Perspectives in Sociology -5/E.

Perspectives in Sociology provide generations of undergraduates with a clear, reassuring introduction to the complications of sociological theory. New features include : - A thoroughly revised text including particular attention to the linking and cross-referencing of chapters - A new chapter reviewing the rise of British sociology, with particular reference to the political context and the changing role of ‘class’ in sociological thinking - A new chapter describing the attempts of sociological theorists to explain current concerns, problems and issues in the areas of gender, (homo)sexuality and ethnicity in the context of the postcolonial world, and to show the similarities in these approaches. - A completely rewritten chapter on the ‘synthesisers’- Bourdieu, Habermas and Giddens- and their attempts to generate a consensus from the apparently conflicting theories predecessors : Marx, Weber and Durkhei

The Local production of knowledge: disease labels, identities and category entitlements in ME support group talk

This article uses discursive psychology to analyse how knowledge claims and entitlements are locally produced in an ME support group meeting and a research interview. The article demonstrates how ‘expertise’ and ‘experience’ associated with lay and professional membership are locally constituted in the activity of reasoning, arguing and claims making. The analysis shows how expertise and experiential claims are constructed, disclaimed, warranted and undermined in relationship to membership categorization and entitlements to knowledge that are co-constructed in the process of a discussion about disease labels and the nature of the illness as physical or psychological. In a discussion about the definition of contested disease categories, what is ‘at stake’ for the group members is the entitlement to speak from experience as members who can ‘know’ their own minds

Statistical practice:Putting Society on Display

As a contribution to current debates on the ‘social life of methods’, in this article we present an ethnomethodological study of the role of understanding within statistical practice. After reviewing the empirical turn in the methods literature and the challenges to the qualitative-quantitative divide it has given rise to, we argue such case studies are relevant because they enable us to see different ways in which ‘methods’, here quantitative methods, come to have a social life – by embodying and exhibiting understanding they ‘make the social structures of everyday activities observable’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 75), thereby putting society on display. Exhibited understandings rest on distinctive lines of practical social and cultural inquiry – ethnographic ‘forays’ into the worlds of the producers and users of statistics – which are central to good statistical work but are not themselves quantitative. In highlighting these non-statistical forms of social and cultural inquiry at work in statistical practice, our case study is an addition to understandings of statistics and usefully points to ways in which studies of the social life of methods might be further developed from here