How data science and the analysis of networks help us solve the puzzle of unintended consequences. Social life is full of paradoxes. Our intentional actions often trigger outcomes that we did not intend or even envision. How do we explain those unintended effects and what can we do to regulate them? In Decoding the Social World, Sandra González-Bailón explains how data science and digital traces help us solve the puzzle of unintended consequences—offering the solution to a social paradox that has intrigued thinkers for centuries. Communication has always been the force that makes a collection of people more than the sum of individuals, but only now can we explain why: digital technologies have made it possible to parse the information we generate by being social in new, imaginative ways. And yet we must look at that data, González-Bailón argues, through the lens of theories that capture the nature of social life. The technologies we use, in the end, are also a manifestation of the social world we inhabit. González-Bailón discusses how the unpredictability of social life relates to communication networks, social influence, and the unintended effects that derive from individual decisions. She describes how communication generates social dynamics in aggregate (leading to episodes of “collective effervescence”) and discusses the mechanisms that underlie large-scale diffusion, when information and behavior spread “like wildfire.” She applies the theory of networks to illuminate why collective outcomes can differ drastically even when they arise from the same individual actions. By opening the black box of unintended effects, González-Bailón identifies strategies for social intervention and discusses the policy implications—and how data science and evidence-based research embolden critical thinking in a world that is constantly changing.

Because of its unique focus on teaching the critical social skills that autistic children lack, this book has been cited by "Library Journal" as "Essential to All Collections."

This book shows why the study of schooling matters to the history of twentieth-century Britain, integrating the history of education within the wider concerns of modern social history. Drawing on a rich array of archival and autobiographical sources, it captures in vivid detail the individual moments that made up the minutiae of classroom life. It focuses on elementary education in interwar London, arguing that schools were grounded in their local communities as lynchpins of social life and drivers of change. Exploring crucial questions around identity and belonging, poverty and aspiration, class and culture, behaviour and citizenship, it provides vital context for twenty-first century debates about education and society, showing how the same concerns were framed a century ago.

Based on data from 2-1/2 years of observing 1- and 2-year-old children learning to talk in their own homes, this book charts the month-by-month growth of the children's vocabulary, utterances, and use of grammatical structures and evaluates the effect

The authors are proud sponsors of the 2020 SAGE Keith Roberts Teaching Innovations Award—enabling graduate students and early career faculty to attend the annual ASA pre-conference teaching and learning workshop. This comprehensive anthology features classical readings on the sociology of education, as well as current, original essays by notable contemporary scholars. Assigned as a main text or a supplement, this fully updated Sixth Edition uses the open systems approach to provide readers with a framework for understanding and analyzing the book’s range of topics. Jeanne H. Ballantine, Joan Z. Spade, and new co-editor Jenny M. Stuber, all experienced researchers and instructors in this subject, have chosen articles that are highly readable, and that represent the field’s major theoretical perspectives, methods, and issues. The Sixth Edition includes twenty new selections and five revisions of original readings and features new perspectives on some of the most contested issues in the field today, such as school funding, gender issues in schools, parent and neighborhood influences on learning, growing inequality in schools, and charter schools.

"This should become a core text for second year courses in sociology and cultural studies... it synthesizes a vast body of literature and a complex range of debates into a text which is at once accessible, engaging and stimulating... it will lead to students seeing and thinking about the material world in a totally new light and can be used as a way into key theoretical debates." Keith Tester, Professor of Social Theory, University of Portsmouth In what ways do we interact with material things? How do material objects affect the way we relate to each other? What are the connections between material things and social processes like fashion, discourse, art and design? Through wearing clothes, keeping furniture, responding to the ring of the telephone, noticing the signature on a painting, holding a paperweight and in many other ways, we interact with objects in our everyday lives. These are not merely functional relationships with things but are connected to the way we relate to other people and the culture of the particular society we live in - they are social relations. This engaging book draws on established theoretical work, including that of Simmel, Marx, McLuhan, Barthes and Baudrillard as well as a range of contemporary empirical work from many humanities disciplines. It uses ideas drawn from this work to explore a variety of things - from stone cairns to denim jeans, televisions to penis rings, houses to works of art - to understand something of how we live with them.