How important are the media? How is culture changing? How is ordinary life being transformed? How do we belong? This ground-breaking book offers a new approach to the understanding of everyday life, the media and cultural change. It explores the social pattern of ordinary life in the context of recent theories and accounts of social and cultural change. Brian Longhurst argues that our social and cultural lives are becoming increasingly audienced and performed and that activities in everyday life are changing due to the ever-growing importance and salience of the media. These changes involve people forging new ways of belonging, where among other things they seek to distinguish themselves from others. InCultural Change and Ordinary Life, Longhurst evaluates changes in the media and ordinary life in the context of large-scale cultural change, especially with respect to globalization and hybridisation, fragmentation, spectacle and performance, and enthusing or fan-like activities. He makes the case that analysis of the media has to be brought into a more thorough dialogue with other forms of research that have looked at social processes. Cultural Change and Ordinary Lifeis key reading for students and researchers of sociology, media studies, cultural studies and mass communication.

Fusing audience research and ethnography, the book presents a compelling account of women’s changing lives and identities in relation to the impact of the most popular media culture in everyday life: television. Within the historically-specific social conditions of Korean modernity, Youna Kim analyzes how Korean women of varying age and class group cope with the new environment of changing economical structure and social relations. The book argues that television is an important resource for women, stimulating them to research their own lives and identities. Youna Kim reveals Korean women as creative, energetic and critical audiences in their responses to evolving modernity and the impact of the West. Based on original empirical research, the book explores the hopes, aspirations, frustrations and dilemmas of Korean women as they try to cope with life beyond traditional grounds. Going beyond the traditional Anglo-American view of media and culture, this text will appeal to students and scholars of both Korean area studies and media and communications studies.

′Bennett provides a well organized, very readable and interesting discussion of a number of significant everyday cultural forms and I am confident student readers will find the book very valuable′ - Barry Smart, University of Portsmouth Culture and Everyday Life provides students with a comprehensive overview of theoretical models, issues and examples of contemporary cultural practice. Bennett begins by summarising and situating - in everyday settings - the key theoretical models applied in the study of existing cultural practices. This entails a systematic study of how academic thinking about mass culture has changed, from critical accounts of early mass cultural theorists to radical postmodernist critiques of mass cultural accounts and to ′the cultural turn′, which explored how various social identities are culturally constructed. Following this are themed chapters that cover a particular aspect of late modern culture, such as media, music, fashion, tourism and counter-cultural ideologies and movements. In each case a comprehensive literature review is provided and its theoretical and empirical relevance to our understanding of the relationship between culture and everyday life in contemporary society is explained. Lucid, meticulous and illustrated with a host of examples, this is a superb text for teaching and research in the Sociology of Culture and Cultural Studies.

Alltagsgeschichte, or the history of everyday life, emerged during the 1980s as the most interesting new field among West German historians and, more recently, their East German colleagues. Partly in reaction to the modernization theory pervading West German social history in the 1970s, practitioners of alltagsgeschichte stressed the complexities of popular experience, paying particular attention, for instance, to the relationship of the German working class to Nazism. Now the first English translation of a key volume of essays (Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen) presents this approach and shows how it cuts across the boundaries of established disciplines. The result is a work of great methodological, theoretical, and historiographical significance as well as a substantive contribution to German studies. Introduced by Alf Lüdtke, the volume includes two empirical essays, one by Lutz Niethammer on life courses of East Germans after 1945 and one by Lüdtke on modes of accepting fascism among German workers. The remaining five essays are theoretical: Hans Medick writes on ethnological ways of knowledge as a challenge to social history; Peter Schöttler, on mentalities, ideologies, and discourses and alltagsgeschichte; Dorothee Wierling, on gender relations and alltagsgeschichte; Wolfgang Kaschuba, on popular culture and workers' culture as symbolic orders; and Harald Dehne on the challenge alltagsgeschichte posed for Marxist-Leninist historiography in East Germany.

Mixing theories of the everyday with a wide range of case studies, this book explains the 'character' of ethnicity, from being a political tool of exclusion, to a source of meaning and solidarity, and the relationship between culture, power and identity. Combining theories of the everyday with empirical case studies, this book examines: the 'dual character' of ethnicity – as a political tool of exclusion and source of meaning/ solidarity respectively the relationship between culture, power and identity the significance of historical/socio-economic contexts to ethnicity and everyday life. This book addresses many important questions through a critical application of theories of the everyday to a series of case studies that include travellers, the South Asian diaspora, contemporary Austria, and asylum seekers in 'Fortress Europe'. This book provides an accessible and coherent introduction to the sociology of ethnicity and will be essential reading for undergraduate students on cultural studies, race and ethnic studies, and sociology courses.

Everyday practice and the production and consumption of time / Elizabeth Shove -- Timespace and the organization of social life / Ted Schatzki -- Re-ordering temporal rhythms : coordinating daily practices in the UK in 1937 and 2000 / Dale Southerton -- Disruption is normal : blackouts, breakdowns and the elasticity of everyday life / Frank Trentmann -- My soul for a seat : commuting and the routines of mobility / Tom O’Dell -- Routines : made and unmade / Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren -- Calendars and clocks : cycles of horticultural commerce in nineteenth-century America / Marina Moskowitz -- Fads, fashions and ’real’ innovation : novelties and social change / Jukka Gronow -- The edge of agency : routine, habits and volition / Richard Wilk -- Buying time / Daniel Miller -- Seasonal and commercial rhythms of domestic consumption : a Japanese case study / Inge Daniels -- Special and ordinary times : tea in motion / Güliz Ger and Olga Kravets -- Making time : reciprocal object relations and the self-legitimizing time of wooden boating / Mikko Jalas -- The ethics of routine : consciousness, tedium and value / Don Slater.

