Contemporary Sociological Theory E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1400

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The new edition of the definitive undergraduate guide to contemporary sociological theory, with updated reading selections throughout

The fourth edition of Contemporary Sociological Theory offers a thorough introduction to current perspectives and approaches in sociology and social science. Covering a broad range of essential topics, this comprehensive volume provides students with the foundation necessary for understanding the theoretical underpinnings of present-day debates in the diverse field. In-depth yet accessible readings address micro-sociological analysis, symbolic interactionism, network theory, phenomenology, critical theory, structuralism, feminist theory, and more.

This classic text is fully revised to incorporate the most representative and up-to-date material, including new readings addressing debates on gender, power, and inequality. New editorial introductions clarify and contextualize the selected readings, while up-to-date examples highlight connections to today’s theoretical discussions. This authoritative survey of contemporary sociological theory:

• Presents substantial primary source texts with detailed introductions, rather than brief excerpts and basic overviews
• Examines the sociological theories of Foucault, Giddens, Bourdieu, and Habermas
• Discusses debates over modernity and postmodernity, crisis and change, and race and difference
• Provides historical and intellectual perspective to each selected reading in the book
• Includes extensive references to further readings and resources

Contemporary Sociological Theory, Fourth Edition provides the depth of coverage students require for undergraduate courses in social and sociological theory as well as courses in wider social science programs such as human geography, anthropology, criminology, and urban studies. In combination with its complement Classical Sociological Theory, Fourth Edition, Contemporary Sociological Theory remains the most complete overview of sociological theory available.

Leseprobe

Contemporary Sociological Theory

Fourth Edition

Edited by

Craig Calhoun, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff,and Indermohan Virk

This edition first published 2022© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Edition HistoryFirst Edition @ 2002 Blackwell Publishing LtdSecond Edition @ 2007 Blackwell Publishing LtdThird Edition © 2012 John Wiley & Sons LtdFourth Edition © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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The right of Craig Calhoun, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff, and Indermohan Virk to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Calhoun, Craig J., 1952- editor. | Gerteis, Joseph, 1970- editor. | Moody, James W., editor. | Pfaff, Steven, 1970- editor. | Virk, Indermohan, editor. | John Wiley & Sons, publisher.Title: Classical sociological theory / edited by Craig Calhoun, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff, Indermohan Virk.Description: Fourth edition. | Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2022. | ncludes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2021055635 (print) | LCCN 2021055636 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119527244 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119527275 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119527237 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Sociology--History--20th century. | Sociology--Philosophy.Classification: LCC HM447 .C66 2022 (print) | LCC HM447 (ebook) | DDC 301.01--dc23/eng/20211207LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021055635LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021055636

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Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Notes on the Editors

Acknowledgements

General Introduction

Part I Symbolic Action

Introduction to Part I

1 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (from The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life) Erving Goffman

2 Symbolic Interactionism (from Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method) Herbert Blumer

3 Interaction Ritual Chains (from Interaction Ritual Chains) Randall Collins

Part II Structure and Agency

Introduction to Part II

4 A Theory of Group Solidarity (from Principles of Group Solidarity) Michael Hechter

5 Metatheory: Explanation in Social Science (from Foundations of Social Theory) James S. Coleman

6 Catnets (from Notes on the Constituents of Social Structure) Harrison White

7 Some New Rules of Sociological Method (from New Rules For Sociological Method) Anthony Giddens

Part III Institutions

Introduction to Part III

8 Economic Embeddedness Mark Granovetter

9 The Iron Cage Revisited Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell

Part IV Power and Inequality

Introduction to Part IV

10 The Power Elite (from The Power Elite) C. Wright Mills

11 Durable Inequality (from Durable Inequality) Charles Tilly

12 Power: A Radical View (from Power: A Radical View) Steven Lukes

13 Societies as Organized Power Networks (from The Sources of Social Power, Vol I. A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760) Michael Mann

Part V The Sociological Theory of Michel Foucault

Introduction to Part V

14 The History of Sexuality (from The History of Sexuality, Vol I: An Introduction) Michel Foucault

15 Discipline and Punish (from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison) Michel Foucault

Part VI The Sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu

Introduction to Part VI

16 Social Space and Symbolic Space (from “Social Space and Symbolic Space: Introduction to a Japanese Reading of Distinction”) Pierre Bourdieu

17 Structures, Habitus, Practices (from The Logic of Practice) Pierre Bourdieu

18 The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed Pierre Bourdieu

19 Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field (from Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field) Pierre Bourdieu

Part VII Race, Gender, and Intersectionality

Introduction to Part VII

20 The Theory of Racial Formation (from Racial Formation in the United States) Michael Omi and Howard Winant

21 Intellectual Schools and the Atlanta School (from The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology) Aldon D. Morris

22 The Paradoxes of Integration (from The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in Americas “Racial” Crisis) Orlando Patterson

23 The Conceptual Practices of Power (from The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge) Dorothy E. Smith

24 Black Feminist Epistemology (from Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment) Patricia Hill Collins

25 Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex Kimberle Crenshaw

26 Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research Hae Yeon Choo and Myra Marx Ferree

27 The Politics of Erased Migrations Rocio R. Garcia

Part VIII The Sociological Theory of Jürgen Habermas

Introduction to Part VIII

28 Modernity: An Unfinished Project (from Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity) Jürgen Habermas

29 The Rationalization of the Lifeworld (from The Theory of Communicative Action Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason) Jürgen Habermas

