社会学 — 全 下位分類

The book critically examines how visual culture, journalism, digital platforms, advertising, and storytelling shape public perception, social identities, political awareness, and cultural experiences across local and global contexts.

The book presents a diverse collection of scholarly studies that analyse contemporary issues in media and communication through critical, cultural, and technological perspectives. It includes discussions on cinematic representation, identity politics, visual symbolism, gender sensitivity, disability discourse, minority visibility, and digital culture. It investigates the role of films, advertisements, and news media in constructing social meanings and influencing audience behaviour, while others examine technological dependency, digital inequality, machine learning applications in journalism, and inclusive design practices in UI/UX. The volume also explores regional and global cultural narratives through studies on anime fandom, environmental justice movements, festival marketing, and diaspora representation. Combining theoretical frameworks with case-study-based analysis, the book demonstrates how media and communication practices continue to evolve alongside technological advancement, social transformation, and shifting cultural identities in the contemporary world.

This book is intended for researchers, academicians, postgraduate students, media professionals, and scholars in communication, journalism, film studies, cultural studies, advertising, literature, and digital media studies. It is especially valuable for readers interested in interdisciplinary approaches to media, identity, technology, and contemporary socio-cultural transformations.

Halldorsson's How Digital Screen Use Alienates Human Societies examines recent processes of technological rationalism, which were intensified by the Covid-pandemic, and explores how they alienate human societies in the name of progress. Challenging the prevailing assumptions of such 'progress', the book argues that these processes undermine the essential 'social magic' - the everyday human sociality that builds communities - which results in societal fragmentation, marked by alienation in the form of social isolation, consumption, polarisation, fear, and conflict.

The paradox of how increased connectivity through digital networks, can lead to lack of human connection is the critical question this book pursues. It explores how intense processes of technological rationalisation has undermined human sociality and alienated the world by replacing human-to-human relationships with human-to-machine interactions. The author argues that communication with/through screen machines is incapable of replacing vital social relationships that breed 'social magic' and build communities. This disconnection, which is driven by technological capitalism, undermines human sociality and causes alienation. Ultimately, the book asserts that humanity needs more social magic, fostered through human-to-human relationships - and offers critical sociological analysis and potential remedies.

This book is a critical academic treatise. It will be of interest to social science scholars and students as well as a broader audience seeking to resist the relentless makeover of human societies, in the name of technological rationalisation, and make the world more humane, meaningful, and magical.

Martin J. Adamian reimagines privacy-exposing how centuries of legal doctrine have tethered it to property-and calls for a more inclusive, dignity-based understanding fit for the digital age.
Drawing on thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, and Juergen Habermas, Adamian develops a more relational and dynamic account of privacy-one rooted in autonomy, dignity, and democratic participation. This framework helps unify disparate areas of privacy law, including tort, Substantive Due Process, and Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, by revealing the underlying assumptions that connect them. Through this lens, contemporary issues such as data privacy, reproductive rights, and surveillance are not understood as isolated legal challenges but as interconnected struggles over personal integrity and political freedom. Ultimately, the book calls for a new approach to privacy-one capable of responding to technological change while resisting the commodification of the private sphere.

The book examines the approaches to regulating artificial intelligence through ethical, legal, and policy frameworks. Its primary focus is on critical issues such as algorithmic bias, data privacy, transparency, human rights, and the broader social implications of AI technologies. The scope of the book aligns with the evolving policies and strategies being developed by governments and international organizations to ensure the responsible and accountable use of AI. It presents real-world applications across sectors such as healthcare, education, finance, and public administration, illustrating both the opportunities and challenges associated with AI regulation for organizations and individuals.

In addition, the book explores national and international initiatives aimed at establishing governance models that promote accountability, fairness, and public trust. It emphasizes the need for participatory and adaptive policy frameworks that can respond effectively to the rapid pace of technological change.

This book is intended for students, researchers, policymakers, and professionals, and seeks to bridge the gap between theory and practice in the field of AI governance.

