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Political sociology as a subject has changed beyond recognition in the last ten years but until now textbooks have lagged behind. Roger's King important book takes as its starting point the fragmentation of the discipline and introduces a range of recent Marxist and other critical writing on the state showing how these can be related to and integrated with the more traditional concerns of the subject.

Roger King explores the state-society relationship in its historical, comparative, local and international context. He analyses the interaction between organised labour, business, and the state and argues that modern societies, whatever their political colouration, apparently converge around a more state directed, organised form of socio-economic arrangement.

"We should be careful to recognise, however, that although the ' market society' school of political economists seeks to reduce levels of state intervention in society, it does not advocate total state abstinence. Rather a pure laissez-faire economy is regarded as a chimera. State interventionism should be specific, fine-tuned, remedial and authoritative. At the very least governments should seek the maintenance of social order and should provide a minimum safeguard for the economically and socially-dependent, such as the infirm or the unemployed. However, the emphasis wherever possible should be to allow the market to provide the bulk of such social provision through private insurance and other schemes. Thus it is accepted that some guarantee of 'social reproduction' must be provided by the state, and interventionism is required to maintain the conditions in which competitive capitalism can operate, such as an appropriate legal and monetary framework."

Roger King

Roger King is Visiting Professor at Centre for Higher Education Research and Information. He is also Research Associate at the ESRC Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR) at the London School of Economics (LSE). Previously he was VC at the University of Lincoln and founding Chair of the Institute for Learning and Teaching (now part of the HE Academy). He was Research Fellow at the Association of Commonwealth Universities 2003-5, and has been a Visiting Professor at Griffith University and QUT universities, Australia. He has been a member of the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education since 2001. He also acts as a consultant for a number of organizatios and is also a Trustee of Regent's College, London.   In recent years he has published a number of articles and books in the fields of globalization, policy internationalization and regulatory governance, including 'The State, Democracy and Globalization' (2004), 'The University in the Global Age' (2004), 'The Regulatory State in an Age of Governance'' (2007), all by Palgrave Macmillan, and 'Governing Universiites Globally' (2009) with Edward Elgar. Currently he is preparing 'A Handbook on Globalization and Higher Education' with Simon Marginson and Rajani Naidoo for Edward Elgar. He is also the co-editor (with Noel Entwistle) of the Palgrave Macmillan Series 'Universities into the Twenty-First century'. He is researching the spread of universalizing standards and models in higher education within contexts of national processes of structuration.