30 Civil Society and the Political Public Sphere (from Between Facts and Norms: Contribution to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy) Jürgen Habermas

Part IX Modernity

Introduction to Part IX

31 The Social Constraint towards Self-Constraint (from The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization) Norbert Elias

32 We Have Never Been Modern (from We Have Never Been Modern) Bruno Latour

33 The Civil Sphere (from The Civil Sphere) Jeffrey C. Alexander

34 Addressing Recognition Gaps: Destigmatization and the Reduction of Inequality (from American Sociological Review) Michèle Lamont

Part X Crisis and Change

Introduction to Part X

35 The Modern World-System in Crisis (from World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction) Immanuel Wallerstein

36 Conceptualizing Simultaneity Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller

37 Nationalism (from Nationalism) Craig Calhoun

38 The End May Be Nigh, But For Whom? (from Does Capitalism Have a Future?) Michael Mann

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Figures

Chapter 3

Figure 3.1 Interaction ritual.

Chapter 5

Figure 5.1 Macrosocial proposition: Calvinism encourages capitalism.

Figure 5.2 Marco- and micro-level propositions: effects of...

Chapter 6

Figure 6.1 Relation between pairs in a triad.

Figure 6.2 Venn diagram showing membership in three classes.

Figure 6.3 Mapping a neighborhood system.

Chapter 12

Figure 12.1 A conceptual map of Power and its Cognates.

Chapter 13

Figure 13.1 Forms of organizational reach.

Chapter 16

Figure 16.1 The space of social positions...

Chapter 18

Figure 18.1 Diagram of the artistic field...

Chapter 29

Figure 29.1 Contributions of reproduction processes...

Figure 29.2 Manifestations of crisis when reproduction...

Figure 29.3 Reproductive functions of action oriented...

Chapter 32

Figure 32.1 What is retained and what is rejected.

Figure 32.2 Modern/nonmodern constitution.

Chapter 34

Figure 34.1 Cultural Resources and Actors...

List of Table

Chapter 6

Table 6.1 Tabular representation of...

Guide

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Notes on the Editors

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Index

End User License Agreement

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Notes on the Editors

Craig Calhoun is University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. He was previously Director of the London School of Economics, President of the Social Science Research Council, and a professor of sociology at NYU, Columbia, and UNC Chapel Hill. Calhoun’s newest book is Degenerations of Democracy (Harvard 2022) with Dilip Gaonkar and Charles Taylor.

Joseph Gerteis is Professor of Sociology and Co-Principal Investigator of the American Mosaic Project at the University of Minnesota. He is author of Class and the Color Line (Duke University Press). His work explores issues of race and ethnicity, social boundaries and identities, and political culture. It has appeared in The Sociological Quarterly, Sociological Forum, American Sociological Review, Social Problems, and elsewhere.

James Moody is Professor of Sociology at Duke University and Director of the Duke Network Analysis Center. He has published extensively in the field of social networks, methods, and social theory with over 70 peer reviewed publications. His work focuses theoretically on the network foundations of social cohesion and diffusion, with a particular emphasis on building tools and methods for understanding dynamic social networks. He has used network models to help understand organizational performance, school racial segregation, adolescent health, disease spread, economic development, and the development of scientific disciplines.

Steven Pfaff is Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. He is the author of Exit-Voice Dynamics and the Collapse of East Germany (Duke, 2006) and, with Mimi Goldman, The Spiritual Virtuoso (Bloomsbury, 200717), and with Michael Hechter, The Genesis of Rebellion (Cambridge, 2020). He has been awarded the Social Science History Association’s President’s Award and the best book award from the European Academy of Sociology.

Indermohan Virk is the Executive Director of the Patten Foundation and the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions at Indiana University Bloomington, and she works in the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs. She was previously a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University.

Acknowledgements

The editors and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book.

PART I

Chapter 1

Erving Goffman, pp. 17–25 from The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959. © 1959 Erving Goffman. Reproduced with permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. and Penguin Books, UK.

Chapter 2

Herbert Blumer, pp. 46–8, 50–2, 78–89 from Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method, 1st edn. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969. Reproduced with permission of Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ.

Chapter 3

Randall Collins, pp. 3–4, 5, 15, 42–5, 47–54, 55–61, 62–3, 81–3, 87 from Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton University Press, 2004. © 2004 Princeton University Press. Reproduced with permission of Princeton University Press.

PART II

Chapter 4

Michael Hechter, “A Theory of Group Solidarity,” pp. 40–54 from Principles of Group Solidarity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987. Reproduced with permission of University of California Press.

Chapter 5

James S. Coleman, “Metatheory” from Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990. © 1990 The President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reproduced with permission of Harvard University Press.

Chapter 6

Harrison White, “Catnets,” from “Notes on the Constituents of Social Structure,” unpublished manuscript, 1966. Reproduced with permission of Prof. Peter S. Bearman.

Chapter 7

Anthony Giddens, “Some New Rules of Sociological Method,” pp. 155–162 from New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretive Sociologies. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Reproduced with permission of Polity Press and Stanford University Press.

