The book brings together a range of socio-legal and law and humanities scholars to elaborate and explore the idea of the legal ‘masterplot’.There is a class of narrative, sometimes referred to as ‘masterplot’ or ‘metanarrative’, that stands above the plethora of other stories, plots, and myths that may be found in law. This book focuses on the masterplot concept as providing a productive yet largely under-explored way of seeing, understanding, and responding to legal controversies ...

This handbook provides a comprehensive global survey and assessment of the law and policy relating to homelessness prevention. Homelessness is regarded internationally as one of the most pressing issues facing humanity and one of the greatest social challenges of our times. This has been further amplified as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Across the globe, there is an enormous divergence in both experiences of and responses to homelessness from governments and state actors. This handbo...

Drawing on studies of social class, crime and deviance, education, work in bureaucracies and changes in religious and political organizations, this Very Short Introduction explores the tension between the individual's place in society and society's role in shaping the individual, and demonstrates the value of sociology for understanding the modern world. In this new edition Steve Bruce discusses the continuing arguments for social egalitarianism, considering issues such as gay mar...

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Comparative Law: A Very Short Introduction aims to offer a concise introduction to Comparative Law—its objectives, methods, concepts and uses. After an overview of the fundamental definitions, key concepts and basic lexicon of the discipline, the book proposes an analysis of the most successful techniques adopted in legal comparison for mapping the world's legal systems and for explaining legal change and diffusion of ...

Politics, Society, and the Media is the first comprehensive political sociology of the media to be published in Canada. Paul Nesbitt-Larking draws upon a range of disciplines, including cultural and media studies, political economy, social theory, and political science to provide an analysis of the relationship between power and representation in Canada.The framework for the book presents a model of the mutual interaction between politics and the media. Attention is focuse...

Does history matter? Is it anything more than entertainment? And if so, what practical relevance does it have? In this fully revised second edition of a seminal text, John Tosh persuasively argues that history is central to an informed and critical understanding of topical issues in the present. Including a range of contemporary examples from Brexit to child sexual abuse to the impact of the internet, this is an important and practical introduction for all students of history.Inspi...

Human rights are considered one of the big ideas of the early twenty-first century. This book presents in an authoritative and readable form the variety of platforms on which human rights law is practiced today, reflecting also on the dynamic inter-relationships that exist between these various levels. The collection has a critical edge. The chapters engage with how human rights law has developed in its various subfields, what (if anything) has been achieved and at what cost, in terms of e...

‘Systematically exposes the neoliberal myths in unequal societies’ - Niels Rosendal Jensen′A call to arms to challenge inequality and social exclusion.′ - Lel Meleyal‘An impassioned dissection of the highly coded lexicon of so-called welfare reform…get reading, get angry, get ready’. - Gargi BhattacharyyaWelfare Words analyses the keywords and phrases commonly used by policy-makers, news-outlets and wider so...

First published in 1982, Professor Bauman’s discussion of the mechanism of class formation and institutionalisation of class conflict argues that our understanding of changes in social and political structure has been hindered by the freezing of concepts of class in the ice-age of industrial society. He investigates the impact of historical memory on the early transformation of rank into a class society, and on the current confusion in the analysis of the ‘crisis of late-industrial society...

Forty-five years after women's liberationists first laid down their challenge, chanting 'Women demand equality!' and 'I'm a second-class citizen', their narratives are now so universally accepted that few people dare speak truth to the power in the land that feminism has undoubtedly become. However, this book does just that.ÂOpening with a startling revelation in 2014 by Mallory Millett, sister of Kate Millett - a mentally-ill Marxist apologist, and probably the prime mover in the w...

The real meaning of ‘conservative’ – today denoting groups as diverse and incompatible as the religious right, libertarian free-marketeers and free-spending neo-conservatives – has been lost to politics. Yet the original conservative ideology, first developed in the eighteenth century by Edmund Burke, was concerned with managing change. Kieron O’Hara argues that genuine conservatism has its own relevance in a complex and dynamic world where change is rapid, pervasive and dislocating. Conse...

This collection of essays brings together moral, social and political philosophers from Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States who explore a wide range of issues under the three headings of Philosophy, Society and Culture; Ethics, Economics and Justice; and Rights, Law and Punishment. The topics discussed range from the public responsibility of intellectuals to the justice of military tribunals, and from posthumous reproduction to the death penalty.