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Reviews the book "Ireland North and South: Perspectives From Social Science," edited by Anthony F. Heath, Richard Breen and Christopher T. Whelan.

Any collection of papers purporting to set out new directions for a discipline, like sociology, whose fundamental orientations are humanist, might reasonably be expected to contain within it items that may themselves be collected into one of two principal categories. The first is of work that brings radically into question existing ontological and, hence, epistemological bases of the discipline; the second, of work that, developing from a fundamental, though not an unquestioning, acceptance of those bases, seeks to modify them in the light of its experiential practice in their terms. Work of both kinds requires the courage and rigour of a strong and serious commitment to sustain sociology as a discipline through questioning thoughtfully its basic tenets in relation to the lived, social experience both of those who conduct it and of those whose conduct is its topic. Work in the second category can be too easily confused, however, with that of a third—the scholarship of the disciplinary cartographer, whose work is the recording and reporting upon the work of others in his field. Such work informs those in search of the new of the names and appearances of the epistemological territories that they are leaving behind, and of the conceptual topography of some of the issues they may expect to have to negotiate during their journey. As such, and if it is thorough, it can be valuable. But it is too often an indication of unreflective neophilia amongst sociologists than of new directions in sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "A Critical Woman: Barbara Wootton, Social Science, and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century," by Ann Oakley.

The article reviews the book "The Development of Sociology in the Soviet Union," by Elizabeth Ann Weinberg.

Reviews the book "Relativism and the Social Sciences," by Ernest Gellner.

Reviews the book "Sociological Interpretations of Education: Social Analysis Series in the Social Sciences," by David Blackledge and Barry Hunt.

Reviews the book "Structural Equation Models in the Social Sciences," by edited by Arthur S. Goldberger and Otis Dudley Duncan.

Reviews the book "The Scientific Study of Society," by Max Steuer.

Reviews the book "The Scientific Study of Society," by Max Steuer.

The article reviews the book "Theory Construction and the Sociology of the Family," by Wesley R. Burr.

The article reviews the book "The Social Grading of Occupations: a New Approach and Scale," by John H. Goldthorpe and Keith Hope.

The article reviews the book "Power and Progress: Essays on Sociological Theory," by Robert Bierstedt.

Reviews the book "Social Theory Today," edited by A. Giddens and J. H. Turner.

This section presents the list of books reviewed in the December 1989 issue of the British Journal of Sociology.

Reviews several books on social science. "British Social Attitudes: The 5th Report," edited by Roger Jowell, Sharon Witherspoon and Lindsay Brook; "British Social Trends Since 1900; A Guide to the Changing Social Structure of Britain," edited by A. H. Halsey; "Contemporary British Society," by Nicholas Abercrombie and Alan Warde.

The article reviews the books "Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People," by D. Smith, and "Institutional Ethnography As Practice," edited by D. Smith.

Reviews the book "Philosophy of the Social Sciences (2 Volumes)," by J. O. Wisdom.

Reviews the book "Analysing Gender, a Handbook of Social Science Research," edited by Beth B. Hess and Myra Marx Ferree.

Reviews the book "Selected Writings," by Jean Baudrillard.

Reviews the book "Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences," by T.N. Clark.