The Body in Culture, Technology and Society

Chris Shilling is Professor of Sociology in SSPSSR at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. Having completed a BA in Politics and an MA in Social and Political Thought at the University of Sussex, he was awarded his PhD in the Sociology of Education at The Open University. Growing increasingly dissatisfied with cognitive conceptions of agency and disembodied theories of social and cultural processes, his research and writing from the late 1980s has sought to contribute to the embodiment of sociology and sociological theory and to promote the interdisciplinary field of ′body studies.′ He has lectured widely in Europe and North America, has written on embodiment in relation to a wide range of substantive issues (from religion, archaeology, sport, music and health and illness, to work, survival, technology and consumer culture) and his publicationshave been translated into a number of different languages. Chris Shilling′s major books include Changing Bodies: Habit, Crisis and Creativity (Sage, 2008), Embodying Sociology: Retrospect, Progress and Prospects (editor, Blackwells, 2007), The Body in Culture, Technology and Society (Sage, 2005) and, with Philip A. Mellor, The Sociological Ambition (Sage, 2001) and Re-forming the Body. Religion, Community and Modernity (Sage, 1997). He is currently editor of The Sociological Review Monograph Series and is continuing to research and write on embodiment as a foundational grounding for social thought and social research.

• IntroductionClassical BodiesContemporary BodiesWorking BodiesSporting BodiesMusical Bodies Sociable BodiesTechnological Bodies

Once in a while a manuscript stops you in your tracks... What we are offered here is no recovering of old ground but a step change in perspectives on "body matters" that is both innovative and of fundamental importance to anyone working on this sociological terrain...This text is groundbreaking and simply has to be readActa Sociologica This is Shilling at his creative best…these are seminal observations of the classical theories drawn together as never before. Moreover, as a framework [this monograph] provides a genuinely new and fertile way of reconsidering not just classical sociology but contemporaryforms as wellSport, Education & Society This is a comprehensive, theoretically sophisticated, and ambitious treatise on the body that draws from, and applies, both classical and contemporary sociological theory in a manner that is innovative and thought-provoking. This book is engaging and thought-provoking, but Shilling′s greatest achievement is his ability to illustrate the importance and continued relevance of classical and contemporary sociological theory to real world concerns. It is a book worthy of widespread attention. It reinvigorated my interest in the sociological classics and contained countless nuggets of interesting information that led me to conclude that it would be a worthy book to recommend to a broad sociological audienceTeaching Sociology Shilling′s book (like his earlier The Body and Social Theory) is crucial reading…a further valuable contribution in a field where he has provided so muchTheory & Psychology This is an impressive book by one of the leading social theorists working in the field of body studies. It provides a critical summation of theoretical and substantive work in the field to date, while also presenting a powerful argument for a corporeal realism in which the body is both generative of the emergent properties of social structure and a location of their effects. Its scope and originality make it a key point of reference for students and academics in body studies and in the social and cultural sciences more generallyIan BurkittReader in Social Science, University of Bradford Chris Shilling is as always a lucid guide through the dense thickets of the "sociology of the body", and his chapters on the fields of work, sport, eating, music and technology brilliantly show how abstract theoretical debates relate to the real world of people′s livesStephen MennellUniversity College Dublin What I find very useful and without any doubt valuable, not only in Shilling’s The Body in Culture, Technology and Society but in his work in general, is the breadth and profoundness of his discussion about the body…the style Shilling maintains is crucial for further development of the sociology of the body as a discipline, for it provides us with a rich intellectual environment about the bodySociology For any colleague wanting to have a clear idea of how studies of the body can be empirically grounded as well as theoretically ‘rich’, Chris Shilling’s The Body in Culture, Technology and Society , is the book to read. To my mind it offers the best account thus far of not only how social action is embodied and must be recognised as such but also of how social structures condition and shape embodied subjects in a variety of social arenas... This is wonderful insightful ‘stuff’ – the ideas and intricate thoughts of a scholar such as Shilling who has been immersed in thinking about the complexities of the body in society as well as sociology for a number of yearsSociology of Health and Illness