If you've never read this book, you MUST. Not just because it remains topical - a discussion of the latest suicide-on-the-internet-chatrooms-made-me-do-it scandal is here.
No, Suicide is a must read because it represents one of the first attempts to write a serious study of a widely known, serious and shocking social phenomenon was laid out on an empirical basis. A statistical scalpel is taken to published data as the basis for a discussion around a heated subject. And the prose is a delight still.
In other words, the great Durkheim develops his argument by looking at the data and testing various conflicting hypotheses against it, not by speculating about "what I feel to be right" "what I prefer to be the case", "how it seems to me", "what we've always supposed", "what I'm too lazy to think about..." etc etc ETC!
Before it we knew that social factors had a role to play (Goethe's yellow-weskit'd Young Werther caused a mild epidemic of upper class suicide about a century previously) but with his eagle eye, Durkheim makes a strong evidenced-based case for quite how much...
Here's an idea: what if we tried the data thing with all our discussions about how things work in marketing, new and old???? How would that be? Do you think that might help?
Just asking...