Which Way Is Up? by R. W. Connell

Class, Sex and Culture

For sixteen years Bob Connell has been writing on society while being active in politics and the labour movement. This book presents a selection of his new writing on three key issues of modern social analysis – sex and gender, class and power, and culture. The essays range from psychoanalysis and contemporary feminism to role theory, from the analysis of class and culture to the debate about intellectuals and the ‘new class’. In critically reviewing contemporary thought on these issues, the author has developed a perspective centered on the analysis of social practice. Easy to read, often witty, the essays represent an attempt to shift social theory into the real world of the late twentieth century, to go beyond the limits of orthodox sociology and radical dogmas, to think through theoretical questions without losing touch with practical politics. At on level, Which Way is Up? is a chronicle and a criticism of the sociological imagination; at another, it gives a picture of an intellectual at work.