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...

The concealment of income, wealth and profits in tax havens has brought the topic of offshoring into public debate, but as John Urry shows in this important new book offshoring is a much more pervasive feature of contemporary societies. These often secretive activities offshore also involve relations of work, finance, pleasure, waste, energy and security. Powerful and pervasive offshore worlds have been generated, posing huge challenges both for governments and for citizens.This bo...

In this thought-provoking new book, Anthony Smith analyses key debates between historians and social scientists on the role of nations and nationalism in history.In a wide-ranging analysis of the work of historians, sociologists, political scientists and others, he argues that there are three key issues which have shaped debates in this field: first, the nature and origin of nations and nationalism; second, the antiquity or modernity of nations and nationalism; and third, the role ...

"The original Tourist Gaze was a classic, marking out a new land to study and appreciate. This new edition extends into fresh areas with the same passion and insight of the object. Even more essential reading!"- Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor, Warwick UniversityThis new edition of a seminal text restructures, reworks and remakes the groundbreaking previous versions making this book even more relevant for tourism students, researchers and designers. ′...

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...

Thinking about the future is essential for almost all organizations and societies. States, corporations, universities, cities, NGOs and individuals believe they cannot miss the future. But what exactly is the future? It remains a mystery perhaps the greatest mystery, especially because futures are unpredictable and often unknowable, the outcome of many factors, known and unknown. The future is rarely a simple extrapolation from the present.In this important book, John Urry seeks ...

In this ground-breaking contribution to social theory, John Urry argues that the traditional basis of sociology - the study of society - is outmoded in an increasingly borderless world. If sociology is to make a pertinent contribution to the post societal era it must forget the social rigidities of the pre-global order and, instead, switch its focus to the study of both physical and virtual movement. In considering this sociology of mobilities, the book concerns itself with the travels of ...

John Urry has been discussing and writing on these and similar questions for the past fifteen years. In Consuming Places, he gathers together his most significant contributions. Urry begins with an extensive review of the connections between society, time and space. The concept of 'society', the nature of 'locality', the significance of 'economic restructuring', and the concept of the 'rural', are examined in relationship to place. The book then considers how places have been tran...

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.

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...

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 ...

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...