The Sociology Books Top 100
The Sociology Books Top 100 is a list of some of the greatest works in sociology. A broad list of classics, it spans from the founders of sociology, Marx, Durkheim and Weber, to modern-day sociologists, such as Mills, Berger and Mann. Many of the texts are essential reading for those studying the subject.
1. The Sociological Imagination
By C. Wright Mills | Used Price: 60% Off
C. Wright Mills is best remembered for his highly acclaimed work The Sociological Imagination, in which he set forth his views on how social science should be pursued. Hailed upon publication as a cogent and hard-hitting critique, The Sociological Imagination took issue with the ascendant schools of sociology ... More »
2. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
By Max Weber | Used Price: 80% Off
Max Weber's best-known and most controversial work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1904, remains to this day a powerful and fascinating read. Weber's highly accessible style is just one of many reasons for his continuing popularity. The book contends that the Protestant ... More »
3. The Social Construction of Reality
By Peter L. Berger; Thomas Luckmann | 90% Off
This book reformulates the sociological  subdiscipline known as the sociology of knowledge.  Knowledge is presented as more than ideology, including as  well false consciousness, propaganda, science and  art. More »
4. Mind, Self, and Society
By George Herbert Mead | Used Price: 60% Off
Written from the standpoint of the social behaviorist, this treatise contains the heart of Mead's position on social psychology. The analysis of language is of major interest, as it supplied for the first time an adequate treatment of the language mechanism in relation to scientific and philosophical issues."If ... More »
5. Suicide
By Emile Durkheim | Used Price: 70% Off
The landmark investigation into suicide and society?now in a new translation Émile Durkheim, one of the fathers of modern sociology, was the first to suggest that suicide might be as much a response to society as an act of individual despair. When he looked at social, religious, or ... More »
6. Capital
By Karl Marx | Used Price: 70% Off
A landmark work in the understanding of capitalism, bourgeois society and the economics of class conflict, Karl Marx's Capital is translated by Ben Fowkes with an introduction by Ernest Mandel in Penguin Classics. One of the most notorious works of modern times, as well as one ... More »
7. The Sources of Social Power
By Michael Mann
While Marx considered economics to be the driving force in the evolution of societies, and Weber believed religion played a role, with his protestant ethic theory, In the Sources of Social Power, Mann identifies 4 different forces - economic, military, ideological and political - and demonstrates their role ... More »
8. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
By Erving Goffman | Used Price: 70% Off
In what the General Practitioner called 'this intelligent searching work', the author of "Stigma" and "Asylums" presents an analysis of the structures of social encounters from the perspective of the dramatic performance. He shows us exactly how people use such 'fixed props' as houses, clothes, and job situations; ... More »
9. The Theory of Communicative Action
By Jurgen Habermas | Used Price: 60% Off
A major contribution to contemporary social theory. Not only does it provide a compelling critique of some of the main perspectives in 20th century philosophy and social science, but it also presents a systematic synthesis of the many themse which have preoccupied Habermas for thirty years. --Times Literary ... More »
10. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
No judgement of taste is innocent. In a word, we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly illuminates this situation of the middle class in the modern world. France's leading sociologist focusses here on the French bourgeoisie, its tastes and preferences. Distinction is at once a vast ethnography ... More »
11. The Civilizing Process
By Norbert Elias | Used Price: 60% Off
The Civilizing Process stands out as Norbert Elias' greatest work, tracing the "civilizing" of manners and personality in Western Europe since the late Middle Ages by demonstrating how the formation of states and the monopolization of power within them changed Western society forever. More »
12. The Structure of Social Action
By Talcott Parsons | Used Price: 60% Off
The Structure of Social Action is a 1937 book by sociologist Talcott Parsons. In 1998 the International Sociological Association listed this work as the ninth most important sociological book of the 20th century. More »
13. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
In the Middle Ages there were gaols and dungeons, but punishment was for the most part a spectacle. The economic changes and growing popular dissent of the 18th century made necessary a more systematic control over the individual members of society, and this in effect meant a change ... More »
14. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
By Thomas Kuhn | Used Price: 60% Off
A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once ... More »
