Macat

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman offers a general audience access to over six decades of insight and expertise from a Nobel Laureate in an accessible and interesting way. Kahneman's work focuses largely on the problem of how we think, and warns of the dangers of trusting to intuition — which springs from "fast" but broad and emotional thinking — rather than engaging in the slower, harder, but surer thinking that stems from logical, deliberate...

In Situated Learning, Lave and Wenger rejected the traditional understanding of learning, or cognition, as something that happens inside an individual brain. They argued, instead, that learning is 'situated' because it is largely a product of the environment in which it occurs and takes place most effectively through participation with experts and peers in a 'community of practice.' They used this insight to develop a theoretical basis for the concept...

With 1962's Centuries of Childhood, Philippe Ariès didn't just produce the first comprehensive history of childhood he also called attention to the consideration ordinary people. Ariès argues that the concept of childhood did not even exist until the 17th century; before that, children were regarded simply as small people. When the 'discovery' of childhood came about, it was not because children had changed, but because people's mentalities had...

First published in 1978, Batatu's extraordinarily detailed text is considered the definitive social history of twentieth century Iraq. The work is actually three volumes in one. The first discusses the evolution of the social groups existing in Iraq at the beginning of the twentieth century. The second tells the story of the emerging communist movement through the 1950s. The third examines the 1958 revolution itself and the role of different social...

Ikujiro Nonaka's A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation outlines the creation of organisational knowledge through the constant conversion of the two types of knowledge, tacit and explicit, which Nonaka believes has the potential to guide managers' knowledge creation strategies. This argument is centred on the conviction that companies are not passive parties that simply utilise existing knowledge for providing solutions to the customers,...

One of the most widely read books in the social sciences, Purity and Danger established Mary Douglas as one of the twentieth century's leading social scientists. Her career spanned fieldwork in the Congo to wartime service in the British government to teaching at Oxford and Princeton, and her work continues to influence not only the social sciences but also fields as diverse as economics, design, and environmental studies.

Outline of a Theory of Practice is recognized as a major theoretical text on the foundations of anthropology and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu develops a theory of practice that is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood, illustrated by his fieldwork in Algeria. The text's rigorous, consistent, materialist approach lays the foundations for a theory of symbolic...

Tabbaa's The Transformation of Islamic Art offers an innovative approach to understanding the profound changes undergone by Islamic art and architecture during the often neglected Medieval Islamic period. Tabbaa argues that devices such as calligraphy, arabesque, muqarnas, and stonework were propagated during a moment of confrontation and facilitated the re-emergence of the Sunni Abbasid caliphate in a more orthodox image. Tabbaa offers a timely...

Ludwig Von Mises's 1912 contribution to the theory of monetary policy and the current prevailing consensus in modern economic liberalism, The Theory of Money and Credit, was a milestone achievement. The author's familiarity with the historical literature on banking and credit allows him to present a coherent theoretical structure that links private exchange between individuals, business and banks to condition the markets affecting money and credit. Through...