Anthem Middle East Studies Series

The book consists of a volume of essays in honor of the outstanding sociologist, Edward A. Tiryakian; whose work has spanned a considerable number of countries, regions and topics. He has been highly influential, particularly in American and French sociology.

'Regimes of Happiness' is a comparative and historical analysis of how human societies have articulated and enacted distinctive notions of human fulfillment, determining divergent moral, ethical and religious traditions, and incommensurate and conflicting understanding of the meaning of the ‘good life’. A two-part book, it provides a historical view of the way in which Western societies, the descendants of the Latin Roman Empire, created languages and institutions that established specifi c and occasionally antithetical conceptions of a fulfilled human life or ‘happiness’ in the first part. In the second part, it explores how non-Western societies and non-Christian religions have conceived and established their own ideals of human perfection. 'Regimes of Happiness' is a critical reflection on modern notions of happiness which are typically focused on individual feelings of pleasure.

‘Post-truth’ was Oxford Dictionaries 2016 word of the year. While the term was coined by its disparagers in the light of the Brexit and US presidential campaigns, the roots of post-truth lie deep in the history of Western social and political theory. Post-Truth reaches back to Plato, ranging across theology and philosophy, to focus on the Machiavellian tradition in classical sociology, as exemplified by Vilfredo Pareto, who offered the original modern account of post-truth in terms of the ‘circulation of elites’. The defining feature of ‘post-truth’ is a strong distinction between appearance and reality which is never quite resolved and so the strongest appearance ends up passing for reality. The only question is whether more is gained by rapid changes in appearance or by stabilizing one such appearance. Post-Truth plays out what this means for both politics and science.

Drawing on the work of Hegel, this book proposes a framework for understanding modernity in the Muslim world and analyzes the discourse of prominent Muslim thinkers and political leaders. Chapter by chapter, the book undertakes a close textual analysis of the works of Mohammad Iqbal, Abul Ala Maududi , Sayyid Qutb , Fatima Mernissi, Mehdi Haeri Yazdi, Mohammad Mojtaehd Shabestari, Mohammad Khatami, Seyyed Hussein Nasr and Mohamad Arkoun, drawing conclusions about contemporary Islamic thought with reference to some of the most significant markers of modernity.

In Habermas and Giddens on Praxis and Modernity Craig Browne investigates how two of the most important and influential contemporary social theorists have sought to develop the modernist visions of the constitution of society through the autonomous actions of subjects. Comparing Habermas’s and Giddens’s conceptions of the constitution of society, interpretations of the social-structural impediments to subjects’ autonomy and attempts to delineate potentials for progressive social change within contemporary society, Browne draws on his own work, which has extended aspects of the social theorists’ approach to modernity. Despite the criticisms developed over the course of the book, Habermas and Giddens are found to be two of the most important theorists of democratization and social democracy, the dynamics of capitalist modernity and their paradoxes, social practices and reflexivity, and the foundations of social theory in the problem of the relationship of social action and social structure.

This book examines the careers of 53 area experts in the US State Department’s Middle East bureau during the Cold War. Known as Arabists or Middle East hands, they were very different in background, education, and policy outlook from their predecessors, the Orientalists. A highly competitive selection process and rigorous training shaped them into a small corps of diplomatic professionals with top-notch linguistic and political reporting skills. Case studies shed light on Washington’s perceptions of Israel and the Arab world, as well as how American leaders came to regard (and often disregard) the advice of their own expert advisors. This study focuses on their transformative role in Middle East diplomacy from the Eisenhower through the Ford administrations.

'Life Chances, Education and Social Movements' explains the sociology of life chances; the opportunities and experiences of different generations in Australia, the United States and the UK; and how the differential distribution of life-enhancing opportunities affects our well-being. Ralf Dahrendorf’s life-chances theory is used to support the theoretical and empirical arguments in Lyle Munro’s book. For Dahrendorf, education is arguably the most important option individuals can utilise for improving their well-being and for overcoming social and economic disadvantages. While there are countless sociological accounts of inequality, Munro’s study takes a different and novel approach based on Dahrendorf’s model, according to which education and social movements and their networks function to enhance the life chances of individuals and social groups respectively.

