Magic, Science and Society

This book investigates how the ’rationality debate’ has developed from E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s study of Azande magic, through Peter Winch’s argument that there can be no such thing as a social science, across the arguments about the status of science in the 1970s and 1980s, to the more recent epistemological and ontological turns.

Alex Dennis is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sheffield, UK, where he also leads the BA Sociology programme. His research explores theories of rationality, ethnomethodology and conversation(al) analysis, ethnographic methodologies, workplace and organisational studies, sociologies of knowledge, social interaction, and social order perspectives. He is the author of Making Decisions about People: The Organisational Contingencies of Illness (Routledge, 2001), co-author of Perspectives in Sociology (Sixth Edition, Routledge, 2015), and co-editor of Human Agents and Social Structures (2010).