Key Features:

• Explore the ethical, legal and policy aspects of AI governance in a multidisciplinary manner.
• Examines practical application of national and global case studies including real life examples of AI policy.
• Discusses how governments, international institutions and civil society can create responsible AI systems.
• Bridges theory to the practice by linking basic principles with new models of governance.
• Academic learning, policy development that is written in an accessible language, well-structured and references that is current.

This edited collection offers an exploration and critical reassessment of the sciences in educational research, foregrounding its agential and material qualities rather than treating it as a neutral instrument of knowledge. Addressing the enduring allure of research as expertise and of science as an elixir for enabling the good life, the book examines a distinctive form of activism within modernity and challenges the ahistorical assumptions that often frame the practices of the human sciences.

The two volumes comprise original historical and sociological studies by international scholars who examine the infrastructures of ideas, theories, methods, and technologies through which scientific knowledge is produced. Across a wide range of educational contexts, the authors interrogate how science operates performatively, shaping norms, subjectivities, and modes of governance. Part of a two-volume series, Volume Two, Visual Cultures and Affective Economies in Education gives attention to science as projection that sustains norms of anticipated potentialities that compare different kinds of people; and how these projections travel and settle in different historical spaces.

It will appeal to scholars and researchers across interdisciplinary fields including sociology of education, sociology of knowledge, historical sociology, political philosophy, educational policy, comparative and international education, and transnational studies.

This timely volume explores the close relationship television has always had with the National Health Service. Taking a chronological approach to examine the multiple ways in which TV has presented the NHS since the 1950s, the chapters delve into key moments in television history and how they reflect and shape our view of public health.

These chapters span the key moments in television history which deal with this subject in many forms, from the 1960s soap opera to the 1970s hospital comedy to the cosy "NHS as heritage" offered by Call the Midwife, via the melodrama of shows like Casualty and the gothic hospital dramas of Jed Mercurio. Beginning with the early dramatisations of the NHS wards, which reflected storylines that combined romance, illness, and sometimes death, the book then shows how, over the years, the depiction of NHS doctors, nurses, and other staff as heroic and romantic has been countered with dramatisations of the impact of austerity cuts, hospital mergers, and competition from the private sector.

This book will interest students and scholars of television and media studies, the history of television, the medical humanities, cultural studies, gender studies, and in the growing area of narrative medicine.

This edited collection offers an exploration and critical reassessment of the sciences in educational research, foregrounding its agential and material qualities rather than treating it as a neutral instrument of knowledge. Addressing the enduring allure of research as expertise and of science as an elixir for enabling the good life, it examines a distinctive form of activism within modernity and challenges the ahistorical assumptions that often frame the practices of the human sciences.

The book comprises original historical and sociological studies by international scholars who examine the infrastructures of ideas, theories, methods, and technologies through which scientific knowledge is produced. Across a wide range of educational contexts, the authors interrogate how science operates performatively, shaping norms, subjectivities, and modes of governance. Part of a two-volume series, Volume One, Infrastructures, Differences and Space of Action in Education explores how science produces new phenomena as comparative logics in kinds of people.

It will appeal to scholars and researchers across interdisciplinary fields including sociology of education, sociology of knowledge, historical sociology, political philosophy, educational policy, comparative and international education, and transnational studies.

As societies around the globe undergo rapid change, Benjamin Nelson's theories help explain how and why civilizations evolve.
This book offers a full-length, comprehensive analysis of Benjamin Nelson's ideas and historical studies, exploring his civilization-analytic perspective, its intricate ties to Max Weber's theories, and Nelson's arguments about the major historical phases shaping Western European civilization. Donald A. Nielsen argues that Nelson's work centers on religious and cultural universalism, reconstructing Nelson's thesis that 12th-century Europe experienced an axial shift in consciousness toward more rationalized, universalistic cultural orientations. Rather than focusing on the origins of modernity, Nelson examined revolutionary changes in structures of consciousness and civilizations, including six ongoing "revolutions" he identified. Nielsen unpacks Nelson's view of civilizational crises and demonstrates that his theories are rooted in a vision of human life that values lived experience and expression within changing historical contexts. By highlighting how Nelson's theories illuminate the dynamics of cultural universalism and structural transformations across historical contexts, this book provides readers a conceptual framework for analyzing civilizational change.

