Social theory

About: Social theory is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 11421 publications have been published within this topic receiving 624898 citations.

The anti-social model of disability

Abstract: Social theories are usually developed to enable a clearer understanding of a situation or problem. The ‘Social Model’ in various forms is currently the dominant model for researching disability, addressing disability from within a socio‐political framework that draws substantially on a ‘social constructionist’ perspective. This article critiques some of the core sociological assumptions of the Social Model, questioning what ‘work’ this kind of theory does in informing a set of practical concerns around the design of assistive technologies, suggesting an alternative framework of analysis, supported by extensive ethnomethodologically informed ethnographic research

Communication Theory Today

Abstract: Notes on Contributors. Acknowlegements. Communication in a Post--Mass Media World: David Crowley and David Mitchell. Part I: Communication and the Mediation of Social Worlds:. 1. Social Theory and the Media: John B Thompson. 2. Medium Theory: Joshua Meyrowitz. 3. A Recursive Theory of Communication: Klaus Krippendorff. Part II: Messages, Meanings, Discourse:. 4. Discourse and Cognition in Society: Teun A Van Dijk. 5. Risk Communication and Public Knowledge: William Leiss. 6.Talk, Text and History: Conversation Analysis and Communication Theory: Deidre Boden. Part III: Contingency, Reflexivity, Post--Modernity:. 7. The Mode of Information and Postmodernity: Mark Poster. 8. In the Realm of Uncertainty: The Global Village and Capitalist Postmodernity: Ien Ang. 9. By Whose Authority? Accounting for Taste in Contemporary Popular Culture: James M Collins. Part IV: Communication and Public Interests:. 10. Mass Communication and the Public Interest: Denis McQuail. 11. Electronic Networks, Social Relations and the Changing Structure of Knowledge: William Melody. 12. Communication and Development: Majid Tehranian. Index.

Meeting Principles and Lifeworlds Halfway: Jürgen Habermas on the Future of Europe:

Abstract: Although Jurgen Habermas is widely recognized as a philosopher and social theorist, his political philosophy is often accused of excessive formalism. Habermas has not only responded to these critiques in his theoretical writings, but also by showing how his critical theory can be applied to concrete situations in his Short Political Writings (Kleine politische Schriften). Using his political commentaries on the future of Europe and the European Union (EU), I explore Habermas' melding of abstract principles with concrete political developments. The case of Europe reveals an ongoing process of adjustment, where Habermas' theoretical insights and the place of the EU in his political thought have to respond to political developments. I argue that this process of ‘meeting halfway’ (Entgegenkommen), a concept I borrow from Habermas' social theory, demonstrates how the formalism of his theoretical commitments may be applied to politics. This approach also allows me to critique Habermas when he does not go far en...

Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classical Readings

Abstract: Preface, 2013 Acknowledgments, 2013 Edition Introduction Social Theory: Its Uses and Pleasures Charles Lemert Part One Modernity's Classical Age: 1848--1919 Charles Lemert The Two Sides of Society Karl Marx Estranged Labor Camera Obscura The Manifesto of Class Struggle, with Friedrich Engels The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte On Imperialism in India Capital and The Values of Commodities Capital and the Fetishism of Commodities Capital and Labor Power Friedrich Engels The Patriarchal Family Jane Addams The Settlement as a Factor in the Labor Movement Emile Durkheim Mechanical and Organic Solidarity Anomie and the Modern Division of Labor Sociology and Social Facts Suicide and Modernity Primitive Classifications and Social Knowledge, with Marcel Mauss The Cultural Logic of Collective Representations Max Weber The Spirit of Capitalism and the Iron Cage The Bureaucratic Machine What Is Politics? The Types of Legitimate Domination Class, Status, Party Sigmund Freud The Psychical Apparatus and the Theory of Instincts Dream-Work and Interpretation Oedipus, the Child Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through Return of the Repressed Civilization and the Individual Ferdinand de Saussure Arbitrary Social Values and the Linguistic Sign John Dewey Democracy and Education Split Lives in the Modern World William James The Self and Its Selves William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois Double-Consciousness and the Veil Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper Women and Economics Anna Julia Cooper The Colored Woman's Office Georg Simmel The Stranger Charles Horton Cooley The Looking-Glass Self Part Two Modernity's Classical Age: 1848--1919 Charles Lemert Action and Knowledge in a Troubled World John Maynard Keynes The Psychology of Modern Society Talcott Parsons The Unit Act of Action Systems Erich Fromm Psychoanalysis and Sociology Georg Lukacs The Irrational Chasm Between Subject and Object George Herbert Mead The Self, the I, and the Me Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (V. I.) Lenin What Is to Be Done? Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno The Culture Industry as Deception Martin Heidegger The Question Concerning Technology: The Age of the World Picture Karl Mannheim The Sociology of Knowledge and Ideology Robert K. Merton Social Structure and Anomie W.E.B. Du Bois Black Reconstruction and the Racial Wage Unavoidable Dilemmas Reinhold Niebuhr Moral Man and Immoral Society Gunnar Myrdal The Negro Problem as a Moral Issue William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki Disorganization of the Polish Immigrant Lewis Wirth The Significance of the Jewish Ghetto Walter Benjamin Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction: War and Fascism Virginia Woolf A Room of One's Own Antonio Gramsci Intellectuals and Hegemony Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi Nonviolent Force: A Spiritual Dilemma Mao Tse-tung Identity, Struggle, Contradiction Part Three The Golden Movement: 1945-1963 Charles Lemert The Golden Age George Kennan The United States and the Containment of the Soviets Daniel Bell The End of Ideology in the West W. W. Rostow Modernization: Stages of Growth Talcott Parsons Action Systems and Social Systems, The AGIL Paradigm Sex Roles in the American Kinship System Robert K. Merton Manifest and Latent Functions Claude Levi-Strauss The Structural Study of Myth Roland Barthes Semiological Prospects Louis Althusser Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses Doubts and Reservations David Riesman Character and Society: The Other-Directed Personality Erik H. Erikson Youth and American Identity Erving Goffman Presentation of Self Jacques Lacan The Mirror Stage Others Object Simone de Beauvoir Woman as Other Aime Cesaire Between Colonizer and Colonized Martin Luther King, Jr. The Power of Nonviolent Action C. Wright Mills The Sociological Imagination Students for a Democratic Society Participatory Democracy (from The Port Huron Statement) Betty Friedan The Problem That Has No Name Frantz Fanon Decolonizing, National Culture, and the Negro Intellectual Part Four Will the Center Hold? 1963--1979 Charles Lemert Experiments at Renewal and Reconstruction Clifford Geertz Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann Society as a Human Product Dorothy Smith Knowing a Society from Within: A Woman's Standpoint Immanuel Wallerstein The Modern World-System Theda Skocpol The State as a Janus-Faced Structure Nancy Chodorow Gender Personality and the Reproduction of Mothering Breaking with Modernity Jacques Derrida The Decentering Event in Social Thought Michel Foucault Biopolitics and the Carceral Society C.L.R. James Black Power and Stokely Alvin W. Gouldner Toward a Reflexive Sociology Herbert Marcuse Repressive Desublimation of One-Dimensional Man Harold Garfinkel Reflexive Properties of Practical Sociology Pierre Bourdieu Structures, Habitus, Practices Audre Lorde The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House Part Five After Modernity: 1979--1991/2001 Charles Lemert The Idea of the Postmodern Jean-Francois Lyotard The Postmodern Condition Richard Rorty Private Irony and Liberal Hope Michel Foucault Power as Knowledge Jean Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulations: Disneyland Arlene Stein and Ken Plummer I Can't Even Think Straight Reactions and Alternatives Jurgen Habermas Critical Theory, the Colonized Lifeworld, and Communicative Competence Anthony Giddens Post-Modernity or Radicalized Modernity? Ernesto LaClau and Chantal Mouffe Radical Democracy: Alternative for a New Left Nancy Hartsock A Theory of Power for Women? Jeffrey Alexander Cultural Codes and Democratic Communication James S. Coleman The New Social Structure and the New Social Science New Cultural Theories After Modernity Cornel West The New Cultural Politics of Difference Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "Race" as the Trope of the World Donna Haraway The Cyborg Manifesto and Fractured Identities Trinh T. Minh-ha Infinite Layers/Third World? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Can the Subaltern Speak? Patricia Hill Collins Black Feminist Thought in the Matrix of Domination Gloria Anzaldua The New Mestiza Jeffrey Weeks Sexual Identification Is a Strange Thing Judith Butler Imitation and Gender Insubordination Paula Gunn Allen Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots of White Feminism Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick The Epistemology of the Closet Part Six Global Realities After Charles Lemert Social Theories of Global Uncertainties Immanuel Wallerstein The Modern World-System in Crisis Zygmunt Bauman Liquid Modernity David Harvey Neo-liberalism on Trial Stanley Hoffman The Clash of Globalizations Stuart Hall The Global, the Local, and the Return of Ethnicity Manuel Castells The Global Network Saskia Sassen Toward a Feminist Analytics of the Global Economy Amartya Sen Asian Values and the West's Claim to Uniqueness Ulrich Beck World Risk Society Achille Mbembe Necropower and Late Modern Colonial Occupation Rethinking the Past that Haunts the Future Avery Gordon Ghostly Matters Edward Said Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals Elijah Anderson The "Nigger Moment" in the Cosmopolitan Canopy Charles Tilly Future Social Science and The Invisible Elbow Julia Kristeva Women's Time William Julius Wilson Global Economic Changes and the Limits of the Race Relations Vision Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri The Multitude Against the Empire Raewyn Connell Southern Theory: Gender and Violence Slavoj Zizek Cynicism as a Form of Ideology Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari The Rhizome/A Thousand Plateaus Giorgio Agamben Sovereign Power and Bare Life Bruno Latour Spheres and Networks: The Spaces of Material Life

