Product Description: Fin-de-Siècle Vienna has become the glorified icon of innovative modernism in the arts and letters. Yet the misery of the masses in the suburbs stood in stark contrast to the urban social order of the wealthy elites who were facing the new collective subjects of emerging mass politics...read more

In this concise and engaging work, Patricia Cormack investigates the broad cultural significance and relevance of academic sociology by examining its on-going relationship with modernity and mass culture. She bids us, rather than deny sociology's participation in culture, to see the discipline as informing ethical, epistemological and pedagogical questions. Through an examination of the writings of Emile Durkheim, C. Wright Mills and Jean Baudrillard, Cormack illustrates how their formulations of sociology as a cultural practice is rooted in the very mass culture that it studies.Central to the argument is a discussion of conceptual and rhetorical devices - "totems" and "tropes" - within social theory. In agreement with the three theorist subjects, Cormack posits that the social is a discursive artifact, becoming over time a "social fact", explaining and sustaining ordinary life. Durkheim treats the 19th century birth of sociology (in which he played a large part), as an intrinsic aspect of modern cultural consciousness. Mills advances this view further, treating the "Sociological Imagination" as part of and informing, mass culture. Baudrillard treats sociological reason as now equivalent to and inextricable from commonsense understandings of the culture it seeks to understand - rendering the sociological project essentially mute.Of value to social scientists, and theorists in particular, this is a specialized volume - a sociology of sociology - written at senior undergraduate or graduate level. It is intended as textually oriented ethnography, and thus presents a theoretical rather than empirical investigation of the relationship between sociology and culture.

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Product Description: Book by George L. Mosse

Argues that the American Empire has now seen the passage of its most triumphant years and is rapidly approaching a period of increased social chaos in which cultural preservation will be a matter of individual conscience. Reprint. (view table of contents)

Product Description: While the consequences of low social order are well understood, the consequences of high social order are not. Yet perhaps nowhere in the world is social order so well developed as in Japan, which is highly organized, economically successful, and enjoys a safe society...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Three major social theories--mass society, pluralism, and bureaucracy--are often employed to interpret and explain modern societies. Although frequently invoked, the theories themselves are poorly understood. This book seeks to clarify the background, context, and major arguments of the theories, assess the claims and validity of each, provide expert commentary, and suggest avenues for further work in each area...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The Description for this book, Small Town in Mass Society: Class, Power, and Religion in a Rural Community, will be forthcoming. (view table of contents)

Argues that the American Empire has now seen the passage of its most triumphant years and is rapidly approaching a period of increased social chaos in which cultural preservation will be a matter of individual conscience. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power explores Walter Benjamin’s seminal writings on the relationship between mass culture and fascism. The book offers a nuanced reading of Benjamin’s widely influential critique of aesthetic politics, while it contributes to current debates about the cultural projects of Nazi Germany, the changing role of popular culture in the twentieth century, and the way in which Nazi aesthetics have persisted into the present...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Milestones in Mass Communication Research, 3/e offers an impressive history of mass communication research over the past 60 years and emphasizes media effects.

Product Description: Published one year after Forget Foucault, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1978) may be the most important sociopolitical manifesto of the twentieth century: it calls for nothing less than the end of both sociology and politics...read more

Product Description: Based on literature and on field research of tribal communities in public drinking places of a modern Western European capital (Helsinki), this book analyzes the new middle class mentality, which is one of the main components of the cultural condition of contemporary Western European countries...read more

Product Description: What is the sociological theory of industrialism? How far do the actual histories and practices of industrial societies fit this theory? The studies in this volume examine many of the economic, social, political and cultural changes caused by the industrialization of society...read more