Professions, Work and Careers addresses some of the central themes that preoccupied the eminent sociologist Anselm Strauss. This collection is directed at sociologists concerned with the development of theory and graduate and undergraduate students in the sociology of work and the sociology of medicine. His approach is both thematic and topical.Straus examines organization, profession, career, and work, in addition to related matters such as socialization, occupational identity, social mobility, and professional relationships, all in a social psychological context. Because medicine is considered by many to be the prototype profession, Strauss effectively illustrates many of the points by allusion to nurses, chemists, hospitals, wards, and terminal care. The progression of ideas in these essays are a befitting source for the study of structure, interaction and process, other themes that occupied Strauss in his other research enterprises.As Irving Louis Horowitz noted at the time of Anselm Strauss's death in 1996: "Anselm was and remained a social psychologist of a special sort. He appreciated that what takes place in the privacy of our minds translates into public consequences for the social fabric. His statements on personal problems are invariably followed in quick succession by intensely sociological essays on close awareness, face-to-face interaction, and structured interactions. The subtext distinguishes sociological from psychiatric conventions, seeing everything from daydreams to visions in interactionist frames rather than as pathology. The implications of his explorations into the medical profession are stated gently, but carry deep ramifications, for the act of people treating each other compassionately, not less than professionally, is also an act of awareness. Treating the human person as a creature of dignity, when generalized, becomes the basis for constructing human society."The late Anselm Strauss was a pioneer in bridging the gap between theory and data in sociology. This collection of his works, available in paperback for the first time, will be a valuable resource for professionals and students interested in grounded social theory.Anselm L. Strauss was professor of sociology and chairman of the graduate program in sociology, University of California, San Francisco. He is the author of numerous books including Creating Sociological Awareness and editor of Where Medicine Fails, both published by Transaction.

Slavery in the United States clarifies the institution of slavery in its historical context. Filler avoids the all too prevalent literary attitude of either treating slavery as an unmitigated nightmare from the past, or regarding it as a way of life which warmly repaid slave and slaveholder. He does not reduce the issue to one of fact and figures, nor does he inject endless hypotheses and analogues. Rather, this finely etched volume encompasses the human implications of slavery and its practices. It emphasizes the distinguished and disreputable elements on both sides of the slavery relationship, and in every part of the United States.Slavery offers peculiar challenges to the student of American life, past and present. It is unrealistic to avoid the human implications of slavery and its practice. It is equally unhelpful to assume glib and partial viewpoints with respect to so all-embracing a system as slavery became. The cause of progress, no less than social science, is not advanced by indifference to patent facts. The civil libertarian who romanticizes black people indiscriminately, and lumps Jefferson Davis with Simon Legree may win popularity with enthusiasts and ideologues. But they will soon find themselves quaint and outmoded.The author reminds us that "the safest approach to slavery is to determine what the institution meant to the country at large; why it flourished as it did, and how it came to be opposed and overthrown." The work includes high quality often neglected readings that permit the reader to form his or her own views. It reveals the best writing on all aspects of the slavery issue, as well as analytic summations by contemporary historians and social researchers.