Social Theory Today - Softcover

a This is an excellent collection of essays which, now that it has been published in paperback, deserves to reach a wide audience. It provides a comprehensive survey of current issues in social theory, although the collection is of interest as much for the authors it brings together as for the topics they cover.a Sociology a Social Theory Todayis a highly useful and satisfying work ... In the first place Anthony Giddens and Jonathan Turner have comprehensively charted their own field ... In the second place, [they] have been largely successful in persuading their authors to observe a consistent format ... Finally, Giddens and Turner, thanks to their own personal standing as productive and original practitioners of sociological theory, have been able to enlist the collaboration of a number of highly distinguished authors.a Times Higher Education Supplement

Social theory has undergone dramatic changes over the past fifteen years. The aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive survey of those changes, and an authoritative statement on current trends of development in social thought. The contents of the book range in a systematic way across the major traditions of social theory prominent today. Among the topics covered are the relationships between modern social theory and the classics of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the connections between social theory and mathematical social science; and, the logical status of generalizations in the social sciences. Traditions of thought discussed include: behaviourism; symbolic interactionism; Parsonian theory; analytical theory; structuralism and post-structuration theory; world systems theory; and, Marxism and critical theory. The highly distinguished group of contributors comprises Jeffrey Alexander, Ira Cohen, Anthony Giddens, John Heritage, George Homans, Axel Honneth, Hans Joas, Ralph Miliband, R. Munch, Jonathan H. Turner, Immanuel Wallerstein and Thomas Wilson.