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The Shape of Sociology for the 21st Century
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The Shape of Sociology for the 21st Century
Tradition and Renewal

Edited by:


April 2012 | 360 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd

"This is an important and thought-provoking collection of contemporary articles on the current crisis in social theory."
- Professor Roger Penn, Lancaster University

"With a comprehensive vision, great sociologists from around the world address the challenges of the new century."
- Professor Michael Burawoy
, University of California, Berkeley

Over the past century, the field of sociology has experienced extraordinary expansion and vitality. But is this growth positive or negative - a promise of diversity or a threat of fragmentation?

This critical volume explores the meaning of sociology and sociological knowledge in light of the recent growth and institutionalization of the discipline. A stellar group of international authors powerfully identify, question, and transform key assumptions in sociology.

Leading us through the challenges faced by sociology, and the possible strategies for addressing them in the future, the book includes key issues such as:

  • globalization
  • development
  • social policy
  • inequality.

An important companion for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers engaged with contemporary sociological theory, sociology of knowledge and sociological analysis.

Devorah Kalekin-Fishman and Ann Denis
Introduction: The Foreseeable Future of Sociology
 
PART I: THEORIZING SOCIOLOGY: FROM PAST TO FUTURE
Michel Wieviorka
Chapter 2: Recent Changes in Sociology
Piotr Sztompka
Chapter 3: On Inter-Human Space
Devorah Kalekin-Fishman
Chapter 4: From Modernity to Globality
Sylvia Walby
Chapter 5: Integrating the Analysis of Complex Inequalities and Globalization into the Heart of Social Theory Using Complexity Theory
 
PART II: SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Emilio Lamo de Espinosa
Chapter 6: Beyond Three Constitutive Ideas of Classical Sociology - Globalization, Post-Modernity and Reflexivity
Elisa P. Reis
Chapter 7: The Shape of Sociology - Looking at the History of our Present
Dennis Smith
Chapter 8: Dimensions of World-Making - Thoughts from the Caspian Sea
 
PART III: FOCUS ON CONCEPTS
Lauren Langman
Chapter 9: Identity in the Global Age - Hegemony, Resistance and Social Transformation
Michael Humphrey
Chapter 10: Community as Social Metaphor - The Need for a Genealogy of Social Collectivities
Julia Evetts
Chapter 11: Professions and Professionalism - Perspectives from the Sociology of Professional Groups
 
PART IV: UNCONSCIOUS AND CONSCIOUS DIFFERENTIATION IN SOCIOLOGY
Raewyn Connell
Chapter 12: Sociology's Narratives of Global Change
Gabriele Rosenthal
Chapter 13: A Plea for a More Interpretive, More Empirical and More Historical Sociology
Larissa Titarenko
Chapter 14: Post-Soviet Sociology as a Pattern of 'Another Sociology'
 
PART V: UNRESOLVED CHALLENGES
Jan Marie Fritz
Chapter 15: Including Sociological Practice - A Global Perspective and the US Case
Pirkkoliisa Ahponen
Chapter 16: A Cultural Transformation - The Design of Alienation in the Guise of Creativity
Marvin Prosono
Chapter 17: 'Bystander Sociology' and the Sonderbehandlung of the Social
Susan A. McDaniel
Chapter 18: Precarious Disciplinary Intersections and Inconvenient Truths
Emma Porio
Chapter 19: Policy-Driven Research, Audit Culture, and Power - Transforming Sociological Practices in the Philippines
 
PART VI: LOOKING AHEAD
Ann Denis
Chapter 20: Sociology in the 21st Century - Embracing Complexity, Diversity and a Global Perspective

Sociology, itself a moment of the self-reflexive nature of modernity, periodically makes itself an object of reflection. This collection of papers, artfully brought together by Devorah Kalekin and Anne Dennis, by many of the leading sociologists of the ISA, covers a wide range of topics and perspectives that are crucial for understanding our time and how sociology shows both greater specialization of interests and at the same time, more interdisciplinary approaches - all of which are contextualized by the ever growing globality of our age - which includes the growing interests in sociology. It is mandatory reading for those concerned with where international sociology is and where it its going. And given the range of topics - it is a very enjoyable read.

Professor Lauren Langman
Loyola University Chicao

All sociologists (and would-be sociologists) are interested in where their discipline is going and it is the backdrop to many conversations amongst those involved with the discipline, but serious discussion about the future is seldom broached. These essays from a workshop of luminaries associated with ISA build on a slim thread of earlier work by carefully updating and extending assessments of the discipline's past and by assaying its potentials. Their empirically-grounded examinations of the relationships between changing social realities (including a widening focus on the Global South) and the cognitive and social organisation of the discipline make the contributions particularly valuable.

Professor Charles Crothers
Auckland University of Technology

This is an important and thought-provoking collection of contemporary articles on the current crisis in social theory.

Professor Roger Penn
Lancaster University

With a comprehensive vision, great sociologists from around the world address the challenges of the new century.

Professor Michael Burawoy
University of California, Berkeley

The book itself is the product of a genuinely international effort and it would be wrong not to recognize this dimension. It arose from an initiative in 2008 in the International Sociological Association and contains nineteen chapters – there is some disproportion (over half) of authors from English-speaking countries of majority-European extraction (Australia, Canada, UK, USA), with a smattering of other individual authors from Continental Europe, leaving sole representatives from Belarus, Brazil, Israel and The Philippines.

Chris Husbands
LSE Review of Books

Sample Materials & Chapters

Introduction


For instructors

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ISBN: 9780857021298
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