Bücher der Reihe Cultural Sociology

When strangers meet in social clubs, watch reality television, or interact on Facebook, they contribute to the social glue of mass society-not because they promote civic engagement or democracy, but because they enact the sacred promise of friendship.

This book offers a detailed and innovative study of the Dutch case of politics of citizenship and nationalism by focusing on public and political controversies in the crucial period of 1973¿2015. By foregrounding the crucial role of performance and narration in public and political debates, this book shows how discourses of citizenship and nationhood are deeply shaped by established repertoires and long-lasting lines of disagreement about difference and belonging in the Netherlands. While change did occur within the Dutch context during this period, this book reveals that these transformations were not primarily driven by purportedly permissive and accommodating responses to immigration and cultural diversity. Instead, it unveils a Dutch landscape deeply marked by challenges related to race, democracy, and liberal exceptionalism. In doing so, the book contributes to ongoing debates in the study of citizenship, nationalism, and intellectual history around the merits and limitations of liberal politics of inclusion. It critically extends concepts and arguments in cultural pragmatics and problematizes the common hope that public debate may progressively resolve antagonisms over difference. With a focus on empirical research, the book meticulously reconstructs the emergence of national identity debates in recent decades and vividly portrays the dynamics and tensions of these public performances while dissecting their role in shaping the nation's identity and its boundaries. The book covers a crucial period of the European politics of citizenship and nationhood in which anti-immigrant politics, new modes of racism, and the bordering of Europe took shape. It locates the Dutch case within these developments and insists on the importance of historical continuity and narrative performance. This book demonstrates that the Netherlands, and Europe more broadly, has not overcome the profound consequences of its past.

Identifying scientism as religion¿s secular counterpart, this collection studies contemporary contestations of the authority of science. These controversies suggest that what we are witnessing today is not an increase in the authority of science at the cost of religion, but a dual decline in the authorities of religion and science alike. This entails an erosion of the legitimacy of universally binding truth claims, be they religiously or scientifically informed. Approaching the issue from a cultural-sociological perspective and building on theories from the sociology of religion, the volume unearths the cultural mechanisms that account for the headwind faced by contemporary science. The empirical contributions highlight how the field of academic science has lost much of its former authority vis-à-vis competing social realms; how political and religious worldviews define particular research findings as favorites while dismissing others; and how much of today¿s distrust of science is directed against scientific institutions and academic scientists rather than against science per se.

Applying a cultural sociology of performance, this book interrogates how the meaning of sport intersects with gender. Broch points out uncertainties in the causal arguments made by key figures in the cultural studies tradition, instead advancing a meaning-centered study of sports as involving both a social and an athletic performance.

This volume is first consistent effort to systematically analyze the features and consequences of colonial repatriation in comparative terms, examining the trajectories of returnees in six former colonial countries (Belgium, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Portugal).

Increasingly, such debates take place online, by organizations in the immigrant rights and the immigration control movements, who engage in symbolic work that includes blurring, crossing, maintaining, solidifying, and shifting the boundaries of belonging.

This book challenges the idea that Western media systems are becoming more American in the digital age, arguing that journalistic cultures are not only significantly different from each other still but also variably open and resistant to change.

Identifying scientism as religion's secular counterpart, this collection studies contemporary contestations of the authority of science. These controversies suggest that what we are witnessing today is not an increase in the authority of science at the cost of religion, but a dual decline in the authorities of religion and science alike.

A resource for those interested in the triggers and safeguards of democracy and civil society, and for scholars and practitioners alike, this volume offers empirical case studies from the US, Europe, Australia, and Latin America of cross-group solidarity efforts.

This original analysis of modern Greece's political culture attempts to present a "total social fact"-a coherent and complex representation of Greek socio-political culture-to identify the cultural causes of Greece's recent disastrous economic crisis.