This edited collection explores strategies of critique for responding to what many commentators now refer to as our current poly-crises.

Today, economic, political, cultural, social, environmental and personal crises increasingly collapse together into situations of toxic shock which intensify repression and process lives into toxic waste. Drawing on the expansive understanding of mediation in the Canadian communication tradition deriving from Harold A. Innis and Marshall McLuhan and on eco-criticism of media environments, Toxic Media Ecologies foregrounds the objective subjectiveness of crises and considers how we as subjects are connected to each other through crises. Critical essays presented in Part One interrogate topics ranging from money and feminist science fiction to the online Alt-Right and racism. Parts Two and Three present theoretical reflections on research-creation engagements with pedagogies, ecology and poetry, as well as design, care-work, performance art and pedagogical games. Overall, this volume elaborates on the thesis that ecological crises are fundamentally historical, political and cultural and presents a novel juxtaposition and comparison between cultural studies and research-creation critical approaches.

Innovative and transdisciplinary in its approach, Toxic Media Ecologies will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental communication and media, environmental humanities, environmental justice, political ecology and media studies.

A rich, interdisciplinary exploration of music through Japanese aesthetics that calls for a new way to think about nature and the role of silence.

The art, aesthetics, and philosophies of medieval Japan and its contemporary Kyoto School lie at the centre of this book. Daryl Jamieson applies East Asian aesthetics, rooted in nature and ways of being that are very different from those of late-capitalist subjects, to critique contemporary experimental music from both Japan and the western world.

Introducing the unique features of Japanese aesthetics, Jamieson connects it to the North American music tradition that includes John Cage and his deep interest in Zen and Fluxus artists such as Yoko Ono. His original interpretation of sound constructs a new way of being in the world, showing how we can cultivate a more ethical way of hearing which is grounded in our environment.

This is a treatise for an aesthetics grounded in Buddhism and a music based on the ethics of respect for the environment. For anyone interested in cross-cultural interpretations of art and reality, it tells us why listening to difficult, challenging and obscure music matters in our present era of crises.

This book examines creative new ways in which legal and administrative information are communicated to diverse audiences. Using a range of theoretical frameworks, it explores these transformations within broader societal issues such as legal activism, access to justice, and citizen participation.

Increasingly, there has been widespread recognition that non-specialists need to be able to understand legal information. Although plain language campaigns have made considerable progress in ensuring that legal texts are now less dense and more readable, such measures are often shown to be insufficient. For this reason, many institutions such as parliaments and courts have made considerable efforts to present this information in more attractive digital formats, and to disseminate the core messages via other media including video and virtual reality. In addition to addressing the social and political trends underlying these changes, the volume provides evidence of various cognitive and multimodal strategies used in different languages and cultures, investigating discourse practices in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America.

The collection will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers and professionals working in the areas of law, public administration, communication, and applied linguistics.

Employing a wealth of British newspaper articles this book explores the ways in which British attitudes to Rhodesia/Zimbabwe developed from the post-war period through to the early years of independence by reconstructing how the print media portrayed the colony. Using articles from a range of different sources it traces the narratives that were presented to the public from the creation of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland to the early years of Robert Mugabe's regime.

Exploring the cultural, political, moral and ideological relationship between metropole, white settler colonialism and African nationalism at the end of Britain's empire in Africa, it maps out the public debates, representations and perceptions of decolonization and Britain's role in it. It lays open ideological fracture lines that existed in the political mind-set in Britain, explores how attitudes towards Empire were shaped through the media, and the extent to which the various crises of southern Africa permeated the British consciousness during this period.

A fast-paced and lively introduction to the most significant approaches to studying and analyzing popular culture.

