Though some dismiss opera as old-fashioned, it shows no sign of disappearing from the world's stage. So why do audiences continue to flock to it? Given its association with wealth, one might imagine that opera tickets function as a status symbol. But while a desire to hobnob with the upper crust might motivate the occasional operagoer, for hardcore fans the real answer, according to "The Opera Fanatic", is passion - they do it for love. Opera lovers are an intense lot, Claudio E. Benzecry discovers in his look at the fanatics who haunt the legendary Colon Opera House in Buenos Aires, a key site for opera's globalization. Listening to the fans and their stories, Benzecry hears of two-hundred-mile trips for performances and nightlong camp-outs for tickets, while others testify to a particular opera's power to move them - whether to song or to tears - no matter how many times they have seen it before. Drawing on his insightful analysis of these acts of love, Benzecry proposes new ways of thinking about our relationship to art and shows how, far from merely enhancing aspects of everyday life, art allows us to transcend it.

Everyone knows the small-world phenomenon: soon after meeting a stranger, we are surprised to discover that we have a mutual friend, or we are connected through a short chain of acquaintances. In his book, Duncan Watts uses this intriguing phenomenon - colloquially called 'six degrees of separation' - as a prelude to a more general exploration: under what conditions can a small world arise in any kind of network? The networks of this story are everywhere: the brain is a network of neurons; organisations are people networks; the global economy is a network of national economies, which are networks of markets, which are in turn networks of interacting producers and consumers. Food webs, ecosystems, and the Internet can all be represented as networks, as can strategies for solving a problem, topics in a conversation, and even words in a language. Many of these networks, the author claims, will turn out to be small worlds. How do such networks matter? Simply put, local actions can have global consequences, and the relationship between local and global dynamics depends critically on the network's structure. Watts illustrates the subtleties of this relationship using a variety of simple models - the spread of infectious disease through a structured population; the evolution of cooperation in game theory; the computational capacity of cellular automata; and, the synchronisation of coupled phase-oscillators. Watts' novel approach is relevant to many problems that deal with network connectivity and complex systems' behaviour in general: How do diseases (or rumours) spread through social networks? How does cooperation evolve in large groups? How do cascading failures propagate through large power grids, or financial systems? What is the most efficient architecture for an organisation, or for a communications network? This fascinating exploration will be fruitful in a remarkable variety of fields, including physics and mathematics, as well as sociology, economics, and biology.

赫伯特·尔库塞（Herbert Marcuse，1898-1979）是法兰克福学派左翼主要代表人物，本书是其最负盛名的著作，旨在揭示当代发达工业社会型的极权主义特征。此书在英国和美国出版后，先后在德国和法国出德文版和法文版，其后又译成多种文字在许多国家出版，被称为西方6 0年代末大学造反运动的教科书.
全书除导言外包括“单向度社会”、“单向度的思想”和“进行替代性选择的机会”三部分。作者通过对政治、生活、思想、文化、语言等领域的分析、批判，指出发达工业社会是如何成功地压制了人们内心中的否定性、批判性、超越性的向度，使这个社会成为单向度的社会，而生活于其中的人成了单向度的人，这种人丧失了自由和创造力，不再想像或追求与现实生活不同的另一种生活。本书对现代资本主义社会作了较为深刻的揭露和探索，但暴露出其社会批判理论的乌托邦性质。本书对研究兰克福学派和马尔库塞理论的发展，有重要的理论价值

本书中，周雪光教授以组织研究的诸种学术问题为导向，系统阐述了当今海外学术界影响至深的诸学术流派，如制度主义学派、交易成本学派、网络分析学派等对若干基本的组织现象的研究和看法，梳理了经济学、社会学和心理学在组织问题上思想交锋的焦点所在，并结合海内外大量组织现象的实例分析，指出了组织社会学研究的努力方向，体现出作者深厚的学术功力和犀利的学术眼光，读来令人茅塞顿开。

Cultural Sociology collects 31 seminal essays by renowned social thinkers that introduce cultural sociology to an emerging generation of students and scholars.