PART III

Chapter 8

Mark Granovetter, “Economic Embeddedness,” pp. 481–2, 482–8, 488–9, 490–2, 492–3, 508–10 from “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91: 3 (November 1985). © 1985 American Journal of Sociology. Reproduced with permission of University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 9

Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited,” pp. 147–60 from “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields,” American Sociological Review 48: 2 (1983). © 1983 American Sociological Review. Reproduced with permission of the author and the American Sociological Association.

PART IV

Chapter 10

C. Wright Mills, pp. 3–4, 6, 7–11, 287–9, 296 from The Power Elite. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956. © 1956 Oxford University Press Inc. Reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press.

Chapter 11

Charles Tilly, pp. 6–10, 81–91, 95–99 from Durable Inequality. University of California Press, 1998. Reproduced with permission of University of California Press.

Chapter 12

Steven Lukes, pp. 16–17, 19–21, 25–30, 34–8, 58–9 from Power: A Radical View, 2nd edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 13

Michael Mann, “Societies as Organized Power Networks,” pp. 1–11, 22–28, 32 from The Sources of Social Power, Vol. I. Cambridge University Press, 1986. Reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press.

PART V

Chapter 14

Michel Foucault, pp. 135–50 from The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, translated from French by Robert Hurley. English translation © 1978 Penguin Random House LLC. Reproduced with permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Chapter 15

Michel Foucault, “Panopticism,” pp. 200–2, 215–16, 218–24 from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated from French by Alan Sheridan. English translation © 1978 Alan Sheridan. Reproduced with permission of Pantheon Books (an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC) and Penguin Books Ltd.

PART VI

Chapter 16

Pierre Bourdieu, pp. 627–38 from “Social Space and Symbolic Space: Introduction to a Japanese Reading of Distinction,” Poetics Today 12: 4 (1991). © 1991 The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University. Reproduced with permission of Duke University Press.

Chapter 17

Pierre Bourdieu, “Structures, Habitus, Practice,” from The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. English translation © 1990 Polity Press. Originally published in French as Le Sens Pratique by Les Éditions des Minuit. Original French text © 1980 Les Éditions des Minuit. Reproduced with permission of Polity Press, Stanford University Press and Les Editions de Minuit S.A.

Chapter 18

Pierre Bourdieu, pp. 312–13, 315–16, 319–26, 341–6, 349–50, 353–6 from “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed,” Poetics 12: 4–5 (1983). Reproduced with permission of Elsevier.

Chapter 19

Pierre Bourdieu, pp. 1–5, 12–18 from “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” translated by Loïc J. D. Wacquant and Samar Farage. Sociological Theory 12: 1 (March 1994). Reproduced with permission of the author and American Sociological Association.

PART VII

Chapter 20

Michael Omi and Howard Winant, “The Theory of Racial Formation,” pp. 105–112, 124–130 from Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd edition. Routledge, 2015. Reproduced with permission of Taylor & Francis Group.

Chapter 21

Aldon Morris, “Intellectual Schools and the Atlanta School,” pp. 174–189, 192–194 from The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. University of California Press, 2015. Reproduced with permission of University of California Press.

Chapter 22

Orlando Patterson, “The Paradoxes of Integration,” pp. 15–6, 64–6, 68–74, 76–7 from The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial” Crisis. Reproduced with permission of Civitas Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Chapter 23

Dorothy E. Smith, pp. 12–19, 21–7 from The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1990. © 1990 Dorothy E. Smith. Reproduced with permission of Dorothy E. Smith.

Chapter 24

Patricia Hill Collins, “Black Feminist Epistemology,” pp. 251–6, 266–71 from Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge, 2000. Reproduced with permission of Taylor & Francis Group.

Chapter 25

Kimberlé Crenshaw, pp. 139–140, 150–152, 154–60 from “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (1989), Article 8.

Chapter 26

Hae Yeon Choo and Myra Marx Ferree, “Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research,” pp. 129, 131–6, 146–7 from Sociological Theory 28: 2 (2010). Reproduced with permission of the author and American Sociological Association.

Chapter 27

Rocio R. Garcia, “The Politics of Erased Migrations: Expanding a Relational, Intersectional Sociology of Latinx Gender and Migration,” pp. 4–6, 8, 14–17 from Sociology Compass 12: 4, e12571 (2018). Reproduced with permission of John Wiley & Sons.

PART VIII

Chapter 28

Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” pp. 39–40, 42–6, 53–5 from Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, edited by Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. Reproduced with permission of The Polity Press and Surkamp Verlag.

Chapter 29

Jürgen Habermas, “The Rationalization of the Lifeworld,” pp. 119–26, 136–45, 147–8, 150–2 from The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. English translation © 1987 Beacon Press. Originally published as Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Band 2: Zur Kritikder funktionalistischen Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981). Reproduced with permission of Beacon Press.

Chapter 30

Jürgen Habermas, “Civil Society and the Political Public Sphere” from Between Facts and Norms, Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, translated by William Rehg,” pp. 331–333, 360, 362–364, 365–367, 368–370, 371, 372, 373–374, 378–379, 381–382, 385–387. © 1996 MIT Press. Reproduced with permission of MIT Press and Polity Press.

PART IX

Chapter 31

Norbert Elias, “The Social Constraint towards Self-Constraint,” pp. 443–8, 450–6 from The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978. Originally translated by Edmund Jephcott. © 1978 Norbert Elias. Reproduced with permission of John Wiley & Sons.

