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For almost a hundred years, the academic study of migration concentrated on evolving standardised models of migration behaviour based on data from censuses or the registration of births, marriages and deaths. More recently, it has been realised that such models fail to take into account the decision-making behind migration and that better understanding will come from study of the behaviour of individuals as well as aggregate numbers. In this book the imaginative use of alternative sources – for example, apprentice books, guild and craft records, legal and court documents, diaries and biographies – gives fresh insights into the processes of movement to reveal much more complex circulatory behaviour than the standard models derived from census and registration sources alone have suggested. The first chapter confronts the issue of rural mobility in post-famine Ireland and is followed by a study centred on Alpine rural families that built impressive networks across pre-industrial Western Europe. Two chapters focus on the particular characteristics of worker groups: mining families of south Lancashire during the period of rapid increase in coal production in the eighteenth century; and the organised mobility of skilled labour in nineteenth-century central Europe. Next, a rigorous deployment of the techniques of family reconstruction and record linkage embracing a variety of sources (vital event registers, wills, port books, apprentice records) teases out the migration histories of those who settled in eighteenth-century Liverpool.

The question of religion, its contemporary and future significance and its role in society and state is currently perceived as an urgent one by many and is widely discussed within the public sphere. But it has also long been one of the core topics of the historically oriented social sciences. The immense stock of knowledge furnished by the history of religion and religious studies, theology, sociology and history has to be introduced into the public conscience today. This can promote greater awareness of the contemporary global religious situation and its links with politics and economics and counter rash syntheses such as the ‘clash of civilizations’. This volume is concerned with the connections between religions and the social world and with the extent, limits, and future of secularization. The first part deals with major religious traditions and their explicit or implicit ideas about the individual, social and political order. The second part gives an overview of the religious situation in important geographical areas. Additional contributions analyse the legal organization of the relationship between state and religion in a global perspective and the role of the natural sciences in the process of secularization.

This collection of essays explores the character and quality of the Holocaust's impact and the abiding legacy it has left for social theory. The premise which informs the contributions is that, ten years after its publication, Zygmunt Bauman's claim that social theory has either failed to address the Holocaust or protected itself from its implications remains true.

This is a translated edition of five of the nine papers and the responses presented at the first conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (DGS) that was held in 1910. These are seminal contributions by some of the founders of classical German sociology and social theory, including Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Ernst Troeltsch and Werner Sombart. A substantial introduction discusses the lives and works of the five thinkers, placing them in the context of Germany in the early twentieth century and discussing their personal and societal connections. The works are a testament to the developing thought of key scholars. The year 1910 was a defining year for German sociology. There were still no sociology schools, departments or even professorships, but a significant number of important thinkers had published crucial sociological works. Through such publications Tönnies, Simmel, Weber, Troeltsch and Sombart had founded considerable reputations, and by 1909 the first three had banded together with other scholars to form the DGS. The works show German sociology at a decisive moment, when these thinkers were at their prime and were engaged in building a new society devoted to investigation of social reality based upon sound scholarly principles and free from biased social dogmatics. The topics continue to have relevance and the exchanges provide a lively dimension, one that is not found simply by reading the books of these five founders of sociological thinking.

This book offers an account of what makes science special among other human pursuits, critically engaging with a variety of approaches, especially constructivist and relativist studies of science and technology. It focuses on the studied lack of haste of science, its relative stress–freeness, and its socially sanctioned withdrawal from the swift pace of ordinary life. The book offers an argument that emphasizes the dangers of cosseting science from the scourge of internal competition while at the same time highlighting the need for distance between the process of scientific thought and the faster machinery of politics, business, sports, and the media.

Globalization has been the topic of heated debate in recent years, with one side asserting that it will produce a better standard of living for people around the world, and a fierce opposition arguing that it will ultimately lead to greater poverty and the destruction of unique human cultures. This book tackles the issue from a different angle, proposing that the contemporary global network of business, politics, and culture be viewed from the inter–disciplinary perspective of world–making. Drawn from the ranks of sociology, law, international relations, political philosophy, and history, the contributors cut through polarized rhetoric to examine the current global situation. Their proposed diagnoses draw upon analyses of various political dilemmas whose ripple effects are felt around the world, such as the volatile relationship between Islam and Europe, or the legal foundations for a true international order absent in the shadows of imperialism.