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What are the manifest and likely future consequences of climate change? How will the world respond to the challenges of climate change in the twenty-first century? How should people think about confronting the politics of climate change? In this highly accessible introduction to the predicted global impacts of climate change, Constance Lever-Tracy provides an authoritative guide to one of the most controversial issues facing the future of our planet. Discussing how the social and natural sciences must work together more effectively in confronting climate change, Lever-Tracy provides a sober, critical assessment of the politics of global warming and climate change. By combining sociology, environmental studies and politics, Confronting Climate Change will serve as an introduction that will appeal to students and general readers alike.

Takes readers into largely uncharted territory in its exploration of anthropogenic climate change. This book highlights the global impact of this issue, and the necessity for multidisciplinary and global social science research and teaching to address the problem. It is suitable for advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students.

This note responds to the discussion pieces by Elizabeth Shove and John Urry in the debates section of Sociological Research Online, 31 August 2010.

AbstractWe have seen a new, distinctive and, to a considerable extent, self-directed implantation and flourishing of capitalist enterprises and accumulation in a number of previously economically under-developed parts of the world. This has been particularly notable in East Asia and coastal China, among some minorities in Southeast Asia and North America and also in parts of Eastern and Southern Europe.The first part of the paper discusses classical theories of civil society as an essential seedbed for capitalist development. The next section argues that some attributes of such a civil society are today interpenetrating with aspects of gemeinschaft type relationships of kinship and community, blurring the distinction and drawing from the combination a renewed dynamism, flexibility and developmental power. In the last sections, a closer look is taken at two situations of recently re-invigorated capitalist activity, amongst Chinese diaspora capitalists outside the mainland, and in the successful, export-oriented industrialisation of the villages of coastal China. The aim is to see if light can be thrown on these recently successful cases, by the notion of a strengthened civil society, reinvigorated by such a civilised gemeinschaft.

This paper focuses on relative levels of investment and trade between Japan and East Asia in the 1990s. Although Japan has been devoting a higher proportion of its world wide investments to this region, the value of this investment has been falling absolutely and even more so relative to the size of inflows from other sources. The region is more important for the trade of Japan than is Japan for the trade of the region. While trade between Japan and China has become more important recently for the latter. Japan's contribution to the trade of the rest of the region has largely stagnated. For both FDI and trade intra regional flows are now larger than are flows between the region and Japan. Evidence that Japan dominates the region through supply of machinery or through coordinating regional production networks is not convincing. The paper concludes that Japanese hegemony over the region is neither actual nor imminent.

Fukuyama's extolling of traditions of business trust, now under threat from a 'culture of rights', may have some validity, but attempts to associate such traditions with the emergence of large corporations are far from convincing. His counterposition of both to the claimed 'low trust' business traditions of Italians and Chinese is theoretically crude and empirically incorrect and it involves him in tangles with significant 'anomalies' some of which he himself acknowledges but does not resolve. In fact, as this paper argues, Chinese business culture is strongly focussed on the development and fostering of trust beyond the family and this is a major source of its strength.