Matthew Wood

Matthew Flinders

Paul Fawcett

Colin Hay

There is a mounting body of evidence pointing towards rising levels of public dissatisfaction with the formal political process. Depoliticization refers to a more discrete range of contemporary strategies that add to this growing trend towards anti-politics by either removing or displacing the potential for choice, collective agency, and deliberation. This book examines the relationship between these two trends as understood within the broader shift towards governance. It brings together a number of contributions from scholars who have a varied range of concerns but who nevertheless share a common interest in developing the concept of depoliticization through their engagement with a set of theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical questions. This volume explores these questions from a variety of different perspectives and uses a number of different empirical examples and case studies from both within the nation state as well as from other regional, global, and multi-level arenas. In this context, this volume examines the potential and limits of depoliticization as a concept and its position and contribution in the nexus between the larger and more established literatures on governance and anti-politics.

Anti-Politics, Depoliticization, and Governance

Martin O'Brien

Sue Penna

What is modernity? Do we all experience modernity in the same way? How should we understand contemporary social change? This volume explores questions of modernity through critical engagements with the work of Anthony Giddens, focusing in particular on the relationships between his social theory and political sociology. Three substantive areas - reflexivity, environment and identity - are examined theoretically through the relationships between reflexivity and rationality, life politics and institutional power, and universalism and 'difference'. As well as specifically addressing Giddens' reconstruction of sociology, the contributors also explore a wide variety of critical issues currently occupying centre stage in social theory. These include questions about the character of contemporary societies, the periodisation of social change, the processes of change by which societies are constantly made and remade by people, the relationships between the 'social' and the 'natural', the formation and maintenance of identities and matters of epistemology and methodology in social science. Theorising Modernity will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociology, modern political thought, social geography and social policy and to social scientists trying to make sense of the modernity debate. Martin O'Brien is Research at the University of Derby. Sue Penna is a Lecturer in Applied Social Science at Lancaster University. Colin Hay is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK), a Visiting Fellow of the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) and Research Affiliate of the Centre for European Studies at Harvard University (US).

Reflexivity, Environment & Identity in Giddens' Social Theory

Theorising Modernity

Daniel Bailey

This book analyses the changing nature of the British economy and the consequences of Brexit upon its place within the European economic space. The overhang from the global financial crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the political negotiation of prolonged economic downturn and now the spectre of ‘Brexit’ provide the backdrop for various forms of capitalist restructuring designed to restore competitiveness and prosperity. This re-structuring has clear implications for existing European growth models, the structural imbalances and inequalities which characterise the British economy, the fortunes of the City of London and competing financial districts internationally, and the prospective strategies of progressive politics in this context. Adopting a broadly critical political economy lens – which gives analytical weight to the relationship between economic and political dynamics – the book will draw on the research of eminent scholars to assess divergence in the foundations of economic competitiveness and their social repercussions.

Britain, the City of London and Europe

Diverging Capitalisms

Anand Menon

Featuring carefully edited contributions from international experts, European Politics blends an analysis of individual nation states with an examination of the critical issues that confront them all. Taking into account the enlargement of the European Union, it provides coverage of Central and Eastern Europe along with discussions of Western Europe. The text considers both the national and transnational factors that affect and are affected by politics in Europe--notably European integration and globalization. European Politics includes chapters on all the major issues, organized into four sections. Section One provides basic information and details of the essential debates concerning the states of Europe and the European Union. Section Two presents comparative chapters on the key features of European politics. These offer a sense of the major areas of continuity and change across Europe as a whole. Section Three again presents explicitly comparative chapters outlining the developments in specific policy sectors. Finally, Section Four outlines the nature of Europe's external relations. European Politics is enhanced by excellent pedagogical features including readers' guides, key points, questions, web links, text boxes, a glossary, and a guide to further reading. A companion website features resources for students including an interactive map of Europe with facts, key dates, and web links for twenty-six countries; mulitiple-choice questions for each chapter; and a flashcard glossary. It also contains PowerPoint slides for instructors.

European Politics

Tom Hunt

This book provides a timely warning of the dangers still present and building in the global economic system, whose frailty was exposed by the global financial crisis, and the Eurozone crisis it spawned. The contributors to this volume draw on SPERI’s work on the political economy of growth, stagnation, austerity and crisis, and placing each in the context of the wider environmental crisis.

The Coming Crisis

Philip Cowley

Richard Heffernan

British politics has experienced unprecedented change in recent years. The Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition that emerged from the 2010 general election represented a marked departure from the single-party majorities Britain is accustomed to. And in the wake of the global economic crisis, the country now faces a new era of austerity. Cuts in public spending, together with the coalition's plans for a radical overhaul of public services, are likely to have profound political and social implications. For over 25 years, Developments in British Politics volumes have established an unrivalled reputation for accessible state-of-the-art coverage incorporating the latest research. Developments in British Politics 9 continues that tradition but with an entirely new set of specially commissioned chapters in which expert authors provide systematic and wide-ranging analysis of key trends, issues and debates.

Developments in British Politics 9

Benedetta Voltolini

Michal Natorski

This book elucidates the link between the politics of a now seemingly permanent crisis in Europe and the politicisation of European integration. Looking at the epistemic dimension of crises, it suggests that the way in which a crisis is framed and contested determines its potential impact on the level of politicisation of European integration. Europe is more challenged and contested today than it has even been, facing crisis of an almost existential kind. Yet, political crises are manufactured and narrated, so Europe has the possibility to intervene and ‘bring about her recovery’, instead of letting these crises prove terminal. This book explores the political process in and through which certain events come to be framed as constitutive of a moment that requires a decisive intervention. It shows that crises require a double framing: a situation needs to be identified as one of crisis in the first place and, subsequently, the nature and character of the crisis need to be specified. By examining a wide range of policy areas, the book demonstrates that framing of crises, i.e., identifying one situation both as a crisis and a crisis of a particular kind, contributes to the politicisation (or depoliticisation) of the process of European integration. The chapters in this book were originally published as special issue of Journal of European Integration.

The Framing and Re-framing of Europe’s Permanent Crisis

Crisis and Politicisation

Meg Russell

Bringing together an all-new set of chapters by leading authorities, Developments in British Politics 10 provides a systematic, accessible and state of the art account of the legacy of Britain's first coalition government in over thirty years and of politics following the return of the Conservative Party to government in 2015.

Developments in British Politics 10

Stephen Farrall

Examining the policies of the Thatcher governments helps us understand the economic and social conditions in Britain today. The book explores Thatcherite policies on the economy, social welfare, housing, education, crime, families, and social inequality, and examines what can be said about the legacy of Thatcherism for the 21st century.

Colin Hay

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