Drawing upon the Marxist, French structuralist and American pragmatist traditions, this is an introduction to the sociology of knowledge, the meaning of emerging political and cultural styles of thought and their class and institutional origins. It looks at the cultural impact of the forms and images of mass media, nationally and globally, and examines the authority of science, medicine and the law as bodies of contemporary knowledge and practice. Finally, it considers the concept of engendered knowledge through a consideration of the complex and often troubled relationship between feminism...