Sociological Routes and Political Roots (Sociological Review Monographs) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1444338137 ISBN 13: 9781444338133

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011

Synopsis

This monograph explores the interplay between ideas of the political and the way that we, as sociologists, look at the phenomena that we study. 

• Shows what empirical sociological enquiries into the political reveal on theoretical and conceptual levels
• Discusses how sociologists should study and understand a political environment 
• Evaluates how the political intersects with current social identities and divisions
• Includes empirical and theoretical cases 

About this title

About the Author

Michaela Benson is a research assistant at the University of Bristol. She previously held the Sociological Review fellowship (2008-9), and is the author of The British in Rural France (2011), and co-editor of the volume Lifestyle Migration (2009).

Rolland Munro is Emeritus Professor at Keele University and was previously Director of the Centre for Social Theory & Technology, CSTT. He is internationally regarded for his path-breaking and interdisciplinary work on consumption, power and identity.

From the Back Cover

The central theme of this monograph is the interplay between ideas of the political and the way sociologists look at the range of phenomena we study. The political and its relation to the social has of course long been a source of profound debate within political sociology as well as more generally. What we want to mark in this volume are some key ways in which the ever-burgeoning lines of inquiry and analysis within sociology alter conceptions of the political, with mutually profound implications for understandings of the social across the discipline of sociology.

Notions of how power operates open up our understandings of the social as these unfold from earlier holistic and overly-humanistic images of society. Consequently fieldwork now embraces relations and affects that are not directly observable, but can be traced, and reported, through the circulation of artefacts, discourses, practices, and technologies. So too political inquiry becomes more nuanced and grounded in what Durkheim called ‘social facts’. Charting our everyday institutions and unseen forms of organising not only helps to show how (and when) lifeworlds are made stable and tractable, it permits closer examination and questioning as to who benefits from the feelings of security and belonging so granted.

Parts 1 and 2 explore the complex interrelations between the social and the political, through their traditional focus on the entangled themes of borders and belonging. The examination of discourse, Part 4, and social movements, Part 5, provide analytical routes through which the boundaries between theoretical and empirical research are also called into question. For all this, as the papers in Part 3 demonstrate, theoretical contributions -if taking a less central, legislating role- remain as important as ever. Taken together, the articles in this volume provide key insights into the many, many ways with which a commitment to the political affects understandings of the social in contemporary sociology.

Notions of how power operates open up our understandings of the social as these unfold from earlier holistic and overly-humanistic images of society. Consequently fieldwork now embraces relations and affects that are not directly observable, but can be traced, and reported, through the circulation of artefacts, discourses, practices, and technologies. So too political inquiry becomes more nuanced and grounded in what Durkheim called ‘social facts’. Charting our everyday institutions and unseen forms of organising not only helps to show how (and when) lifeworlds are made stable and tractable, it permits closer examination and questioning as to who benefits from the feelings of security and belonging so granted.

Parts 1 and 2 explore the complex interrelations between the social and the political, through their traditional focus on the entangled themes of borders and belonging. The examination of discourse, Part 4, and social movements, Part 5, provide analytical routes through which the boundaries between theoretical and empirical research are also called into question. For all this, as the papers in Part 3 demonstrate, theoretical contributions -if taking a less central, legislating role- remain as important as ever. Taken together, the articles in this volume provide key insights into the many, many ways with which a commitment to the political affects understandings of the social in contemporary sociology.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1444338137
• ISBN 13: 9781444338133
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 308
• Editor: Benson Michaela, Munro Rolland