This volume brings together Ron Eyerman's most important interventions in the field of cultural trauma and offers an accessible entry point into the origins and development of this theory and a framework of an analysis that has now achieved the status of a research paradigm.

This volume is first consistent effort to systematically analyze the features and consequences of colonial repatriation in comparative terms, examining the trajectories of returnees in six former colonial countries (Belgium, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Portugal).

This book explores the lived experiences of boxers in a French banlieue, largely populated by people from working-class and immigrant backgrounds. Jerome Beauchez, who joined in the men's daily workouts for many years, analyzes the act of boxing as a high-stakes confrontation that extends well beyond the walls of the gym. Exploring the physical and existential realities of combat, the author provides a multifaceted "e;thick description"e; of this world and shows that the violence faced by the gym's members is not so much to be found in the ring as in the adversity of everyday racism and social exclusion. Boxing can therefore be understood as an act of resistance that is about more than simply fighting an opponent and that reflects all the existential struggles facing these men who are both stigmatized and socially dominated by race and class.

This book focuses on the recurring struggle over the meaning of the Anglican Church's role in the Indian residential schools--a long-running school system designed to assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture, in which sexual, psychological, and physical abuse were common.

The 2016 U.S. presidential election revealed a nation deeply divided and in flux. Simultaneously intellectual and accessible, this volume is designed to illuminate the 2016 U.S. presidential election and its aftermath for academics and students of politics alike.

Originally published in 1987, Colin Campbell's classic treatise on the sociology of consumption has become one of the most widely cited texts in sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and the history of ideas.

When strangers meet in social clubs, watch reality television, or interact on Facebook, they contribute to the social glue of mass society-not because they promote civic engagement or democracy, but because they enact the sacred promise of friendship.

This book explores the lived experiences of boxers in a French banlieue, largely populated by people from working-class and immigrant backgrounds. Jérôme Beauchez, who joined in the men¿s daily workouts for many years, analyzes the act of boxing as a high-stakes confrontation that extends well beyond the walls of the gym. Exploring the physical and existential realities of combat, the author provides a multifaceted ¿thick description¿ of this world and shows that the violence faced by the gym¿s members is not so much to be found in the ring as in the adversity of everyday racism and social exclusion. Boxing can therefore be understood as an act of resistance that is about more than simply fighting an opponent and that reflects all the existential struggles facing these men who are both stigmatized and socially dominated by race and class.

This book is an original application of rhetoric and moral-emotions theory to the sociology of social movements.

Performing Punk is a rich exploration of subcultural contrasts and similarities among punks. By investigating how punk is made, for whom, and in opposition to what, this book takes the reader on a journey through the lesser-known aspects of the punk subculture.

A social tragedy is a collective representation of injustice. Baker demonstrates how social tragedies facilitate moral action and discusses a series of contemporary case studies - the death of Princess Diana, Zinedine Zidane's 2006 World Cup scandal, KONY 2012 - to examine their social and political effects.

The struggle to create and sustain meaning in our everyday lives is fought using cultural ingredients to spin the webs of meaning that keep us going.

Revisiting the dominant scientific method, 'coding,' with which investigators from sociology to literary criticism have sampled texts and catalogued their cultural messages, the author demonstrates that the celebrated hard outputs rest on misleading samples and on unfeasible classifying of the texts' meanings.

In recent times, there has been a substantial push by people to escape the metropolis for lifestyles in small coastal, country, or mountainside locales. This book explores the narratives emerging from amenity-left migration using methods developed within the 'strong' cultural sociology.

Developing the theory of cultural trauma in regard to the shattering potential effects of political assassinations, Eyerman examines political and social life in three different national contexts: Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and Harvey Milk in the U.S.; Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands; and Olof Palme and Anna Lindh in Sweden

Global Injustice Symbols and Social Movements examines our collective moral and political maps, dotted with symbols shaped by political dynamics beyond their local or national origin and offers the first systematic sociological treatment of this important phenomenon.