This volume is the most up-to-date collection of essays on the nature of the individual self and its relationship to society. It raises such questions... such as: can we understand human behavior without considering social and cultural attachments held by individuals? Can or should the State promote an idea of the good? Contributors include Ronald Dworkin, David Gauthier, Amy Gutmann, Will Kymlicka, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Michael Sandel.

Many have criticized liberalism for being too individualistic, but few have offered an alternative that goes beyond a vague affirmation of the need for... community. In this entertaining book, written in dialogue form, Daniel Bell fills this gap, presenting and defending a distinctively communitarian theory against the objections of a liberal critic. Drawing on the works of such thinkers as Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, and Alasdair MacIntyre, Bell attacks liberalism's individualistic view of the person by pointing to our social embeddedness. He develops Michael Walzer's idea that political thinking involves the interpretation of shared meanings emerging from the political life of a community, and intelligently rebuts criticism that this approach damages his case by being conservative and relativistic. Communitarianism and Its Critics is a provocative defense of a distinctly communitarian theory which will stimulate interest and debate among scholars and students of political theory as well as those approaching the subject for the first time.

In this seminal work, Edith Turner extends and investigates the concept of communitas that Victor Turner developed nearly four decades ago.Communitas is... inspired fellowship, a group's unexpected joy in sharing common experiences together. Turner argues that communitas is a driving force in history as it operates personally, in religion, in revolution, in all domains of human life. This tour de force views key events through the lens of communitas and establishes by narration and multicultural case studies its fundamental importance to human personal, social, and spiritual well-being. At heart, this is an inspired book, or as Turner writes, a connection among "nature, spirit-energy, and soul."

No theme has been more central to international philosophical debates than that of community: from American communitarianism to Habermas's ethic of... communication to the French deconstruction of community in the work of Derrida and Nancy. Nevertheless, in none of these cases has the concept been examined from the perspective of community's original etymological meaning: cum munus. In Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, Roberto Esposito does just that through an original counter-history of political philosophy that takes up not only readings of community by Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Heidegger and Bataille, but also by Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Canetti, Arendt, and Sartre. The result of his extraordinary conceptual and lexical analysis is a radical overturning of contemporary interpretations of community. Community isn't a property, nor is it a territory to be separated and defended against those who do not belong to it. Rather, it is a void, a debt, a gift to the other that also reminds us of our constitutive alterity with respect to ourselves.

Communities and Forests offers a timely view of the changing face of forests and forestry in North America today. In examining interactions between... people and forests, the book shows that forests are as much a social institution as they are a biological resource. Editors Robert Lee and Donald Field document the shift from scientific forestry to community forestry. They note that the traditional science-based, state-controlled model for managing forests ignores the voices of those affected by the use of forest resources. The editors suggest that science-based forestry is giving way to an alternative approach, one in which nature, economy, society, and culture are considered integral elements of the human-forest relationship. They see a future where forestry will continue to be informed by science but shaped by community values. Contributors to this volume consider the connection between forests and communities from a variety of perspectives, including environmental history, natural resource sociology, and forest policy. The book begins with an investigation of the historical and sociological foundations of community-based forest management. Chapters in the second section highlight the diverse issues surrounding community forestry, specifically the conflicts between the management of public forestlands and the interests of various stakeholders in using forests as a public good. The final section examines urban forestry, focusing on both the importance of forestry in urban settings and the demographic shifts that have brought people with urban values and lifestyles to rural, forested settings. With its unique focus on the integration of communities into decision-making about forests, this collection of insightful essays will prove useful to public and private land managers, as well as to researchers and students in the fields of forestry, resource management, rural sociology, regional planning, environmental studies, and parks and recreation.

