Product Description: What do pop songs have to say about love? Surprisingly, this book shows that most popular love songs express much more about alienation, infatuation, estrangement, jealousy, and heartbreak than about love. Scheff takes the reader on a tour of popular lyrics from 80 years of American song to reveal the emotional and relational meaning of lyrics...read more

Product Description: A child/adolescent/youth's roller coaster ride through the South in the thirties and forties. As an adult, finding a mate and a calling. Passages about being girl crazy, work life as a soldier, physicist, sociologist, marriage counselor, and finally as a social psychologist and anti-war activist...read more

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Product Description: What causes violence? Thomas Scheff and Suzanne Retzinger deftly explore this age-old question. What emerges is an extraordinarily innovative explanation that gives fresh hope for reducing physical and emotional violence in the world and in our times...read more

Product Description: "In an elegantly argued analysis, Thomas Scheff has illuminated the causes of war in the light of family and small-group behavior. This is masterful historical sociology, which undercuts the reason of state and the logic of nationalism that have sustained so many of the atrocities of our century...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

In incorporating social process into a model of the dynamics of mental disorders, this text questions the individualistic model favoured in current psychiatric and psychoanalytic theory. While the conventional psychiatric viewpoint seeks the causes of mental illness, Scheff views "the symptoms of mental illness" as the violation of residual rules - social norms so taken for granted that they are not explicitly verbalized. The sociological theory developed by Scheff to account for such behaviour provides a framework for studies reported in subsequent chapters. Two key assumptions emerge: first, that most chronic mental illness is in part a social role; and second, that societal reaction may in part determine entry into that role. Throughout, the sociological model of mental illness is compared and contrasted with more conventional medical and psychological models in an attempt to delineate significant problems for further analysis and research. This third edition has been revised and expanded to encompass the controversy prompted by the first edition, and also to re-evaluate developments in the field. New to this edition are discussions of the use of psychoactive drugs in the treatment of mental illness, changing mental health laws, new social science and psychiatric studies, and the controversy surrounding the labelling theory of mental illness itself.

In his important new book, Thomas Scheff offers an innovative approach to researching human behavior that relates the smallest parts of social interaction to the greatest wholes of social structure. These are the details and connections usually found only in the finest novels, but Scheff combines the insights of the humanities and social sciences to capture the same evocative details of sight, sound and context, better to understand what he calls "human reality". He puts a fresh emphasis on the importance of emotions in the social bond, and describes in newly subtle ways the outer and inner lives of persons in real life, such as inner city children, and in fiction, such as Jane Austen's heroines. By closely observing the significance of words and gestures, in the context in which they occur, he is able to illuminate the connection between people's lives and the society in which they live. (view table of contents)

Moving beyond the traditional boundaries of sociological investigation,Thomas J. Scheff brings together the study of communication and the socialpsychology of emotions to explore the microworld of thoughts, feelings,and moods. Drawing on strikingly diverse and rich sources—the findings ofartificial intelligence and cognitive science, and examples from literarydialogues and psychiatric interviews—Scheff provides an inventive accountof the nature of social life and a theory of motivation that brilliantlyaccounts for the immense complexity involved in understanding even the mostroutine conversation."A major contribution to some central debates in social theory at thepresent time. . . . What Thomas Scheff seeks to develop is essentially aquite novel account of the nature of social life, its relation to languageand human reflexivity, in which he insists upon the importance of a theoryof emotion. . . . A work of true originality and jolting impact. . . .Microsociology is of exceptional interest, which bears witness to thevery creativity which it puts at the center of human social contact."—Anthony Giddens, from the Foreword"Scheff provides a rich theory that can easily generate further exploration. And he drives home the message that sociological work on interaction, social bonds, and society cannot ignore human emotionality."—Candace Clark, American Journal of Sociology"This outstanding and ground-breaking little volume contains a wealth of original ideas that bring together many insights concerning the relationship of emotion to motivation in a wide variety of social settings. It is strongly recommended to all serious students of emotion, of society, and of human nature."—Melvin R. Lansky, American Journal of Psychiatry