Is mankind alone in the universe? Will we ever encounter intelligent life beyond Earth? These questions have been asked for centuries. Recent advances in the fields of astrophysics, astronomy and astrobiology make it more likely than ever before, that Earth may not be the only inhabited planet, and that humanity may not the only intelligent species in the universe.

What would be the consequences of contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence? This question is at the heart of the emerging discipline of exosociology. According to the authors, first contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence poses enormous risks for humanity. These risks come not only from extraterrestrials, but above all from ourselves. We should be prepared.

Michael Schetsche and Andreas Anton's comprehensive introduction to exosociology was first published in German in 2019. The book has been widely acclaimed in Germany and internationally. It is now available in English for the first time.

The originality of Women Reclaiming the City lies not only in the variety of themes being presented, but also in the variety of all these different highly respected women researchers. This book is the first in which current societal themes revolving around urbanism, architecture, and city planning are put forth solely through female perspectives. It reveals the importance of having female lenses on certain societal debates.

Twenty-five leading female urban scholars draw on principles, concepts, and positions that are foundational to other frameworks and fields-specifically, critical studies, indigenous and ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, queer theory, feminist theory, progressive urban theory, social ecology, urban planning and design, architecture, urban economics and urban social geography, landscape urbanism, new urbanism, heritage management and urbanism, political ecology, and cultural studies- to present alternatives to the current classical theories and conceptualizations that have failed to engage a truly intersectional analysis of dominant city and urban discourses, policies, and practices.

The book is intended for scholars of urban studies, policy makers, and city planning professionals.

David R. Maines (1940-2021), one of the most important sociological scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries, constructed a vast area of research to advance the field of symbolic interactionism during his career. Highlighting the significance of Maines' works in symbolic interactionism, Festschrift in Honor of David R. Maines documents his most celebrated areas of scholarship, including social structure, narrative sociology, social interaction, dialectic perspective, temporality, and mesostructure.

Including stories from individuals who knew Maines via kinship, friendship, or professional relationship, the chapters conclude with two new empirical studies to reflect Maines' interest in continually advancing the field with cutting-edge research. The collection also features a list of Maines' selected works for further reading to guide other symbolic interactionists in their research endeavors.

Volume 57 of Studies in Symbolic Interaction is a source of both consolation and celebration for those who knew David R. Maines, as well as those who have just begun to discover his inspiring work.

This edited volume gathers top scholars from across disciplines, generations, and countries to provide constructive commentary on the theory, methods and practices of institutional ethnography. These contributions explore themes of relevance to institutional ethnographers that are both enduring and newly emerging: how institutional ethnographers can take an expanded view of social institutions, how they might explore the dynamics of ruling relations over time, what results from understanding experience as dialogue (including internal or in-skull dialogue), the significance of "standpoint," and the opportunities for institutional ethnographers to move beyond texts as they discover and describe social relations.

A key aspect of Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography, and one that distinguishes it from others, is the forward-looking orientation of the authors. This perspective allows them to establish bridges between the institutional ethnography that hasbeen developed heretofore and the potential that is looming for such a mode of inquiry into the social. As such, the book is both informative and inspirational.

This volume presents recent advances in identity theory, which is a prominent and active theory in sociological social psychology and a versatile framework for explaining the sources of identities, how they develop, how they operate in situations and groups, and how they influence behavior and well-being. The volume is organized around new theoretical developments, measurement techniques, and research in the field. Theoretical developments covered in the volume sharpen, reframe, and expand fundamental concepts in identity theory. State-of-the-art techniques for measuring identities assess, refine, and update existing measures. New research in the volume addresses both individual processes and outcomes and group processes and outcomes. The chapters together showcase the wide applicability of identity theory to a host of identities, such as the religious, gender, sexual, physical attractiveness, racial/ethnic, parent, student, partisan, and group member identities. The volume editors introduce identity theory and provide an overview of the chapters. In the last chapter, they describe how this volume points to future directions for advancing theory, measurement, and research in identity theory.

This volume is of interest to a wider readership, including sociological social psychologists, sociologists, and scholars in other disciplines (psychology, political science, economics, education) whose research or teaching deals with identities. Graduate and advanced undergraduate students interested in identity research will also find this book accessible. Finally, this is for discerning laypersons who are interested in how identities influence and shape their lives and affect their well-being.

This book analyzes the informal practices of contemporary cities through a close dialogue between different research perspectives, with the shared goal of giving voice to informality and evaluating its benefits and potential in a multidimensional key of social factors.

