Polity Press

In this major new study Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet provide a timely and wide#8211;ranging account of the changing nature of suicide in the world today. The suicide rate is soaring in the former Communist bloc, in India and in China, which now has the highest female suicide rate in the world. This rise coincides with those countries...

Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture provides the first comprehensive overview of desire and pleasure in western sexual culture. It argues that both have always been seen as socially disruptive and morally dangerous and offers an entertaining account of the methods by which these attributes of sex were managed across the centuries from Classical...

Search engines have become a key part of our everyday lives. Yet while much has been written about how to use search engines and how they can be improved, there has been comparatively little exploration of what the social and cultural effects might be. Like all technologies, search engines exist within a larger political, cultural, and economic...

This new book by two leading economists is a far-reaching analysis of the role and organization of the financial system in the aftermath of the economic crisis. The authors argue that the financial markets, as currently organized, hinder genuine market transactions and therefore harm the economy, along with any chance of sustained recovery. ...

Alain Badiou was born in 1937 in Rabat and Jean-Claude Milner in 1941 in Paris. They were both involved in the "Red Years" at the end of the Sixties and both were Maoists, but while Badiou was focusing all his attention on China, Milner was already taking his distance from it. Over the years, that original dispute over the destiny of gauchisme was...

The third edition of Popular Music and Society is fully revised and updated, deftly exploring the study of popular music in the context of wider debates in sociology and media and cultural studies. Astute and accessible, it continues to set the agenda for research and teaching in this area. The book begins by examining the ways in which popular...