The diverse international contributors share concerns about social problems such as poverty, substandard housing, and violence, and all are committed to improving cultural understanding, social justice, and human rights. The contributors hold academic qualifications in sociology and/or social work, and they are experienced as educators and as human service practitioners.

Many have witnessed debates in which sociologists or social workers are stereotyped by others, suggesting that, for example, sociologists are theoretical purists who will not act to promote public interests, or that social workers are value-driven ideologues intent on imposing their interpretations of ideal family lives. The contributors to this book do not believe that these dualistic typologies are accurate reflections of the complex considerations that they apply in their research, teaching, and human services work.

After many decades of following divergent paths, social workers and sociologists have recently been coming back together to deal with complex, intractable social problems. In the world of work, interdisciplinary collaborations seek to address major issues such as poverty, violence, and human rights violations.

Within universities, previously separate academic departments of sociology and social work are joining or colocating. Although combinations of previously separate disciplines into joint departments are sometimes prompted by fiscal considerations resulting from cutbacks affecting the social sciences internationally, working together has helped them recognize their common aims and interests. They have been stimulated and inspired by their debates about theory and practice.

Fully revised and updated throughout, this second edition examines sociology in relation to key areas of social work and probation practice, and includes one new chapter. Areas covered are:

• family
• childhood
• youth
• community
• care and caring
• health and illness
• crime and deviance

Essential reading for all social work and probation studies students, this text looks beyond individual and psychological explanations and solutions to develop a sociological knowledge base for social work practice.

Nine years have passed since that first edition was published, and, as might be anticipated amidst broader social transformations, the domains of health and illness continue to represent rapidly moving objects for and subjects of sociological analysis. Health issues demand ongoing consideration amidst increasing complexity and controversy, or at least people’s growing awareness that health, illness and care cannot be taken for granted. McDonnell et al. (2009), for example, flag such concerns in relation to the internet and heightened sensitivity to medical risk (iatrogenesis), citing controversies surrounding the putative safety of vaccinations for children.

We could, of course, add to this, drawing from health inequalities literature which elucidates the impact of neoliberal globalization as Western capitalism lurches from one crisis to the next. At the current historical juncture, we certainly remain mindful of the pressing salience of sociology in understanding class divisions (in interaction with gender and ethnicity, for instance) and their relation to (growing) health inequalities in the UK and beyond. When considering people’s private troubles, especially in health contexts, attention cannot veer too far from larger social structures and what C. Wright Mills (1959) termed public issues.

The task of incorporating the main elements of these developments within an introductory textbook is a formidable one. But it is a task that the authors of Introductory Sociology have accomplished in a very impressive fashion.

Introductory Sociology, in my opinion, is simply the best and most comprehensive introductory text currently available. Its virtues are several. All of the chapters are written in a clear and cogent style, but manage to initiate the reader into debates of a complex character.

The authors are particularly concerned to emphasise that sociology is an inherently controversial subject, and try to summarise several different competing views on the major topics that are analysed.

The book includes reference to the latest empirical studies, and at the same time has lengthy sections dealing with problems which have rarely figured in introductory texts previously (e.g. sexual divisions in society).

Not least important, the authors show themselves to be sensitised to contemporary trends in social theory. The “Sociological Theories” chapter presents an exemplary discussion, accessible to the beginning reader, of basic theoretical issues that anyone studying sociology today must confront.

Like several of the other chapters in the book, it is an independent contribution in its own right.

The first edition of this book deservedly became one of the standard introductions to sociology in schools, colleges and universities, and this new edition can only add to its already substantial reputation.

Anthony Giddens

Becher muestra que no todas las disciplinas son iguales. Algunas, como las ciencias duras, tienden a ser más estructuradas, acumulativas y consensuales, mientras que otras, como las humanidades, son más interpretativas, fragmentadas y abiertas al debate. Estas diferencias afectan la manera en que los académicos investigan, publican, colaboran y evalúan el trabajo de sus pares.

El libro también explora aspectos sociales de la vida académica, como la búsqueda de reconocimiento, las jerarquías internas, el papel de las élites intelectuales y los mecanismos de validación, como la revisión por pares. Asimismo, analiza cómo se construyen las carreras académicas, desde la formación inicial hasta la consolidación profesional, incluyendo momentos críticos como la obtención de independencia investigadora.

Otro tema central es la comunicación del conocimiento: Becher examina tanto los canales formales (publicaciones, congresos) como los informales (redes personales), destacando su importancia en la difusión de ideas. En conjunto, la obra ofrece una visión sociológica de la academia, subrayando que el conocimiento no es solo un producto intelectual, sino también social.

Crane argues that scientific advancement is not simply the result of individual genius, but of collective activity within these interconnected communities. Influential scientists within an invisible college help define research agendas, train new members, and facilitate the rapid exchange of ideas. Through both formal publications and informal interactions, these groups contribute to the diffusion of knowledge across the scientific community.

The book also examines variations in how different disciplines are organized and how these differences affect communication and innovation. Some fields are tightly structured and collaborative, while others are more fragmented and individualistic. Overall, Crane highlights the importance of social organization in understanding scientific progress, emphasizing that knowledge grows through dynamic networks of collaboration rather than isolated efforts.

How do fashion and clothing choices differ in societies where social class and gender are the most salient aspects of social identity, as compared with societies where lifestyles, age cohorts, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity are as meaningful to people as social class in constructing their self-images and in their presentation of self? Changes in the dissemination of fashion and in clothing choices can be used to trace and interpret these transformations in class cultures.

