Books by "Thomas K. Rudel"

3 books found

The Meaning of General Theoretical Sociology

The Meaning of General Theoretical Sociology

by Thomas J. Fararo

1992 · Cambridge University Press

This book sets out a generative structuralist conception of general theoretical sociology; its philosophy, its problems, and its methods. The field is defined as a comprehensive research tradition with many intersecting subtraditions that share conceptual components.

The social question is back. Yet today's social question is not primarily between labour and capital, as it was in the nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth. The contemporary social question is located at the interstices between the global South and the global North. It finds its expression in movements of people, seeking a better life or fleeing unsustainable social, political, economic, and ecological conditions. It is transnationalized not only because migrants and their significant others entertain ties across the borders of national states, staying in touch with family and friends, receiving or sending financial remittances in transnational social spaces. Also of importance are cross--border recruitment schemes for workers and the cross-border diffusion of norms appealed to in the case of migration--for example, the social right to decent work as a human right. Moreover, migration can become an issue of inclusion or exclusion in fields important to life chances in the emigration, transit, or immigration states--a transnationalization of national states. And, as in the nineteenth century, political conflicts arise, constituting the social question as a public concern. In earlier periods class differences dominated conflicts. While class has always been criss-crossed by manifold heterogeneities, not least of all cultural ones around ethnicity, religion, and language, it is these latter heterogeneities that have sharpened in situations of immigration and emigration over the past decades. Casting a wide net in terms of conceptual and empirical scope, this book tackles both the social structure and the politics of social inequalities. It sets a comprehensive agenda for research which also includes the public role of social scientists in dealing with the transnationalized social question.

Vertigo

Vertigo

by Thomas Brandt

2003 · Springer Science & Business Media

This monograph has been written for clinicians who are involved in the management of the dizzy patient and for scientists with a particular interest in the multi-sensorimotor mechan isms that subserve spatial orientation, motion perception, and ocular motor and postural con trol. Special emphasis has been put on making the correct diagnosis, and detailed recommendations have been given for specific treatments. The second edition has resulted in an almost completely new book due to the dramatic expansion in the 1990s of our understanding of vestibular function and dis orders. A few rele vant examples include the novel concept of canalolithiasis, as opposed to cupulolithiasis, both of which are established causes of typical posterior and horizontal canal benign paroxysmal positioning vertigo; familial episodic ataxia land II have been identified as inherited chan nelopathies; otolithic syndromes were recognized as a variety separate from semicircular canal syndromes; several new central vestibular syndromes have been described, localized, and attributed to vestibular pathways and centres; a new classification based on the three major planes of action of the vestibulo-ocular reflex is available for central vestibular syn dromes; and the mystery of the location and function of the multisensory vestibular cortex is slowly being unravelled. This book differs from other clinical textbooks in that it is not divided into two parts: anatomy and physiology, on the one hand, and disorders, on the other.