Evaluation-whether called by this name, quality assurance, audit, accreditation, or others-is an important social activity. Any organization that "lives in public" must now evaluate its activities, be evaluated by others, or evaluate others. What ar…
Combining engaging narrative with analytic power, this book presents the past and present of East Central Europe in the larger context of the political and economic history of the Continent.The central theme of the book is best summarized by the fam…
This book studies the impact of cultural factors on the course of military innovations. One would expect that countries accustomed to similar technologies would undergo analogous changes in their perception of and approach to warfare. However, the i…
Already a standard in its first edition, this newly expanded and reorganized reader provides a compelling exploration of what arguably remains the single most important problem in social theory: the problem of social order. Contending that theory's…
By articulating a general theory of crime and related behavior, the authors present a new and comprehensive statement of what the criminological enterprise should be about. They argue that prevalent academic criminology-whether sociological, psychol…
When faced with complex challenges or uncertain outcomes, many leaders believe that if they are smart enough, work hard enough, or turn to the best management tools, they will be able to find the right answer, predict and plan for the future, and br…
Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance has been widely recognized for its important and influential concepts in areas of motivation and social psychology. The theory of dissonance is here applied to the problem of why partial reward, delay…
Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had…
The first decade of the 21st century saw a remarkable number of large-scale disasters. Earthquakes in Haiti and Sumatra underscored the serious economic consequences that catastrophic events can have on developing countries, while 9/11 and Hurricane…
All social scientists learn the celebrated theories and frameworks of their predecessors, using them to inform their own research and observations. But before there can be theory, there must be theorizing. Theorizing in Social Science introduces the…
A sustained engagement with Theodor Adorno, Jazz As Critique looks to jazz for ways of understanding the inadequacies of contemporary life. Adorno's writings on jazz are notoriously dismissive. Nevertheless, Adorno does have faith in the critical po…
From Internet-dating profiles to Native American folktales to the photo trickery of Hollywood gossip magazines, this volume explores deception and offers insights from leading figures in disparate fields, drawing out surprising commonalities. For th…
Opening with the provocative query "what might an anthropology of the secular look like?" this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensi…
This extraordinary book can be read on several levels. Primarily, it is the story of Joseph Jacotot, an exiles French schoolteacher who discovered in 1818 an unconventional teaching method that spread panic throughout the learned community of Europe…
In the past few years, a number of well-known firms have failed; think of Blockbuster, Kodak, or RadioShack. When we read about their demise, it often seems inevitable-a natural part of "creative destruction." But closer examination reveals a distur…
In this highly original and provocative book, Michel Serres reflects on the relation between nature and culture and analyzes the origins of the world's contemporary environmental problems. He does so through the surprising proposition that our clean…
Just about any social need is now met with an opportunity to "connect" through digital means. But this convenience is not free-it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to ge…
This book addresses one of the basic questions in military studies: How can armies cope effectively with technological and doctrinal surprises-ones that leave them vulnerable to new weapons systems and/or combat doctrines? Author Meir Finkel contend…
The Enlightenment remains widely associated with the rise of scientific progress and the loss of religious faith, a dual tendency that is thought to have contributed to the disenchantment of the world. In her wide-ranging and richly illustrated book…
The end of human history is an event that has been foreseen or announced by both messianics and dialecticians. But who is the protagonist of that history that is coming-or has come-to a close? What is man? How did he come on the scene? And how has h…
"Opening the enormous metal gate, the guard suddenly took away my blindfold and asked me, tauntingly, if I would recognize my parents. With my eyes hurting from the strange light and anger in my voice, I assured him that I would. Suddenly I was push…
Contemporary Japan is home to one of the world's largest and most diversified markets for sex. Widely understood to be socially necessary, the sex industry operates and recruits openly, staffed by a diverse group of women who are attracted by its hi…
Diana E. Forsythe was a leading anthropologist of science, technology, and work, and especially of the field of artificial intelligence. This volume collects her best-known essays, along with other major works that remained unpublished upon her deat…
Geographic interpretations of development recently have become the subject of much renewed interest and debate within scholarly and public policy circles. Focusing on Latin America, this book examines how physical and human geography has influenced…
"I believe that Luhmann is the only true genius in the social sciences alive today. By this, I mean that not only is he smart, extremely productive, and amazingly erudite, though all this is true enough, but also that he has, in the course of an imp…
