What is culture? What is the relationship between social structure and culture in a globalized and networked world? This book explores the key themes in social theory: the nation state; the city; modernity and reflexivity; post-Fordism and the spatial logic of the informational city.

Introduction - Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash PART ONE: TECHNOLOGICAL SPACE Growth and Failure - Richard Sennett The New Political Economy and Its Culture Simulated Sovereignty, Telematic Territoriality - Timothy W Luke The Political Economy of Cyberspace Digital Networks and Power - Saskia Sassen PART TWO: CULTURAL MAPPING The Postmodern Urban Condition - Michael Dear and Steven Flusty Roaming the City - Hilary Radner Proper Women in Improper Places PART THREE: REFLEXIVE SPACE Not All That Is Solid Melts into Air - Heidrun Friese and Peter Wagner Modernity and Contingency Moving Culture - Ron Eyerman Radiated Identities - Barbara Adam In Pursuit of the Temporal Complexity of Conceptual Cultural Practices PART FOUR: CARTOGRAPHIES OF A NATION Triumphalist Geographies - Michael J Shapiro The Anti-Reflexivist Revolution - G[um]oran Dahl On the Affirmationism of the New Right PART FIVE: TRANSCULTURAL PLACE Transculturality - Wolfgang Welsch The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today Towards a Multicultural Conception of Human Rights - Boaventura de Sousa Santos The Hybridization of Roots and the Abhorrence of the Bush - Jonathan Friedman Narrating the Postcolonial - Couze Venn