196 Book reutews

looking at Japan and seeing our own inventions sold to us by Japan at prices lower than we can compete with. It is something to worry about.

The report is almost entirely about information hardware, with only modest mention of the importance of software. What is not mentioned, and is also ignored in a news article on IT in The Times I read while working on this review, is information. In short, everyone seems to be concentrating on the machinery for handling information and not on the information it handles. Information scientists, perhaps more than engineers or programmers, recognize that infor- mation is also a product and is marketable. Information is not being produced in Japan at anything like the rate that machines are. People the world over are still coming to the United States and Britain to buy education, books, technical journals, news services, films and the like. Could it be that Japan, Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong are going to get the bulk of manufacturing away from us, but that we will be left with, and might even thrive on, our ability to teach them how?

The recommendations of the report seem reasonable enough, but lack vigor. This is a highly competitive field and half-way measures are not going to make Britain a ma,jor competitor in world markets. As one example, the recommen- dation is made that the government support R and D mainly at the industrial level, which usually means applied research. But you can’t do without a vigorous basic research program as well, and in the modern age there is no substitute for government sponsorship in this area, and lots of it.

The recommendation is made that a single government department take over the control and coordination of the information technology and that the Post Office monopoly on providing terminal equipment be abolished. That last change, alone, could do wonders for British industry. If they were also asked to reduce the cost of telephone services we might, indeed, see a resurgence of the information industry here.

In summary, I found this a curious document. It does not educate the layman well enough to understand the complex technical, economic and political issues; it does not discuss them in enough detail for the sophisticate; and it is not vigorous in its recommendations. 1 should think that to accomplish the goals set forth, something like the World War II atomic energy program or the 1960’s American space program is needed in Britain.

Charles T. Meadow Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science University of Sheffield Sheffield S 10 2TN, England

J. J. Hartman and J. H. Hedblom. Methods for the social sciences, a handbook for students and non-specialists. London: Greenwood Press, 1979. (No price quoted)

Hartman and Hedblom’s book, as a methodology text, is unusual in two ways. First, it intends to be a handbook serving all social sciences (sociology, social anthropology and social psychology in particular). To this end, each chapter is organized as a separate unit which may be used independently of the other material. Secondly, the authors emphasize the need to integrate social science theory and research methodology. They discuss various aspects of this integration at some length by considering the sociological theories of structural functional- ism and symbolic interactionism as well as issues in the philosophy of science.

Book reviews 197

Can the book be used as a general methodological handbook? The answer is yes, with some reservations. The chapters on research designs, preparation for data analysis, sampling, survey research, demography, participant observation, evaluation research and reporting the research results are useful. They contain concise, well-summarized introductions to the available techniques and pro- cedures. The other chapters related to methodology sensu stricto are less convincing. The chapter on scales and data collection instruments provides a good presentation of the principles of questionnaire design but the coverage of scaling techniques is too brief to be of any practical value. (The discussion of Thurston Scales is superfluous, as this technique only enjoyed popularity before computer facilities became generally available.) The chapter on interviewing describes the various types of research interview available; but as is often the case in methodology texts, no suggestions are made about actual interviewing techniques so that it is unclear how interviews should be conducted. The same criticism applies to the chapter on field studies, i.e., after reading this chapter the student will not know how to collect data in field settings. The chapter on statistics is so limited in coverage that it serves, at best, the function of informing the student about elementary statistical procedure.

Turning now to Hartman and Hedblom’s second aim, that of providing an integration of social science theory and research methodology, this, in my judgement, has not been achieved successfully. The structural-functionalist and symbolic-interactionist theories are reviewed, yet no attempt is made to relate the material to the more purely methodological chapters of the book. (In the case of structural functionalism this is not surprising, as much of this theory is of such generality that it is virtually untestable. Thus, the two theoretical chapters ‘hang in the air’ and should have been omitted. The characterization of the social science research process is disappointing, as it is extremely old-fashioned and impracticable, following the hypothetico-deductive recommendations for research proposed by philosophers of science. The authors fail to present a logic of social science enquiry which is close to current conceptions of research practices in the social sciences, as, for example, outlined, as long ago as 1964, by A. V. Cicourel in his Method and Measurement in Sociology.

In conclusion, the book contains a number of useful chapters on various methodological techniques; other chapters lack sufficient detail to meet, in particular, the beginner’s methodological needs. The more theoretical parts of the book, in particular the philosophy of science offered as the foundation for social research, are not useful.

Michael Brenner Oxford Polytechnic Oxford, England

Tze-chung Li. Social science reference sources: a practical guide. Westport (Corm.) : Greenwood Press, 1980. (Contributions in librarianship and information science, no. 30.) 315 pp. ISBNO313214735.El5.95

It is now twenty years since Peter Lewis produced the first significant guide to the literature of the social sciences. Since then there have been numerous successors (including several valuable books discussing the wider problems of documen- tation and bibliographic control) both in the social sciences generally and in