Download or read book Order and Agency in Modernity written by Kwang-ki Kim and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Power in Modernity written by Isaac Ariail Reed and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Isaac Reed's Power in Modernity aims to be a major contribution to social theory. It is a bold and innovative theoretical reimagining of power. Drawing on an eclectic range of ideas from across the humanities and social sciences, Reed rethinks the fundamentals of sociological theorizing of power-upsetting canonical traditions and remaking them with insights from poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies. First, Reed conceptualizes power as having three aspects: relational, discursive, and performative. He explores these aspects in relation to three different kinds of social actors-rector, agent, and other-and their connections. In essence, Reed brings power in the actions of individuals into relation with a wide range of institutional circumstances of power while neatly finessing the outmoded agency/structure binary. The result is a framework for the analysis of power that allows us to see both its sometimes fragile and precarious character, as well as its more typical stability and durability. We also get a window onto the episodic performances of power and how they institutionalize or unravel social orders. Power in Modernity is sure to be of interest to political sociologists and social theorists especially, and it will serve sociologists and other social scientists well who are interested in how power operates across many different social situations"--
Download or read book Ethnomethodology s Program written by Harold Garfinkel and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2002 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Foundations of Modernity written by Isa Blumi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-06-16 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Challenging Women s Agency Activism Eahb written by WIESNER-HANKS and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining women's agency in the past has taken on new urgency in the current moment of resurgent patriarchy, Women's Marches, and the global #MeToo movement. The essays in this collection consider women's agency in the Renaissance and early modern period, an era that also saw both increasing patriarchal constraints and new forms of women's actions and activism. They address a capacious set of questions about how women, from their teenage years through older adulthood, asserted agency through social practices, speech acts, legal disputes, writing, viewing and exchanging images, travel, and community building. Despite family and social pressures, the actions of girls and women could shape their lives and challenge male-dominated institutions. This volume includes thirteen essays by scholars from many disciplines, which analyze people, texts, objects, and images from many different parts of Europe, as well as things and people that crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Download or read book Reflexive Modernization written by Ulrich Beck and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three prominent social thinkers discuss how modern society is undercutting its formations of class, stratum, occupations, sex roles, the nuclear family, and more. Reflexive modernization, or the way one kind of modernization undercuts and changes another, has wide ranging implications for contemporary social and cultural theory, as this provocative book demonstrates.
Download or read book Anthony Giddens and Modern Social Theory written by Kenneth Tucker and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1998-09-24 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Remaking Modernity written by Julia Adams and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-02 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVA sociology collection reviewing the state-of-historical-study in a wide range of areas while showcasing the use of poststructuralist approaches to studying family, gender, war, protest & revolution, state-making, social provisions, colonialism, trans/div
Download or read book Culture and Agency written by Margaret Scotford Archer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-09-26 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Margaret Archer's Culture and Agency was first published in 1988, and proved a seminal contribution to social theory and the case for the role of culture in sociological thought. Described in Sociological Review as 'a timely and sophisticated treatment', the book showed that the 'problems' of culture and agency, on the one hand, and structure and agency, on the other, could be solved using the same analytical framework. In this revised edition of Culture and Agency, Margaret Archer contextualises her argument in 1990s cultural sociology and links it explicitly to her latest book, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Download or read book More Studies in Ethnomethodology written by Kenneth Liberman and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Phenomenological analyses of the orderliness of naturally occurring collaboration.
Download or read book Talcott Parsons written by Dr Shaun Best and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-12-28 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is not a conventional biography but an attempt to explore the motives and intentions that underpin Talcott Parsons’ published work by exploring the reasoning Parsons shares with his readers in the pages of his many published works and the possible links between Parsons’ academic outputs and the social, economic and political situations in which Parsons found himself during the course of his life. Shaun Best brings together biography and the sociology of knowledge to demonstrate that there are links between the phases of Parsons theorizing the political, economic and social problems facing the United States; the circumstances in which he found himself and the intellectual decisions he made about what to publish. The assumption which underpins Parsons’ work is that knowledge is produced by people in particular historical conditions, grounded in sensory experience, exercising choice, judgment and reflection on those experiences. Thus, this book explores and evaluates Parsons’ ideas and arguments in relation to developments in social theory since the 1970s.
Download or read book The Transformation of Modernity written by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2001: For over 30 years it has been argued that contemporary society is undergoing a fundamental transformation. The portrait of the modern society or modernity offered by philosophers and social scientists from Hobbes to Parsons is no longer understood as a description of the final and highest stage in the social evolution of mankind. Modern society is not the end of history but simply another more or less contingent social and cultural formation on planet earth. This new perspective on modernity and its transformation, which has emerged from the modernist-postmodernist debate, is the subject matter of this book. It is addressed in a multidisciplinary and international way, both theoretically and empirically, and is explored not only in general and historical terms, but also through specific topics such as sexuality, identity, democracy, globalization, knowledge and leadership. Offering an important collaborative contribution to contemporary discourse in sociology, social psychology, politics and philosophy, this book represents a unique effort to come to grips with our obscure and elusive social position at the start of the 21st century.
Download or read book Social Theory and Modern Sociology written by Anthony Giddens and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Organising Modernity written by John Law and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 1993-12-08 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this important theoretical and empirical statement John Law argues against the purity of post-enlightenment political and social theory, and offers an alternative post-modern sociology. Arguing in favor of a sociology of verbs, he suggests that power, organizations, mind-body dualisms, and macro-micro distinctions may all be understood as the local performance of recursive modes of social ordering. Drawing on a range of theoretical traditions including actor-network theory, verstehende sociology, and the writing of Michel Foucault, he explores the production of materials - including agents and architectures - and their importance for these modes of ordering. The book, which draws on organizational ethnography to develop its argument, is essential reading for all those interested in social theory, materialism, or the sociology of organizations at the end of the era of high modernity.
Download or read book Relocating Agency written by Olakunle George and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Muslim Subjectivities in Global Modernity written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-09 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gives an account of the ways in which Islamic traditions have contributed to the construction of modern Muslim selfhoods. They underpin Eisenstadt’s argument that religious traditions can play a pivotal role in the historically different interpretations of modernity.
Download or read book Theorising Modernity written by Martin O'Brien and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-10 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is modernity? Do we all experience modernity in the same way? How should we understand contemporary social change? This volume explores questions of modernity through critical engagements with the work of Anthony Giddens, focusing in particular on the relationships between his social theory and political sociology. Three substantive areas - reflexivity, environment and identity - are examined theoretically through the relationships between reflexivity and rationality, life politics and institutional power, and universalism and 'difference'. As well as specifically addressing Giddens' reconstruction of sociology, the contributors also explore a wide variety of critical issues currently occupying centre stage in social theory. These include questions about the character of contemporary societies, the periodisation of social change, the processes of change by which societies are constantly made and remade by people, the relationships between the 'social' and the 'natural', the formation and maintenance of identities and matters of epistemology and methodology in social science. Theorising Modernity will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociology, modern political thought, social geography and social policy and to social scientists trying to make sense of the modernity debate. Martin O'Brien is Research at the University of Derby. Sue Penna is a Lecturer in Applied Social Science at Lancaster University. Colin Hay is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK), a Visiting Fellow of the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) and Research Affiliate of the Centre for European Studies at Harvard University (US).