Opening with an introduction exploring the challenges of defining just what we mean by 'popular culture', this book charts popular culture studies from the early 20th century to present day. The book specifically examines the evolution of popular culture studies and the debates over popular culture from the early 20th century until the advent of digital culture in the early 1990s to the ways the digital revolution is continuing to transform the field in the present day. Specific chapters also focus on 'Doing Popular Culture Studies,' with each chapter providing historical and contemporary examples, accessible key case studies, and featuring different focal points. Topics covered within this include popular culture as an industry; what popular culture means for fans and audiences; and how popular culture intersects with issues of identity, diversity, and power. The final chapter considers possibilities for the future of popular culture studies, highlighting its ongoing importance in an environment of accelerating media and cultural change.

This is an ideal starting point for anyone interested in learning more about popular culture studies.

This text offers a comprehensive and accessible guide to understanding AI's impact on the fashion industry.

This volume brings together contributions from leading researchers and industry professionals, providing insights into how AI is being used to create innovative designs, optimise supply chains, personalise customer experiences, and enhance sustainability. It covers the historical development of AI, the key technologies driving its applications, and real-world case studies showcasing successful AI integration. Beyond the technical aspects, the book critically explores the ethical considerations and challenges of adopting AI in fashion, emphasising the importance of transparency, data privacy, and bias mitigation, and considers the broader geographical implications, including the impact on the Global South. Looking to the future, it explores emerging trends and potential opportunities for AI-driven innovation, encouraging readers to think creatively and strategically about the possibilities of AI in fashion.

Through practical insights, engaging activities, discussion questions and detailed case studies, this book equips Fashion Management students, academics and reflective practitioners with the knowledge and tools needed to navigate and leverage AI in the fashion industry. It serves as an essential resource for understanding the transformative power of AI in fashion.

This book benefits from downloadable support material, including PowerPoint slides and test bank questions available at www.routledge.com/9781032984551

This book examines how twenty-first century horror narratives are shaped by transmedia storytelling, digital convergence, and mediated intertextuality.

Contemporary storytelling is increasingly participatory, multimodal, and intermedial. As a result, it might be tempting to argue that we are witnessing an entirely new set of horrors emerging in today's digitised world. Despite the innovations brought about by artificial intelligence, digital connectivity and social media, this book argues that today's horror narratives are deeply rooted in historical and cultural discourses. Age-old fears are being reimagined in a new media landscape that is both global and deeply personal. This collection offers insights into how horror narratives are evolving across various media platforms including film, television, video games, and social media such as TikTok and YouTube. It also explores the lived reality of communities who engage with horror as a cultural identity and practice, considering how fashion, make-up, and costuming operate as their own forms of transmedia. These chapters examine the relationship between media, culture, and technology, revealing how digital culture reshapes traditional horror motifs and influences social norms. Readers will gain a deeper understanding of the connections between new storytelling practices and established genres, as well as how these narratives reflect contemporary societal fears and desires.

This book will be valuable for scholars of media studies, fan studies, game studies, the Gothic, and horror research. By addressing both emerging technologies and historical representations of horror, the collection provides critical perspectives for academics interested in the intersections of media, culture, identity, community, and horror. The interdisciplinary approach will appeal to those studying screen studies, sociology, media representation, and cultural practices, offering new trends and insights within the evolving field of horror studies.

This timely new text provides a comprehensive and critical guide to ethics and sustainability across the Fashion industry.

Seeking to foster critical analysis, the book encourages students to question common narratives and delve deeper into surface-level approaches to sustainability. It raises awareness of ethical issues in the fashion industry, including the lack transparency, poor labour practices, environmental impact, and social implications of fashion production and consumption. The book provides insights into current trends, emerging regulations, and practical applications, underpinned by examples from industry. Real-life case studies from around the world showcase some of the innovative brands that have shifted the focus from profit-driven motives to value-driven growth, embracing ethics, transparency, and social purpose in their business strategies.

Exploring how the fashion industry can commit to more comprehensive, measurable changes across all aspects of design, production, labour, sales, marketing, and community engagement, this text is essential reading for postgraduate students of Fashion Management, Fashion Entrepreneurship and Fashion Sustainability, as well as reflective practitioners considering fresh approaches to their businesses.