A comprehensive introduction to radar principlesThis volume fills a need in industry and universities for a comprehensive introductory text on radar... principles. Well-organized and pedagogically driven, this book focuses on basic and optimum methods of realizing radar operations, covers modern applications, and provides a detailed, sophisticated mathematical treatment. Author Peyton Z. Peebles, Jr., draws on an extensive review of existing radar literature to present a selection of the most fundamental topics. He clearly explains general principles, such as wave propagation and signal theory, before advancing to more complex topics involving aspects of measurement and tracking. The last chapter provides a self-contained treatment of digital signal processing, which can be explored independently. Ample teaching and self-study help is incorporated throughout, including:* Numerous worked-out examples illustrating radar theory* Many end-of-chapter problems* Hundreds of illustrations, including system block diagrams, demonstrating how radar functions are achieved* Appended review material and useful mathematical formulas* An extensive bibliography and references.*An Instructor's Manual presenting detailed solutions to all the problems in the book is available from the Wiley editorial department.Radar Principles is destined to become the standard text on radar for graduate and senior-level courses in electrical engineering departments as well as industrial courses. It is also an excellent reference for engineers who are typically required to learn radar principles on the job, and for anyone working in radar-related industries as well as in aerospace and naval research.

Alternative religious groups have had a profound influence on American history-they have challenged the old and opened up new ways of thinking about... healing, modes of meaning, religious texts and liturgies, the social and political order, and the relationships between religion and race, class, gender, and region. Virtually always, the dramatic, dynamic history of alternative religions runs parallel to that of dissent in America. Communities of Dissent is an evenhanded and marvelously lively history of New Religious Movements in America. Stephen J. Stein describes the evolution and structure of alternative religious movements from both sides: the critics and the religious dissenters themselves. Providing a fascinating look at a wide range of New Religious Movements, he investigates obscure groups such as the 19th-century Vermont Pilgrims, who wore bearskins and refused to bathe or cut their hair, alongside better-known alternative believers, including colonial America's largest outsider faith, the Quakers; 17th- and 18th-century Mennonites, Amish, and Shakers; and the Christian Scientists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Black Muslims, and Scientologists of today.Accessible and comprehensive, Communities of Dissent also covers the milestones in the history of alternative American religions, from the infamous Salem witch trials and mass suicide/murder at Jonestown to the positive ways in which alternative religions have affected racial relations, the empowerment of women, and American culture in general.

Widely acknowledged as one of our most insightful commentators on the history of journalism in the United States, David Paul Nord reveals how newspapers... have intersected with religion, politics, reform, and urban life over nearly three centuries in a lively and wide-ranging discussion that shows journalism to be a vital component of community. In settings ranging from the religion-infused towns of colonial America to the rapidly expanding urban metropolises of the late nineteenth century, Nord explores the cultural work of the press and how ordinary readers use journalism to form community attachments and engage in civic life.

Play communities existed long before massively multiplayer online games; they have ranged from bridge clubs to sports leagues, from tabletop... role-playing games to Civil War reenactments. With the emergence of digital networks, however, new varieties of adult play communities have appeared, most notably within online games and virtual worlds. Players in these networked worlds sometimes develop a sense of community that transcends the game itself. In Communities of Play, game researcher and designer Celia Pearce explores emergent fan cultures in networked digital worlds--actions by players that do not coincide with the intentions of the game's designers. Pearce looks in particular at the Uru Diaspora--a group of players whose game, Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, closed. These players (primarily baby boomers) immigrated into other worlds, self-identifying as "refugees"; relocated in There.com, they created a hybrid culture integrating aspects of their old world. Ostracized at first, they became community leaders. Pearce analyzes the properties of virtual worlds and looks at the ways design affects emergent behavior. She discusses the methodologies for studying online games, including a personal account of the sometimes messy process of ethnography. Pearce considers the "play turn" in culture and the advent of a participatory global playground enabled by networked digital games every bit as communal as the global village Marshall McLuhan saw united by television. Countering the ludological definition of play as unproductive and pointing to the long history of pre-digital play practices, Pearce argues that play can be a prelude to creativity.

Learning is becoming an urgent topic. Nations worry about the learning of their citizens, companies about the learning of their workers, schools about... the learning of their students. But it is not always easy to think about how to foster learning in innovative ways. This book presents a framework for doing that, with a social theory of learning that is ground-breaking yet accessible, with profound implications not only for research, but also for all those who have to foster learning as part of their responsibilites at work, at home, at school.

