Product Description: This provocative book offers a probing account of the erosion of privacy in American society, that shows that we are often unwitting, if willing, accomplices, providing personal data in exchange for security or convenience. The author reveals that in today's "information society," the personal data that we make available to virtually any organization for virtually any purpose is apt to surface elsewhere, applied to utterly different purposes...read more

Product Description: What is the role of sociology in society? How can - and should - sociology contribute with insights relevant and useful to the outside world? Is sociology attuned to accommodate the demands of the wider public and of surrounding society? Who benefits from the knowledge produced and provided by sociology? What are the social implications and cultural effects of the knowledge sociology provides and creates? All of these questions, and many others, concern and centre on sociology's relationship to the surrounding society, in short to the ´public´...read more

Product Description: Is any image in modern times more evocative of social change than the computer? Popular mythology ascribes extraordinary powers to computers in the ordering of human affairs. Computers are seen as instruments of social transformation and economic change...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This work attacks questions that have long troubled social scientists--questions of the cumulative nature of social inquiry. Does the knowledge generated by the study of social, political, and economic life grow more comprehensive over time? Do today's social scientists in any meaningful sense know more than their intellectual ancestors about such perennial concerns as the origins of war and peace, or the causes of economic growth, or the forces shaping social stratification, or origins of civil upheaval? These questions go to the heart of social scientists' soul-searching as to whether they are indeed engaged in "science...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Reveals the operations of five information systems in the United States and Great Britain that collect and dispense personal data