Life Stories

Drawing on decades of pioneering research – including his celebrated study of family-run bakeries in France – Daniel Bertaux demonstrates how collecting and comparing life stories of people and their daily work reveals the tacit knowledge, relationships, and processes that sustain entire ways of life.

Clear, rigorous, and richly evidenced, Life Stories equips readers with the theoretical grounding and practical tools to integrate this method into their own research. It shows how to collect, analyse, and present life stories, from single-case investigations making visible long-term personal projects to comparative studies, showing their power to illuminate broader social realities.

First published in French in 1997, Bertaux’s classic text has been translate into several languages but has never been made available to English-speaking audiences. This new English edition will help sociologists worldwide gain deeper insight into the lived experiences shaping our societies.