Welcome to our book review site www.go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Climate Change Adaptation in the Built Environment
Global climate change is one of the greatest environmental threats facing humanity and it is affecting every country on every continent. Recent evidence confirms a close liaison between climate change induced hazards and the built environment, as the built environment demonstrates a high fragility and vulnerability to hazardous situations. The impact of climate change is particularly pertinent to the built environment given the life expectancy of buildings and the fact that it is essential to adapt the existing built environment to deal with a climate that may be significantly different from that in which it evolved. Coastal regions are highly vulnerable to climate change because, in additio...
The Dynamics of Social Practice
Everyday life is defined and characterised by the rise, transformation and fall of social practices. Using terminology that is both accessible and sophisticated, this essential book guides the reader through a multi-level analysis of this dynamic. In working through core propositions about social practices and how they change the book is clear and accessible; real world examples, including the history of car driving, the emergence of frozen food, and the fate of hula hooping, bring abstract concepts to life and firmly ground them in empirical case-studies and new research. Demonstrating the relevance of social theory for public policy problems, the authors show that the everyday is the basis...
Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience
Over the past few generations, expectations of comfort, cleanliness and convenience have altered radically, but these dramatic changes have largely gone unnoticed. This intriguing book brings together the sociology of consumption and technology to investigate the evolution of these changes, as well the social meaning of the practices themselves. Homes, offices, domestic appliances and clothes play a crucial role in our lives, but not many of us question exactly how and why we perform so many daily rituals associated with them. Showers, heating, air-conditioning and clothes washing are simply accepted as part of our normal, everyday lives, but clearly this was not always the case. When did th...
Social Practices and Dynamic Non-Humans
The robots are coming! So too is the ‘age of automation’, the march of ‘invasive’ species, more intense natural disasters, and a potential cataclysm of other unprecedented events and phenomena of which we do not yet know, and cannot predict. This book is concerned with how to account for these non-humans and their effects within theories of social practice. In particular, this provocative collection tackles contemporary debates about the roles, relations and agencies of constantly changing, disruptive, intelligent or otherwise 'dynamic' non-humans, such as weather, animals and automated devices. In doing so contributors challenge and take forward existing understandings of dynamic non-humans in theories of social practice by reconsidering their potential roles in everyday life. The book will benefit sociology, geography, science and technology studies, and human- (and animal-) computer interaction design scholars seeking to make sense of the complex entanglement of non-human phenomena and things in the performance of social practices.
Tracts of Action
This volume offers the user a guide to the neglected field of how-to books. How do I make soap? How do I dye textiles? What ingredients do I need for an effective remedy? Practical information of this kind, on distillation, medicine, dyeing, cosmetics, glassmaking, ceramics, metallurgy and many other subjects flooded the book market in the first centuries of printing. As varied as these subjects may be, they provoke a number of research questions: How does one learn practical skills from a book? Why were these books so popular, who used them and how, and can they even be considered a clearly defined genre? The aim of this volume is to establish which patterns characterise the genre of how-to...
The Design of Everyday Life
How do common household items such as basic plastic house wares or high-tech digital cameras transform our daily lives? This title considers this question, from the design of products through to their use in the home. It looks at how everyday objects, ranging from screwdrivers to photo management software, are used on a practical level.
Connecting Practices
Connecting Practices develops a distinctive method of conceptualising significant trends and global issues including environmental sustainability and inequalities in wealth and health, arguing that these are outcomes of the ways in which social practices interact and combine across space and time. Engaging with the question of how connections are made between practices and how past and present combinations make some futures more likely than others, this book brings practice theory to bear on large problems in society. Richly illustrated with examples from the spreading of germs to the history of shipping containers, this powerful analysis of how societies hang together and how they change will appeal to scholars and students of sociology and social theory.
Consumer Engineering, 1920s–1970s
In the middle of the twentieth century, a new class of marketing expert emerged beyond the familiar ad men of Madison Avenue. Working as commercial designers, consumer psychologists, sales managers, and market researchers, these professionals were self-defined “consumer engineers,” and their rise heralded a new era of marketing. To what extent did these efforts to engineer consumers shape consumption practices? And to what extent was the phenomenon itself a product of broader social and cultural forces? This collection considers consumer engineering in the context of the longer history of transatlantic marketing. Contributors offer case studies on the roles of individual consumer engineers on both sides of the Atlantic, the impact of such marketing practices on European economies during World War II and after, and the conflicted relationship between consumer activists and the ideas of consumer engineering. By connecting consumer engineering to a web of social processes in the twentiethcentury, this volume contributes to a reassessment of consumer history more broadly.
