A wide-ranging exploration of why inequality persists and what can be done about it.

Dennis Smith offers a fascinating survey of Elias's life and writings and traces the growth of his reputation. He also illustrates how Elias's insights can be applied to understand Western modernity and social and political change, showing why Elias is so important to sociology.

An instant Sunday Times bestseller, O Brother is by turns heart-breaking and hilarious - evoking a working-class childhood of the 1970-80s and trying to answer the questions that often haunt the survivors of suicide

From the Holocaust to Vietnam and Iraq, this title explains how ordinary people can commit the most horrific of crimes if placed under the influence of a malevolent authority.

Anatomy of the new breed of state regulation colonising everyday life.

Do the Olympic Games really live up to their glowing reputation? As the biggest global sport mega-event, the Olympic Games command public and media attention, while Olympic mythology and ritual obscure their underlying function as a profit-making business enterprise.

Ronald Wright's skills as an ethnologist, political historian, and travel writer have found an ideal outlet an excellent book.' The Independent

* Luc Ferry is a well-known philosopher, essayist and public intellectual, with a large and established readership. * In this broad-ranging and original book, he presents a clear argument for a comprehensive philosophy of love that will in effect replace dead faiths and ideologies.

This book offers an account of how groups of economically marginal people have adapt and negotiate the offerings of a 'post industrial' labour market and a welfare system geared towards reintegrating them into formal employment. Through close ethnographic study it highlights collective strategies and responses to labour and welfare changes.

101 chance meetings, juxtaposing the famous and the infamous, the artistic and the philistine, the pompous and the comical, the snobbish and the vulgar, told by Britain's funniest writer.

An oral history of Britain's second city and how it has been changed for the better by its migrant population

"A powerful manifesto for dealing with the march of time." - Observer

Now in its second edition, Parenting Culture Studies seeks to understand how parenting is taken as a particular mode of childrearing that reflects broader social trends.

Dorling brings together new material alongside a selection of his most recent writing on inequality from publications including the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, New Statesman, Financial Times and the China People's Daily. He explores whether we have now reached `peak inequality' and concludes by predicting what the future holds for Britain.

For more than a decade, Carol Smart has been at the forefront of debates about the sociology of the family. Yet she has become frustrated by the fixation of many commentators with the supposed decline of commitment, and even the decline of the possibility of family life.

What is race? Can we do without race? What is racism and why is it wrong? What should our policies on race and racism be? Using the tools of philosophy this book addresses these and other fundamental questions.

A collection of key readings in the philosophy of social science, covering the essential issues, problems and debates in the field.

How society should respond to the rise of the sex trade is shaping up to be one of the Twenty-First Century's big questions. Should it be legal to pay for sex? Isn't it a woman's choice whether she strips for money? Could online porn warping the attitudes of a generation of boys?

On the fiftieth anniversary of the historic 1969/1970 Springbok tour to Britain and white South Africa's expulsion from the Olympics, Pitch Battles explores the themes of sport, globalisation and resistance over the past two centuries.