Chapter 32

Bruno Latour, pp. 130–45 from We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. English translation © 1993 Harvester Wheatsheaf and the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reproduced with permission of Harvard University Press.

Chapter 33

Jeffrey C. Alexander, pp. 3–9, 53–62, 64–67 from The Civil Sphere. Oxford University Press, 2006. Reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press.

Chapter 34

Michele Lamont, “Addressing Recognition Gaps: Destigmatization and the Reduction of Inequality,” pp. 420–436 from American Sociological Review 83: 3. Reproduced with permission of the author and American Sociological Association.

PART X

Chapter 35

Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Modern World-System in Crisis,” pp. 76–90 from World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Reproduced with permission of Duke University Press.

Chapter 36

Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller, “Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society,” pp. 1002–1039 from International Migration Review 38: 3 (2004). Reproduced with permission of Sage Publications.

Chapter 37

Craig J. Calhoun, pp. 1, 3–7, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 66, 92–93, 94, 99, 103, 123, 125–126 from Nationalism. Open University Press, 1997. Reproduced with permission of McGraw-Hill Education (UK) Ltd.

Chapter 38

Michael Mann, “The End May Be Nigh, But For Whom?” pp. 71–76, 83–97 from Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Does Capitalism Have a Future? Oxford University Press, 2013. Reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press.

Introduction

Sociology is the pursuit of systematic knowledge about social life, the way it is organized, how it changes, its creation in social action, and its disruption and renewal in social conflict. Sociological theory is at once an integrated account of what is known and a guide to new inquiry. It is organized scientifically to help us see the connections among different facts, relations of cause and effect, and deeper patterns of social organization and change.

But, sociological theory always comes in the form of multiple theories. Each offers a distinct perspective on society, helping us to see different dimensions of what is going on. Some difference is just a matter of focus, like looking at nature with a microscope or a telescope. Sociological theories may focus on interpersonal relations, large organizations like a corporation or an army, or overall patterns of social change and stability. But at any of these levels, sociological theories also propose different ways to look at social life.

The Classical Inheritance

Contemporary sociological theory is built on a foundation of classical theory laid down as part of Western modernization between the 18th century and the middle of the 20th century. These were remarkable but troubled years. They ran from the Enlightenment and industrial revolution through the rise of empires and then decolonization, the formation of the modern capitalist world system, two world wars, communist revolutions, Cold War, to the formation of welfare states that expanded health care, education, and other benefits. They included fantastic advances in technology, urbanization, and wealth. They also included the flourishing of the world’s first large-scale democratic societies – and long struggles to improve them because they were founded with internal contradictions, including toleration of slavery, exclusion of women, and restrictions on the rights of those without property.

Sociology was born of trying to understand all this transformation and upheaval – and also likely directions for further change and what action could shape the future of society. What we now call classical sociological theory is the most enduringly influential of this earlier work. Classical sociological theories orient us to several basic questions, revealing what is involved in different approaches to answering them. Among the most important are the following:

What are the conditions for scientific knowledge of social life?

How is society shaped by the state, and how in turn does society shape politics?

What are the social origins and impacts of markets, especially large and still expanding markets?

How do individuality, Community, and society relate to each other?

What are the fundamental differences among societies?

How have power relations among societies – such as colonialism and war – shaped individual societies and regional and global social relations?

All these questions remain active concerns for sociologists today. Sociological theories not only propose answers, but they also understand what counts as a good answer. They help us clarify basic concepts and their relations to each other. They help us develop the capacity for good judgment about what variables are likely to be important in a particular analytic problem or explanation. Even when they disagree with classical theories, contemporary sociologists measure their work by classical standards of intellectual quality.

Contemporary sociological theory has built on classical predecessors but sought both to go beyond them and to theorize new developments. Earlier theorists paid too little attention to race or to colonialism, for example. W.E.B. DuBois was an exception, showing the “problem of the color line” at work both in the racial division of the United States and in the global division shaped by European colonization. Not surprisingly, perhaps, most male theorists failed to appreciate the importance of both women’s inequality and gender as a constitutive social category. Classical theorists like Harriet Martineau and Jane Addams pointed to the issue, but men were slow to grasp it fully.

But, Du Bois, Martineau, and Addams were all clear that what they wanted was not to abandon classical sociological theory but rather to bring its analytic strengths to bear on issues it initially ignored or underestimated. Du Bois, for example, drew enthusiastically on the work of Max Weber and later Karl Marx. Martineau admired Spencer; Addams drew ideas of social evolution from the American sociologist Lester Frank Ward. What all wanted was to keep improving sociology’s intellectual inheritance and advance engagement with the key issues of their day.

What is “contemporary” of course keeps shifting. For Du Bois and Addams, the 19th century was classical, and the early 20th century was contemporary. For us, their work has become classical. Contemporary theory incorporates what is most valuable from its classical inheritance at the same time that it innovates, overcomes limits, and responds to new issues. Theorists ask, for example, whether the West is in decline or how it can renew itself.

We have drawn the line separating contemporary from classical roughly in 1968–1975. This was a period of crises and shifting directions. The year 1968 saw protest movements around the world, many sparked by the US war in Vietnam but also calling for broad social transformation. A million students marched through the streets of Paris and joined forces with as many as 10 million striking workers. In Japan as well as Europe and the United States, specific concerns of students mixed with pursuit of broader social transformation. Protests were huge in the United States, not just on college campuses but at the Chicago convention of the Democratic Party – where police repression became as famous as the protests.