In the 2010s, digital platforms swiftly became the dominant way to disseminate media content, promising to make communication transparent in ways that print, cinema, and broadcast never could. The Digital Transparent critically interrogates this claim, arguing that while platforms introduce new transparencies, they also create opacities intrinsic to their technology and architecture.

Using Michel Foucault's concept of the dispositif, the book demonstrates that transparency arrangements are always selective, partial, and strategically constructed. It argues that transparency functions both as an opening up of the platform and as a mechanism that enables platforms to govern. Through dispositif analysis of two key transparency devices-the dashboard and the transparency centre-the book examines YouTube, SoundCloud, Facebook, and X.com/Twitter using textual analysis, interface analysis, and interviews with YouTubers.

The Digital Transparent is essential reading for students and scholars in media studies, offering a historical perspective on digital platforms that reveals what is genuinely new and what continues from earlier media. It will appeal to those interested in Foucault's work and its application to contemporary media, researchers in transparency studies seeking critical perspectives on communication and distribution, and platform scholars focused on governance, creative practices, and regulation.

This book investigates the linguistic features and translation strategies of English-to-Chinese film translation from a comparative, corpus-based perspective.

It establishes an English-Chinese parallel corpus of 50 Oscar-winning or -nominated English films, alongside a reference corpus of 215 original Chinese films. This provides a foundation for exploring how translated film dialogue can be made more natural and colloquial. Focusing on character usage, vocabulary, syntactic patterns and cultural elements such as honorifics, idioms and vulgar language, the analysis reveals the distinctive differences between translated and original Chinese film texts. It also compares official dubbing translations with online fan subtitles. Using quantitative metrics such as frequency, lexical grade and multiplier values, the book provides practical translation strategies and stylistic benchmarks for English-Chinese film translation.

This book will serve as an invaluable reference for researchers and students of translation studies interested in English-Chinese translation, audiovisual translation and corpus linguistics. It will also provide translation professionals with a valuable guide to improving the quality and audience acceptance of film translation through evidence-based strategies and methodological approaches.

This collection of incisive essays is a nuanced interrogation of the suitability of literature as a vehicle for moral philosophy - a complex debate at the intersection of ethics and aesthetics.

What connects these different perspectives is a central question: is literature is an appropriate medium for approaching and unpicking moral, ethical and philosophical questions? And what insights does its form allow? Whilst some thinkers have charged literature as the source of feelings of resentment and alienation, others have argued that it is the most fertile ground for the development a moral imagination. Indeed, numerous philosophers have shown a great deal of interest in the possibility of reading literature as a philosophical exercise, with proponents such as Martha Nussbaum and Iris Murdoch leading the quest for a philosophical style which is more representative of human experience than abstract, analytic texts.

This volume brings together 12 exciting new contributions to this debate, contextualised by a comprehensive and in-depth editorial introduction that delves into its conceptual lineage. Grouped into three thematic sections, chapters explore literature's ability to be argumentative, its potential to bring about moral growth, and the rich diversity of philosophical thought across different literary genres.

The Routledge Handbook of Making: Craft-based Research Methods and Pedagogy is a book that celebrates the embodied process of craft methods. It uniquely centralises crafting, the practice of doing and making, as significant to the research project.

The handbook is a gathering together of several wayfaring crafts based scholars across the globe into one 'knot'. It is a celebration of craft from Indigenous, Asian, European, North American, South American, Australia and New Zealand contexts. These scholars provide a rigorous and passionate exploration of the diverse craft-based methods, pedagogies, and range of theoretical lenses they engage with in their research. The chapters demonstrate transdisciplinary approaches to research and pedagogy through crossing disciplinary boundaries and combining academic disciplines and rich theoretical conversations with practical, non(traditional)-academic knowledge to respond to complex real-world problems. Because this book is about making, the authors provide powerful, engaging and useful images as visual text. There are seven sections in the handbook, although with such creative and theoretical work there is also much crossover. The first section is a series of introduction chapters to key thinking about craft histories, craft pedagogies, craft as embodied practiced and a way to connect, crafting as becoming otherwise and craft as bodily thinking. Section two is a focus on Crafting with ancestors, Section three Crafting as decolonial activism, Section four Crafting as pedagogy, Section five Crafting professional identity, Section six Crafting as feminist practice and Section seven Crafting as healing. The Handbook provides a significant marker, a 'stake in the ground', to establish a definitive position for craft as method in scholarly practice and an invitation for other craft wayfarers to gather.

