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Offers a detailed critical analysis of the ideal of ‘community’ in politics. Traces elements of the idea of community in a number of social, philosophical, and political contexts over the last century, exploring how these have been and continue to be articulated in recent political and public policy debates. ‘Community’ is invoked as a justification for reorganization of state institutions, as the source of care and support for individuals, and as an entity that is valuable in its own right and must therefore be sustained and defended. In community development, community action, community care and community politics, the tensions and contradictions within the concept are invariably felt. Community is both inclusive and exclusive, both organized and unstructured, both hierarchical and egalitarian. The book argues that analysis of the concept ‘community’ reveals the role of ideas and ideals in shaping political action, the barriers to the realization of community in practical contexts, and ultimately the untenability of the ideal itself.

The book provides a critical and constructive overview of historic and contemporary themes on the family in Christian social and political thought. The principal historic sources examined include Greco-Roman and biblical texts, patristic and medieval literature, and selected Reformation, Puritan, and 19th century authors. The development of modern liberal thought on marriage and family is subjected to extensive scrutiny by surveying the works of some of its leading founders, proponents, and contemporary critics, including a range of Christian theological responses. The chief weakness of late liberalism is that it promotes a voluntaristic vision of civil society, which portrays human associations solely as the outcome of the corporate will of autonomous individuals. The central constructive argument of the book is that such a vision has effectively eroded an understanding of the family as the most basic and natural form of human association, thereby diminishing contemporary Christian social and political thought. In order to rectify this situation, the philosophical and ideological presuppositions of late liberalism is subjected to critical analysis regarding its understanding of the nature of human associations in general, and the familial association in particular. Building upon this analysis, an alternative set of philosophical, theological, and moral presuppositions are developed, which provide the basis for developing a normative account of the family in opposition to that offered by late liberalism. This alternative account in turn may be used to inform contemporary Christian social and political thought.

Life at the beginning of the 21st century is something the social theory of the last century would have found hard to explain. Science, capitalism, and politics are pervasive and powerful in the everyday lives of ever-expanding layers of the world’s population. But so is religion. This book is an attempt to let “everyday religion” raise critical questions about how we understand the role of religion in society. We take pluralism and choice as givens, for instance, but we find “rational choice” theories too thin to explain the religious expressions we document. We look for religion in both “private” and “public” spaces, and ask about the social circumstances of religion’s presence and absence. In the end, we find that no simple theory of secularization or revival can explain how modern religious lives unfold.

Finding ways to understand the nature of social change and social order—from political movements to market meltdowns—is one of the enduring problems of social science. This book draws together far-ranging insights from social movement theory, organizational theory, and economic and political sociology to construct a general theory of social organization and strategic action. This book proposes that social change and social order can be understood through what the book calls strategic action fields. It posits that these fields are the general building blocks of political and economic life, civil society, and the state, and the fundamental form of order in our world today. Similar to Russian dolls, they are nested and connected in a broader environment of almost countless proximate and overlapping fields. Fields are mutually dependent; change in one often triggers change in another. At the core of the theory is an account of how social actors fashion and maintain order in a given field. This sociological theory of action, what they call “social skill,” helps explain what individuals do in strategic action fields to gain cooperation or engage in competition. To demonstrate the breadth of the theory, the book makes its abstract principles concrete through extended case studies of the Civil Rights Movement and the rise and fall of the market for mortgages in the U.S. since the 1960s. The book also provides a “how-to” guide to help others implement the approach and discusses methodological issues.

Indian society is extremely complex, particularly in the twentieth century. However, this complexity has not been captured by Indian social theory. One reason is the theoretical burden caused by historical events such as colonialism, which incidentally brought modernity to India. Western modernity is mainly normative, and its norms include the concept of autonomous individual, freedom, and instrumental rationality. This normative project is sought to be ruthlessly implemented through modern programmes of secularism, nationalism, urbanization, and industrialization where the pre-modern is sought to be disinherited. This book explores the limitations surrounding Indian social theorists' views on Indian society. It discusses Partha Chatterjee's perspectives on Indian nationalism, Javeed Alam's interpretation of Indian secularism and the use of plural character of Indian society by some Indian social scientists, and Gopal Guru's proposal to move Dalits' lived experience from literature into social theory. The book also examines the limitations surrounding the reading of contemporary texts and activities of thinkers such as Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda, B.R. Ambedkar, and Aurobindo Ghosh.

Social capital theorists have shown that inequality arises in part because some people enjoy larger, more supportive, or otherwise more useful networks. But why do some people have better networks than others? This book argues that the answer lies less in people's deliberate “networking” than in the institutional conditions of the churches, colleges, firms, gyms, and other organizations in which they happen to participate routinely. This book introduces a model of social inequality that takes seriously the embeddedness of networks in formal organizations, proposing that what people gain from their connections depends on where those connections are formed and sustained. The model is illustrated and developed through a study of the experiences of mothers whose children were enrolled in New York City childcare centers. As a result of the routine practices and institutional conditions of the centers—from the structure of their parents' associations, to apparently innocuous rules such as pick‐up and drop‐off times—many of these mothers dramatically increased their social capital and measurably improved their wellbeing. Yet how much they gained depended on how their respective centers were organized. This book identifies the mechanisms through which childcare centers structured the networks of mothers, and shows that similar mechanisms operate in many other routine organizations, from beauty salons and bath houses to colleges and churches. The book makes a case for the importance of organizational embeddedness in the study of personal ties.

This book approaches the problems raised by the media via a set of arguments with post-modernism and Information Society theory. It argues that the media are important because they raise a set of questions central to social and political theory. It focuses on the problem raised by what Kant called the unsocial sociability of human kind. Then, it examines the implications for emancipation of seeing the media as cultural industries within the capitalist market economy; of seeing the media as technologies; of the specialisation of intellectual production and of the separation and increasing social distance between the producers and consumers of symbols. The problem of how the symbolic forms that the media circulate can be assessed is provided. It is argued that evaluation is in practice unavoidable and without some standards that are more than just subjective any criticism of the media's performance is impossible. Via an examination of the debate between the sociology of art and aesthetics the book argues for the ethical foundations of aesthetic judgement and for the establishment of agreed standards of aesthetic judgement via the discourse ethic that underlies the argument of the entire book. Next the book gives a discussion of the media and politics. Hereafter the book returns to the roots of public sphere theory.

What is the role of government in protecting animal welfare? What principles should policy makers draw on as they try to balance animal welfare against human liberty? Much has been written in recent years on our moral duties toward animals, but scholars and activists alike have neglected the important question of how far the state may go to enforce those duties. This book fills that gap by exploring how liberal political principles apply to animal welfare policy. Focusing on animal welfare in the United States, the book argues that some animals (most prominently pets and livestock) may be considered members of the liberal social contract. That conclusion justifies limited state intervention to defend their welfare—even when such intervention may harm human citizens. The book also examines such questions as whether citizens may enjoy property rights in animals, what those rights entail, how animals may be represented in our political and legal institutions, and what strategies for reform are most compatible with liberal principles. More generally, this study asks, what sort of liberalism is suitable for the twenty-first-century United States? It argues that investigating the political morality of our treatment of animals gives us insight into how to design institutions that protect the most vulnerable members of our society, thus making of our shared world a more fitting home for both humans and the nonhumans to which we are so deeply connected.