San Antonio College Library

"Reflecting emerging research and ongoing reassessments of social theory, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists offers significant updates and revisions to the original Blackwell Companion published a decade ago. Volume I: Major Classical Theorists presents 18 comprehensive essays on social theorists writing in the classical tradition, more than half all-new for this Companion, written by some of the most eminent contemporary scholars...

What would happen if a social scientist saw himself not as an outsider but as a participant, engaging in the situations he studied and acting to change the course of events? The distinguished career of William Foote Whyte as an activist scholar provides a rich and complex answer to that question. Participant Observer is Whyte's own story. He takes us to worksites from Boston's North End in the early forties to Spain and Peru in the seventies to Jamestown,...

"Housing and the Democratic Ideal uses Abrams's experiences as a lens through which we can better understand the development of American social policy and state expansion during the twentieth century. In his left-leaning critique of centrist liberalism. Abrams took aim at the use of fiscal and monetary policies to achieve social objectives - a practice that allowed business interests to maximize private profits at the expense of public benefits. His...

Max Weber, widely considered a founder of sociology and the modern social sciences, visited the United States in 1904 with his wife Marianne. The trip was a turning point in Weber's life and it played a pivotal role in shaping his ideas, yet until now virtually our only source of information about the trip was Marianne Weber's faithful but not always reliable 1926 biography of her husband. Max Weber in America carefully reconstructs this important...

"What motivates a lifelong scholarly pursuit, and how do one's studies inform life outside the academy? Sociologists, who live in families but also study families, who go to work but also study work, who participate in communities but also try to understand communities, have an especially intimate relation to their research. Growing up poor, struggling as a woman in a male-dominated profession, participating in protests against the Vietnam War: facts...