The importance of the global rural-urban matrix is often overlooked due to urban-normativity. But sometimes agrarian populism and a pastoral rural imaginary result in the equally fallacy of a rural-normativity, as in Jeffersonian nostalgia for a lost way of life that never existed. The nature of rurality in North America is important to study, but as Alessandro Bonanno makes clear, we cannot limit ourselves to the study of one or two nation-states. We must take a global perspective when it...

This Festschrift for Irving M. Zeitlin honors a scholar whose work has influenced and continues to influence sociology, particularly classical sociological theory, sociology of religion, and historical sociology. Irving M. Zeitlin's scholarship and mentoring has also influenced and inspired a new generation of sociologists. The essays presented here address a wide range of topics that include classical sociological theory, globalization, bureaucracy, genocide, resistance, ethnic d...

Semiotics provides key analytical tools to understand the creation and reproduction of meaning in social life. Although some fields have productively incorporated semiotic models, sociology still needs to engage with semiotic mediation.Written by a diverse group of authors in interpretive sociology, this ambitious volume asks what the relationship between meaning systems and action is, how we can describe culture and which roles we assign to language, social processes and cognition...