When I decided to write about edgework over twenty-five years ago, I had no idea that I had put myself on a pathway of sustained engagement with one of the most important sociologists of the twentieth century. As an academic sociologist in the early stages of my career, I felt that I had a good general understanding of Erving Goffman’s most important ideas and a proper appreciation of his uniqu...

The transition from the modern world of the postwar period into late modernity involves a movement from an inclusive to an exclusive society. This is concomitant with a change in tolerance from a society which abhors difference and attempts to reform difficulty to one which celebrates difference and attempts to exclude the difficult. Two motifs of exclusion coexist uneasily in late modernity, t...

T INTR he food system is undergoing profound changes, at the level of production and consumption models. Economic theory on the one hand, and sociological and anthropological theories on the other, give different interpretations of the changes, but these often do not confront each other. Moreover, within sociology, with regard to food, ‘(a) curious, if implicit, division of labour seems to have...

In discussing the ideology of social inclusion, this paper demonstrates that the composition of community groups in a period of late modernity is worthy of consideration. Although it would appear, on the surface at least, that previously stable community institutions, such as family, organised religion, trade unions, occupational workplaces, residential neighbourhoods, and so on, are being chal...

The term ‘shock’ has been central to accounts of the origins of technological and artistic modernity. Its appearance ranges from Baudelaire’s use of the term to describe urban experience in the 1860s and the phenomena of ‘railway spine’ in the same decade to the psychology of shell-shock; from the aesthetic categories of Krakauer, Benjamin and Brecht in the inter-war period to later titles like...