Book picks similar to
Social Research Methods by Alan Bryman


non-fiction
research
sociology
research-methods

Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology


Nancy Scheper-Hughes - 2003
    Edited by two of anthropology's most passionate voices on this subject, Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology is the only book of its kind available: a single volume exploration of social, literary, and philosophical theories of violence. Brings together a sweeping collection of readings, drawn from a remarkable range of sources, that look at various conceptions and modes of violence. Juxtaposes the routine violence of everyday life against the sudden outcropping of extraordinary violence such as the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the state violence of Argentina's Dirty War, and organized criminal violence. Edited by two of the most prominent researchers in the field. Offers a thought-provoking tool for students and thinkers from all walks of life: an exploration of violence at the broadest levels: personal, social, and political.

Psychology: From Inquiry to Understanding


Scott O. Lilienfeld - 2007
    By encouraging students to question, and teaching students how to test their assumptions, Lilienfeld motivates students to use scientific thinking skills to better understand the complex world of psychology.

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked


Adam Alter - 2017
    We obsess over our emails, Instagram likes, and Facebook feeds; we binge on TV episodes and YouTube videos; we work longer hours each year; and we spend an average of three hours each day using our smartphones. Half of us would rather suffer a broken bone than a broken phone, and Millennial kids spend so much time in front of screens that they struggle to interact with real, live humans. In this revolutionary book, Adam Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at NYU, tracks the rise of behavioral addiction, and explains why so many of today's products are irresistible. Though these miraculous products melt the miles that separate people across the globe, their extraordinary and sometimes damaging magnetism is no accident. The companies that design these products tweak them over time until they become almost impossible to resist. By reverse engineering behavioral addiction, Alter explains how we can harness addictive products for the good—to improve how we communicate with each other, spend and save our money, and set boundaries between work and play—and how we can mitigate their most damaging effects on our well-being, and the health and happiness of our children.

Social Psychology


Thomas Gilovich - 1998
    Emergent areas of study like emotion, morality, and judgment are included throughout the text to give students the most accurate and contemporary picture of the field. To emphasize the relevance of social psychology in everyday life, the Second Edition includes a capstone chapter on applications, which focuses on topics like personal finance, education, and health. Throughout the text, an illustration program engages students in the scientific process, with You Be the Subject activities and Scientific Method figures.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future


James Bridle - 2018
    Underlying this trend is a single idea: the belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world.   In actual fact, we are lost in a sea of information, increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. Meanwhile, those in power use our lack of understanding to further their own interests. Despite the accessibility of information, we’re living in a new Dark Age.   From rogue financial systems to shopping algorithms, from artificial intelligence to state secrecy, we no longer understand how our world is governed or presented to us. The media is filled with unverifiable speculation, much of it generated by anonymous software, while companies dominate their employees through surveillance and the threat of automation.   In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle excavates the limits of technology and how it aids our understanding of the world. Surveying the history of art, technology, and information systems, he explores the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.

Natural Capitalism


Paul Hawken - 1999
    This groundbreaking book reveals how today's global businesses can be both environmentally responsible and highly profitable.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life


Adam Greenfield - 2017
    But at what cost? In this urgent and revelatory excavation of our Information Age, leading technology thinker Adam Greenfield forces us to reconsider our relationship with the networked objects, services and spaces that define us. It is time to re-evaluate the Silicon Valley consensus determining the future.We already depend on the smartphone to navigate every aspect of our existence. We're told that innovations--from augmented-reality interfaces and virtual assistants to autonomous delivery drones and self-driving cars--will make life easier, more convenient and more productive. 3D printing promises unprecedented control over the form and distribution of matter, while the blockchain stands to revolutionize everything from the recording and exchange of value to the way we organize the mundane realities of the day to day. And, all the while, fiendishly complex algorithms are operating quietly in the background, reshaping the economy, transforming the fundamental terms of our politics and even redefining what it means to be human.Having successfully colonized everyday life, these radical technologies are now conditioning the choices available to us in the years to come. How do they work? What challenges do they present to us, as individuals and societies? Who benefits from their adoption? In answering these questions, Greenfield's timely guide clarifies the scale and nature of the crisis we now confront --and offers ways to reclaim our stake in the future.

McKeachie's Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers


Wilbert J. McKeachie - 1953
    The suggested strategies are supported by research and are grounded in enough theory to enable teachers to adapt them to their own situations. The author does not suggest a "set of recipes" to be followed mechanically, but gives teachers the tools they need to deal with the ever changing dynamics of teaching and learning.

Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences


Geoffrey C. Bowker - 1999
    Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis.The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything


Steven D. Levitt - 2005
    Wade have on violent crime? Freakonomics will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much heralded scholar who studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life -- from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing -- and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics.Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives -- how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of ... well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan.What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and -- if the right questions are asked -- is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Steven Levitt, through devilishly clever and clear-eyed thinking, shows how to see through all the clutter.Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.(front flap)

Intercultural Competence: Interpersonal Communication Across Cultures


Myron W. Lustig - 1993
    Blending both the practical and theoretical, the concrete and abstract, this book is both enjoyable to read and thoroughly researched. By clearly explaining different theories and the significance of cultural patterns and having readers practice what they learn via examples in the book, Intercultural Competence better prepares readers to interact in intercultural relationships. The book also provides a discussion of important ethical and social issues relating to intercultural communication. The authors cover U.S. cultures as well as global cultural issues.

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art


Scott McCloud - 1993
    Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is a seminal examination of comics art: its rich history, surprising technical components, and major cultural significance. Explore the secret world between the panels, through the lines, and within the hidden symbols of a powerful but misunderstood art form.

The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations


Robert L. Cross - 2004
    In The Hidden Power of Social Networks, Cross and Parker, experts in "social network analysis"—a technique that visually maps relationships between people in large, distributed groups - apply this powerful tool to management for the first time. Based on their in-depth study of sixty informal employee networks in well-known companies around the world, Cross and Parker show managers how to conduct a social network analysis of their organization.

The Theory of the Leisure Class


Thorstein Veblen - 1899
    Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class is in the tradition of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, yet it provides a surprisingly contemporary look at American economics and society.Establishing such terms as "conspicuous consumption" and "pecuniary emulation," Veblen's most famous work has become an archetype not only of economic theory, but of historical and sociological thought as well. As sociologist Alan Wolfe writes in his Introduction, Veblen "skillfully . . . wrote a book that will be read so long as the rich are different from the rest of us; which, if the future is anything like the past, they always will be."

Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande


E.E. Evans-Pritchard - 1937
    In her introduction, Eva Gillies presents the case for the relevance of the book to modern anthropologists.