Intended as a textbook for introductory courses in the social sciences, this excellent volume can be read with pleasure and profit by the 'intelligent layman' and also by that far rarer breed, the intelligent specialist. Leaning heavily on the data and methods of sociology, the authors have managed to enrich their work with valuable insights from anthropology, economics, history, literature, politics, and psychology. The book represents not only an unusually happy collaboration between two scholars who wear their erudition lightly but also a synthesis of various disciplines which are ordinarily monopolized by narrow specialists.It is especially refreshing to point out that this book does not dispense the usual sociological bromides on sociometrics and industrial sociology. Thus, the labor-management studies at the Hawthorne works of the Western Electric Company in the nineteen twenties are mentioned only summarily and can be consulted at greater length in the original publication.