Upheavals were international. Early in 1968, the Prague Spring briefly brought a progressive, potentially democratic government to Czechoslovakia before Soviet repression. Protests in Poland and Yugoslavia further signaled a crisis in the Communist bloc. Repression of dissent helped to bring stagnation that undermined communism over coming decades. 1973 brought a military coup in Chile that led to decades of right wing military dictatorship there (mirrored in some other Latin American countries). The dictators gave neoliberal economists some of their first chances to shape policy. Later in 1973, the Yom Kippur War helped to spark the transformation of OPEC into a global force controlling – and radically increasing – the price of oil. This sparked an economic crisis that famously combined high inflation with stagnant growth. Neoliberalism guided an intervention that tamed inflation but with policies that guided a long period when wealth grew but wages did not. The postwar boom ended, and inequality began to grow sharply.

Also in 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and the Great Civil Rights Movement launched in the 1950s seemed to stall. The same period saw dramatic expansion in the long struggle for women’s rights. “Second wave feminism” started in the early 1960s and continued for two decades.

In short, the era was a watershed. Sociology was deeply engaged in trying to understand social change and transformation. Some earlier work seems surprisingly contemporary. We have no doubt that some later work will soon attain the status of classics. But, most of the major conversations and controversies in contemporary sociological theory have roots in the 1960s and 1970s, and each drew in different ways on classical theory.

Symbolic and strategic interaction

In the 1960s, there was renewed interest in connecting personal life to sociological issues. The most important bridge from classical to contemporary was established in Herbert Blumer’s work in the tradition of his teacher, George Herbert Mead He named this “symbolic interactionism.” The creation of social reality, Blumer argued, is a continuous process. Positivist research methods that break this down into “variables” commonly lose touch with the meaning that was created by actors in interaction. It is important to understand society not as static structures but as potentials that people could use in their future actions and interactions.

Part of the attraction of symbolic interactionism was that it offered insight into the self and society at the same time. This suited it to an era when people placed new emphasis on self-understanding, not least in the context of expansion in the range of choices they could make about their lives. Throwing off constraints was a major theme of the 1960s, an era of Romantic enthusiasm for self-examination and self-expression. But, as contemporary sociologists showed, the ideal of perfect freedom was illusory. Even sex, drugs and rock and roll were socially organized.

No theorist was more important to this effort than Erving Goffman (excerpted here). Influenced by Mead, Durkheim, the “Chicago School” and classical sociological theory generally (and also by anthropology), Goffman resisted belonging to any one school. He pursued ethnographic studies with theoretical intent – and vast influence. In these, he sought to situate individuals not just in social relationships but in projects of creating and managing their self-understanding at the same time they managed their relations to others. Coping with embarrassment is a repeated and personally meaningful social task (even if sometimes ignored by theorists). We can think of individuals as actors in social dramas, he wrote, presenting themselves in more or less persuasive performances.

Part of what made Goffman’s work so important was his focus on ordinary people as they managed social challenges such as stigma, mental illness, repressive institutions, or simply dating in high school. He did not see society mainly through its elites, nor did he see it as obviously harmonious. In this, he fit with and shaped an era of growing appreciation for the life projects of ordinary people and a sensitivity to society as sometimes an obstacle or a challenge as well as usually a necessary condition.

Goffman was perhaps the most powerful influence in the development of “microsociology.” This focused on the small picture of face-to-face interaction, not the big picture of politics, economics, functional integration or class conflict. A successful conversation is a social achievement and not always an easy one, Goffman suggested, and commonly dependent on “interaction rituals.” Goffman’s insight informed decades of research in conversational analysis, a branch of ethnomethodology – the phenomenological study of how people create culture and meaning.

Randall Collins (excerpted here) took the theme of “interaction rituals” forward in a “radical microsociology,” seeking to complement Durkheim’s understandings of group membership and conflict with attention to the small scale and concrete. For it is not just conversation that has to be socially organized in interpersonal exchanges but also sex – or just holding hands, crime, violence, smoking or not smoking, or starting a business partnership. Institutions maintain themselves through the ritualization of interaction. Conflict results not only from the breakdown of ritual interaction chains but also from mobilizing them into contending social forces – say capitalists and workers, different religions, or police and protestors. In conflicts, action is shaped by rituals, but actors also mobilize ritual interaction chains to try to secure their objectives.

It is common to think of symbolic interactionism and interpretative microsociology generally as completely distinct from strategic or rational choice analysis. Goffman, however, made contributions to both. His accounts of the production and management of meanings and images always included attention to implicit strategies. Indeed, he coined the term “strategic interaction,” which later became the title of one of his books, including a chapter based on his presentation to a 1964 conference on “Strategic Interaction and Games” that influenced developments in international relations and economics as well as sociology and social psychology. This introduced him to the dynamic (later to be called or evolutionary) game theory being developed by Thomas Schelling (an economist and future Nobel economist). Schelling in turn cited Goffman appreciately for contributions to understanding enforcement and communication in strategic interaction.

