Originally published in 1974, this book provided a most useful introductory survey of all the major philosophical issues relating to the social sciences at the time. While it covers a remarkable amount of ground in a short space, it is never superficial, for its lucid and careful analysis does full justice to the complexities and controversies of the subject. Nor is it merely a survey, for, while putting all points of view with scrupulous fairness, the author never fails to make clear his own, and to support it with reasoned argument.

The book’s basic framework is a comparison of...

Originally published in 1972, this book aimed to provide the student with a basic understanding of the main theories of social stratification and to acquaint them with current methods of research, with the results from modern research (with emphasis on British research), and with current issues in this field. The first two chapters are concerned with theory and are followed by chapters on slavery and the caste system. These are intended to illustrate concepts and theory and to offer the student a comparative perspective in which to view stratification in modern society – which is dealt...

Originally published in 1971, this was the first text on community studies which analysed the major empirical work in this field in a comparative perspective. It is concerned both with the sociology of community and the sociology of community studies. It takes both the findings of individual studies and the research process itself as significant sociological data in their own right, and it asks continually: how do we know what we know about communities?

Community Studies is, then, not only a contribution to that particular field but also to our understanding of the...

Originally published in 1980 The Sociology of Women: An Introduction aimed to provide a sociological, biographically organised portrait of women written from a feminist perspective. It was the first self-contained analytical textbook treatment to present an account of the situation of women in modern Britain that was informed by sociological research. At the same time, it remained a straightforward and elementary text in the sense that it assumed no previous knowledge and is written throughout with the beginning student in mind; it provided a lively, thorough and realistic...

Originally published in 1979, this was the first text to be concerned explicitly with the analysis of forms of kin and non-kin sociability. Its aim was to compare and contrast the different ways in which sociability was patterned in modern life at the time. Many studies had been concerned with kin relations, rather fewer had examined friendship, while none had attempted to compare these relationships. It was the author’s belief that such a comparison was necessary if both kin and non-kin relationships were to be understood more adequately. A Sociology of Friendship and Kinship...

Originally published in 1983, the origin of this book is to be found in C. C. Harris’s ‘Changing conceptions of the relation between family and societal form’ (in Scase: Industrial Society: Class, Cleavage and Control). In that article Harris attempted to relate traditional research on the family to recent developments in historical enquiry and Marxist scholarship. The aim of The Family and Industrial Society is to explain the character of the contemporary family by placing it in a wider historical and theoretical perspective. It is therefore directed at the...

In the 1970s the subject of leisure was attracting interest among both social scientists and people concerned with developing recreation policies. A relative newcomer to the sociological scene at the time, leisure was beginning to compete in research effort and theory-building with the more established fields of sociology. As well as making an academic contribution, this book, originally published in 1976, provided practitioners (such as planners, administrators and managers) with an up-to-date and comprehensive review of social research finding over the whole field of leisure.

Part...

Originally published in 1982, this book describes those basic ideas and techniques of statistics which should be known to every social scientist. The explanations are given in careful detail at a level of mathematical sophistication which will be readily attainable by students meeting statistical methods for the first time.

All the methods described are applied to, and sometimes are motivated by, genuine problems of interest arising in sociology, social policy, politics or human geography. The authors often provide a meaningful discussion of the substantive problem itself in...

Originally published in 1969, this introduction to the social study of the family was designed both for students of sociology and for students of related subjects requiring familiarity with a similar approach. It is therefore written in language as simple as possible; technical terms are only introduced when indispensable and are always defined.

While the book is focused on European and American family systems, the author believed these are intelligible only when placed in a wider context, and so the first part is concerned with kinship, marriage and the family in general. He...