Sociology - Textbooks

This reader provides two centuries of historical context to debates on health inequality. Extracts from classic texts, information about authors and an introduction draw together important themes of change and continuity. It is a key text for students on a range of policy courses and an excellent resource for anyone interested in poverty.

This exciting and innovative book fills a gap in the growing area of discourse analysis within the social sciences. It provides the analytical tools with which students and their teachers can understand the complex and often conflicting discourses across a range of social science disciplines.

This book explores the choices that we make about our sexuality and their effect our personal lives. It analyses how social policy informs and responds to such choices through an examination of normative assumptions about sexuality and its role in forming, regulating and constituting welfare subjects, discourses, theories, provisions and practices.

Edited and selected by the author, this reader starts with work first published in the early 1970s. Ann Oakley's research and writing on sex and gender, housework, motherhood, women's health, and social science have influenced many inside and beyond social science, helping to shape the academic study of women and gender up to the present day.

Making a committed argument for a participative, inclusive understanding of the term, Paul Spicker examines views about what poverty is and what should be done about it.

The book provides an essential background to understanding debates surrounding immigration and refugee policy. It examines different theoretical approaches to immigration and explores links between immigration policy, welfare and social exclusion, as well as documenting migrants' experiences in negotiating and challenging these policies.

This book brings together perspectives from social science, health-care and pastoral theology, looking at the way death is handled in contemporary society and the sensitive ethical and practical dilemmas facing nurses, social workers, doctors and chaplains.

This major textbook provides students with a critical understanding of poverty and social exclusion in relation to wealth, rather than as separate from it.

This book challenges the official discourse that shapes the debates on Equal Opportunities and Diversity (EO&D) at national, regional and European level and will be a key text for students and researchers of EO&D in many fields.

"Understanding social welfare movements" is the first text to bring together social policy and social movement studies. The book provides a timely and much needed overview of the changing nature of social welfare as it has been shaped by the demands of social movements.

This book shapes a new language of social theory that allows people to embody their differences with a sense of dignity and self-worth, enabling them to come to terms with the complexities of their lived identities in a post-modern globalised world.

Aimed at first-year undergraduates studying sociology and related disciplines, this introductory-level textbook presents key ideas and concepts in social theory and an account of their intellectual background.