15. The Philosophy of Money
By Georg Simmel
With a new foreword by Charles Lemert 'Its greatness...lies in ceaseless and varied use of the money form to unearth and conceptually reveal incommensurabilities of all kinds, in social reality fully as much as in thought itself.' - Fredric Jameson In The Philosophy of Money, Georg ... More »
16. Risk Society
By Ulrich Beck | Used Price: 60% Off
This panoramic analysis of the condition of Western societies has been hailed as a classic. This first English edition has taken its place as a core text of contemporary sociology alongside earlier typifications of society as postindustrial and current debates about the social dimensions of the postmodern. ... More »
17. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century
This widely acclaimed book, first published in 1974, was a classic from its first day in print. Written in a direct, inviting way by Harry Braverman, whose years as an industrial worker gave him rich personal insight into work, Labor and Monopoly Capital overturned the reigning ideologies of ... More »
18. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century
Immanuel Wallerstein’s highly influential, multi-volume opus, The Modern World-System, is one of this century’s greatest works of social science. An innovative, panoramic reinterpretation of global history, it traces the emergence and development of the modern world from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. More »
19. Selections from the Prison Notebooks
By Antonio Gramsci | Used Price: 60% Off
The Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere) were a series of notebooks written by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926. The notebooks were written between 1929 and 1935, when Gramsci ... More »
20. The Origins of Totalitarianism
By Hannah Arendt | Used Price: 60% Off
Hannah Arendt's definitive work on totalitarianism and an essential component of any study of twentieth-century political history  The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to ... More »
21. The Gift
By Marcel Mauss | Used Price: 50% Off
Since its first publication in English in 1954, The Gift, Marcel Mauss's groundbreaking study of the relation between forms of exchange and social structure, has been acclaimed as a classic among anthropology texts.A brilliant example of the comparative method, ?The Gift? presents the first systematic study of the custom—widespread ... More »
22. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
By Karl Polanyi | Used Price: 50% Off
In Polanyi's classic work of economic history and sociology, he examines societal changes since the Industrial Revolution and expertly explains the inadequacies of the free market. Published in 1944, it is as relevant as today as ever, with Harvard Professor Stephen Walt recommending it in his Top 10 ... More »
23. Reading Capital
By Louis Althusser; Etienne Balibar; Roger Establet
Establishing a rigorous program of “symptomatic readingâ€Â that cuts through the silences and lacunae of Capital to reveal its philosophical core, Louis Althusser interprets Marx’s structural analysis of production as a revolutionary break—the basis of a completely new science. Building on a series of Althussers’s conceptual innovations that ... More »
24. Social Systems
A major challenge confronting contemporary theory is to overcome its fixation on written narratives and the culture of print. In this presentation of a general theory of systems, Germany's most prominent and controversial social thinker sets out a contribution to sociology that reworks our understanding of meaning and ... More »
25. The Lonely Crowd
By David Riesman | Used Price: 80% Off
The Lonely Crowd is considered by many to be the most influential book of the twentieth century. Its now-classic analysis of the 'new middle class' in terms of inner-directed and other-directed social character opened exciting new dimensions in our understanding of the psychological, political, and economic problems that ... More »
26. Outsiders: Studies In The Sociology Of Deviance
By Howard S. Becker | Used Price: 70% Off
Although Becker does not claim to be a deviancy specialist, his work on the subject is often cited by sociologists and criminologists studying deviance. Becker's 1963 book Outsiders is credited as one of the first books on labeling theory and its application to studies of deviance. A compilation ... More »
27. Sociology
The seventh edition of this indispensable resource continues from strength to strength to provide a vibrant, engaging and authoritative introduction to sociology. Revised and updated throughout, it provides a commanding overview of recent global developments and new ideas in sociology. Classic debates are also given careful coverage, with ... More »
28. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
By Barrington Moore | Used Price: 70% Off
A landmark in comparative history and a challenge to scholars of all lands who are trying to learn how we arrived at where we are now. -New York Times Book Review More »
29. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience
By Bin Wong | Used Price: 80% Off
