Contemporary Political Sociology

This fully revised and updated introduction to political sociology incorporates the burgeoning literature on globalization and shows how contemporary politics is linked to cultural issues, social structure and democratizing social action.

• New material on global governance, human rights, global social movements, global media
• New discussion of democracy and democratization
• Clearly lays out what is at stake in deciding between alternatives of cosmopolitanism, imperialism and nationalism
• Includes additional discussion of the importance of studying culture to political sociology

"There is, to date, no better critical review of the current field of politics than Kate Nash's Contemporary Political Sociology." ?Steven Seidman, University at Albany, State University of New York

Kate Nash is Reader in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy at Goldsmiths. She recently published The Cultural Politics of Human Rights: Comparing the US and UK (2009), she is editor (with Alan Scott and Anna Marie Smith) of New Critical Writings in Political Sociology (2009), and she is currently editing (with Alan Scott and Edwin Amenta) The New Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology.

The second edition of this popular book is a fully revised and updated introduction to developments in contemporary political sociology, and especially to the burgeoning literature on globalization. The discussion throughout concerns how, in order to understand contemporary politics, we need to be sensitive to the contestation of cultural meanings, and to their effects on social structuring and democratizing social action. The book focuses throughout on substantive areas of sociological research. There are updated chapters on: definitions of power and politics; macro-theories of globalization, including new discussions of global governance and state transformation, and of media and political community; social movements, including recent work on global social movements; and citizenship and the politics of equality and "difference", including an extended discussion of welfare and poverty. In addition there is a new chapter on democracy, democratization, and environmentalism in a global context. Above all the book lays out the terms of the fundamental debate that is currently being enacted in contemporary politics, giving students in sociology and politics the tools to understand and to assess for themselves how globalization is linked to imperialism, at the same as it involves new possibilities for democracy, peace and respect for human rights.

The second edition of this popular book is a fully revised and updated introduction to developments in contemporary political sociology, and especially to the burgeoning literature on globalization.

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