Social Postmodernism defends a postmodern perspective anchored in the politics of the new social movements. The volume preserves the focus on the politics of the body, race, gender, and sexuality as elaborated in postmodern approaches. But these essays push postmodern analysis in a particular direction: toward a social postmodernism which integrates the micro-social concerns of the new social movements with an institutional and cultural analysis in the service of a transformative political vision.

Postmodernism in Pieces performs a postmortem on what is perhaps the most contested paradigm in literary studies. In the wake of a critical consensus proclaiming its death, Matthew Mullins breaks postmodernism down into its most fundamental orthodoxies and reassembles it piece by piece in light of recent theoretical developments in Actor-Network-Theory, object-oriented philosophy, new materialism, and posthumanism. In the last two decades postmodernism has collapsed under the weight of the very phenomena it set out to deconstruct: language, whiteness, masculinity, class, the academy. Recasting these categories as social constructs has done little to alleviate their material effects. Through detailed analyses of everyday objects in novels by Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Lethem, John Barth, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, and Julia Alvarez, Mullins argues that what makes fiction postmodern is its refusal to accept "social" explanations for problems facing a given culture, and its tendency instead to examine everyday things and people as constituent pieces of larger networks. The result is a new story of postmodernism, one that reimagines postmodernism as a starting point for a new mode of literary history rather than a finish line for modernity.

This authoritative and revealing book provides the first sociological examination of postmodernism. Lash examines the differences between modernism and postmodernism, providing a clear explanation of why postmodernism is important.

Examines the conflict between modern and postmodern theories in sociology and attempts to bridge the divide between them.

Transforming Social Work Practice shows that postmodern theory offers new strategies for social workers concerned with political action and social justice. It explores ways of developing practice frameworks, paradigms and principles which take advantage of the perspectives offered by postmodern theory without totally abandoning the values of modernity and the Enlightenment project of human emancipation. Case studies demonstrate how these perspectives can be applied to practice.

Examines postmodernism and its expression in family therapy, raising questions about realities and realness, the subjective process of truth, and the experience of self.

Identity and Social Change examines the thorny problem of modern identity. Trenchant critiques have come from identity politics, focusing on the construction of difference and the solidarity of minorities, and from academic deconstructions of modern subjectivity. This volume places identity in a broader sociological context of destabilizing and reintegrating forces. The contributors first explore identity in light of economic changes, consumerism, and globalization, then focus on the question of identity dissolution. Zygmunt Bauman examines the effects of consumerism and considers the constraints these place on the disadvantaged. Drawing together discourses of the body and globalization, David Harvey considers the growth of the wage labor system worldwide and its consequences for worker consciousness. Mike Featherstone outlines a rethinking of citizenship and identity formation in light of the realities of globalization and new information technologies. Part two opens with Robert Dunn’s examination of cultural commodification and the attenuation of social relations. He argues that the media and marketplace are part of a general destabilization of identity formation. Kenneth Gergen maintains that proliferating communications technologies undermine the traditional conceptions of self and community and suggest the need for a new base for building the moral society. In the final chapter, Harvie Ferguson argues that despite the contemporary infatuation with irony, the decline of the notion of the self as an inner depth effectively severs the long connection between irony and identity.

Covering the ideas of key theorists, this text provides an introduction to the relationship between the environment and social theory, both historically and within contemporary social theory.

This thought-provoking critique of postmodern theory provides an overview of issues as they relate to management and organization theory and its history, and assembles a variety of important works on postmodern philosophy - including feminist and cultural postmodern philosophies. Addressing the future of the postmodern influence on management and organization theory and method, the book also establishes an agenda for future research.

In all the arts a war is being waged between modernists and postmodernists. Radicals have tended to side with the modernists against the forces of conservatism. Postmodern Culture is a break with this tendency. Its contributors propose a postmodernism of resistance - an aesthetic that rejects hierarchy and celebrates diversity. Ranging from architecture, sculpture and painting to music, photography and film, this collection is now recognised as a seminal text on the postmodernism debate.The essays are by Hal Foster, Jürgen Habermas, Kenneth Frampton, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens, Gregory L. Ulmer, Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Edward W. Said.