"This bold, intellectually ambitious, and wholly original book challenges the way in which Western social science understands China. . . . It will set the standard for all future comparative and theoretical research on China."?Timothy Brook, Stanford University"This is a most extraordinary book. Wong's approach is to explore ... More »
30. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
By Robert D. Putnam | Used Price: 80% Off
Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work—but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified in this brilliant volume, which The Economist hailed as "a prodigious achievement."Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans' changing behavior, Putnam shows how ... More »
31. Dialectic of Enlightenment
By Theodor W. Adorno | Used Price: 50% Off
Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in ... More »
32. Men and Women of the Corporation
By Rosabeth Moss Kanter | Price: $0.01
In this landmark work on corporate power, especially as it relates to women, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the distinguished Harvard management thinker and consultant, shows how the careers and self-images of the managers, professionals, and executives, and also those of the secretaries, wives of managers, and women looking for ... More »
33. Tristes Tropiques
By Claude Levi-Strauss | Used Price: 60% Off
A milestone in the study of culture from the father of structural anthropology. This watershed work records Claude Lévi-Strauss's search for "a human society reduced to its most basic expression." From the Amazon basin through the dense upland jungles of Brazil, Lévi-Strauss found ... More »
34. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups
By Mancur Olson | Used Price: 60% Off
This book develops an original theory of group and organizational behavior that cuts across disciplinary lines and illustrates the theory with empirical and historical studies of particular organizations. Applying economic analysis to the subjects of the political scientist, sociologist, and economist, Mancur Olson examines the extent to which ... More »
35. The Interpretation Of Cultures
By Clifford Geertz | Used Price: 80% Off
In The Interpretation of Cultures, the most original anthropologist of his generation moved far beyond the traditional confines of his discipline to develop an important new concept of culture. This groundbreaking book, winner of the 1974 Sorokin Award of the American Sociological Association, helped define for an entire ... More »
36. Eros and Civilization
By Herbert Marcuse | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
 In this classic work, Herbert Marcuse takes as his starting point Freud's statement that civilization is based on the permanent subjugation of the human instincts, his reconstruction of the prehistory of mankind - to an interpretation of the basic trends of western civilization, stressing the philosophical and sociological ... More »
37. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times
By Giovanni Arrighi | Used Price: 70% Off
The Long Twentieth Century traces the relationship between capital accumulation and state formation over a 700-year period. Arrighi argues that capitalism has unfolded as a succession of “long centuries,â€Â each of which produced a new world power that secured control over an expanding world-economic space. Examining the changing ... More »
38. Critique of Everyday Life
Henri Lefebvre’s magnum opus: a monumental exploration of contemporary society.Henri Lefebvre’s three-volume Critique of Everyday Life is perhaps the richest, most prescient work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. Written at the birth of post-war consumerism, the Critique was a philosophical inspiration for the 1968 student ... More »
39. Civilization and Capitalism
By Fernand Braudel | Used Price: 70% Off
By examining in detail the material life of pre-industrial peoples around the world, Fernand Braudel significantly changed the way historians view their subject. Volume I describes food and drink, dress and housing, demography and family structure, energy and technology, money and credit, and the growth of towns. More »
40. Ideology and Utopia
By Karl Mannheim | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
Mannheim, a pioneer in the field of SOCIOLOGY (740), here analyzes the ideologies that are used to stabilize a social order and the wish-dreams that are employed when any transformation of that same order is attempted. Translated and with a Foreword by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils; Preface ... More »
41. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
By Matthew Desmond | Used Price: 60% Off
WINNER OF THE 2017 PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NONFICTION In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted ... More »
42. History and Class Consciousness
By Georg Lukacs | Used Price: 60% Off
This is the first time one of the most important of Lukács' early theoretical writings, published in Germany in 1923, has been made available in ... More »
43. Patriarchy and Accumulation On A World Scale
By Maria Mies | Used Price: 60% Off