After decades of official atheism, a religious renaissance swept through much of the former Soviet Union beginning in the late 1980s. The Calvinist-like... austerity and fundamentalist ethos that had evolved among sequestered and frequently persecuted Soviet evangelicals gave way to a charismatic embrace of ecstatic experience, replete with a belief in faith healing. Catherine Wanner's historically informed ethnography, the first book on evangelism in the former Soviet Union, shows how once-marginal Ukrainian evangelical communities are now thriving and growing in social and political prominence. Many Soviet evangelicals relocated to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, expanding the spectrum of evangelicalism in the United States and altering religious life in Ukraine. Migration has created new transnational evangelical communities that are now asserting a new public role for religion in the resolution of numerous social problems.Hundreds of American evangelical missionaries have engaged in "church planting" in Ukraine, which is today home to some of the most active and robust evangelical communities in all of Europe. Thanks to massive assistance from the West, Ukraine has become a hub for clerical and missionary training in Eurasia. Many Ukrainians travel as missionaries to Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union. In revealing the phenomenal transformation of religious life in a land once thought to be militantly godless, Wanner shows how formerly socialist countries experience evangelical revival. Communities of the Converted engages issues of migration, morality, secularization, and global evangelism, while highlighting how they have been shaped by socialism.

In the wake of modern genocide, we tend to think of violence against minorities as a sign of intolerance, or, even worse, a prelude to extermination.... Violence in the Middle Ages, however, functioned differently, according to David Nirenberg. In this provocative book, he focuses on specific attacks against minorities in fourteenth-century France and the Crown of Aragon (Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia). He argues that these attacks--ranging from massacres to verbal assaults against Jews, Muslims, lepers, and prostitutes--were often perpetrated not by irrational masses laboring under inherited ideologies and prejudices, but by groups that manipulated and reshaped the available discourses on minorities. Nirenberg shows that their use of violence expressed complex beliefs about topics as diverse as divine history, kinship, sex, money, and disease, and that their actions were frequently contested by competing groups within their own society.Nirenberg's readings of archival and literary sources demonstrates how violence set the terms and limits of coexistence for medieval minorities. The particular and contingent nature of this coexistence is underscored by the book's juxtapositions--some systematic (for example, that of the Crown of Aragon with France, Jew with Muslim, medieval with modern), and some suggestive (such as African ritual rebellion with Catalan riots). Throughout, the book questions the applicability of dichotomies like tolerance versus intolerance to the Middle Ages, and suggests the limitations of those analyses that look for the origins of modern European persecutory violence in the medieval past.

The increasing individualism of modern Western society has been accompanied by an enduring nostalgia for the idea of community as a source of security... and belonging and, in recent years, as an alternative to the state as a basis for politics.Gerard Delanty begins this stimulating introduction to the concept with an analysis of the origins of the idea of community in Western Utopian thought, and as an imagined pristine condition equated with traditional societies in classical sociology and anthropology. He goes on to chart the resurgence of the idea within communitarian thought, the complications and critiques of multiculturalism, and its new manifestations within a society where new modes of communication produce both fragmentation and the possibilities of new social bonds. Contemporary community, he argues, is essentially a communication community based on new kinds of belonging. No longer bounded by place, we are able to belong to multiple communities based on religion, nationalism, ethnicity, life-styles and gender

Brenton D. Faber’s spirited account of an academic consultant’s journey through banks, ghost towns, cemeteries, schools, and political campaigns... explores the tenuous relationships between cultural narratives and organizational change. Blending Faber’s firsthand experiences in the study and implementation of change with theoretical discussions of identity, agency, structure, and resistance within contexts of change, this innovative book is among the first such communications studies to profile a scholar who is also a full participant in the projects. Drawing on theories of Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, and Pierre Bourdieu, Faber notes that change takes place in the realm of narrative, in the stories people tell. Faber argues that an organization’s identity is created through internal stories.  When the organization’s internal stories are consistent with its external stories, the organization’s identity is consistent and productive. When internal stories contradict the external stories, however, the organization’s identity becomes discordant. Change is the process of realigning an organization’s discordant narratives.   Faber discusses the case studies of a change management plan he wrote for a city-owned cemetery, a cultural change project he created for a downtown trade school, and a political campaign he assisted that focused on creating social change. He also includes detailed reflections on practical ways academics can become more involved in their communities as agents of progressive social change. Featuring six illustrations, Faber’s unique study demonstrates in both style and substance how stories work as agents of change.