Elites have always ruled – wielding inordinate power and wealth, taking decisions that shape life for the rest. In good times the ‘1%’ can hide their privilege, or use growing social mobility and economic prosperity as a justification. When times get tougher there’s a backlash. So the first years of the twenty-first century – a time of financial crashes, oligarchy and corruption in the West; persistent poverty in the south; and rising inequality everywhere – have brought elites and ‘establishments’ under unprecedented fire. Yet those swept to power by this discontent are themselves a part of the elite, attacking from within and extending rather than ending its agenda. The New Power Elite shows how major political and social change is typically driven by renegade elite fractions, who co-opt or sideline elites’ traditional enemies. It is the first book to combine the politics, economics, sociology and history of elite rule to present a compact, comprehensive account of who’s at the top, and why we let them get there.

Brexit traces the implications of the UK’s projected withdrawal from the EU, placing short-term political fluctuations in a broader historical and social context of the transformation of European and global society. This book provides a forum for leading Eurosociologists (broadly defined), working inside and outside the UK, to rethink their analyses of the European project and its prospects, as well as to reflect on the likely implications for the UK.

Structure, Agency and Biotechnology argues for the significance of sociological theory and highlights the insights it can offer to the study of agricultural biotechnology. Cautioning against a simplistic reading of the GM controversy as merely a debate of science versus politics, Aristeidis Panagiotou suggests that the discussion should be embedded in the wider social, political, economic and cultural contexts. Structure, Agency and Biotechnology assesses the 2012 Rothamsted GM wheat trials and proposes that the tension underlying GM technology should be resolved through sustained dialogue, public involvement and broad scientific consensus.

Return has long been considered the end of a migration cycle. Today, returnees’ continued transnational ties, practices and resources have become increasingly visible. Transnational Return and Social Change joins what is now a growing fi eld of research and suggests new ways to understand the dynamics of return migration and the social changes that come along. It pays tribute to the meso-level impacts that follow the practices and resources migrant returnees mobilize across borders. With a particular focus on the meso-level the book takes up the challenge of transnational research and enquires into the consequences of return for local communities, organizations, social networks and groups. Presenting a collection of case studies dedicated to migrations across Europe and beyond, this book contributes new insights into the societal impact of migration in pluralized societies.

A labor lawyer and publicist of weight in the Weimar Republic, Franz Neumann devoted his 21-year exile, after 1933, to understanding the failure of arrangements supposed to be in the line of social progress. He sought to delineate a new conception of democracy as a vehicle of social change. A remarkably effective teacher in the last years of his life, Neumann was also a gifted learner, whose negotiations with a series of forceful thinkers enabled him to work toward a promising intellectual strategy in political thinking. Learning from Franz L. Neumann examines Neumann’s social and political theory in the context of his career as a practitioner, learner and teacher

‘Life Chances, Education and Social Movements’ explains the sociology of life chances, the opportunities and experiences of different generations in Australia, the United States and the UK, and how the differential distribution of life-enhancing opportunities affects our well-being. It is now four decades since the publication of Ralf Dahrendorf’s ‘Life Chances: Approaches to Social and Political Theory’ (1979), a surprisingly neglected work that has much to offer by way of explaining some of the social and political challenges of the present era. Dahrendorf’s life-chances theory is an expanded and innovative analysis of Max Weber’s original notion of ‘Lebenschancen’ and is used to support the theoretical and empirical arguments in Lyle Munro’s book. Dahrendorf defines life chances as a function of options (provisions and entitlements) and ligatures (networks that provide a sense of solidarity and belonging). For Dahrendorf, education is arguably the most important option individuals can utilise for improving their well-being and for overcoming social and economic disadvantages. While there are countless sociological accounts of inequality, Munro’s study takes a different and novel approach based on Dahrendorf’s model according to which education and social movements and their networks function to enhance the life chances of individuals and social groups respectively. Munro emphasises the necessity of formal education and its transformative power in the lives of individuals; he stresses the importance of an individual’s life chances of achieving satisfactory levels of literacy, numeracy and oracy during a decade or more of formal schooling. While this might seem self-evident, the evidence in Australia indicates there is a disturbingly large number of students who leave school without these basic skills, the consequences of which are often dire. At a broader level, ‘Life Chances, Education and Social Movements’ stresses the importance of education movements in improving the lives of disadvantaged social groups. This is a topic that rarely features in the social movement literature, as a content search of the leading journals in the field reveals. Education movements, including the controversial widening participation movement and the lifelong learning movement and its several subsidiaries, such as VET and adult education, are advocated as alternatives to university, which for many students has proven to be either out of reach, beyond their means or a costly mistake. Munro is critical of the widening participation movement whenever it privileges university learning at the expense of technical and vocational education. The last part of the book focuses on five social movements that seek to sustain the lives of human and nonhuman animals. The first movement to be analysed is the social justice movement that campaigns against racism, sexism and classism, the much-studied trinity in the discipline of sociology. Followers of Peter Singer’s ‘Animal Liberation’ regard speciesism as the missing relative in race, gender and class relations and nonhuman animals as arguably the most vulnerable members of society. For an increasing number of movement theorists, speciesism – the prejudice and practice that posits the interests of members of one’s own species against the interests of members of other species – is seen as animal abuse, a social problem on a par with elder abuse, child abuse and the like. The second movement against risks to our collective life chances seeks to protect human and nonhuman animals from some of the most dangerous developments confront

