Berg Publishers

In an effort to restore its world-power status after the humiliation of defeat and occupation, France was eager to maintain its overseas empire at the end of the Second World War. Yet just fifteen...

Is there a peculiarly English 'look' and if so how does one define it? From the 'traditional' dress of the Victorian rural working class through to the contemporary collections of Vivienne Westwood...

It is commonly known that fashion is big business, yet given its global significance, little has been written on the phenomenon of the fashion system. Instead, books have tended to focus on dress...

Feminists have argued that the Barbie doll perpetuates unrealistic standards of feminine beauty and undermines the credibility of women - that her long, slender plastic limbs and tiny waist fetishize...

This innovative text aims to provide a comprehensive overview and comparative analysis of European labour movements from 1900 to 1990. The authors examine the links between workers and organized...

As a wave of open misogyny swept through French literature and society in the aftermath of the Great War, a new generation of professional women writers took up pen to redress the situation. They...

Transnational movements of people, cultural objects, images and identities have played a vital role in creating an informal global network for African fashion - from clothing designers and tailors to...

The Globalization of Food provides a comprehensive guide to all of the key issues involving globalization and the production, distribution and consumption of food in the present day. From domestic...

The management of design has emerged as central to the operational and strategic options of any successful organization. The Handbook of Design Management presents a state-of-the-art overview of the...

Visual culture has become one of the most dynamic fields of scholarship, a reflection of how the study of human culture increasingly requires distinctively visual ways of thinking and methods of...

"There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors." Francois Truffaut's famous statement defined a new way of seeing cinema as an art form and its directors as artists or auteurs. The...

Quietly but implacably, powerful transnational corporations are gaining power over our visual world. A 'global, visual content industry' increasingly controls images supplied to advertisers,...

We are at war. Human cultures are divided into two basic types, two antagonistic forces, one based on symbolic exchange, which is dual and reciprocal, and one based on money and sign exchange, which...

Life without the internet, a very new technology, seems almost unimaginable for most people in western nations. Today the internet is intrinsic to media and communications, entertainment, politics,...

Despite recent challenges from New York, London and Milan, Paris is renowned as the greatest fashion capital in the world. Its distinctive categorization of haute couture, demi-couture, and...

Due to its potent mix of triumph and controversy, the Liberation of France from Nazi Occupation continues to reverberate in the post-war politics and culture of France. Presenting new research by...

We constantly hear about 'the consumer'. The 'consumer' has become a ubiquitous person in public discourse and academic research, but who is this person? The Making of the Consumer is the first...

The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century reveal disturbing and uncomfortable facts about human nature, social life, and moral progress. Totalitarianism, ironically, came at a time when the...

Mention the word Europe in today's society and you are greeted with a range of responses, from impassioned debate, to scepticism and outright hostility. Yet long before the emergence of the modern...

Howard Williamson's 'Five Years' was a ground-breaking study of youth, poverty and crime in the 1970s. At its close, the boys he interviewed were left with few prospects and bleak futures...

British fashion is characterized by oppositions: punk versus pageantry, anarchy versus monarchy, Cool Britannia versus Rule Britannia. Why has British fashion come to be so contradictory? How are...

Drawing on unpublished archival material, this book provides the first complete account of the Polish miners' union in the Ruhr and places it in the wider context of the German labor movement, from...

In the turbulent political and social landscape of Revolutionary France, dress played a major role in defining and displaying new identities. What people wore was, in fact, a vital symbol of their...

Why did German states for so long make it extraordinarily difficult for foreigners who were not ethnic Germans to become citizens? To what extent was this policy a product of popular national...

Is shopping for food really a political act? Why is it that, in a world with enough food for everyone, more people than ever go hungry? Why did the French resistance against genetically modified...

This authoritative study considers contemporary policies for the arts in France and the cultural and political issues they have raised. The author concentrates particularly on the seminal Mitterrand...

Once it was just Mods and Rockers or Hippies and Skinheads. Now we have Riot Grrls and Rappers; Modern Primitives and Metalheads; Goths, Clubcultures and Fetishists; Urban Tribes, New Age Travellers...

Is the restaurant an ideal total social phenomenon for the contemporary world? Restaurants are framed by the logic of the market, but promise experiences not of the market. Restaurants are key sites...

This book examines how the British people came to terms with the massive trauma of the First World War. Although the literary memory of the war has often been discussed, little has been written on...

From fox-hunting to farming, the vigour with which rural activities and living are defended overturns received notions of a sleepy and complacent countryside. Alongside these developments, the rise...