This now classic book traces the social origins of the sexual division of labor. It gives a history of the related processes of colonization and "housewifization" and extends this analysis to the contemporary new international division of labor and the role that women have to play as the ... More »
44. Social and Cultural Dynamics
In his Social and Cultural Dynamics, his magnum opus, Sorokin classified societies according to their 'cultural mentality', which can be "ideational" (reality is spiritual), "sensate" (reality is material), or "idealistic" (a synthesis of the two). He suggested that major civilizations evolve from an ideational, to an idealistic, and ... More »
45. The Making of the English Working Class
By E. P. Thompson | Used Price: 60% Off
This book transformed our understanding of English social history. Thompson revealed how working class people were not merely victims of history, moved by powerful forces outside of themselves, but were also active in creating their own culture and future, during the degradation of the industrial revolution. More »
46. Studies in Ethnomethodology
By Harold Garfinkel | Used Price: 60% Off
This is the first appearance in paper back of one of the major classics of contemporary Sociology. Studies in Ethnomethodology has inspired a wide range of important theoretical and empirical work in the social sciences and linguistics. It is one of the most original and controversial works in ... More »
47. The Sociological Tradition
By Robert Nisbet | Under $1.00
When first published, The Sociological Tradition had a profound and positive impact on sociology, providing a rich sense of intellectual background to a relatively new discipline in America. Robert Nisbet describes what he considers the golden age of sociology, 1830-1900, outlining five major themes of nineteenth-century sociologists: community, ... More »
48. Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum
By William Foote Whyte | Under $1.00
Street Corner Society is one of a handful of works that can justifiably be called classics of sociological research. William Foote Whyte's account of the Italian American slum he called "Cornerville"—Boston's North End—has been the model for urban ethnography for fifty years.By mapping the intricate social worlds of ... More »
49. Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation
By David F. Noble | Used Price: 80% Off
Focusing on the postwar automation of the American metal-working industry--the heart of the modern industrial economy--this is a provocative study of how automation has assumed a critical role in America. David Noble argues that industrial automation--more than merely a technological advance--is a social process that reflects very real ... More »
50. Imagined Communities
By Benedict Anderson | Used Price: 60% Off
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism is the most read book on nationalism. It's a historical, political and sociological analysis of nations which are really imagined communities or socially constructed communities. More »
51. The State: Its Nature, Development, and Prospects
By Gianfranco Poggi | Used Price: 90% Off
The state is the most massive and significant modern expression of the broader phenomenon of political power. This book offers a fresh, accessible and original interpretation of the modern state, concentrating particularly on the emergence and nature of democracy.Poggi presents an extensive conceptual portrait of the state, distinguishing ... More »
52. Postmodern Ethics
By Zygmunt Bauman | Used Price: 50% Off
Zygmunt Baumana s powerful and persuasive study of the postmodern perspective on ethics is particularly welcome. For Bauman the great issues of ethics have lost none of their topicality: they simply need to be seen, and dealt with, in a wholly new way. Our era, he suggests, may ... More »
53. The Second Sex
By Simone de Beauvoir | Used Price: 50% Off
Newly translated and unabridged in English for the first time, Simone de Beauvoir’s masterwork is a powerful analysis of the Western notion of “woman,â€Â and a groundbreaking exploration of inequality and otherness.  This long-awaited new edition reinstates significant portions of the original French text that were cut in ... More »
54. Patterns of Culture
By Ruth Benedict | Used Price: 90% Off
"Unique and important . . . Patterns of Culture is a signpost on the road to a freer and more tolerant life." -- New York TimesA remarkable introduction to cultural studies, Patterns of Culture is an eloquent declaration of the role of culture in shaping human life. In ... More »
55. Social Movements 1768-2012
The updated and expanded third edition of Tilly’s widely acclaimed book brings this analytical history of social movements fully up to date. Tilly and Wood cover such recent topics as the economic crisis and related protest actions around the globe while maintaining their attention to perennially important issues ... More »
56. Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen
By James Suzman | Used Price: 50% Off
WASHINGTON POST'S 50 NOTABLE WORKS OF NONFICTION IN 2017AN NPR BEST BOOK OF 2017A vibrant portrait of the “original affluent society”--the Bushmen of southern Africa--by the anthropologist who has spent much of the last twenty-five years documenting their encounter with modernity.If the success of a civilization is measured ... More »
