Contemporary society

About: Contemporary society is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3991 publications have been published within this topic receiving 91755 citations.

Policing minority ethnic communities

Abstract: The delivery of policing – whether in the form of ‘force’ or ‘service’ – should not be greatly inferior for some social groups than others. And yet, the research evidence shows that, in general, people who are seen as ‘white’ tend to have a more satisfactory experience of the police than people whose ancestry lies in Asia, Africa and the ‘islands of the sea’.1 The so-called ‘colour-line’ that the pioneering sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois (1901/1989: 13) predicted would be the ‘problem of the twentieth century’ can be discerned clearly 100 years later in the relationship between police and ethnic minority communities in numerous countries around the world.2 Furthermore, recent shifts in migration patterns have demanded a reconceptualisation of the perception of those who might belong to ‘ethnic minority groups’ and indeed, it is the question of ‘difference’ that has become salient in contemporary societies (Hall 1991, 2000). Such conceptual shifts have implications for the relationship between the police and citizens from minority ethnic communities. In this chapter, we examine policing practices, making comparisons between the policing of ‘white’, ‘black’ and ‘Asian’ communities in Britain.3We also review some of the research that has assessed Post-Lawrence reforms and consider the implications of recent events on contemporary policing.

The Individual and Society: A Processual Approach

Abstract: In the dark ages of the sociological past we worked within a dominant paradigm which could be loosely termed that of modernisation. In the terms of this paradigm contemporary society occupied a place between two conceptual poles associated loosely with the past and the future respectively. Past societies were religious, familial and communal; future societies scientific, industrial and associational. Contemporary society was well on the way to the embodiment of the future. In Parsonian terms, past societies were ascriptive and particularistic and modern societies achievement-oriented and universalistic. Ascriptive and particularistic groupings and relationships were on their way out, and of interest only as quaint survivals of the past, and this was reflected by the relative prestige accorded to industrial and urban sociology and to the sociology of stratification as opposed to the sociology of religion, the sociology of the family and the sociology of communities.

Housing & Family Wealth

Abstract: This collection provides a multi-disciplinary and cross-national perspective on the links between housing, personal sector wealth and the family in contemporary society Reasserting the role of the family and informal networks in housing provision it counteracts a tendency to view housing issues in narrow terms of market and state provision Highly international in perspective, the book addresses important policy questions and offers new theoretical insights into the way housing is embedded in the wider social structure

Affective capitalism of knowing and the society of search engine

Abstract: Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the affective premises and economics of the influence of search engines on knowing and informing in the contemporary society. Design/methodology/approach A conceptual discussion of the affective premises and framings of the capitalist economics of knowing is presented. Findings The main proposition of this text is that the exploitation of affects is entwined in the competing market and emancipatory discourses and counter-discourses both as intentional interventions, and perhaps even more significantly, as unintentional influences that shape the ways of knowing in the peripheries of the regime that shape cultural constellations of their own. Affective capitalism bounds and frames our ways of knowing in ways that are difficult to anticipate and read even from the context of the regime itself. Originality/value In the relatively extensive discussion on the role of affects in the contemporary capitalism, influence of affects on knowing and their relation to search engine use has received little explicit attention so far.