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In this unique analysis of three prominent theorists of modern sociology, theory is understood as implicitly, but importantly, reflecting especially modern problems of individual and social life. From the grand-theoretical systems of Talcott Parsons to the unique symbolic interactionism of Erving Goffman and the radically mundane ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel, a wide variety of noted sociological theories have addressed central issues of sociology against the backdrop of modern society. When this modern backdrop is brought into the foreground of analysis, sociological theories assume new depth and breadth and new historical significance. The author outlines features of the modern experience, drawing upon neglected cultural theorists of modernity, and then shows how these features of modernity are reflected and incorporated in the scholarship of Parsons, Goffman, and Garfinkel. The result is an original and eclectic analysis that illuminates previously overlooked dimensions to modern sociological theory, and suggests new possibilities for meaningful and rewarding comparisons between theoretical traditions.
In Power in Modernity, Isaac Ariail Reed proposes a bold new theory of power that describes overlapping networks of delegation and domination. Chains of power and their representation, linking together groups and individuals across time and space, create a vast network of intersecting alliances, subordinations, redistributions, and violent exclusions. Reed traces the common action of “sending someone else to do something for you” as it expands outward into the hierarchies that control territories, persons, artifacts, minds, and money. He mobilizes this theory to investigate the onset of modernity in the Atlantic world, with a focus on rebellion, revolution, and state formation in colonial North America, the early American Republic, the English Civil War, and French Revolution. Modernity, Reed argues, dismantled the “King’s Two Bodies”—the monarch’s physical body and his ethereal, sacred second body that encompassed the body politic—as a schema of representation for forging power relations. Reed’s account then offers a new understanding of the democratic possibilities and violent exclusions forged in the name of “the people,” as revolutionaries sought new ways to secure delegation, build hierarchy, and attack alterity. Reconsidering the role of myth in modern politics, Reed proposes to see the creative destruction and eternal recurrence of the King’s Two Bodies as constitutive of the modern attitude, and thus as a new starting point for critical theory. Modernity poses in a new way an eternal human question: what does it mean to be the author of one’s own actions?
Since the 1967 publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology, Harold Garfinkel has indelibly influenced the social sciences and humanities worldwide. This new book, the long-awaited sequel to Studies, comprises Garfinkel's work over three decades to further elaborate the study of ethnomethodology. 'Working out Durkheim's Aphorism, ' the title used for this new book, emphasizes Garfinkel's insistence that his position focuses on fundamental sociological issues--and that interpretations of his position as indifferent to sociology have been misunderstandings. Durkheim's aphorism states that the concreteness of social facts is sociology's most fundamental phenomenon. Garfinkel argues that sociologists have, for a century or more, ignored this aphorism and treated social facts as theoretical, or conceptual, constructions. Garfinkel in this new book shows how and why sociology must restore Durkheim's aphorism, through an insistence on the concreteness of social facts that are produced by complex social practices enacted by participants in the social order. Garfinkel's new book, like Studies, will likely stand as another landmark in sociological theory, yet it is clearer and more concrete in revealing human social practices.
Innovatively looking at the complex interactions between indigenous peoples and modern imperialism in Arabia and Balkans, Foundations of Modernity challenges previous analytical models that attempt to capture the complexity of human interactions during the1800-1912 period in ways that instigates the paradigmatic shift of the "Euro-centric" perspective of modern world history.
Anthony Giddens is widely recognized as one of the most important sociologists of the post-war period. This is the first full-length work to examine Giddens′ social theory. It guides the reader through Giddens′ early attempt to overcome the duality of structure and agency. He saw this duality as a major failing of social theories of modernity. His attempt to resolve the problem can be regarded as the key to the development of his brandmark `structuration theory′. The book is the most complete and thorough assessment of Giddens′ work currently available. It incorporates insights from many different perspectives into his theory of structuration, his work on the formation of cultural identities and the fate of the nation-state. This far-reaching work also touches on issues such as the transformation of modern intimacy and sexuality, and the fate of politics in late modern society.
This new introduction to the sociology of gender and sexuality provides fresh insight into our rapidly changing attitudes towards sex and our understanding of masculine and feminine identities, relating the study of gender and sexuality to recent research and theory, and wider social concerns throughout the world.
2003 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Combining a sustained critical engagement of Anglo-American theory with focused close-readings of major African writers, this book performs a long-overdue cross-fertilization of ideas among poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, and African literature. The author examines several influential figures in current theory such as Habermas, Althusser, Laclau and Mouffe, as well as the theorists of postcolonialism, and offers an extended reading of the Nigerian writers D.O. Fagunwa, Wole Soyinka, Amos Tutuola, and Chinua Achebe. He argues that contrary to what the purism and voluntarism common to postcolonial theory might suggest, one lesson of African letters is that significant agency can result from acts that are blind to their determinations. For George, African letters offer an instance of "agency-in-motion," as opposed to agency in theory.
In this book Anthony Giddens addresses a range of issues concerning current developments in social theory, relating them to the prospects for sociology in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Composed of closely integrated papers, all written over the past few years, the book includes seven essays not previously published, plus two have not appeared in English before. In assessing the likely future evolution of sociology in particular, and the social sciences in general, the author both draws upon ideas established in his more abstract theoretical writings and examines critically competing traditions of thought. Those looking for an accessible introduction to Gidden's writing will find in this book a set of clear expositions of his basic ideas. By situating these ideas in relation to the critical assessment of the views of others, however, the author provides new sources of insight into the distinctiveness of his own claims.
Phenomenological analyses of the orderliness of naturally occurring collaboration.
Today we hear much talk of crisis and comparisons are often made with the Great Depression of the 1930s, but there is a crucial difference that sets our current malaise apart from the 1930s: today we no longer trust in the capacity of the state to resolve the crisis and to chart a new way forward. In our increasingly globalized world, states have been stripped of much of their power to shape the course of events. Many of our problems are globally produced but the volume of power at the disposal of individual nation-states is simply not sufficient to cope with the problems they face. This divorce between power and politics produces a new kind of paralysis. It undermines the political agency that is needed to tackle the crisis and it saps citizens’ belief that governments can deliver on their promises. The impotence of governments goes hand in hand with the growing cynicism and distrust of citizens. Hence the current crisis is at once a crisis of agency, a crisis of representative democracy and a crisis of the sovereignty of the state. In this book the world-renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and fellow traveller Carlo Bordoni explore the social and political dimensions of the current crisis. While this crisis has been greatly exacerbated by the turmoil following the financial crisis of 2007-8, Bauman and Bordoni argue that the crisis facing Western societies is rooted in a much more profound series of transformations that stretch back further in time and are producing long-lasting effects. This highly original analysis of our current predicament by two of the world’s leading social thinkers will be of interest to a wide readership.