Social Structures is a book that examines how structural forms spontaneously arise from social relationships. Offering major insights into the building blocks of social life, it identifies which locally emergent structures have the capacity to grow into larger ones and shows how structural tendencies associated with smaller structures shape and constrain patterns of larger structures. The book then investigates the role such structures have played in the emergence of the modern nation-state.
Bringing together the latest findings in sociology, anthropology, political...
Social Structures is a book that examines how structural forms spontaneously arise from social relationships. Offering major insights i...
The Explanation of Social Action is a sustained critique of the conventional understanding of what it means to "explain" something in the social sciences. It makes the strong argument that the traditional understanding involves asking questions that have no clear foundation and provoke an unnecessary tension between lay and expert vocabularies. Drawing on the history and philosophy of the social sciences, John Levi Martin exposes the root of the problem as an attempt to counterpose two radically different types of answers to the question of why someone did a certain thing: first...
The Explanation of Social Action is a sustained critique of the conventional understanding of what it means to "explain" something in the soc...
Written with students in mind, Thinking Through Theory explores the role of theory in sociology with a focus on good thinking: how to keep from thinking in circles, how to know when we are contradicting ourselves, and how to avoid thinking tautologies are meaningful.
Written with students in mind, Thinking Through Theory explores the role of theory in sociology with a focus on good thinking: how to keep from thinki...
Sociological research is hard enough already--you don't need to make it even harder by smashing about like a bull in a china shop, not knowing what you're doing or where you're heading. Or so says John Levi Martin in this witty, insightful, and desperately needed primer on how to practice rigorous social science. Thinking Through Methods focuses on the practical decisions that you will need to make as a researcher--where the data you are working with comes from and how that data relates to all the possible data you could have gathered. This is a user's guide to...
Sociological research is hard enough already--you don't need to make it even harder by smashing about like a bull in a china shop, not knowing what yo...
