In this new volume, leading researchers provide state-of-the-art perspectives on how social interaction influences the development of knowledge. The book integrates approaches from a variety of disciplines including developmental psychology, psychopathology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, evolutionary biology, and primatology. It reviews the

Over the past quarter century, researchers have successfully explored the inner workings of the physical and biological sciences using a variety of social and historical lenses. Inspired by these advances, the contributors to Social Knowledge in the Making turn their attention to the social sciences, broadly construed. The result is the first comprehensive effort to study and understand the day-to-day activities involved in the creation of social-scientific and related forms of knowledge about the social world. The essays collected here tackle a range of previously unexplored questions about the practices involved in the production, assessment, and use of diverse forms of social knowledge. A stellar cast of multidisciplinary scholars addresses topics such as the changing practices of historical research, anthropological data collection, library usage, peer review, and institutional review boards. Turning to the world beyond the academy, other essays focus on global banks, survey research organizations, and national security and economic policy makers. Social Knowledge in the Making is a landmark volume for a new field of inquiry, and the bold new research agenda it proposes will be welcomed in the social science, the humanities, and a broad range of nonacademic settings.

For the past fifty years anxiety over naturalism has driven debates in social theory. One side sees social science as another kind of natural science, while the other rejects the possibility of objective and explanatory knowledge. Interpretation and Social Knowledge suggests a different route, offering a way forward for an antinaturalist sociology that overcomes the opposition between interpretation and explanation and uses theory to build concrete, historically specific causal explanations of social phenomena.

The fully revised edition of this successful textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to medical sociology and an assessment of its significance for social theory and the social sciences. It includes a completely revised chapter on mental health and new chapters on the sociology of the body and on the relationship between health and risk in contemporary societies. Bryan S Turner considers the ways in which different social theorists have interpreted the experience of health and disease, and the social relations and power structures involved in medical practice. He examines health as an aspect of social action and looks at the subject of health at three levels - the individual, the social and the societal. Among the perspectives analyzed are: Parsons′ view of the `sick role′ and the patient′s relation to society; Foucault′s critique of medical models of madness and sexuality; Marxist and feminist debates on the relation of health and medicine to capitalism and patriarchy; and Beck′s contribution to the sociological understanding of environmental pollution and hazard in the politics of health.

A watershed event in the field of sociology, this text introduced “a major breakthrough in the sociology of knowledge and sociological theory generally” (George Simpson, American Sociological Review). In this seminal book, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann examine how knowledge forms and how it is preserved and altered within a society. Unlike earlier theorists and philosophers, Berger and Luckmann go beyond intellectual history and focus on commonsense, everyday knowledge—the proverbs, morals, values, and beliefs shared among ordinary people. When first published in 1966, this systematic, theoretical treatise introduced the term social construction,effectively creating a new thought and transforming Western philosophy.

Illuminating Social Life has enjoyed increasing popularity with each edition. It is the only book designed for undergraduate teaching that shows today's students how classical and contemporary social theories can be used to shed new light on such topics as the internet, the world of work, fast food restaurants, shopping malls, alcohol use, body building, sales and service, and new religious movements.A perfect complement for the sociological theory course, it offers 13 original essays by leading scholars in the field who are also experienced undergraduate theory teachers. Substantial introductions by the editor link the applied essays to a complete review of the classical and modern social theories used in the book.

Theory as Critique, while discussing many central issues of Marxian theory, has two main emphases: First, as the title suggests, it takes seriously Capital’s claim to be a critique of economic theory, rather than a contribution to political economy. Understanding what this means, it shows, goes far to unravelling many difficulties traditionally found in Marx’s book, from the nature of his theory of class to the 'transformation problem'. Secondly, Mattick’s volume carefully explores how to bridge the gap between the extreme abstraction of Marx’s ideas and the complex reality that they are intended to help us understand.

Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something else—symbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do. The Social Life of Spirits challenges this notion. By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more diverse environment of entities—with their own histories, motivations, and social interactions—providing a new understanding of spirits not as symbols, but as agents. The contributors tour the spiritual globe—the globe of nonthings—in essays on topics ranging from the Holy Ghost in southern Africa to spirits of the “people of the streets” in Rio de Janeiro to dragons and magic in Britain. Avoiding a reliance on religion and belief systems to explain the significance of spirits, they reimagine spirits in a rich network of social trajectories, ultimately arguing for a new ontological ground upon which to examine the intangible world and its interactions with the tangible one.

This volume raises for the first time developmental issues in relation to the theory of social representations, which Serge Moscovici introduced to account for the influence of social life on psychological processes. Moscovici describes a society's values, ideas, beliefs and practices as social representations that function both as rule systems structuring social life and as codes facilitating communication. The editors' introduction identifies the need to expand the theory of social representations to consider developmental changes in social beliefs, in individual understanding, and in the process of communication. Individual chapters examine change in nursery school life, gender, social divisions in society, images of childhood, emotion, intelligence and psychology. Moscovici's final chapter considers the contribution of these developmental perspectives. The book will interest specialists and students within the human and social sciences, including developmental and social psychology, sociology, and communication studies.