Routledge Library Editions Cultural Studies

This seven volume set reissues a collection of out-of-print titles covering a range of responses to modern culture. They include in-depth analyses of US and Australian popular culture, works on the media and television, macrosociology, and the media and ‘otherness’. Taken together, they provide stimulating and thought-provoking debate on a wide range of topics central to many of today’s cultural controversies.

This seven volume set reissues a collection of out-of-print titles covering a range of responses to modern culture. They include in-depth analyses of US and Australian popular culture, works on the media and television, macrosociology, and the media and 'otherness'. Taken together, they provide stimulating and thought-provoking debate on a wide range of topics central to many of today's cultural controversies.

This book, first published in 1987, is a landmark contribution to macrosociology that extends the tradition of Sorokin, Durkheim, Marx, Weber and other founders of the discipline in new and exciting directions. Using their innovative content analysis methodology to examine American and British political documents, the authors show that the long-term dynamics of culture are subject to their own laws and are independent of the actions of 'great men' and other individual actors. This comprehensive volume brings together over two decades of the authors' research on culture indicators. Key findings include the identification of two long-term cultural cycles in the United States and Great Britain: one is related to party realignments, the other to long-term economic fluctuations. In addition, the authors demonstrate how culture provides the themes that political parties use to interpret economic conditions in their appeal for votes. Other results show that organizational cultures move in opposite directions from those in the culture of the larger society. The book also includes detailed discussions of both the methodology used to analyse text content and related metatheoretical issues in the study of cultural dynamics.

A variety of theoretical approaches to the study of culture have emphasised the significance of the creation, maintenance, and the transgression of boundaries to identities – be they social, cultural, national or personal. The essays collected in this book, first published in 1997, explore the creation of identities in American culture through analysis of the boundaries within and across which American identity is negotiated. The dissemination of cultural identity and the creation of national identity through this process has had a crucial impact on the shape of social life in post-war American culture. The contributors to this volume offer a variety of perspectives on this richly complicated process.

This book, first published in 1992, challenges the elitism and cultural pessimism of much Anglo-American and Continental cultural debate with regard to the role and power of transnational media practices. In a series of ten innovative essays, an international group of media researchers explores a wide range of cultural practices across national borders and the cultural politics associated with these everyday practices and debates.

Originally published in 1992. This book discusses the possibilities of developing the research process in social science so that it benefits the subjects as well as the researcher. The authors distinguish between ‘ethical’, ‘advocate’ and ‘empowering’ approaches to the relationship between researcher and researched, linking these to different ideas about the nature of knowledge, action, language, and social relations. They then use a series of empirical case studies to explore the possibilities for ‘empowering research’. The book is the product of dialogue between researchers from a range of disciplines (anthropology, cultural studies, sociology and linguistics) and is for those working across the social sciences. Through combination of philosophical discussion, methodological recommendation and case-study illustration, it provides guidance that is practical without being simplistic.