Matthew David

This second edition of a major textbook uses lively prose and a series of carefully crafted pedagogical features to both introduce sociology as a discipline and to help students realise how deeply sociological issues impact on their own lives. Over the book’s 12 chapters, students discover what sociology is, alongside its historical development and emergent new concerns. They will be...

Today's economic system, premised on the sale of physical goods, does not fit the information age in which we live. The capitalist order requires the maintenance of an artificial scarcity in goods that have the potential for near-infinite and almost free replication. The sharing of informational goods through distributed global networks—digital libraries, file-sharing, live-streaming, free software, free-access publishing, the free-sharing...