The age in which people in the West have treated society and nature as essentially separate matters is at an end. Environmental change and degradation impinge on all our lives, and even our genes are increasingly seen by employers and insurers as commodities.
The Natural and the Social draws on insights from across the social sciences to examine the changing character of these interrelations between society and nature. Individual chapters look in depth at genes, environments and human development, medical practices and health, and the management of environmental risk. Throughout students are encouraged to draw on their own experiences to understand the theoretical and practical problems of living in this new natural-and-social world.
This exciting and original text will be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand more clearly the role and limitations of technological and scientific progress in contemporary society.

Knowledge and the Social Sciences takes as its point of departure the claims that all forms of knowledge, the social sciences included, must be seen and understood in their social context. It argues that the social sciences both describe and transform their object of study, though rarely in ways that social scientists intend, and introduces students to the key epistemological and philosophical terms and issues essential for further study in the social sciences.
In a radical and yet lucid and practical introduction to ways of thinking and knowing in the social sciences this text investigates:
* the origins and consequences of different types of knowledge in substantive areas of social change: medical practice, religious beliefs, and the environment
* whether there is a decline in public trust of expert knowledge systems
* whether we are entering a knowledge society, a fragmented post-modern society, or a risk society.