What motivates a lifelong scholarly pursuit, and how do one's studies inform life outside the academy? Sociologists, who live in families but also study families, who go to work but also study work, who participate in communities but also try to understand communities, have an especially intimate relation to their research. Growing up poor, struggling as a woman in a male-dominated profession, participating in protests against the Vietnam War; facts of life influence research agendas, individual understandings of the world, and ultimately the shape of the discipline as a whole.
Barry...

By placing the dual-career marriage in its economic and social context, More Equal Than Others goes beyond the media image of dual-career couples as self-sufficient units and compels the reader to confront the dilemmas and possibilities of modern marriages.

The dynamics of work and parenthood are in the midst of a revolutionary shift in the United States. Focused around a major factor in this shiftthe rise of dual-income familiesthis groundbreaking volume provides a highly informative snapshot of the intricate fabric of work and family in the United States. With selections written by leading scholars both inside and outside academia, Working Families offers intimate stories of how families manage and how children respond to the rigors of their parents' lives, as well as broad overviews developed from survey and census data. Taken...

Presents an array of contemporary ethnographers grappling with the problematics and conventions of ethnographic writing.

This insightful volume examines how: sociological understanding helps with the experience of everyday life; the observation of everyday life affects research agendas and vice versa; and how the qualitative approach helps the understanding of experiences in a broad sense rather than as random and isolated events.

This insightful volume collects essays from some of the most renowned sociologists working today. They examine the ways that sociological understanding helps them with their daily experiences. These essays reflect the desire to understand experiences in a broader context rather than as random and isolated events - and how the qualitative approach can achieve that end.

Organized around the notion of place - public places, family spaces, interior spaces, and workplaces, the essays touch on the major sub-disciplines within sociology.

The very nature of elites makes them difficult for social researchers to study. This volume provides valuable insights into how researchers can successfully gain access to elite settings. Using their actual experiences, the contributors provide constructive advice as well as cautionary tales about how they learned to manoeuvre and become accepted in worlds otherwise closed to them.

Three broad research areas are covered: business elites; professional elites; and community and political elites. Useful information is given on how researchers in these areas can gather data, construct...

A remarkable number of women today are taking the daunting step of having children outside of marriage. In Single By Chance, Mothers By Choice, Rosanna Hertz offers the first full-scale account of this fast-growing phenomenon, revealing why these middle class women took this unorthodox path and how they have managed to make single parenthood work for them.
Hertz interviewed 65 women--ranging from physicians and financial analysts to social workers, teachers, and secretaries--women who speak candidly about how they manage their lives and families as single mothers. What Hertz...

At a time when an emphasis on productivity in higher education threatens to undermine well-crafted research, these highly reflexive essays capture the sometimes profound intellectual effects that may accompany disrupted scholarship. They reveal that over long periods of time relationships with people studied invariably change, sometimes in dramatic ways. They illustrate how world events such as 9/11 and economic cycles impact individual biographies.

Some researchers describe how disruptions prompted them to expand the boundaries of their discipline and invent concepts that could more...

At a time when an emphasis on productivity in higher education threatens to undermine well-crafted research, these highly reflexive essays capture the sometimes profound intellectual effects that may accompany disrupted scholarship. They reveal that over long periods of time relationships with people studied invariably change, sometimes in dramatic ways. They illustrate how world events such as 9/11 and economic cycles impact individual biographies.

Some researchers describe how disruptions prompted them to expand the boundaries of their discipline and invent concepts that could more...