Strategic analysis of basic sociological questions is at least as old as Thomas Hobbes’ account of why rational individuals in a “state of nature” would choose to give up their freedom for the security of a strong state. The issue remains current today as people debate whether to worry more about policy violence restricting their freedom or crime that poses a demand for policy to provide security. Obviously, balance is desirable. But, achieving balance is itself the kind of problem taken up by analysts of strategic interaction. Building on the exchange theories of George Homans and Peter Blau (both excerpted in Classical Sociological Theory), contemporary sociological theorists developed a “rational choice” approach to sociology. This was grounded in methodological individualism – the idea that a good sociological explanation had to make sense of individual action as a crucial building block. As articulated, for example, by James Coleman (excerpted here), this challenged Durkheim, Parsons, and all who approached society as a “whole” sharply distinct from individuals. Critics sometimes confused methodological individualism with a preference for individual autonomy over group solidarity. But as Michael Hechter (excerpted here) famously showed, one could provide a strong account of how rational individuals formed group solidarity.

Both studies of symbolic action and analysis of rational choice inform the idea of “agency.” This means the capacity to act effectively, accomplishing one’s own goals and potentially changing social relations. Minimal agency is involved in making a simple consumer choice – like which brand of breakfast cereal to buy. There is more when one can choose a career and acquire the education to succeed in it or start a business and secure the capital for it to flourish. This is partly a matter of resources and rational choices. But as Goffman showed, it is also a matter of communication that makes collaboration and social relationships possible. Paying attention to strategy and communication together helps to distinguish agency from action based on emotion or habit or indeed failure to think.

Without agency, people either act without direction or are dominated by social structure. This does not mean they do nothing but that their actions are highly constrained. People form relationships partly in order to get things done but also for the pleasure of the relationship itself. They invest relationships with meaning, which is mutually constituted through their interaction. Relationships in turn become factors enabling people to realize their goals. Goffman bridged what is more commonly a divide between interpretative sociology and more formal strategic analysis. Both sides inform the analysis of agency.

Structure, agency, and institutions

At its most basic, structure is the enduring patterns of social organization with which individuals must contend. They can change structure, but usually only over a long period and through collective action. Take the population structure. How many people are young and how many are old will have a big impact on markets, need for schools or old age care, hospitals and sports fields. The age distribution changes if young people marry earlier and have more babies, but the influence of any one pair of parents is small. It will change if more immigrants are accepted, but this depends on politics and policy, not just individual choices.

Structural patterns are slow to change. Many constraints are produced and reproduced beyond the direct, conscious choices of individuals. Sociologists also want to know how much agency individuals or groups have in guiding this change, but the answer is never complete and full autonomy. Simply to celebrate action without considering constraints is unrealistic. And, constraint is not all conservatism. Consider Georg Simmel’s famous contrast of dyads and triads (considered in Classical Sociological Theory). These are structural forms. A relationship between two people is changed if a third is introduced. And, there are more complicated versions. Group size is an example. If you mix two groups of very different size, equal contact will have different consequences for each. If a college is 10% black and 90% white, for example, black students will be far more exposed to their white classmates than vice versa. If there are more boys than girls at a dance (or vice versa), guess who will have more trouble finding partners.1

Networks work in a similar way. They are material realities based on numbers and patterns of relationships. We can grasp networks intuitively: who do we know? But, this is only part of the story. As the contemporary sociological theorist Harrison White (excerpted here) pointed out, we should also ask who do we not know? Think of a high school class where everyone seems to know the popular social stars – but there are many people they fail to recognize. The same logic applies to getting jobs. What credentials you gather is important – degrees and work experience make you a more attractive employee. But, the most important factor is not anything about you – it is whether or not there is a vacancy.

Networks have become an important theme for contemporary sociological theory, entwined with more and more robust empirical analytical techniques. They help to explain everything from transmission of diseases to chances for upward mobility. Networks, in this sense, are distinct from categories. Sociologists had long studied whether people were male or female, old or young, and native born or immigrants. All these categories correlate with social inequality and opportunities, and all are important. But, networks focus more on specific positions in webs of relationships. Not just male or female, but head of household or not. Not just old or young, but boss or employee. Not just native or immigrant, but connected to local elites or only to others in disadvantaged populations. Harrison White’s work showed that networks and categories had distinct effects but also that the strongest groups were those in which category and network coincided.

The social bases for agency were challenged by the rising prominence of neoliberal economic ideology. This is the view that social policy should be guided entirely by the preferences and interests of individuals, especially individual owners of property. It is closely related to the classical liberalism that so appalled Karl Polanyi (excerpted in Classical Sociological Theory) when it led economists to endorse cutting welfare benefits to those who lost their jobs because of technological change that benefitted the wealthy. In 1987, the neoliberal UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher captured the notion so starkly that she inadvertently caricatured it, saying: “there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.”2 Needless to say, this view was not widespread among sociologists.

Contemporary sociological theorists analyzing markets generally side with Polanyi and emphasize what he called “embeddedness.” Markets are not an escape from society but very much a part of it. Take applying for a job. This is an action, and it may build on earlier actions like acquiring educational credentials. But, as Mark Granovetter (excerpted here) showed, social networks shape who has access to information about new job openings. Those with friends and family in good jobs have an advantage. Their social relationships combine with their individual initiative to give them greater agency to realize their goals.

