Product Description: Providing a unique critical perspective to debates on slavery, this book brings the literature on transatlantic slavery into dialogue with research on informal sector labour, child labour, migration, debt, prisoners, and sex work in the contemporary world in order to challenge popular and policy discourse on modern slavery...read more

Product Description: This compelling new book explores the complexities of the global child sex industry, but without falling into cliche and melodrama. Julia O'Connell Davidson draws attention to the multitude of ways in which children become implicated in the sex trade, and the devastating global political and economic inequalities that underpin their involvement...read more

Prostitution, Power and Freedom brings new insights to the ongoing debate among scholars, activists, and others on the controversial subject of prostitution. Sociologist Julia O'Connell Davidson's concise, accessibly-written study is based on wide research from various corners of the world. The study employs a range of theoretical analyses and argues against simplistic explanations of the prostitution phenomenon, showing it to be a complex relationship where economics, power relations, gender, age, class, and "choice" intersect.The author has conducted an impressive amount of research in nine countries, including conversations with male and female sex tourists, adult and child prostitutes, procurers, and clients. Through her research, O'Connell Davidson demonstrates the complexity of prostitution, arguing that it is not simply an effect of male oppression and violence or insatiable sexual needs, nor is it an unproblematic economic encounter. The book provides a sophisticated explanation of the economic and political inequalities underlying prostitution, but also shows that while prostitution necessarily implies certain freedoms for the clients, the amount of freedom experienced by individual prostititutes varies greatly.This highly accessible book will be of great interest to those in gender and women's studies, sexuality and cultural studies, the sociology of work and organizations, and social policy. General readers will also appreciate having new ways of thinking about this age-old social phenomenon.Julia O'Connell Davidson is Lecturer in Sociology, University of Leicester.

Social research yields knowledge which powerfully affects our daily lives. The "facts" it generates shape not just how we see ourselves and others, but also whether or not we see the existing status quo as normal, just and legitimate. This book examines and questions the methods used by social researchers to produce such knowledge. It focuses chiefly on research into human sexuality and madness, and introduces and critically assesses everything from survey methods to participant observation. It opens up broader philosophical debates about the nature of knowledge, and highlights issues surrounding the ethics and politics of research. The book looks at the research community and the research process in detail before moving on to examine the main techniques used in social research: the use of official statistics; the survey method; interviewing; laboratory observation; ethnography; the use of documentary sources; and textual analysis.

Product Description: An exposition of the impact of privatization in the water industry, this book analyzes the restructuring and changing pattern of employment relations. It uses the water industry to explore general principles, showing how commercial pressures have led to work intensification.