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Introductions to each section and each article identify and explain central issues, key concepts, and relationships among topics.

The new edition features revised section introductions, one slightly expanded selection, and 15 entirely new contributions. The new articles address such topics as:
The central role of culture in human psychology.
Young children’s everyday uses of racial and ethnic identities.
The effects of beauty images in the mass media on adolescent girls’self-concepts.
The historical development of conflicting standards of self-control in America.
Narratives of Self in Codependency
The social order of conversation.
The challenges and dynamics of constructing family.
The experience of caring for mentally ill loved ones.
Clique hierarchies and their effects on identity among children.
The contrasting agendas of white and black sororities.
The impact of legal restrictions on the informal social order of street vendors.
The construction of criminal selves in prisons.
The emergence of road rage as a social problem.
The social factors and processes that led to the Holocaust.
The expanding possibilities for self-construction in the contemporary world.

Average Customer Rating:

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Customer Rating:

This is an excellent sociology text for anyone interested in how people thought about sociology in the early 1980s. It is impressively unaffected by any sociological thinking of the past two decades. If you'd be amazed to find that social forces affect the way people think about themselves, this is the book for you! Four essays do stand out, however: Goffman's (two) and Geertz's essays are classics, and one centemporary author (Diamond) actually takes into account relatively recent ideas from disability studies.