The book is intended for scholars and researchers across disciplines engaged in complex societal issues, including Indigenous, qualitative, decolonial, narrative, postqualitative, critical, practitioner and feminist researchers; for students at all levels of study (undergraduate, Masters, postgraduate); and for more established scholars in academia and other sectors. In is an invite to make.

Employing examples and stories from Tolkien's series, Moore outlines basic principles of organization theory and illustrates how management concepts can apply to organizations of any kind. Chapters relate Tolkien's notion of stewardship to sustainability management, discuss how to cultivate 'servant leadership' and examine The Lord of the Rings as a study in good diversity management. The book concludes by exploring the lessons and personal philosophies readers can draw for their own careers as managers, employees and businesspeople in a changing world.

Management Lessons from The Lord of the Rings is an informative resource for scholars and students of business and management, especially those interested in the relationship of management theory to popular culture. It will also benefit managers and practitioners seeking a greater understanding of general organizational theories.

This volume provides a sustained study and review of a distinct school of thought in Vienna which has long shaped a specific form of interpretive social research, setting it apart from other approaches.

Labelled the "Vienna School of Interpretive Social Research" in 2020, the book explores the movement's key characteristics, which are anchored in structure, materiality, and reflexivity. It examines how these elements form an integrated yet permeable body of knowledge and situates this approach in relation to other interpretive traditions. The contributors demonstrate how the Vienna School occupies a unique space on the map of qualitative methodologies and methods, both in terms of epistemological stance and local environment of thinking, with one of its defining characteristics being that it dissolved some of the established fault lines throughout European and Anglo-American discourses. In this spirit, the school fosters permeable boundaries to other approaches and communities conducive to enriching understandings of the social world without giving up or diluting its own distinct approach.

As such, this volume presents an integrative contribution to ongoing debates that transparently addresses and discusses contradictions and opportunities for conversation across qualitative approaches in postmodern, critical, and symbolic interactionist traditions, offering generative ways forward. It will therefore appeal to scholars of sociology with an interest in the sociology of knowledge, communication, and social theory.

Now in its second edition, this comprehensive research methods textbook provides an introduction to the diverse scientific methods that form the foundation of scholarship and practice in Human Development and Family Science (HDFS), with a focus on information literacy for applied practitioners.

Illustrated throughout with studies foundational to the discipline as examples of the strategies described in the text, the book distinguishes empirical scientific research from common sense and personal experience. It explores how scientific consensus is developed and how scientific literacy translates into evidence-based professional practice. It also introduces the use of study design to achieve falsifiability in scientific research and provides an overview of four different study designs: qualitative, prevalence, correlational, and experimental. It then examines systematic empiricism through sampling and measurement and addresses the public verifiability of science, including how information literacy and scientific literacy translates into evidence-based professional practice. This section also includes a discussion of the strategies used by pseudoscience to exploit the well-deserved credibility of science and relevant examples, with guidance to distinguish science from its pretenders.

Key features of this new edition include:

• In-text pedagogical tools, such as learning activities, recorded interviews and mini lectures, and reflection questions
• Interactive digital resources including flashcards and self-testing questions to enhance student engagement and understanding

Research Foundations for Human Development and Family Science is a comprehensive, accessible core textbook for undergraduate research methods classes in HDFS and related fields. It introduces the discipline of HDFS and challenges students to understand the limitations of common sense and the threat of pseudoscience for those working professionally with children and families.

The Routledge International Handbook of Disability Studies and the New Digital Society offers important new perspectives on the digitization of society in relation to disability.