57. The Rise of the Network Society
By Manuel Castells | Used Price: 50% Off
This first book in Castells' groundbreaking trilogy, with a substantial new preface, highlights the economic and social dynamics of the information age and shows how the network society has now fully risen on a global scale. * Groundbreaking volume on the impact of the age of information on ... More »
58. The Bureaucratic Phenomenon
In The Bureaucratic Phenomenon Michel Crozier demonstrates that bureaucratic institutions need to be understood in terms of the cultural context in which they operate. The originality of the study lies in its association of two widely different approaches: the theory of decision-making in large organizations and the cultural ... More »
59. The Wretched of the Earth
By Frantz Fanon; Jean-Paul Sartre | 50% Off
A distinguished psychiatrist from Martinique who took part in the Algerian Nationalist Movement, Frantz Fanon was one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history. Fanon’s masterwork is a classic alongside Edward Said’s Orientalism or The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and it ... More »
60. Urban Villagers
By Herbert J. Gans | Used Price: 90% Off
Herbert Gans' study of Italian Americans in Boston's West End is one of the classics of contemporary sociology A first-hand account of life in an inner city neighborhood, it is a systematic and sensitive analysis of working-class culture_ and of the politicians, planners and other outside professionals who ... More »
61. The World: A Beginner's Guide
By Goran Therborn | Used Price: 50% Off
What is the world of the 21st century like now that the centrality of the West is no longer given? How were the societies and cultures of today's world together with their interconnections forged, and what is driving human society in our times? In short, what is the ... More »
62. Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare
By Frances Fox Piven; Richard A. Cloward
"Originally published in 1971, this social science classic outlines the social functions of welfare programs." Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc."Uncompromising and provocative....By mixing history, political interpretation and sociological analysis, Piven and Cloward provide the best explanation to date of our present situation...no future discussion of welfare can ... More »
63. Foundations of Social Theory
Combining principles of individual rational choice with a sociological conception of collective action, James Coleman recasts social theory in a bold new way. The result is a landmark in sociological theory, capable of describing both stability and change in social systems. This book provides for ... More »
64. The Logic of Scientific Discovery
By Karl Popper
Described by the philosopher A.J. Ayer as a work of 'great originality and power', this book revolutionized contemporary thinking on science and knowledge. Ideas such as the now legendary doctrine of 'falsificationism' electrified the scientific community, influencing even working scientists, as well as post-war philosophy. This astonishing work ranks ... More »
65. State, Power, Socialism
In State, Power, Socialism, the leading theorist of the state and European communism advances a vigorous critique of contemporary Marxist theories of the state. Arguing against a general theory of the state, Poulantzas identifies forms of class power crucial to socialist strategy that go beyond the state apparatus. More »
66. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America
By William Thomas; Florian Znaniecki | 80% Off
Focusing on the immigrant family, this new, abridged edition of the classic "The Polish Peasant in Europe and America" brings together documents and commentary that will be valuable in teaching United States history survey courses as well as immigration history and introductory sociology courses. It includes a new ... More »
67. The Souls of Black Folk
W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and ... More »
68. Woman's Role in Economic Development
'Boserup's contribution to our thinking on women�s role in development cannot be underestimated. Her keen observations, her use of empirical data and her commitment to greater gender equality are still an inspiration to students, researchers and activists who are interested in a better and more equal world.' From ... More »
69. Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics
By R.W. Connell | Used Price: 80% Off
This book is an introductory textbook on sexual politics and an original contribution to the reformulation of social and political theory. In a discussion of, among other issues, psychoanalysis, Marxism and feminist theories, the structure of gender relations, and working class feminism, the author has produced a work ... More »
70. The Evolution of Cooperation
By Robert Axelrod | Used Price: 70% Off
The Evolution of Cooperation provides valuable insights into the age-old question of whether unforced cooperation is ever possible. Widely praised and much-discussed, this classic book explores how cooperation can emerge in a world of self-seeking egoists-whether superpowers, businesses, or individuals-when there is no central authority to police their ... More »
71. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society
By Xiaotong Fei; Gary G. Hamilton; Wang Zheng
This classic text by Fei Xiaotong, China's finest social scientist, was first published in 1947 and is Fei's chief theoretical statement about the distinctive characteristics of Chinese society. Written in Chinese from a Chinese point of view for a Chinese audience, From the Soil describes the contrasting organizational ... More »
72. The Power Elite and the State
By G. William Domhoff | Used Price: 80% Off
This volume presents a network of social power, indicating that theories inspired by C.Wright Mills are far more accurate views about power in America than those of Mills's opponents. Dr. Domhoff shows how and why coalitions within the power elite have involved themselves in such policy ... More »
73. Against Method
Paul Feyerabend’s globally acclaimed work, which sparked and continues to stimulate fierce debate, examines the deficiencies of many widespread ideas about scientific progress and the nature of knowledge. Feyerabend argues that scientific advances can only be understood in a historical context. He looks at the way the philosophy ... More »
74. Great American City
By Robert J. Sampson | Used Price: 50% Off
For over fifty years numerous public intellectuals and social theorists have insisted that community is dead. Some would have us believe that we act solely as individuals choosing our own fates regardless of our surroundings, while other theories place us at the mercy of global forces beyond our ... More »
75. Unequal Childhoods
Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of ... More »
76. The Affluent Worker
By John H. Goldthorpe | Under $1.00
This 1968 volume, the second of The Affluent Worker monographs, reports on the voting and political attitudes of highly paid manual workers. As in the first book, the affluent workers studied are employed in Luton, a town which benefited faster and more consistently than almost any other in ... More »
77. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism
Few discussions in modern social science have occupied as much attention as the changing nature of welfare states in Western societies. Gøsta Esping-Andersen, one of the foremost contributors to current debates on this issue, here provides a new analysis of the character and role ... More »
78. Pedagogy of the Oppressed
By Paulo Freire | Used Price: 60% Off
This text argues that the ignorance and lethargy of the poor are the direct result of the whole economic, social and political domination. The book suggests that in some countries the oppressors use the system to maintain a 'culture of silence'. Through the right kind of education, the ... More »
79. Human Ecology
By Amos H. Hawley | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
Human Ecology: A Theoretical Essay, by Amos Hawley, presents for the first time a unified theory of human ecology by a scholar whose name is virtually synonymous with the discipline.Focused on the interaction between society and environment, human ecology is an attempt to deal holistically with the phenomenon ... More »
80. The Rise of Professionalism
What gave rise to our modern conceptions of professional status, and how did particular professions gain their privileged status? Magali Sarfatti Larson shows how our present conception and acceptance of profession was shaped in the liberal phase of capitalism. Larson argues that professionalization was both a response to ... More »
81. We Have Never Been Modern
By Bruno Latour
With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us ... More »
82. Power and Privilege
A former president of the American Political Science Association, Heinz Eulau, described Power and Privilege as a "masterpiece of comparative social analysis" and Ralf Dahrendorf referred to it as "an imaginative and substantial work [and] an indispensable guide." More »
83. Phenomenology of the Social World
By Alfred Schutz | Used Price: 60% Off
Phenomenology originated with Edmund Husserl. Schutz became friends with Husserl and soon after began working on this concept. Phenomenology is the study of things as they appear (phenomena). It is also often said to be descriptive rather than explanatory: a central task of phenomenology is to provide a ... More »
84. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
By Richard G. Wilkinson; Kate Pickett | 60% Off
It is a well-established fact that in rich societies the poor have shorter lives and suffer more from almost every social problem. The Spirit Level, based on thirty years of research, takes this truth a step further. One common factor links the healthiest and happiest societies: the degree ... More »
85. Power: A Radical View
By Steven Lukes | Used Price: 50% Off
Steven Lukes' Power: A Radical View is a seminal work still widely used some 30 years after publication. The second edition includes the complete original text alongside two major new essays. One assesses the main debates about how to conceptualize and study power, including the influential contributions of ... More »
86. Orientalism
By Edward W. Said | Used Price: 70% Off
