Sociological Theory (original) (raw)
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Before theory comes theorizing or how to make social science more interesting
The British journal of sociology, 2016
The basic argument in this article is that sociology and social science more generally are today severely hampered by the lack of attention being paid to theory. Methods--qualitative as well as quantitative methods--have proven to be very useful in practical research (as opposed to theory); and as a result they dominate modern social science. They do not, however, do the job that belongs to theory. One way to redress the current imbalance between methods and theory, it is suggested, would be to pay more attention to theorizing, that is, to the actual process that precedes the final formulation of a theory; and in this way improve theory. Students of social science are today primarily exposed to finished theories and are not aware of the process that goes into the production and design of a theory. Students need to be taught how to construct a theory in practical terms ('theorizing'); and one good way to do so is through exercises. This is the way that methods are being taugh...
The introduction to The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory provided an interesting metaphor explaining the nature and work of social theory, including sociological theory (Turner, 2009). He said that we can imagine theory as a scaffold built around a building that is the social reality. This scaffold helps sociologists move around with some ease, take a look at the nooks and corners of the social building, and gain a better understanding of it. It also helps us gauge which parts of the social building we have no idea of, and for which parts we need to build further scaffolding to investigate¹. Social theories, including sociological theories, are basically concepts or ideas or sets of concepts or ideas developed by people to better understand and explain their social surroundings. At their simplest, they are regularly developed and used by all of us. The popular idea that shopkeepers and autorickshaw drivers charge more when they know that the customer is someone new in town and uninformed is a rudimentary social theory. Same goes for the ever present fear of many elders that society in the hands of the new youth is at the verge of collapse. We all observe our social surroundings (though often unsystematically) and draw conclusions from our observations. This helps us make sense of our extremely complicated and somewhat debilitating world. They provide order amidst chaos by categorizing and labeling social realities, and offer a range of predictions. They help us choose our everyday course of action in social settings.
Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology, 2010
Developing a distinctive disciplinary vantage point is crucial to becoming a professional. Thesis writing at the Master's level allows the professional opportunity of thinking and writing independently. For students of Sociology in particular, it is fundamental to recognize that the social is everywhere. There is nothing that is not socially constituted. Further on, a Sociology student should develop the sociological vantage point in order to see how the social is constituted. This the student can do by engaging and ‘dialoguing' with well-known sociological theorists. The student will then be able to think about how and why societies are historically constituted, how and why societies are diverse, internally differentiated and hierarchized and how and why societies transform themselves. They will learn to unravel the relationship between different levels of a society. In addition, they will also learn the significance of the structure even as they visualize historical human ...
Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research, 2001
If we placed ourselves back in 1950, what would we see in theoretical circles? Functional theorizing was about to become the dominant perspective; Marxist-oriented conflict theory in America was still in the closet imposed by McCarthyism, although alive and well in Europe in many guises but most prominently in the tradition of the Frankfurt School (Turner, 1998, pp. 545-557; Held, 1980; Schroyer, 1973); and symbolic interactionism was carrying forth the legacy of George Herbert Mead. At the general level, this is all there was, although many more specific theories of meso processes could be observed, theories such as urban ecology, differential association, and anomie theory in criminology, phenomenology, theories from the Gestalt tradition (e.g., cognitive dissonance, congruity, and balance theories) in social psychology, and perhaps a half dozen other narrow theories.' A little over a decade later, functionalism was being challenged by European conflict theorists who prodded a new generation of Marxist theorists in America to take up the challenge, structuralism was emerging in Europe and about to infect America, and exchange theory was just making its entrance. Still, there were few general approaches, but things were about to change. The 1960s and 1970s saw a proliferation of theoretical perspectives that continues to this day. Today, sociology is experiencing what can only be described as hyperdifferentiation of theories; and if Randall Collins' (1998) "law of small numbers" has any merit, there are now too many approaches competing for an attention space that in the intellectual arena can manage at best seven approaches. From this perspective, we should see a weeding out of theories to a smaller number, but in fact, this is not likely to occur because each of the many theoretical perspectives has a resource base of adherents, a place in academia, and a series of outlets for scholarly publications (Turner & Turner, 1990). As a result, theories in sociology do not compete head on with each other as much as they coexist. One of the effects of hyperdifferentiation is that many new resource niches are created, allowing scholars and their students to operate without having to justify their importance visa -vis other theories, and this 'Textbooks in theory tended to list many more theoretical perspectives, but the distinctions made by authors in the 1950s, for the most part, were labels that they imposed. Actual theorizing was confined to a few general approaches, plus a larger number of more specific theories on specific substantive topics.
Current Sociological Theory - Hunter College - Spring 2015
No one knows what current social theory is. To begin with, there is no disciplinary consensus over what constitutes "sociological" or "social" "theory." Sociology has been heavily influenced by a disparate array of voices and disciplines. No good theorist knows where to draw the disciplinary line, and most think that such a task is (at best) counterproductive. There is also the question of timespan: Classical social/sociological theory syllabi tend to end in the 1920s, at the latest. This leaves around 100 years of social thought to cover in sixteen weeks of coursework. That is not possible. We are not going to bother trying to do that.