Two billion people around the world use Instagram, but so far social scientists have done little research on the platform. Despite Instagram's reputation for shallowness, the ongoing self-presentation it demands confronts users with profound dilemmas. Who are we? What do we want to show of ourselves? What do we aspire to be? On Display is a book about how people remake their worlds through social media. John D. Boy and Justus Uitermark provide an encompassing account of how a plat...

Based on case studies, this book analyzes a recent wave of social movement and protests in the twenty-first century. It has two overarching broadly defined themes: first, to identify commonalities across the social movements and protests in terms of strategies, desire, hopes as well as the main factors in the decline of the movements. And second, to underline the significance of the general economic, social, and political conditions in which these protests arose. Although there are specifi...

Through historical and comparative research on the immigrant rights movements of the United States, France and the Netherlands, Cities and Social Movements examines how small resistances against restrictive immigration policies do – or don’t – develop into large and sustained mobilizations.Presents a comprehensive, comparative analysis of immigrant rights politics in three countries over a period of five decades, providing vivid accounts of the processes through whic...

Integration politics in the Netherlands has changed dramatically between 1990 and 2005. Whereas ethnic and religious differences were hitherto pacified through accommodation, a new and increasingly powerful current in Dutch politics problematized the presence of minorities. This development represents a challenge to sociologists and political scientists: how to map and explain drastic changes? Arguing that extant approaches are better at explaining continuity than change, this book develop...

Power needs abstraction, to make the unwieldy complexity of the social world legible and manageable. The proposition at the heart of Seeing Like a Platform is that digital technology brings new metaphors through which power operates. While industrial modernity saw society as a machinery to be designed according to detailed blueprints, digital modernity views society as organic and alive, to be herded and nudged through digital infrastructures, AI, and algorithms.

Smart Urbanism (SU) – the rebuilding of cities through the integration of digital technologies with buildings, neighbourhoods, networked infrastructures and people – is being represented as a unique emerging ‘solution’ to the majority of problems faced by cities today. SU discourses, enacted by technology companies, national governments and supranational agencies alike, claim a supremacy of urban digital technologies for managing and controlling infrastructures, achieving greater effective...

Digital hyperconnectivity is a defining fact of our time. The Silicon Valley dream of universal connection – the dream of connecting everyone and everything to everyone and everything else, everywhere and all the time – is rapidly becoming a reality. In this wide-ranging and sharply argued book, Rogers Brubaker develops an original interpretive account of the pervasive and unsettling changes brought about by hyperconnectivity. He traces transformations of the self, social relations, cultur...

Most of us recognize that organizations are everywhere. You meet them on every street corner in the form of families and shops, study in them, work for them, buy from them, pay taxes to them. But have you given much thought to where they came from, what they are today, and what they might become in the future? How and why do they have so much influence over us, and what influences them? How do they contribute to and detract from the meaningfulness of lives, and how might we improve them so...

Privacy is one of the most urgent issues associated with information technology and digital media. This book claims that what people really care about when they complain and protest that privacy has been violated is not the act of sharing information itself—most people understand that this is crucial to social life —but the inappropriate, improper sharing of information.Arguing that privacy concerns should not be limited solely to concern about control over personal information, He...

Ethnography is an increasingly important research method in the private sector, yet ethnographic literature continues to focus on an academic audience. Sam Ladner fills the gap by advancing rigorous ethnographic practice that is tailored to corporate settings where colleagues are not steeped in social theory, research time lines may be days rather than months or years, and research sponsors expect actionable outcomes and recommendations. Ladner provides step-by-step guidance at every turn-...

Multiculturalism appears to be in terminal crisis. It has been blamed for undermining national identity, diluting social cohesion, creating ethnic ghettos and cultural fragmentation, providing fertile ground for Islamic radicalism, encouraging perverse 'political correctness', and restricting liberal freedoms of expression, amongst other things. The public debate over multiculturalism has polarised opinion amongst the general public, policy makers, and politicians. But how much real eviden...

"A splendid new book. . . . Takes on—and mostly demolishes—the conventional narrative about the acceleration of life in a digital world." ― ObserverMost of us complain that there aren't enough hours in the day and too many e-mails in our thumb-accessible inboxes. This widespread perception that life is faster than it used to be is now ingrained in our culture, and smartphones and the Internet are continually being blamed. But isn't the sol...