Network Persistence and the Axis of Hierarchy shows how networks, modestly redefined as a strong, yet imperfect tendency for pairings to recur day after day, that is, stickiness, imply a singular axis of stratification. This is contrary to the nearly universal insistence that stratification is multidimensional. Reanalysis of three central mobility data sets sustains the novel claim. Network concepts provide a supple base for analysis whereby order and regularity are strongly sustained in network neighborhoods but are not necessarily uniform or universal. This provides new takes, often quite radical, on accounts of structure and order by authors such as Pierre Bourdieu, Randall Collins and Talcott Parsons.

A Player’s Guide to the Post-Truth Condition: The Name of the Game presents sixteen short, readable chapters designed to leverage our post-truth condition’s deep historical and philosophical roots into opportunities for unprecedented innovation and change. Fuller offers a bracing, proactive and hopeful vision against the tendency to demonize post-truth as the realm of ‘fake news’ and ‘bullshit’. Where others see threats to the established order, Fuller sees opportunities to overturn it. This theme is pursued across many domains, including politics, religion, the economy, the law, public relations, journalism, the performing arts and academia, not least academic science. The red thread running through Fuller’s treatment is that these domains are games that cannot be easily won unless one can determine the terms of engagement, which is to say, the ‘name of the game’. This involves the exercise of ‘modal power’, which is the capacity to manipulate what people think is possible. Once the ‘necessarily’ true appears to be only ‘contingently’ so, then the future suddenly becomes a more open space for action. This was what frightened Plato about the alternative realities persuasively portrayed by playwrights in ancient Athens. Nevertheless, Fuller believes that it should be embraced by denizens of today’s post-truth condition.

The idea of occupational devotion, or devotee work, was conceptualized and incorporated in the serious leisure perspective as one of the two serious pursuits. The other pursuit is serious leisure itself, with both forms being anchored in activities that are immensely appealing and fulfilling. Despite such desirable qualities the serious pursuits constitute a minority of all work and leisure, these two domains being dominated by disagreeable work and hedonic casual leisure activities.  The devotee occupations serve as full-time or part-time livelihoods for people fortunate enough to have found them. Such work has so far been observed to exist in four sectors of the economy: the liberal professions, consulting occupations, craft-like trades, and creativity-based small businesses. In ways set out in this book, devotee work roots in serious leisure, even while many participants in the latter have no desire to pursue the former.

Media Sociology and Journalism is a dialogue on contemporary society as defined through news media, politics and contemporary sociological theory. The tenacity of deeply opposing truth claims in politics and in journalism exposes the current fragility of democracy as a type of society and regime of power. Debates are reviewed on competing explanations of post truth attitudes, the rise of populism, fake news, conspiracy theories, neoliberalism, nihilism, white nationalism and the flights from and to democracy. Focus is on the tenacity of deeply opposing truth claims where each side takes the other’s claim to be an existential threat. A dialogical critique of divisions in news media, politics and contemporary sociological theory provides an alternative way forward as right populism, fake news and post truth attitudes render democracy fragile. It is argued that professional journalism also contributes to this fragility when it reports or opines on the most vulnerable subjects in society but does not address them as their imagined audience. The fragility at the heart of democracy, the fine line that once crossed separates freedom from equality or rule by the people from authoritarian demagogues, are further examined through case studies of mainstream acts of journalism on the themes of immigration, urban poverty and cultural diversity.