Philosophy, Socrates declared, is the art of dying. This book underscores that it is also the art of learning to live and share the earth with those who have come before us. Burial, with its surrounding rituals, is the most ancient documented cultur…
What is a technical object? At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature, which had within themselves a beginning of movement and rest, and man-made objects, which did not have the source of their own producti…
Radical Atheism presents a profound new reading of the influential French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Against the prevalent notion that there was an ethical or religious "turn" in Derrida's thinking, Hagglund argues that a radical atheism informs D…
Author and consultant Jennifer Garvey Berger has worked with all types of leaders-from top executives at Google to nonprofit directors who are trying to make a dent in social change. She hears a version of the same plea from every client in nearly e…
This account of the Pearl Harbor attack denies that the lack of preparation resulted from military negligence or a political plot
Disorientation is the first publication in English of the second volume of Technics and Time, in which French philosopher Bernard Stiegler engages in a close dialogue with Husserl, Derrida, and other philosophers who have devoted their energies to t…
In the first two volumes of Technics and Time, Bernard Stiegler worked carefully through Heidegger's and Husserl's relationship to technics and technology. Here, in volume three, he turns his attention to the prolematic relationship to technics he f…
What don't we know, and why don't we know it? What keeps ignorance alive, or allows it to be used as a political instrument? Agnotology-the study of ignorance-provides a new theoretical perspective to broaden traditional questions about "how we know…
Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to a…
The revolutionary wave that swept the Middle East in 2011 was marked by spectacular mobilization, spreading within and between countries with extraordinary speed. Several years on, however, it has caused limited shifts in structures of power, leavin…
I am. We are.That is enough. Now we have to start.These are the opening words of Ernst Bloch's first major work, The Spirit of Utopia, written mostly in 1915-16, published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years l…
Images increasingly saturate our world, making present to us what is distant or obscure. Yet the power of images also arises from what they do not make present-from a type of absence they do not dispel. Joining a growing multidisciplinary conversati…
No contemporary figure is more demonized than the Islamist foreign fighter who wages jihad around the world. Spreading violence, disregarding national borders, and rejecting secular norms, so-called jihadists seem opposed to universalism itself. In…
A Financial Times Best Book of the YearThe first book that examines India's mega-publicity campaigns to theorize the global transformation of the nation-state into an attractive investment destination.The early twenty-first century was an optimistic…
The Subject of Human Rights is the first book to systematically address the "human" part of "human rights." Drawing on the finest thinking in political theory, cultural studies, history, law, anthropology, and literary studies, this volume examines…
What role have communication media played in the formation of modern societies? How should we understand the social impact of new forms of communication and information diffusion, from the advent of printing in fifteenth-century Europe to the expans…
Modern democracies face tough life-and-death choices in armed conflicts. Chief among them is how to weigh the value of soldiers' lives against those of civilians on both sides. The first of its kind, Whose Life Is Worth More? reveals that how these…
It is commonly believed that Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), well known as the founder of phenomenology and as the teacher of Heidegger, was unable to free himself from the framework of a classical metaphysics of subjectivity. Supposedly, he never aband…
The Pakistan Army is a uniquely powerful and influential institution, with vast landholdings and resources. It has deep roots in the colonial armed forces and relies heavily on certain regions to supply its soldiers, especially parts of rural Punjab…
One of the central pillars of US counterterrorism policy is that capturing or killing a terrorist group's leader is effective. Yet this pillar rests more on a foundation of faith than facts. In Leadership Decapitation, Jenna Jordan examines over a t…
The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philo…
This book argues that the most profound and far-reaching effects of Buddhism on Chinese culture occurred at the level of practice, specifically in religious rituals designed to cure people of disease, demonic possession, and bad luck. This practice…
Whether from customers, supply-chain partners, policymakers, or regulators, organizations in virtually every industry are facing calls to do more with less. They are feeling compelled to provide higher-quality outcomes, more rapidly, at a lower cost…
For decades, the formal peculiarities of War and Peace disturbed Russian and Western critics, who attributed both the anomalous structure and the literary power of the book to Tolstoy's "primitive," unruly genius. Using that critical history as a st…
This is a highly original book about the connections between historical moment, social structure, technology, communication systems, and what is said and thought using these systems - notably literature. The author focuses on the differences between…
