New Releases by David SILVERMAN

Harvey Sacks''s early death in 1975 robbed the social sciences of one of its most original thinkers. Although he published relatively little in his lifetime, his lectures and papers were enormously influential in sociology and sociolinguistics, and they played a major role in the development of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. The recent publication of Sacks''s Lectures on Conversation has provided an excellent opportunity for a wide-ranging reassessment of his contribution. In this new book, David Silverman provides a clear introduction to Sacks''s work and reassesses its value for sociology, linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. Using a variety of examples, he explains Sacks''s ideas on method, language and talk-interaction. He argues that Sack''s work offers a highly original perspective on language and social life and raises fundamental questions for the social sciences--questions which, after more than twenty years, remain vitally important and largely unanswered. Written in a lively and accessible way, this book will be of particular interest to students of sociology, sociolinguistics, social theory and method, but it will also be of interest to students and researchers in anthropology, psychology, and related disciplines.

Drawing on research on counselling of clients undergoing an HIV test, this book offers a fully researched and analytically sensitive account of how counselling as a process is dynamically constructed through the interaction of counsellor and client.

"The importance of the doctor-patient interaction in medical practice has become the focus of much recent study and debate. "Patient-centered medicine" has become a new conventional wisdom in medical practice. The power relations involved in doctor-patient interaction have been stressed by recent feminist and critical work in medical sociology. Silverman''s important new volume provides a carefully researched and analytically sensitive view of how doctors and patients in fact relate. Among the key themes of the book are the way in which doctor-patient conversation varies according to the patient''s medical history and method of payment; the problems implicit in pediatric medicine when parents and children are viewed as social actors with psychological propensities; and the difficulties intrinsic to reformist medical practice and patient-centered medicine. This book is essential reading for scholars and students in the fields of medical sociology, medical social work, and professional medical training."--Publisher.

First published in 1980, this reissue is a study of the sociology of language, which aims to bridge the gap between textbook and monograph by alternating chapters of explication and analysis. A chapter outlining a particular theory and suggesting general criticisms is followed by a chapter offering an original application of that theory. The aim of the authors is to treat text and talk as the site of specific practices which sustain or subvert particular relations between appearance and reality.

UK. Research monograph on personnel management, with particular reference to recruitment performance recording and career patterns of junior administrators in the public sector - covers organization development theories, occupational sociology definitions of bureaucracy, etc., and includes excerpts of transcripts of tape recorded interviews. Bibliography pp. 183 to 185.