Social Science Space

Management book titles have won one of the coveted TAA Textbook Awards across two categories: the Textbook Excellence Award and the Most Promising New Textbook Award.

“Writing a textbook,” says Tom Heinzen, “is a foolish idea.” It’s an enormous undertaking and the rewards a few. But there are some rewards, and Heinzen and Wind Goodfriend, the authors of the new intro textbook ‘Social Psychology,’ are reaping one of them: their book received a Most Promising New Textbook Award from the Textbook & Academic Authors Association, or TAA.

How do you teach someone to be entrepreneurial? That’s the challenge presented to Heidi Neck, the Jeffry A. Timmons Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Babson College and director of the Babson Entrepreneur Experience Lab, every day. We asked her some questions in the wake of her new textbook on those issues won an award.

The author of a new introduction to statistics textbook was bothered that even among students who but their required books they rarely crack them open. So he decided to give them an incentive.

All criticism of the genre notwithstanding, textbooks do have a central role to play in turning sociology students into sociologists. Sometimes I do wonder, however, whether it is time to re-invent the textbook.

When the customs agent started to smile, I knew that things would go badly indeed. He told me that my books would not be allowed into the country, unless I paid a fine of 50 per cent of their current price (a lot of money, and more than I could possibly afford).

Many sociology departments teach along conventionalist, Eurocentric lines. Nonetheless, a reformulation of the scope of the sociological curriculum seems to be slowly taking shape.

Sociology is arguably a global project. Significant approaches to the study of society have been developed in many parts of the world. Yet, students in the North Atlantic world do not learn about these approaches, as textbooks interpret the world in terms of scholars of the region.

Currently, textbooks exist at the margins of the Sociology, summarising and recycling extant knowledge while fundamentally lacking in original contributions to sociological enquiry. This doesn’t have to be.

Textbooks now play a crucial role in teaching in the social sciences. Their importance is mirrored by their abundance; there is an enormous variety of textbooks on the most commonly taught subjects. The rise of the ‘textbook industry’ is not necessarily a good thing, though.

World Social Science confirmed for 2013, Black Iowans denied jobs test new bias theory, Suicide prevention bill moves ahead in Parliament and more in social science news this week.