ABSTRACT
Until recendy, sociology has largely ignored accidents as a legitimate subject of study. This chapter explores the marginal place that accidents have had in both empirical research in sociology and in classical social theory, and suggests that this neglect is not mere coincidence but an inevi table outcome of the ways in which accidents have been constructed. When they have been studied, accidents have been redefined as “non accidental”, as something other than our initial working definition of ran dom misfortunes in Chapter 1 suggested.
