By focusing on familiar sites and scenes - the home, the pub, the street - this text introduces students to contemporary debates about the social organization of everyday life. From the private sphere through to work, consumption and the community, it reveals the intricacies of social processes and structures as they affect students' own lives. Using richly-illustrated examples, the authors demonstrate how the perspectives of sociology, cultural studies and feminism can shed new light on aspects of day-to-day social life that are usually taken for granted. At the same time, they place these debates in historical perspective, both by tracing key historical changes in the patterns of everyday life and by looking at the history of social thought about the everyday. The authors consider a broad range of theoretical approaches to everyday life and explore these in the light of class, ethnicity, age, gender and sexuality.