The best-known theory of fashion and clothing behavior is Simmel’s theory of fashion change as a process of imitation of social elites by their social inferiors (1957). Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Simmel delineated the role of fashion as it had developed in nineteenth-century societies, in which social classes had relatively distinct class cultures. Simmel’s model of fashion change was centered on the idea that fashions were first adopted by the upper class and, later, by the middle and lower classes. Lower-status groups sought to acquire status by adopting the clothing of higher-status groups and set in motion a process of social contagion whereby styles were adopted by groups at successively inferior status levels.

By the time a particular fashion reached the working class, the upper class had adopted newer styles, since the previous style had lost its appeal in the process of popularization. The highest-status groups sought once again to differentiate themselves from their inferiors by adopting new fashions.

After a discussion of recent uses of the term in sociology, I show how claims for new, computational ways of knowing society were made across fields, in computing, in the media as well as data science, and have become the subject of significant academic and public controversies. The chapter then evaluates different definitions of digital sociology. It can alternatively be characterized in terms of (a) its object of enquiry (the digital society); (b) its methods; (c) its platforms (new sites and techniques for the public communication of sociology). While each of these aspects of digital sociology are important in their own right, I argue that we fail to grasp something crucial about digital sociology as long as we consider them in isolation. In a discussion of relevant examples, I show how the digital affects the relations between social life and its analysis in various ways, and why digital sociology must address these cross-cutting developments.

The second chapter asks: What is ‘social’ about digital media technologies? I evaluate three prominent answers to this question: (a) the device-centred view that says that social media technologies can be distinguished from non-social technologies by their technical capacities (they allow for social networking, for example); (b) the analytic view that highlights that social technologies make available new sources and forms of social data (for example, social media and mobile, locative data); (c) the critical view that says that media technologies are not social in and of themselves, and only their uptake in social practices make them so. There are then several, mutually inconsistent accounts on offer as to what makes digital technologies social. While some emphasize features like ‘user-generated content’ or social networking functionality, others foreground the importance of ‘contexts of use’: it is in the ‘doing’ of digital practice, that digital media technologies become social. The chapter goes on to discuss a number of problems with these three different views, and then introduces a fourth: the ‘performative’ – or rather, ‘interactive’ – understanding of what is social about digital infrastructures, devices and practices.

This latter approach highlights that digital technologies do not only facilitate social life, or render it researchable, they also make social life amenable to intervention. I argue that the resulting interactions between social life and digital media technologies require further investigation, and invite us to develop a more experimental understanding of digital sociality, of what makes digital technologies social. If we wish to grasp the relevance of digital media technologies for social enquiry and social life, we must then better understand how the digital changes relation between technology and sociality.

The third chapter is concerned with methods. Much recent work in digital sociology has focused on this topic, as questions of method seem to crystallize both the promises and the problems that digital innovation opens up for sociology. This chapter offers an evaluation of these promises and problems, through a discussion of what has become known as the ‘digital methods’ debate. This debate revolves around the question: should we work towards the digitization of existing methods? Or is it more important to develop so-called ‘natively digital’ methods – methods, that is, which take advantage of technical features that are specific to digital networked media technologies? I offer a critical evaluation of these two positions, showing how emerging digital infrastructures provide support for both of them. I then make the case for a third approach, which I call ‘interface methods’.

This third approach builds on the former two, and starts from the recognition that important social research methods are already built into digital infrastructures, devices and practices, even if they currently tend to serve other-than-sociological ends. I argue that it therefore is our task to test and develop the capacities of these methods-devices for social enquiry, so that they may better serve its purposes. While digital architectures constrain social research in many ways, they are also to an extent configurable: the digital application of method requires a continuous mutual adjustment of research question, data, technique, context and digital setting.

Chapter 4 discusses an important methodological problem of digital sociology, which can be summed up by the question: are we studying society or technology? The problem is that sociologists tend to turn to digital social data and platforms in order to study social life, but the resulting research often ends up telling us more about digital technology than about society. I argue that digital sociologists must confront this problem, and I discuss ways of addressing it. First and foremost, it requires that we recognize that there are important problems of bias in digital social research. But we must also move beyond this problem definition, and consider a more fundamental problematic: the object of digital social enquiry is inherently ambiguous, insofar as both technological settings and social practices inflect digital formations, and it is difficult in many cases to disentangle their respective contributions. To conclude, I argue that it would be a mistake to transpose sociological methodologies onto digital settings unchanged. On the one hand, we cannot assume that society and technology can be easily disentangled. But neither can we just assume that digital societies constitute ‘hybrids’ of the technical and the social.

This is because the specification of social problems and media-technological problems is too important and complex a task for sociologists to be able to leave it to others. The solution is to become more flexible in our ontological assumptions: it depends on our research topic, question, research design, chosen methods, and the forms of our data, whether we end up shedding light on digital technology or on digital social life.

The text covers key topics such as job analysis, employee recruitment and selection, training and development, performance appraisal, motivation, leadership, and organizational decision-making. It also gives significant attention to job satisfaction, organizational commitment, counterproductive work behavior, and the psychological factors that shape employee effectiveness.

A central theme of the book is the importance of evidence-based practice, emphasizing rigorous research methods, measurement, and statistical analysis as essential tools for improving organizational outcomes.

In addition, Spector addresses critical issues related to occupational stress, work–life balance, health, and safety, highlighting the impact of work on both mental and physical health. By linking research findings to real organizational challenges, the book demonstrates how industrial and organizational psychology contributes to the creation of productive, ethical, and healthy workplaces.