Help Caribbean students understand the society they live in while ensuring full coverage of the 2013 syllabus. - Ensure complete coverage of Units 1 and 2 in a single volume, while giving the students the opportunity to make links between content at both levels. - Illustrate key research for each topic with Caribbean and international studies. - Support learning with exclusive online content, providing additional new material, guidelines to doing the Internal Assessment (IA) and a student friendly approach to research.
In this second edition of Sociology for Caribbean Students, author Nasser Mustapha builds on the success of the earlier volume by continuing to demystify the science of Sociology for the introductory student. This text also stays true to the aims of the first edition by incorporating the perspective of the Caribbean and developing societies within the concepts and theories of Sociology. Fully up to date and in line with the requirements of the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE(r)) Sociology Syllabus, Sociology for Caribbean Students is divided into two major Units with three modules each. Topics such as the Family, Culture and Identity, Religion, Population Theories and Institutions of Social Control are explained in a student-friendly manner which speaks to the Caribbean reality. The book has been significantly revised to include new activities, data and exercises to clarify concepts and theories which may be difficult to grasp for the beginner in Sociology; and will thereby remain the preferred text for student
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 are reproduced in this book: · Clarity of exposition and criticism · A passion for the importance and relevance of sociological reasoning and explanation · A commitment to treat social theory as a living tradition of thought In addition, the volume comes with a variety of pedagogic aids including summary points and key definitions to facilitate learning and study. This is a book that enhances the sociological imagination. It draws on the authors deep understanding and experience of teaching the subject over many decades. It will be welcomed by lecturers as a vital new teaching and research aid, and students will be stimulated and enriched by the unfussy and reliable advice on doing sociology that it imparts.
Seasonal Sociology offers an engrossing and lively introduction to sociology through the seasons, examining the sociality of consumption practices, leisure activities, work, religious traditions, schooling, celebrations and holidays.
Known for its pioneering studies of urban life, immigration, and criminality using the “city as laboratory,” the so-called Chicago school of sociology has been a dominant presence in American social science since it emerged around the University of Chicago in the early decades of the twentieth century. Canonical figures such as Robert Park, Everett Hughes, Howard S. Becker, and Erving Goffman established foundational principles of how to conduct social research. This groundbreaking book on the development and influence of the Chicago tradition, first published in 2001, became an immediate classic in France, where Chicago sociology has exerted significant appeal. Drawing on deep archival research and interviews with members of the tradition, Jean-Michel Chapoulie interrogates evidence with a historian’s eye and recognizes the profound effects that culture, society, and the economy have on individuals and institutions. His study is a fine-grained and panoramic portrait of the complex and interlocking factors that gave rise to the research interests and methodologies that characterized the Chicago tradition in the 1920s and that contributed to rises and falls in its predominance in American sociology over the following decades. Now revised and available for the first time in English, Chicago Sociology provides a unique perspective on the history of social science in the twentieth century. A foreword by William Kornblum places Chapoulie’s work in context and addresses recent critical challenges to the Chicago school and its origins.
Perspectives in Sociology provides students with a lively and critical introduction to sociology and to the ways in which sociologists are trained to think and work. The subject is presented as a sequence of different perspectives on the social world, all of them interrelated, sometimes in conflict with one another, and all contributing important and necessary insights. The discussion is backed up by extensive reference to empirical studies. This edition has been completely revised. A chapter on critical theory has been added in order to reflect the extensive work and thinking that Marx's basic work continues to stimulate. The chapter on research strategies now takes account of new developments in the philosophy of science that are relevant for sociological approaches. Throughout, the authors have rewritten extensively in their continuing desire to produce clarity, and to respond to the comments of students and teachers.
Why do people like books, music, or movies that adhere consistently to genre conventions? Why is it hard for politicians to take positions that cross ideological boundaries? Why do we have dramatically different expectations of companies that are categorized as social media platforms as opposed to news media sites? The answers to these questions require an understanding of how people use basic concepts in their everyday lives to give meaning to objects, other people, and social situations and actions. In this book, a team of sociologists presents a groundbreaking model of concepts and categorization that can guide sociological and cultural analysis of a wide variety of social situations. Drawing on research in various fields, including cognitive science, computational linguistics, and psychology, the book develops an innovative view of concepts. It argues that concepts have meanings that are probabilistic rather than sharp, occupying fuzzy, overlapping positions in a “conceptual space.” Measurements of distances in this space reveal our mental representations of categories. Using this model, important yet commonplace phenomena such as our routine buying decisions can be quantified in terms of the cognitive distance between concepts. Concepts and Categories provides an essential set of formal theoretical tools and illustrates their application using an eclectic set of methodologies, from micro-level controlled experiments to macro-level language processing. It illuminates how explicit attention to concepts and categories can give us a new understanding of everyday situations and interactions.
This collection of recent essays by the influential sociologist Herbert J. Gans brings together the many themes of Gans’s wide-ranging career to make the case for a policy-oriented vision for sociology. Sociology and Social Policy explicates and helps solve social problems by presenting a range of studies on what people, institutions, and social structures do with, for, and against one another. These works from across Gans’s areas of interest—the city, poverty, ethnicity, employment and political economy, and the relationship between race and class—together make a powerful call to action for the field of sociology.
The Credential Society is a classic on the role of higher education in American society and an essential text for understanding the reproduction of inequality. Controversial at the time, Randall Collins’s claim that the expansion of American education has not increased social mobility, but rather created a cycle of credential inflation, has proven remarkably prescient. Collins shows how credential inflation stymies mass education’s promises of upward mobility. An unacknowledged spiral of the rising production of credentials and job requirements was brought about by the expansion of high school and then undergraduate education, with consequences including grade inflation, rising educational costs, and misleading job promises dangled by for-profit schools. Collins examines medicine, law, and engineering to show the ways in which credentialing closed these high-status professions to new arrivals. In an era marked by the devaluation of high school diplomas, outcry about the value of expensive undergraduate degrees, and the proliferation of new professional degrees like the MBA, The Credential Society has more than stood the test of time. In a new preface, Collins discusses recent developments, debunks claims that credentialization is driven by technological change, and points to alternative pathways for the future of education.