Chaos, complexity, and sociology : myths, models, and theories

Abstract: Foreword - Frederick Turner Chaos and Social Science Preface PART ONE: EMERGING NEW DIRECTIONS: MYTHS AND THEORIES The Myth of Postmodern Science - Bob Price From Enlightenment to Chaos - Mary E Lee Toward Nonmodern Social Theory The Persistence of 'Emergence' - Kevin Mihata Chaos and Complexity - Kurt W Back Necessary Myths Nonlinear Dynamics and the Micro-Macro Bridge - Thomas S Smith Nonlinear Dynamics, Complexity and Public Policy - Euel Elliot and L Douglas Kiel Use, Misuse and Applicability Self-Organization of the Economy - Helmut Michael Staubmann A System-Theoretical Reconsideration of Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money The Omicron Point Sociological Application of the Anthropic Theory - William Sims Bainbridge The Origins of Order and Disorder in Physical and Social Deterministic Systems - Alvin M Saperstein PART TWO: PRELIMINARY THINKING ABOUT METHODS Webs of Chaos - William F Stroup II Implications for Research Designs Chaos and Social Reality - R J Bird An Emergent Perspective Chaos and Pattern in Complex Systems - Ben Goertzel PART THREE: CONCEPTUAL MODELS AND APPLICATIONS Dynamics of Children's Friendships - Lutz-Michael Alisch, Shahram Azizighanbari and Martin Bargfeldt Short-Term Changes in the Domestic Division of Labor - Sara Horsfall and Elizabeth Maret Intimations of Complexity Biological Foundations of Social Interaction - Thomas S Smith and Gregory T Stevens Explorations of Nonlinear Dynamics in Arousal-Modulation Collective Behavior Following Disasters - Eve Passerini and David Bahr A Cellular Automation Model Organizations and Constraint-Based Adaptation - Kakthleen M Carley Chaotic Behavior in Society - Kevin Dooley et al Adolescent Childbearing in Texas 1964-1990 So Where Are We Now? A Final Word - Raymond A Eve