Recently, the human sciences have seen the emergence of this new term "informality," at first sight in conflict with their function of giving order and form to social phenomena. A term with which, in this book, the authors, having as reference the Italian and European experience, specifically identify those unsatisfied social demands and those collective actions "from below" that aim at the recovery of urban space and the renewal of its organization, often not following the trajectories of legality and institutions. By means of a close dialogue between different areas of social research, this book attempts to establish the different declinations and applications of the term, evaluating the causes and effects, benefits, and potential of the phenomena attributable to it, within a multidimensional analysis that calls into question the regeneration and collective use of spaces, political-institutional confrontation and conflict, legal innovation, and social-economic benefits.

This book examines the essence of a particular personal experience within a New York City public space. The principal approach, both theoretical and methodological, is the phenomenological perspective, an in-depth study of such a surprising experience in the real world from the first-person point of view. The book introduces a new concept of "the situated self," that is, the whole entity of the respondent's subjective world about his or her particular urban experience in public. It is one's "being-in-the-word" or lived experience in the real world. Another important feature of "the situated self" is its comprehensive constitution of all certain human traits, perceptions, emotions, bodily sensations, cognition, and behavioral reaction, and their close situational connectivity to one another. By implication, this public experience of "the situated self" is a common denominator shared among regular users of New York City public spaces for making their city life with urban strangers more routinized, predictable, tolerant, and civic.

Is America in the midst of an electoral transformation? What were the sources of Joseph Biden's victory in 2020, and how do they differ from Republican and Democratic coalitions of the past? Does the Democratic victory signal a long-term decline for Republicans' chances in presidential elections?
Change and Continuity in the 2020 and 2022 Elections explores those questions by analyzing and explaining the voting behavior in the most recent presidential and midterm elections, as well as setting the results in the context of larger trends and patterns in elections studies. The authors present the latest National Election Studies data to help students see how social forces, party loyalties, and prominent issues affect voting behavior, turnout, and ultimately the results of presidential and congressional elections. Readers will come away with a better understanding of what the most recent elections mean for the future of American politics.

This textbook is an introductory guide to applying behavioral sciences and systemic thinking into public policy design and implementation. It presents an innovative public management toolkit to handle 'wicked' social problems - those not very responsive to traditional public policy instruments - by incorporating insights from the behavioral sciences and systemic design in the diagnostics of public problems, based on the motivations and constraints of the 'real citizen' - beyond the ideal citizen's perfectly rational intentions and plans devoid of social context or self-control problems.

This volume aims to motivate the inclusion of broader and deeper insights from the behavioral sciences - especially behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, and social psychology - to the repertoire of public managers by introducing new methodologies for diagnosing the root causes behind public problems and for designing effective policies to address them. The new diagnosis tool - theMSI framework (an acronym for Motivation, Self-control, and Inattention problems) -, will help identify new mechanisms underlying social problems or reinterpret known problems based on behavioral insights. The new methodology for policy design - the PRIx framework (an acronym for Pricing policies, Regulatory policies, and Information policies) -, will enrich existing policy tools with such behavioral insights.

Behavioral Insights for Policy Design: A New Framework for Understanding Wicked Social Problems and Designing Policies for Real Citizens will be a useful and practical guide to public managers and students of graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in public management interested in learning how to apply innovative tools and methodologies inspired by the behavioral sciences into public policy design in a simple and practical way, even when dealing with complex social problems.

Grounded in the awareness that many public sector inefficiencies remain unsolved, Identity in the Public Sector presents a critical consideration of the interplay between public sector reforms and organizational changes across a variety of levels.

Framing this issue and its importance within organizational and management studies, Andrea Tomo considers how organizational change is translated and experienced at the individual level, exposing why public employees often resist such projects. Building upon related literature for a better understanding and management of complex organizational change initiatives in the public sector, Tomo provides a more integrated picture of individual identity, emphasising the influence of cultural and context-specific factors, as well as their importance in policy-making processes, particularly their potential for improving the effectiveness of public administration.

Offering insights for public management into a murky, often complex research area, Identity in the Public Sector provides a new theoretical and practical approach for the analysis and interpretation of the intersection between identity and public enterprises and services.

This book provides an historical overview of the formation of sports media in Latin America and its role in the construction of the political history of Latin American sport. The sports press was a privileged observer of the development of modern sports, but it was also a key factor in the making of professional sports in Latin America. Most of the literature on sport in Latin America treats the sports press as an historical source, rarely taking it as an object of study in itself. However, the development of sports in the region is connected to national and state-building processes and the role of media narratives is crucial to understanding how sports participate in those processes. Spanning the globalization of football in the late nineteenth century to the shift promoted by television in the 1970s, the chapters survey the historical development of sports media in Latin America. Representing ten countries, the contributors follow a framework that presents the press not as a passive narrator of the sports phenomenon, but as a social agent of the sports field. This book is of use to those interested in the history of sports and the media, and it will be a good resource for undergraduates taking courses on Sports History, Latin American History, Sports Management, and Journalism and Communication.