Help Caribbean students understand the society they live in while ensuring full coverage of the 2013 syllabus. - Ensure complete coverage of Units 1 and 2 in a single volume, while giving the students the opportunity to make links between content at both levels. - Illustrate key research for each topic with Caribbean and international studies. - Support learning with exclusive online content, providing additional new material, guidelines to doing the Internal Assessment (IA) and a student friendly approach to research.

In this second edition of Sociology for Caribbean Students, author Nasser Mustapha builds on the success of the earlier volume by continuing to demystify the science of Sociology for the introductory student. This text also stays true to the aims of the first edition by incorporating the perspective of the Caribbean and developing societies within the concepts and theories of Sociology. Fully up to date and in line with the requirements of the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE(r)) Sociology Syllabus, Sociology for Caribbean Students is divided into two major Units with three modules each. Topics such as the Family, Culture and Identity, Religion, Population Theories and Institutions of Social Control are explained in a student-friendly manner which speaks to the Caribbean reality. The book has been significantly revised to include new activities, data and exercises to clarify concepts and theories which may be difficult to grasp for the beginner in Sociology; and will thereby remain the preferred text for student

From the team that brought you the bestselling Understanding Classical Sociology (SAGE Publications, 1995), we now have a companion volume dealing with the modern period of social theory. An introductory chapter situates the reader in the main changes in society and sociology following the classic period. This is then followed by separate chapters giving a detailed account of four perspectives that are regarded to be of seminal importance - Functionalism, Critical Theory, Structuralism and Symbolic Interactionism. All of the popular features of Understanding Classical Sociology are reproduced in this book: · Clarity of exposition and criticism · A passion for the importance and relevance of sociological reasoning and explanation · A commitment to treat social theory as a living tradition of thought In addition, the volume comes with a variety of pedagogic aids including summary points and key definitions to facilitate learning and study. This is a book that enhances the sociological imagination. It draws on the authors deep understanding and experience of teaching the subject over many decades. It will be welcomed by lecturers as a vital new teaching and research aid, and students will be stimulated and enriched by the unfussy and reliable advice on doing sociology that it imparts.

This collection of recent essays by the influential sociologist Herbert J. Gans brings together the many themes of Gans’s wide-ranging career to make the case for a policy-oriented vision for sociology. Sociology and Social Policy explicates and helps solve social problems by presenting a range of studies on what people, institutions, and social structures do with, for, and against one another. These works from across Gans’s areas of interest—the city, poverty, ethnicity, employment and political economy, and the relationship between race and class—together make a powerful call to action for the field of sociology.

Perspectives in Sociology provides students with a lively and critical introduction to sociology and to the ways in which sociologists are trained to think and work. The subject is presented as a sequence of different perspectives on the social world, all of them interrelated, sometimes in conflict with one another, and all contributing important and necessary insights. The discussion is backed up by extensive reference to empirical studies. This edition has been completely revised. A chapter on critical theory has been added in order to reflect the extensive work and thinking that Marx's basic work continues to stimulate. The chapter on research strategies now takes account of new developments in the philosophy of science that are relevant for sociological approaches. Throughout, the authors have rewritten extensively in their continuing desire to produce clarity, and to respond to the comments of students and teachers.

Pragmatist thought is central to sociology. However, sociologists typically encounter pragmatism indirectly, as a philosophy of science or as an influence on canonical social scientists, rather than as a vital source of theory, research questions, and methodological reflection in sociology today. In The New Pragmatist Sociology, Neil Gross, Isaac Ariail Reed, and Christopher Winship assemble a range of sociologists to address essential ideas in the field and their historical and theoretical connection to classical pragmatism. The book examines questions of methodology, social interaction, and politics across the broad themes of inquiry, agency, and democracy. Essays engage widely and deeply with topics that motivate both pragmatist philosophy and sociology, including rationality, speech, truth, expertise, and methodological pluralism. Contributors include Natalie Aviles, Karida Brown, Daniel Cefaï, Mazen Elfakhani, Luis Flores, Daniel Huebner, Cayce C. Hughes, Paul Lichterman, John Levi Martin, Ann Mische, Vontrese D. Pamphile, Jeffrey N. Parker, Susan Sibley, Daniel Silver, Mario Small, Iddo Tavory, Stefan Timmermans, Luna White, and Joshua Whitford.

The Credential Society is a classic on the role of higher education in American society and an essential text for understanding the reproduction of inequality. Controversial at the time, Randall Collins’s claim that the expansion of American education has not increased social mobility, but rather created a cycle of credential inflation, has proven remarkably prescient. Collins shows how credential inflation stymies mass education’s promises of upward mobility. An unacknowledged spiral of the rising production of credentials and job requirements was brought about by the expansion of high school and then undergraduate education, with consequences including grade inflation, rising educational costs, and misleading job promises dangled by for-profit schools. Collins examines medicine, law, and engineering to show the ways in which credentialing closed these high-status professions to new arrivals. In an era marked by the devaluation of high school diplomas, outcry about the value of expensive undergraduate degrees, and the proliferation of new professional degrees like the MBA, The Credential Society has more than stood the test of time. In a new preface, Collins discusses recent developments, debunks claims that credentialization is driven by technological change, and points to alternative pathways for the future of education.

This book offers a guide to sociology that explores its theoretical and methodological dimensions. Aiming to provide the reader with a sense of the reasoned character of the discipline, it traces how different theories and methods relate to one another, exploring the particular problems they spawn and the debates that have arisen in response.

This book is the first comprehensive account of the history and current state of South African sociology. Providing a holistic picture of the subject both as it is taught in universities and as a field of research, it reveals the trajectories of a discipline in a challenging socio-political context. With the support of historical and scientometric data, it demonstrates how the changing political situation, from colonialism to apartheid to democracy, has influenced the nature, direction and foci of sociological research in the country. The author shows how, during the apartheid era, sociology was professionally fragmented and divided along language and race lines. It was, however, able to flourish with the advent of democracy in 1994 and has become a unique academic movement. This insightful work will appeal to students and scholars of the social sciences, and all those interested in the history and society of South Africa.