Neither structure nor agency is simply the “right” point of view. They are both important dimensions of social life. But, they are difficult to reconcile. This became a major focus for sociological theory. It is not enough simply to say “balance.” It is important to see how categories and relationships are constructed out of meaningful action as well as how they constrain us as structures. It is important to see that structures not only constrain us but also empower us to get jobs or launch social movements. Anthony Giddens (excerpted here) called for “new rules of sociological method” designed to reconcile the two perspectives.

There is also more to social life than structures and actions – even actions with lots of agency. There are, for example, institutions. Whether we speak of family or religion or business corporations, institutions are a combination of structure, patterned ways of action, and cultural meanings. Families can be larger or smaller, for example, and the (structural) trend has been toward fewer children. Family members do not act randomly toward each other but take up more or less common roles (patterned ways of action). At least in principle, parents provide for children, secure their education, make sure they have medical care, and so forth. And families are products of culture. Are they formed of arranged marriages or love matches? How many children couples think they should have or at what age they should have them are views reproduced in culture not merely among individuals. So too how strongly children feel they should care for aging parents.

Specific families, or religious organizations, or business corporations all learn from each other. As Walter Power and Paul Dimaggio (excerpted here) argue, they both imitate and adapt to each other within fields. In essence, families look at other families to see how they should behave. But, they cannott look at all families; they look at those in the same country, and probably class, region, and religion. Likewise, business organizations in an industry will resemble each other more and more. This is not necessarily a matter of conscious choice. It is a matter of what possible actions or structures seem sensible, something that may be partly materially objective but is largely a matter of shared culture. The result is what they call “institutional isomorphism.” Companies in the same industry or schools competing for the same students come to look like each other. As Powell and Dimaggio make clear, following Max Weber, this need not be either the result of happy functional integration or of coercive power. It is a pattern produced out of individual actions that in the aggregate become social pressures. Likewise, as Granovetter argues, there are many individual decisions in markets, but they are not the whole story. Markets are embedded in social institutions.

Power and Inequality

Pursuit of stability and prosperity were dominant concerns in the decades after World War II and the Great Depression. Functionalist sociology was dominant partly because it spoke to the desire for social order and gradual improvement. And, in fact, the years after 1945 saw a great deal of orderly progress, building new institutions, and improving social conditions. In France, they came to be called “les trente glorieuses” – the thirty glorious years. In the United States, it was “the postwar boom.”

This was an era of building state institutions to provide social support – education, health care, social security, public media, and more. It was an era of relative cooperation between capital and labor. These still had competing interests, of course, but for a time they found negotiated solutions within the frame of “organized capitalism,” based largely on public regulation to avoid disruptive confrontations.3 Nonetheless, for all the eras achieved, there were internal tensions or even contradictions. These became drivers for transformations – including in sociological theory.

Sociologists had always been attentive to power, inequality and difference, but during the period of functionalist dominance after World War II, theoretical emphasis fell overwhelmingly on social integration, consensus, and factors that held society together. When Parsons and other functionalists used the word “power,” for example, the emphasis was on the overall capacity of a society, the “systemic” character of social life, and the extent to which social organization fit together so that every feature was necessary to the whole. But, Parsons was less concerned with the ways in which some people wielded power over others and the extent to which such domination shaped social organization.4

A new generation of theorists criticized the implicit conservatism in this. They saw functionalist sociology as too supportive of the existing social structure, too focused on achieving stability. While Parsons drew widely on earlier sociological theory, he sidestepped Marx. The new generation looked for different classics largely to help them analyze the inequalities and conflicts they saw in contemporary society. Interest in Parsons declined, and there was new attention to Marx.

Sociological theory was also reshaped by new readings of the classics. While Parsons’ interpretation of Weber emphasized legitimate authority, the new generation focused on Weber’s critical analyses of oppressive rationalization. They integrated this with Marx’s early writings about alienation in the experience of work as much as his mature theory of capitalism as a system. There was a renewal of interest in Adorno, Hokheimer, and other critical theorists who analyzed how social psychology and the construction of knowledge entwined to support authority and close off paths to liberation in modern society. Herbert Marcuse, for example, saw the new consumer capitalism as basic to a “one-dimensional society” that stifled creativity.

More and more sociological theorists presented a model of society in which tensions and struggles were basic and unity was largely maintained by power.5 Environmentalists condemned exhaustion of resources, dumping of waste, and damaging side effects of new products. Sociologists of gender argued that better kitchen appliances did not compensate for consigning women to work in the domestic sphere. Sociologists of race pointed to inequalities in education, housing, and other dimensions of what were supposedly well-integrated societies. Many younger sociologists identified with the “New Left” that developed in the 1960s. This built on the history of labor struggles but contrasted itself with the Old Left that saw economic issues as always primary. It embraced traditions of radical democracy, the struggle for Civil Rights, and the peace movement.

C. Wright Mills (excerpted here) famously documented the existence of a “power elite.” This was more than a matter of simple inequality. Members of this elite were connected to each other across fields and professions, for example, generals to bankers, politicians to lawyers. They went to the same schools and belonged to the same organizations, like the Council on Foreign Affairs or certain clubs in New York. They were not only privileged; through these connections, they exerted power. Relatedly, Steven Lukes (excerpted here) showed that power was reflected not only in the making of decisions but also in determining what decisions would be on the agenda and shaped the very wants, desires, and attitudes of citizens.

