Edited by Canadian sociologist William K. Carroll, this thought-provoking volume is designed for research methods courses in sociology and social sciences. Critical Strategies for Social Research explores ways in which several key research strategies bring an emancipatory dimension to social analysis. The new approaches recognize that social analysis is a form of knowledge production that takes place in a human-constructed world marked by injustice and persistent inequality.
Carroll considers five influential and productive strategies of inquiry:

• Dialectical Social Analysis
• Institutional Ethnography
• Participatory Action Research
• Critical Discourse Analysis
• Social Inquiry as Communicative Reason

William K. Carroll is a professor of Sociology at the University of Victoria, where he served as founding director of the Social Justice Studies Program (2008-2012). Among his recent books are The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class: Corporate Power in the 21st Century, Remaking Media: The Struggle to Democratize Public Communication (co-authored with Bob Hackett), Challenges and Perils: Social Democracy in Neoliberal Times and Critical Strategies for Social Research. He has won the Canadian Sociological Association's John Porter Prize twice for his books on the structure of corporate power in Canada. He is a Research Associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, an associate editor of the journal Socialist Studies and a member of the International Network of Scholar Activists.

Kanchan Sarker has a PhD in sociology from the University of North Bengal and teaches at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan. He has also taught at York University, the University of Windsor, the University of Waterloo and Cleveland University. He was a researcher at the Sociological Research Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India, from 1990-2001. He studies social movements, social inequality, globalization and neoliberalism, and has published several papers in national and international journals.

William K. Carroll's profile page

"I most like the way this book organizes the field of critical research by presenting five strategies. This framework sets up useful opportunities for comparison of research perspectives. There certainly is a need for a critical reader on research strategies."— “Mary-Beth Raddon, Brock University