Ann Oakley

"Systemic Action Research" works with real social and organisational issues to uncover their complex dynamics, often revealing unexpected opportunities. This book shows how this process can be integrated, in any context, to the process of social and organisational development and change. The book explains how systemic thinking works and how Systemic Action Research can be embedded into organisational structures and processes to catalyse sustainable change and critical local interventions. Practically written, it details how to design a programme and build it directly into policy and practice development, extending the possibilities of action research beyond the 'individual' and the 'group' to work across whole organisations, multi agency governance arenas, and networks. The book is filled with illustrative stories and pictures which bring the concepts to life enabling the reader to develop a clear picture of how to put it into practice. Systemic Action Research programmes are now being adopted in Government and local governance contexts as well as in national and international NGOs. This book will be invaluable for experienced action researchers as well as social science and social policy researchers who will benefit from an approach to qualitative research which is participative, grounded in practice and allows systemic understandings of complex problems. Policy makers and practitioners will appreciate a process which generates meaningful evidence about the dynamics of change and offers a tangible system for continuously integrating that learning into both formal and informal decision-making.

"In Gender on Planet Earth, influential author, social scientist and iconoclastic feminist Ann Oakley argues that men and women have inherited and reinforce a system of gender differences that has a destructive effect on them, their shared humanity and the planet. By showing us how every aspect of our lives is dominated by male/female power structures, she forces us to take a step back and see how and why gender inequality has thrown our society out of balance."--BOOK JACKET.

"This book explores the history, ideology and implications of methodology or 'ways of knowing' in the social and natural sciences. It extends arguments developed in the author's previous work that divisions between 'quantitative' and 'qualitative' methods are unhelpful in the pursuit of useful knowledge, and that a major challenge facing scientists, academics and the public today is the need to scrutinize the claims professionals of all kinds make to possess effective expertise. The rejection of 'quantitative' and experimental methods, in particular, prevents us from understanding both the parameters of social inequality and the effects of professional interventions in people's lives and obstructs the development of a critical and emancipatory social science."--BOOK JACKET.

In this collection of essays, Ann Oakley, one of the most influential social scientists of the last twenty years, brings together the best of her word on the sociology of women's health. She focuses on four main themes - divisions of labour, motherhood, technology and methodology - and in her own inimitable style, combines serious academic discourse from a feminist sociological perspective with a practical understanding of what it is to be a women facing the often impersonal world of twentieth-century medicine. Updating and expanding substantially on her earlier work, Telling the Truth About Jerusalem, this new collection bridges the medical/social divide in an accessible and personable way.