The past ten years have seen local government in the UK facing two major challenges: to survive in the face of Thatcher government hostility, and to adapt to enormously powerful forces of economic restructuring which have also been encouraged by government policies.The key aspects of these changing fortunes of British towns explored in this important new book is the ability of individual localities to exercise any control over their own growth and decline. Place, Policy and Pol...

This book, written by a philosopher interested in the problems of social science and scientific method, and a sociologist interested in the philosophy of science, presents a novel conception of how we should think about and carry out the scientific study of social life. This book combines an evaluation of different conceptions of the nature of science with an examination of important sociological theorists and frameworks. This second edition of the work was originally published in 1982.

How should we understand the personal and social impacts of complex mobility systems? Can lifestyles based around intensive travel, transport and tourism be maintained in the 21st century? What possibility post-carbon lifestyles?In this provocative study of "life on the move", Anthony Elliott and John Urry explore how complex mobility systems are transforming everyday, ordinary lives. The authors develop their arguments through an analysis of various sectors of mobile lives: networ...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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 ...