market, the rest of the scene gradually moved with them including the substantial proportion of drug users who preferred obtaining their prescriptions from less conspicuous chemist shops. Although the chemist proprietor reported in 1983 that the number of addict maintenance prescriptions he dispensed halved in the second half of 1982, after the publicity over Dr Khan's case, the thriving market...

How do we include animals in sociology? Although sociology’s initial avoidance of the nonhuman world may have been necessary to field’s development, recent scholarship – within mainstream sociology, environmental sociology and animal-centred research is helping expand horizons. With a focus on variety, this article reviews four key paths that researchers are taking their research: (1) studying ...

Although research into social and behavioural determinants of health and illness was conducted throughout the 20th century, it has become more common since the 1980s. Because of this, the term 'social epidemiology' is increasingly encountered in the biomedical literature. Recent commentaries by Kaufman and Cooper 1,2 and Muntaner 3 on causal explanations in social epidemiology, although of inte...

Burawoy (2005) argues that sociology needs to re-establish a public sociology oriented toward society’s problems and the practice of its unique knowledge if it is to again be taken seriously by the public, policymakers, and others. Yet, it is unclear how best to achieve these goals. We argue that the relatively young field of social gerontology provides a useful model of successful public socio...

Following a discussion of activity theory as an approach to human development originally rooted in transformational change, we review the historical context and diverse conceptualizations of social conduct from the field of sociology. The discussion of social conduct is broken into theories of social action, theories of enactment, and contemporary sociological attempts at critical integration o...