory and to making sense of the world(s) in which we live. It develops a series of original images or metaphors - gardens v...read more

Timely and original, this collection of essays from the leading figures in their fields throws new and valuable light on the significance and future of flanerie. The Flaneur is the first book to develop the debate beyond Baudelaire and Benjamin, and to push it in unexpected and exciting directions.

This major study discusses some of the meanings and preconditions of freedom, responsibility and social order. The author argues that these are problems of modernity. The imagination of civil society created a milieu which was at once the location and defence of social self-sufficiency in the world. The book identifies the origins of civil society in the work of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau and the often forgotten philosophers of the Scottish Enlightnement. It shows how the assumptions of civil society, and the state of nature, fed into the sociological and philosophical discourses which emerged in the nineteenth century. The book does not ask ‘What is civil society?’; instead it asks ‘Why is civil society?’ The author concludes that through civil society, the protagonists and heirs of European modernity struggled to make their world meaningful and safe. Civil society involved the establishment of boundaries between the community of the social and the terrifying milieu of Nature.