Society & Culture: General books

Innovation is a central mechanism in the progression of society and often captures the imagination and enthusiasm of corporate leaders, public policy makers, and so on. However, the cultural, political and social complexities of innovation that extend beyond economic and technological contexts are often overlooked. In this volume, a novel approach to deeply understanding innovation in contexts that range from the socio-cultural to the technological is presented. The fundamental principles and constructs of innovation are identified and described according to an interdisciplinary lens that gives particular focus to a variety of historical examples of innovation. This exploration leads to the development of a learning model that serves as an alternative to mainstream innovation curricula.

This new volume publishes four selected articles covering an interesting set of topics in international management studies with a comparative focus, including: organizational control in joint ventures; institutional and cultural effects on subsidiary operations; corporate governance practices; and employee's choice of dissatisfaction behavior display. These articles along with the five Research Forum papers, present a rich diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches. They also represent the state-of-the-art and some of the best thinking in the field.

This book strives to understand the social and cultural dynamics in Mediterranean tourism destinations through ethnographic examples and case studies from places including Greece, Spain, Morocco, Croatia, Lebanon, France, and Crete. Exploring themes such as globalization, cosmopolitanism, leisure mobilities, power, and late capitalism, this volume analyzes the blurring edges of tourism and migration, the role the former plays in the dialogical construction of cultural identities, or how the interconnection between each of the diverse residing sociocultural groups influences the relation with other groups. The work of several social scientists, from different interdisciplinary backgrounds, over numerous years is documented using multiple research techniques to observe cultures and societies as they occur in daily practices. This analysis discovers how tourism characterizes the daily lives of social groups living in tourists' destinations and how it offers a distinctive sense of collective memories, thus unfolding cultures and societies in tourism contexts.

This volume examines diverse developments in the evolution of public policy institutions for remedying social problems. The collected chapters address the transformation of social problems, social problems work, and social problems solutions in the context of criminal justice, mental health, and community institutions (schools) in contemporary society. These diverse settings and institutions collectively reflect a trend toward the use of various 'treatment' initiatives within formal disciplinary systems and as part of legalistic social control strategies. Although all of the remedial approaches considered are 'new' in the sense of being recent innovations, many are only the most recent in a long sequence of policy initiatives. The contributors to the collection demonstrate that recent transformations in remedial approaches to social problems and the challenges faced by such policy initiatives are as much a function of what has come before as they are of their own inherent features.

As economic stagnation freezes the globe; capitalism is increasingly questioned; war, revolution and political instability unsettles the Middle East; and President Obama's campaign for the Presidency looms, Volume 23 of Political Power and Social Theory reflects on these and related issues. Chapters in this volume discuss the meaning of revolution, the origins of neoliberalism in India, identity formation in a Chicago social movement, the Palestinian National Question, and the Black middle-class in the US. Additionally, in the Scholarly Controversy section, Fred Block questions whether the concept of "capitalism" should be problematized entirely.

This volume takes a fresh approach to qualitative research on sport and physical culture by presenting "student friendly" engaging chapters that clearly articulate the significance and practice of qualitative and/or critical methods in plain and convincing language. It outlines contemporary, cutting-edge approaches in qualitative research methods that students in undergraduate programs in sociology and sociology of sport, as well as, for instance, sport, exercise, kinesiology, or health, can understand clearly. Chapters revolve around one principal method in qualitative methodology, and look at why certain methodological choices were made, what problems were faced, and how these were overcome. Classic issues in methodology, contemporary issues in research methods and innovative trends in qualitative research are addressed through case study examples from emerging and exciting areas of research in sport studies. Topics covered include: historical methods; ethnography; auto-ethnography; embodied methods; interviewing; narratives; participatory action methods; interpretative phenomenological analysis; media analysis; and visual methods.