Featuring the work of leading researchers from around the world, the book explores digitization and disability in a wide range of contexts, including schools, healthcare settings, public transport and working life, as well as across different forms of e-government, e-learning and e-business. It examines digitization in everyday life, including digital products such as smart phones, computer games and social media, and explores key themes such as artificial intelligence, the digitization of welfare and social services, overprotection and risk, and universal design and co-creation for better digital solutions. At the heart of the book is a focus on accessibility to digital technology as well as consideration of The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).

This handbook will be of interest to all scholars of disability studies, health and social care, nursing, teaching, sociology, and science and technology studies.

As the United States celebrates the 250-year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the ninth edition of the hugely successful American Civilization not only describes and explains what makes the United States a "civilization" but also examines the challenges to its cohesion and democratic progress.

This edition introduces readers to the significant debates in U.S. society, culture, and politics, ensuring a nuanced understanding of the complexities of American civilization. Early chapters have been reconfigured to address the challenges of race and discrimination in American political development. The book has been fully updated to reflect developments in education and local government during the second Trump administration, a more critical approach to foreign policy which questions the concept of American exceptionalism, and an examination of the impact, in federal government terms, of the 2024 presidential campaign, election results, and the opening of Trump's second term. New sections have been added to analyse efforts to control the Department of Justice, as well as developments in Medicaid policies and the results of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Supported by exercises, discussion questions, and suggestions for further reading, watching, and listening at the end of each chapter, as well as a substantial chronology of key events in U.S. history, this textbook remains an indispensable resource for students of American Studies. With its updated content and critical approach, the ninth edition equips readers with the tools to analyse and engage with the ongoing American attempt at creating "a more perfect union."

The chapters illustrate how older people negotiate urban change, highlighting inequalities which can limit access to the benefits of urban neighbourhoods, and demonstrate how individuals employ strategies of resistance to overcome challenges. The book makes the case for a new generation of community studies focusing on the impact of changing lifestyles at local as well as at societal levels.

Rethinking Community is a vital resource for scholars and students in the social sciences and related disciplines, including sociology, social gerontology, geography, social anthropology and urban studies. Professionals in urban planning and architecture alongside voluntary and third sector workers in social policy and social work will also benefit from its many practical insights.

Manufacturing Digitalisation in Italy: The Future Behind examines how digitalisation is transforming manufacturing in Italy, with particular attention to the interplay between new technologies and territorially embedded manufacturing systems.

Drawing on extensive empirical research, the book introduces the concept of the regional digitalisation system to explain how policies, firms, and decentralised institutional capacities jointly shape patterns of digital transformation. Challenging linear models of technological adoption, it advances the idea of "the future behind" to show how pre-existing regional socio-institutional configurations both enable and constrain emerging development trajectories. As Europe's second-largest manufacturing economy, yet a relative digital laggard, Italy has recently experienced a significant acceleration in firms' digitalisation, rapidly converging towards the EU average despite structurally adverse conditions. Characterised by regionalised capitalism, small and medium-sized enterprises, territorial inequalities, limited high-technology sectors, and weak, decentralised innovation systems, Italy provides a crucial case for understanding how subnational socio-institutional contexts shape manufacturing transformation and produce distinct regional digitalisation paths.

As the first comprehensive sociological book on manufacturing digitalisation, this book will appeal to scholars, practitioners, and policymakers interested in economic sociology, the sociology of work and industry, comparative political economy, industrial policy, regional studies, innovation studies, and the sociology of technology.

This book considers how European and Asian Christian missionaries communicated religious doctrine through the visual arts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Greater China.

Zooming in on these rich cross-cultural and inter-religious artifacts, Susangeline Patrick reveals how Christian images and visual culture reflected, interacted with, and influenced spiritual and sociopolitical powers during the period. Across eight chapters, Patrick expands the meaning of "liturgical art" within this historical and geographical context, locating religious visual arts within alternative spheres such as Christian charitable institutions, cartography, and bodily behavior, intentionally shedding light on Christian women's initiatives and participation in art, devotion, and power. In essence, this book underscores the interreligious and global aspects of encounters which shaped and impacted the production, circulation, and outcome of devotional art.