This text brings together a a number of contributions that discuss issues surrounding and informing questions such as: what is the "social"?; in what ways can we know it?; and how can our findings be validated? Topics discussed include: the relationship of philosophical and research issues to each other; the nature of social reality; properties that may be ascribed to the social; research accounts and rhetorical "persuasion"; and the relations between "gender and knowing". The overall concern of the book is to clarify how and in what ways we can claim to know the social world and what implications and consequences this may have for social scientific practice.