Thomas Kuhn's shadow hangs over almost every field of intellectual inquiry. His book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has become a modern classic. His influence on philosophy, social science, historiography, feminism, theology, and (of course) the natural sciences themselves is unparalleled. His epoch-making concepts of 'new paradigm' and 'scientific revolution' make him probably the most influential scholar of the twentieth century.


Sharrock and Read take the reader through Kuhn's work in a careful and accessible way, emphasizing Kuhn's detailed studies of the...

Thomas Kuhn's shadow hangs over almost every field of intellectual inquiry. His book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has become a modern classic. His influence on philosophy, social science, historiography, feminism, theology, and (of course) the natural sciences themselves is unparalleled. His epoch-making concepts of 'new paradigm' and 'scientific revolution' make him probably the most influential scholar of the twentieth century.


Sharrock and Read take the reader through Kuhn's work in a careful and accessible way, emphasizing Kuhn's detailed studies of the...

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...

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...

Born in 1917, Harold Garfinkel is one of a handful of sociologists to have founded a major sociological research programme, and he is perhaps the only one to have done so in the 20th century. Unlike many major theorists, whose individual contributions have become part of the sociological canon, Garfinkel's contribution is identified with a distinctive empirical approach that continues to be taken up in sociology and a number of other social science fields. He coined the term ethnomethodology - to describe a unique orientation to the production of social order. This term became established to...

This four-volume collection presents the key publications which exemplify the participant observation tradition in sociology and social research, an increasingly important method used in qualitative research and ethnography. Such research usually involves a range of methods: informal interviews, direct observation, participation in the life of the group, collective discussions, analyses of the personal documents produced within the group, self-analysis, and life-histories.

This book offers a guide to sociology that explores its theoretical and methodological dimensions. Providing the student 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. The guide is written to be easy to use: individual chapters stand alone as well as fit into the overarching narrative; boxes in the text explain key concepts and feature particular methods, theories or key figures; and annotated further reading lists are...

Ethnomethodology (meaning, very crudely, 'small group' methods) is an approach to sociological research that is associated with the work of Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks. It was very influential in the 1970s and 80s for challenging the more abstract types of social theory. Against these, it offered a way of exploring the rules of practice (generally the hidden rules of practice) in small groups. This four-volume set includes selections that discuss and exemplify how conversations, experiments, and observations are used to gain insight into larger questions of social order and social...