Social theory

A fully updated edition of this bestselling textbook offers a radical approach to community development taking theories of Gramsci and Freire into the current context. The focus is on putting theory into action for those training, working or managing any social justice practice.

Can the criminal justice system achieve justice based on its ability to determine the truth? This book investigates the concept of truth and scrutinises how well the criminal justice process facilitates truth-finding. It bridges the gap between what people expect from the justice system and what it can legitimately deliver.

Written by criminologists and policy analysts, Criminalisation and advanced marginality offers a constructive but critical application of Wacquant's ideas.

This perceptive study explores the extent to which boxing has the potential to reduce violent attitudes among young offenders. Jump assesses conflicting evidence and presents in-depth case studies of fighters to ask whether boxing’s values of discipline and respect can create a support network that helps young men refrain from reoffending.

Moral order is disturbed by criminal events, however traditionally, issues around morality have been neglected by criminologists. Using the moral perspective Boutellier bridges the gap between people’s emotional opinions on crime, and criminologists rationalised answers to questions of crime and security.

In this engaging and original book, John Clarke is in conversation with twelve leading individual scholars about the dynamics of critical thinking in the social sciences, and he reflects on the necessity of thinking collaboratively and dialogically.

This book analyses societal trends and controversies related to developments in data ownership, access, construction, dissemination and interpretation, looking at the ways that society interacts with and uses statistical data.

The pieces in this Byte raise important questions about what it means to bring our embodied selves into contact with digital media technologies. The selections expand our understanding of what it means to live in and through bodies augmented by digital technologies within a deeply unequal social world.

This is the first book to connect digital media technologies in digital sociology to traditional sociological and offers a much needed overview of it. It includes problems of the digital age in relation to inequality and identity, making it suitable for use for a global audience on a variety of courses.

Chapters in this Byte cover topics such as designing a research framework and how to work ethically as a digital researcher, continually interrogating one’s position as a researcher and reflecting on the process of knowledge creation. Cumulatively, they highlight the value of sociological theory for understanding our digital world.

In this Byte, the contributions consider the way that digitally meditated social processes are transforming institutions. It examines the interconnectedness of institutions and considers digitization across schooling, work, and media, with an eye on inequality.

This exciting and innovative book fills a gap in the growing area of discourse analysis within the social sciences. It provides the analytical tools with which students and their teachers can understand the complex and often conflicting discourses across a range of social science disciplines.