Michael Mann (also excerpted here) offered perhaps the most fundamental theory of social power.6 This was not, he suggested, just a matter of influence or even control exercised in society. Societies themselves were and are organized as power networks. Power was deployed hierarchically, of course, but also laterally, determining who and what was brought into a particular network. And, power was evident not only in explicit domination like that of a boss over subordinates but also in forms like what Mann called “infrastructural power” – the capacity to extend bureaucratic systems at a distance. In modern societies, states are able to exert influence and collect taxes as effectively at the geographical edges of countries as at the center.

Mann and other sociologists of the next generation shared with functionalism the question of how society was held together at a large scale. Parsons had called this “the problem of order,” tracing it back to Thomas Hobbes. His answer was basically that order was achieved by a system in which the different parts of society met each other’s needs and those of society as a whole. Schools, for example, met industry’s needs for educated (but also disciplined) workers. Industry in turn met consumers’ needs for products. Together, they contributed to society’s overall prosperity. But when functionalists said that the social system “worked,” critics asked “worked for whom?” Their answers pointed attention to patterns of inequality.

Inequality can of course be organized in different ways, from slavery to a feudal hierarchy to the special privileges bureaucrats and party officials have enjoyed in communist societies. In modern capitalist democracies, citizens are at least legally free to pursue different careers, but they are rewarded unequally. Functionalists, like many economists, have argued that differences in wages and salaries mainly reflect a necessary incentive system.7 Critics charge that this might justify some inequality, but not the amount typical of modern capitalist societies.

The “incentive” view fits better when there is a high level of social mobility – that is, when large numbers of people are able to move up in the social hierarchy. This was characteristic of Europe and the United States, as the middle class expanded after WWII. Since the 1970s, rates of social mobility have declined sharply. Inheritance explains more of people’s economic opportunities – like whether their families can help them buy houses. Not only do more people now find upward mobility blocked, many also experience downward mobility, for example, by losing good jobs with benefits and becoming unemployed or forced to accept work closer to the minimum wage. It is often the same categories of people who inherit better opportunities or more constrained life chances. As Charles Tilly (excerpted here) showed, inequality can be structural and durable without being the result of functional imperatives.

Indeed, in almost all the capitalist democracies, inequality has grown more extreme since the middle of the 1970s.8 In the 1950s, CEOs were paid about 20 times what a typical worker earned. In the United States, they now make more than 300 times the average worker’s pay. This is not only higher than it used to be, it is higher than in other successful capitalist countries – such as Norway, for example, or France. Pay differentials are shaped by culture and power, not just functional necessity. It is no accident that the United States has not only the highest levels of CEO compensation in the world but also the most violent history of resistance to labor organizing.

More generally, contemporary sociologists point out that inequalities of wealth may be both more extreme and more durable than inequalities of income. The gap between those with $100,000 salaries and those with only $50,000 salaries is real, but it pales by comparison with the gap between those with billions of dollars in assets and all those who must sell their labor to live. It is easier to move wealth – capital – from one country to another or from the manufacturing industry to high-tech IT companies; it is much harder for workers to adjust when their jobs vanish.

Upward mobility is associated with societies in which there are many relatively permeable layers. Sociological theorists contrast such “stratification” systems with class inequality in which divides are sharper. Marx emphasized the categorical difference between owners of the means of production (capitalists) and workers who had no choice but to sell their labor. Class inequality remains a basic concern for sociological theory. It shapes every aspect of social structure.

In and after the 1960s, however, other dimensions of inequality demanded increased attention. Previous analyses of class have often emphasized the situation of white men, but race, ethnicity, and gender have also been basic dimensions of inequality. In each case, power has been mobilized to maintain inequality. And, there are other dimensions: sexual orientation, disability, and immigration status. In each case, contemporary sociological theorists are attentive not only to material inequality but also to issues of voice, cultural expression, and recognition of difference. They focus not only on the explicit exercise of interpersonal power but also on the ways in which culture and social structure distribute power unequally. Even a seemingly equal interaction between men and women or Black and White citizens is typically shaped by their previous experience of established inequalities and power dynamics. Likewise, unequal pay is not just a matter of pay for workers in exactly the same job but also cultural norms for workers in similar jobs. Women working as nurses and teachers are required to have high levels of education but are paid less than men in other occupations with similar requirements.

More generally, contemporary sociology has come to see inequality as a matter of cultural as well as economic capital and of the influence of each on the other.9 Inequalities are reproduced when parents are able to get their children better education than others. They are shaped by the neighborhoods in which families live. They are shaped by accents in people’s speech.

Bourdieu

The most important theorist of the interrelationship of culture and inequality was Pierre Bourdieu (excerpted here). Bourdieu showed ways in which inequality was reproduced through a combination of culture, social structure, and individual internalization and the challenges of achieving agency for change. We do not just follow norms or rules, we develop habitual ways of acting. Bourdieu called this the “habitus.” But this is not just habit; it is also how we improvise new actions, even in new contexts, on the basis of our previous experiences. It is how a basketball player knows when to pass and how a stand-up comedian knows the timing crucial to a joke.10

What becomes a part of us in this way is shaped by structural patterns in society, but not so much in the abstract as in the ways we encounter them. We internalize the class structure, for example, from the perspective of where we started out and a trajectory of how we did in school, job applications and promotions, treatment by other individuals – even dating! – and institutions like banks. Our experience of inequality is shaped not only by economic capital – money – but also by cultural capital.