A New Industrial Future? examines whether a further industrial revolution is taking place around the world. In this compelling book Birtchnell and Urry examine such a new possible future involving the mass adoption of 3D printing. The locating of 3D printers in homes, offices, stores and workshops would disrupt existing systems and pose novel challenges for incumbents. The book drawing upon expert interviews, scenario workshops and various case studies assesses the potential futur...

Most recent sociological work on the theory of class is based on a distinction between Weberian and Marxist approaches. For the first part of this volume, the authors use this distinction to review the literature on the middle class, concentrating particularly on the traditions of Marxist theory and of the more empirical work inspired by Max Weber. They show, however, that this distinction is of limited utility in reconstructing a theory of the middle class.

There have been striking increases in both long-distance travel and in communications through mobile phones, text messaging, emailing and videoconferencing. Such developments in communication, along with a similar increase in physical travel and movement of goods around the globe, reconfigure social networks by disconnecting and reconnecting people in new ways. This original book puts forward one of the first social science studies of the geographies of social networks and related mobiliti...

This innovative volume focuses on tourism through the twin lenses of cultural theory and cultural geography. Presenting a set of innovative case studies on tourist destinations around the world, the contributors explore the paradoxes of the tourist experience and the implications of these paradoxes for our broader understanding of the problems of modernity and identity. The book examines how tourism reveals the paradoxical ways that places are both mobile and rooted, real and fake, inhabit...

Demonstrating that all notions of nature are inextricably entangled in different forms of social life, the text elaborates the many ways in which the apparently natural world has been produced from within particular social practices. These are analyzed in terms of different senses, different times and the production of distinct spaces, including the local, the national and the global.The authors emphasize the importance of cultural understandings of the physical world, highlighting...

In the twenty-first century, more than ever, everything and everybody seems to be on the move. Global flows of people, goods, food, money, information, services and media images are forming an intensely mobile background to everyday life. Social scientists, too, are on the move, seeking new analytical purchase on these important aspects of the social world by trying to move with, and to be moved by, the fleeting, distributed, multiple, non-causal, sensory, emotional and kinaesthetic.

Bringing together leading urban scholars, this book discusses the linkages between the economic, social and psychological factors of the urban environment. It focuses on the growth of private urbanity that has led to a 'spectactularization' of the city, the most extreme component of attention being the fascination which is aroused by attractions and state-managed events. The complex characteristics of this fascination are examined under the dimensions of aesthetics, emotions, lived experie...

Objects and materials are on the move like never before, often at astonishing speeds and along hidden routeways. This collection opens to social scientific scrutiny the various systems which move objects about the world, examining their fateful implications for many people and places. Offering texts from key thinkers, the book presents case studies from around the world which report on efforts to establish, maintain, disrupt or transform the cargo-mobility systems which have grown so drama...

What would a de-carbonised society be like? What are the implications of a general de-globalisation for our social futures? How will our high-carbon patterns of life be restructured in a de-energized world?As global society gradually wakes up to the new reality of peak oil, these questions remain unanswered. For the last hundred years oil made the world go round, and as we move into the century of 'tough oil' this book examines some profound consequences. It considers what societie...

Bringing together the leading authors currently working at the intersection of social science and transport science, this volume provides a companion to the well-established and extensive international Transport and Society series. Each chapter, and the volume as a whole, offers closer and richer consideration of the issues, practices and structures of multiple mobilities which shape the current world but which have typically been overlooked or minimised. What this approach seeks to do is ...

This book looks at the making and the consuming of places in the contemporary world. Illustrated through various case-studies from Denmark, it considers how places, performances and peoples intersect. It examines the fascinating circumstances through which visitors to a place, in part, produce that place through their performances. Places are intertwined with people through various systems that generate and reproduce performances in and of that place. These systems comprise networks of ’ho...

First published in 1973, this is a reissue of John Urry's important and influential study of the theory of revolution.Part 1 offers a detailed discussion of the concept of the reference group, tracing its development from the symbolic interactionist tradition and then showing how it came to be used in ways which emasculated some of the suppositions of that tradition.Part 2 sets out a theory of revolutionary dissent, in which Dr Urry emphasizes the interconnection be...