'Critique' is the crux of good academic work, and functions as the hinge-point between scholarship, professional activity and practice. Each theory is only as strong as its capacity to withstand sustained critical examination of the assumptions it makes about the world, and so each of these books have been constructed in such a way as to anticipate what would be made of their arguments by the most searching reader. A founding premise of each book in this series is that learning about a field of professional activity must also be to understand how theory and practice are linked together, and so the role of 'critique' in this process is to question what the impact of those ideas will be on the lives of people outside the classroom. To 'critically examine' an argument is a way of constructing a new practice which will help us understand the world and change it.