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"Realism and Complexity in Social Science is an argument for a new approach to investigating the social world, that of complex realism. Complex realism brings together a number of strands of thought, in scientific realism, complexity science, probability theory and social research methodology. It proposes that the reality of the social world is that it is probabilistic, yet there exists enough invariance to make the discovery and explanation of social objects and causal mechanisms possible. This forms the basis for the development of a complex realist foundation for social research, that utilises a number of new and novel approaches to investigation, alongside the more traditional corpus of quantitative and qualitative methods. Research examples are drawn from research in sociology, epidemiology, criminology, social policy and human geography. The book assumes no prior knowledge of realism, probability or complexity and in the early chapters, the reader is introduced to these concepts and the arguments against them. Although the book is grounded in philosophical reasoning, this is in a direct and accessible style that will appeal both to social researchers with a methodological interest and philosophers with an interest in social investigation"--

By sociology Pareto means a synthesis of all the particular researches and disciplines dealing with human society—law, economics, political history, the history of religion, and so on—in a search for the relationships between social facts (1, 2). Sociology is to provide a framework into which will fit the results of these specialized studies; it is to be a comprehensive study which aims at discovering the principles underlying the form and changes of society in general.Such is Pareto's own formulation. It is apparent that he believes both that there are general principles underlying the form and changes of society, and that these can be discovered by a new discipline, sociology, working on the results of the specialized studies. The primary concern of the new discipline must therefore be methodology, and Pareto devotes much more attention to the problem of method in the social sciences than he does to the construction of his own theory of society. His justification for this is his belief that the methods of all previous sociologists have been basically faulty and can lead only to invalid conclusions. In this paper it is proposed to follow Pareto's emphasis, and to deal with his analysis of social facts and his general theory of society primarily with a view to bringing out those aspects which raise the problem of method in the social sciences.

As measured by citations in articles listed in the Social Sciences Citation Index.

Social scientists have long been concerned with inequality, yet the focus has often been on its theoretical and political aspects. This is now starting to change, writes Mike Savage. Thanks to research interventions by scholars, together with attempts to institutionalise cross-disciplinary work, the focus is shifting from normative debates and towards the more technical, empirical and historical problems of inequality.