Drawing on decades of pioneering research – including his celebrated study of Parisian family-run bakeries – Daniel Bertaux demonstrates how asking participants to narrate the concrete details of their daily work reveals the tacit knowledge, relationships, and processes that sustain entire ways of life.

Clear, rigorous, and richly illustrated, 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 to comparative studies, demonstrating their power to illuminate broader social realities.

First published in French in 1998, Bertaux’s classic text has been translated into several languages but has never been made available to English-speaking audiences. This new and updated English edition will help sociologists in the English-speaking world gain deeper insight into the lived experiences that shape our societies.