From the seventeenth century until the Holocaust, Germany's Jews lurched between progress and setback, between fortune and terrible misfortune. German society shunned Jews in the eighteenth century and opened unevenly to them in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only to turn murderous in the Nazi era. By examining the everyday lives of ordinary Jews, this book portrays the drama of German-Jewish history -- the gradual ascent of Jews from impoverished outcasts to comfortable bourgeois citizens and then their dramatic descent into genocidal torment during the Nazi years. Building on social, economic, religious, and political history, it focuses on the qualitative aspects of ordinary life -- emotions, subjective impressions, and quotidian perceptions. How did ordinary Jews and their families make sense of their world? How did they construe changes brought about by industrialization? How did they make decisions to enter new professions or stick with the old, juggle traditional mores with contemporary ways? The Jewish adoption of secular, modern European culture and the struggle for legal equality exacted profound costs, both material and psychological. Even in the heady years of progress, a basic insecurity informed German-Jewish life. Jewish successes existed alongside an antisemitism that persisted as a frightful leitmotif throughout German-Jewish history. And yet the history that emerges from these pages belies simplistic interpretations that German antisemitism followed a straight path from Luther to Hitler. Neither Germans nor Jews can be typecast in their roles vis à vis one another. Non-Jews were not uniformly antisemitic but exhibited a wide range of attitudes towards Jews. Jewish daily life thus provides another vantage point from which to study the social life of Germany. Focusing on both internal Jewish life -- family, religion, culture and Jewish community -- and the external world of German culture and society provides a uniquely well-rounded portrait of a world defined by the shifting sands of inclusion and exclusion.

As a new trend in aesthetics appearing concurrently in the West and the East in the last ten years, the aesthetics of everyday life points to a growing diversification among existing methodologies for pursuing aesthetics, alongside the shift from art-based aesthetics. The cultural diversity manifest in global aesthetics offers common ground for the collaborative efforts of aesthetics in both the West and the East. Given the rapidly growing interest and its potential for attracting new audiences extending beyond the more narrowly focused traditions of twentieth-century analytic and environmental aesthetics, it stands to command its own share of attention in the future of aesthetic studies. The aesthetics of everyday life has become a stream of thought with a global ambition. This interest has led to numerous systematic and in-depth works on this topic, some of which were conducted by the authors represented in this volume. A salient feature of this book is that it not only represents the recent developments of the aesthetics of everyday life in the West, but also highlights the interaction between scholars in the West and the East on this topic. Thus, the project is a contribution toward mutual progress in the collaboration between Western and Eastern aesthetics. What distinguishes this book from other anthologies and monographs on this topic is that it reconstructs the aesthetics of everyday life through cultural dialogue between the West and the East, with a view to building a new form of aesthetics of everyday life, as seen from a global perspective. At present, the aesthetics of everyday life as a newly emergent approach to aesthetics may encounter skepticism among aestheticians accustomed to the rigors of analytic philosophers who prefer to discuss aesthetics at the level of abstract concepts and argument, and who tolerate the particulars of experience mainly as illustrations. But, there is no reason to abandon the pursuit of the aesthetics of everyday life in the face of such objections. On the contrary, there are many benefits to gain in bringing aesthetics to bear on a wider sphere of human life, made possible through efforts to show the relevance of aesthetics to a broader range of human actions.

By providing a survey of consumption and lifestyle in Hungary during the second half of the twentieth century, this book shows how common people lived during and after tumultuous regime changes. After an introduction covering the late 1930s, the study centers on the communist era, and goes on to describe changes in the post-communist period with its legacy of state socialism. Tibor Valuch poses a series of questions. Who could be called rich or poor and how did they live in the various periods? How did living, furnishings, clothing, income, and consumption mirror the structure of the society and its transformations? How could people accommodate their lifestyles to the political and social system? How specific to the regime was consumption after the communist takeover, and how did consumption habits change after the demise of state socialism? The answers, based on micro-histories, statistical data, population censuses and surveys help to understand the complexities of daily life, not only in Hungary, but also in other communist regimes in east-central Europe, with insights on their antecedents and afterlives.

What did British citizens really feel about the political system, their role in it, and the people who represented them? Everyday Politics, Ordinary Lives examines British democracy from below, investigating how electors understood politics and how they viewed its relationship to their lives, from the establishment of a near democracy with the Representation of the People Act 1918 up until the rise of the internet and 24-hour news channels in the early 1990s. It focuses on the everyday political opinions, discussions, and interactions of ordinary British voters in the period, and pays attention to the ways in which women, young people, and minoritized groups related to a political system dominated by men. Adrian Bingham incorporates material from a broad and diverse range of sources, from pioneering social surveys conducted after the First World War, through the mid-century qualitative research of Mass-Observation and early political scientists, up to the data-driven work of the British Election Study and modern pollsters such as Gallup and MORI. The book also draws extensively on the archives of the Conservative and Labour parties, as they sought to understand the attitudes of the voters they were trying to attract, and content from the media, memoirs, diaries, and life-writing. Everyday Politics, Ordinary Lives argues that most people, across the period, felt remote from politics and sceptical of politicians. But this reflected the perception that the world of parliamentary debates and party intrigue was distant, insular, and rather impenetrable, not that people did not care about political issues or have a desire to improve their position. Britain was home to plenty of everyday political thinking and conversation, and the amount and quality of this activity tended to increase and improve over the period as people became better educated, had access to more information through the media, and the power of the democratic ideal grew in strength over the period. The author maps these changing patterns of political support to deeper social and cultural developments, and thereby produce a new and distinctive history of British democracy that challenges some of the simplistic narratives that underpin contemporary political debate.