Social science in question

How do social scientists study the social world? Is social scientific practice in transformation? Can social science learn from its own past? Social Science in Question provides an accessible and authoritative guide to both traditional debates and new approaches to knowledge construction in the social sciences. The book takes the reader on an intellectual journey starting with the story of modern science and the impact that this has had on social scientific practice, and going on to outline and critically review the major approaches to social scientific inquiry, ranging from positivism to postmodernism. This innovative text poses questions about the recent 'cultural turn' in the social sciences. The central dilemmas of the philosophy of social sciences are readdressed in the light of contemporary debates on: perception and imagination; detachment and involvement; simplicity and complexity; representation and reality; and subjectivity and objectivity.