'This should become a core text for second year courses in sociology and cultural studies...it synthesizes a vast body of literature and a complex range of debates into a text which is at once accessible, engaging and stimulating...it will lead to students seeing and thinking about the material world in a totally new light and can be used as a way into key theoretical debates' - Keith Tester, Professor of Social Theory, University of Portsmouth. In what ways do we interact with material things? How do material objects affect the way we relate to each other? What are the connections between material things and social processes like fashion, discourse, art and design? Through wearing clothes, keeping furniture, responding to the ring of the telephone, noticing the signature on a painting, holding a paperweight and in many other ways, we interact with objects in our everyday lives. These are not merely functional relationships with things but are connected to the way we relate to other people and the culture of the particular society we live in - they are social relations. This engaging book draws on established theoretical work, including that of Simmel, Marx, McLuhan, Barthes and Baudrillard as well as a range of contemporary empirical work from many humanities disciplines. It uses ideas drawn from this work to explore a variety of things - from stone cairns to denim jeans, televisions to penis rings, houses to works of art - to understand something of how we live with them.

作者　Tim Dent

東英格蘭大學國際政治社會學院高級講師，開設社會及文化理論相關課程。著有《知識、意識型態與論述》(1991)、《社會世界的實體文化》(1999)、《批判社會理論》(2003)、《實質性與社會》(2005)。相關論文散見於各大期刊及專書，目前主要研究批評理論與當代媒體再現的道德論述。

譯者　龔永慧

畢業於台大社會系、倫敦大學歐洲文學碩士。曾任雜誌社編輯，專職翻譯數年，現任外商公司翻譯。譯著有《剛剛好完美的管理》等書。不知不覺選擇了翻譯與文字工作，幾年來，時而甜美、時而寂寞，但不後悔。