Orientalism examines how the West has historically perceived the East and how Western imperialism has shaped these perceptions. Published in 1978, Said's work is a landmark in post-colonial studies. More »
87. Main Currents in Sociological Thought
By Raymond Aron | Used Price: 90% Off
This is the first of Raymond Aron's magisterial two-volume treatment of the sociological tradition—perhaps the definitive work of its kind. The second volume treating Durkheim, Pareto, and Weber is scheduled to appear in spring 1998. More than a work of reconstruction, Aron's study is, at its deepest level, ... More »
88. The Society of the Spectacle
By Guy Debord | Used Price: 50% Off
The Das Kapital of the 20th century. An essential text, and the main theoretical work of the situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's up to the present, the volatile theses of ... More »
89. Agrarian Revolution
By Jeffrey M. Paige | Used Price: 80% Off
paige' agrarian revolution provided a theoretical framework which creatively explores the linkage between forms of economic and social organization and collective political movements More »
90. Crime Control as Industry
By Nils Christie | Used Price: 80% Off
This classic text argues that crime control, rather than crime itself is the real danger for our future. Since the second edition was published in 1994, prison populations , especially in Russia and America, have grown at an increasingly rapid rate. This third edition is published to take ... More »
91. Social Justice and the City
By David Harvey
Throughout his distinguished and influential career, David Harvey has defined and redefined the relationship between politics, capitalism, and the social aspects of geographical theory. Laying out Harvey’s position that geography could not remain objective in the face of urban poverty and associated ills, Social Justice and the City ... More »
92. Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals
Western democracies are "open societies" in which neither the state nor religion try to achieve a monopoly of power or the exclusive claim on people's hearts. In between the state and the family are countless other institutions from Trade Unions to stamp collecting clubs, from student organisations to ... More »
93. When Work Disappears
By William Julius Wilson | Price: $0.01
Wilson, one of our foremost authorities on race and poverty, challenges decades of liberal and conservative pieties to look squarely at the devastating effects that joblessness has had on our urban ghettos. Marshaling a vast array of data and the personal stories of hundreds of men and women, ... More »
94. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
By Douglas Massey; Nancy Denton | 70% Off
This powerful and disturbing book clearly links persistent poverty among blacks in the United States to the unparalleled degree of deliberate segregation they experience in American cities. American Apartheid shows how the black ghetto was created by whites during the first half of the twentieth ... More »
95. Worlds Of Pain
By Lilian Brelow Rubin | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01
The classic that is widely acknowledged to be the most valuable and insightful book ever written on the dynamics of working-class family life by a renowned sociologist, psychotherapist, and bestselling author."One of the most devastating critiques of contemporary American life that I have read."--Michael B. Katz Professor of ... More »
96. Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
By Jonathan Kozol | Used Price: 60% Off
For two years, beginning in 1988, Jonathan Kozol visited schools in neighborhoods across the country, from Illinois to Washington D.C., and from New York to San Antonio. He spoke with teachers, principals, superintendents, and, most important, children. What he found was devastating. Not only were schools for rich ... More »
97. The Sociology of Science
By Robert K. Merton | Used Price: 70% Off
"The exploration of the social conditions that facilitate or retard the search for scientific knowledge has been the major theme of Robert K. Merton's work for forty years. This collection of papers [is] a fascinating overview of this sustained inquiry. . . . There are very few other ... More »
98. Schooling In Capitalist America
By Samuel Bowles; Herbert Gintis
"This seminal work . . . establishes a persuasive new paradigm."—Contemporary SociologyNo book since Schooling in Capitalist America has taken on the systemic forces hard at work undermining our education system. This classic reprint is an invaluable resource for radical educators.Samuel Bowles is research professor and director of ... More »
99. The Death and Life of Great American Cities
By Jane Jacobs | Used Price: 60% Off
A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are ... More »
100. The I in We
By Axel Honneth
In this volume Axel Honneth deepens and develops his highly influential theory of recognition, showing how it enables us both to rethink the concept of justice and to offer a compelling account of the relationship between social reproduction and individual identity formation.Drawing on his reassessment of ... More »
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