Building Better Societies ─ Promoting Social Justice in a World Falling Apart

From environmental decline to growing economic inequality, things are getting worse for the majority of the human race and will continue to worsen until determined action is taken. Starting from this vantage point, Building Better Societies looks to social scientists to identify what is needed to solve the problems that are building to a collapse of civil society. This is the first book to collect the ideas of those whose research on social conditions is at the forefront of our biggest societal problems.

Challenging fellow social scientists to cast aside their commitment to the established order and its ideological support systems, Building Better Societies argues that social researchers must, as objectively as possible, use their skills to look ahead, identify the likely outcomes of various forms of intervention, and move to the forefront of informed political debate. Bringing together expert contributors researching the many aspects of our social condition, this book channels the energy of social scientists into a more normative and engaged voice; it asks them what mechanisms, interventions, and evidence we might draw on as we make a better world.

Rowland Atkinson is chair of inclusive societies in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Sheffield. He is coauthor of Domestic Fortress: Fear and the New Home Front. Lisa Mckenzie is a research fellow in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain, also published by Policy Press. Simon Winlow is professor of criminology in the School of Social Sciences, Business & Law at Teeside University. He is coauthor, most recently, of Riots and Political Protest.