Contemporary Sociological Theory

Citation

Calhoun, C., Gerteis, J., Moody, J., Pfaff, S., & Virk, I. (Eds.). (2022). Contemporary Sociological Theory (4th ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.

Chapter Summary

Like its companion volume, this is a reader rather than a continuous textbook: 576 pages containing a General Introduction, ten parts and 38 numbered selections, each part preceded by an editorial introduction. The publisher says the introductions give each reading historical and intellectual perspective, and that the fourth edition updates the selections and adds new readings on gender, power and inequality. Entries below keep the titles given in the table of contents.

Part I: Symbolic Action (Readings 1–3)

Erving Goffman, "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life"; Herbert Blumer, "Symbolic Interactionism"; and Randall Collins, "Interaction Ritual Chains". The part covers the micro-sociological tradition of interaction.

Part II: Structure and Agency (Readings 4–7)

Michael Hechter, "A Theory of Group Solidarity"; James S. Coleman, "Metatheory: Explanation in Social Science"; Harrison White, "Catnets"; and Anthony Giddens, "Some New Rules of Sociological Method". The four readings share the part's concern with how social structure and individual action relate.

Part III: Institutions (Readings 8–9)

Mark Granovetter, "Economic Embeddedness", and Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, "The Iron Cage Revisited".

Part IV: Power and Inequality (Readings 10–13)

C. Wright Mills, "The Power Elite"; Charles Tilly, "Durable Inequality"; Steven Lukes, "Power: A Radical View"; and Michael Mann, "Societies as Organized Power Networks".

Part V: The Sociological Theory of Michel Foucault (Readings 14–15)

Two selections: "The History of Sexuality" (from volume I) and "Discipline and Punish".

Part VI: The Sociological Theory of Pierre Bourdieu (Readings 16–19)

"Social Space and Symbolic Space", "Structures, Habitus, Practices", "The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed" and "Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field".

Part VII: Race, Gender, and Intersectionality (Readings 20–27)

The longest part, with eight readings: Michael Omi and Howard Winant, "The Theory of Racial Formation"; Aldon Morris, "Intellectual Schools and the Atlanta School"; Orlando Patterson, "The Paradoxes of Integration"; Dorothy Smith, "The Conceptual Practices of Power"; Patricia Hill Collins, "Black Feminist Epistemology"; Kimberle Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex"; Hae Yeon Choo and Myra Marx Ferree, "Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research"; and Rocio Garcia, "The Politics of Erased Migrations".

Part VIII: The Sociological Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Readings 28–30)

"Modernity: An Unfinished Project", "The Rationalization of the Lifeworld" and "Civil Society and the Political Public Sphere".

Part IX: Modernity (Readings 31–34)

Norbert Elias, "The Social Constraint towards Self-Constraint"; Bruno Latour, "We Have Never Been Modern"; Jeffrey Alexander, "The Civil Sphere"; and Michèle Lamont, "Addressing Recognition Gaps: Destigmatization and the Reduction of Inequality".

Part X: Crisis and Change (Readings 35–38)

Immanuel Wallerstein, "The Modern World-System in Crisis"; Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller, "Conceptualizing Simultaneity"; Craig Calhoun, "Nationalism"; and Michael Mann, "The End May Be Nigh, But For Whom?".

Key Concepts

Parts I–III

• Presentation of self and interaction ritual chains: the titles of the Goffman and Collins selections, and the micro-sociological focus of the part.
• New rules of sociological method: the title of Giddens's selection, which closes the part on structure and agency.
• Economic embeddedness and the iron cage: the titles of the two readings in the part on institutions.

Parts IV–VI

• Power elite, durable inequality, radical view of power: three accounts of how power and inequality are produced and reproduced (Mills, Tilly, Lukes).
• Organised power networks: Mann's term in Reading 13.
• Habitus and field: Bourdieu's vocabulary, named in the titles of Readings 17 and 18.
• Discipline: the title of Foucault's second selection.

Parts VII–X

• Racial formation and intersectionality: the organising ideas of Part VII (Omi and Winant; Crenshaw; Choo and Ferree).
• The lifeworld and the public sphere: Habermas's themes in Part VIII.
• Civil sphere and destigmatization: Alexander and Lamont in Part IX.
• World-system and simultaneity: Wallerstein, and Levitt and Glick Schiller, in Part X.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Substantial selections with framing. By the page numbers in the contents, selections run from about 6 to 17 pages, each within a part introduced by the editors, and the publisher stresses "substantial primary source texts" rather than brief excerpts.
• Four theorists get a block of their own. Foucault, Bourdieu and Habermas have separate parts and Giddens appears in Part II, so a course can follow a single thinker across several readings. Part VII, with eight readings, gives race, gender and intersectionality a prominent place.
• A wide range of topics. The ten parts run from face-to-face interaction through institutions, power and inequality, race and gender, modernity and global change, with Wallerstein, Tilly, Mann and Lukes covering large-scale power and change.

Limitations

• Still a set of extracts. The majority are excerpts from longer works (the contents repeat "from ..."), so the reader supports, but does not replace, reading the books.
• No continuous narrative. Connection between traditions has to come from the part introductions and a teacher.
• Contents differ from the publisher's blurb. The Wiley description lists phenomenology and structuralism among the covered approaches, but no part has those titles; the phenomenology reading (Schutz) is in the classical volume.
• No postcolonial or decolonial part. Three parts are organised around single thinkers (Foucault, Bourdieu, Habermas) and the rest around topics, but none is titled for postcolonial or decolonial theory; readers who want it need a separate book.

Where It Fits in the Course

The reader suits a course that follows a classical theory course. Anthony Elliott's Contemporary Social Theory: An Introduction is a plain-language survey of the main currents from the mid-twentieth century to the present, and Patrick Baert and Filipe Carreira da Silva's Social Theory in the Twentieth Century and Beyond is a critical survey of the same period that assesses strengths and weaknesses of each tradition; either can supply the explanation that a reader of excerpts lacks. Rob Stones's edited Key Sociological Thinkers introduces one thinker per chapter and works as a guide to the people behind the readings.

Two books in the list provide a full-length counterpart to the selections: Giddens's The Constitution of Society states structuration theory at length and can follow Reading 7, and Bourdieu's Distinction is the large empirical study behind the Bourdieu part. The classical volume of the same series covers the earlier tradition and ends with Parsons, Merton, Homans and Blau.

How to Use This Book

The publisher presents the reader for undergraduate courses in social and sociological theory and for human geography, anthropology, criminology and urban studies. The publisher offers it as the complement to the classical volume, so some acquaintance with classical theory helps, but the introductions are written to supply context.

A practical plan:

• Core: the General Introduction, Part I (Goffman, Blumer, Collins) and Part II (structure and agency), then one thinker-centred part (Foucault, Bourdieu or Habermas) depending on the course.
• Next: Part IV on power and inequality, and Part VII on race, gender and intersectionality.
• Optional: Parts III, IX and X for institutions, modernity and global change.

Read each part introduction before the readings, note the debate each author joins, and compare authors across parts (for example, Lukes and Foucault on power, or Bourdieu and Giddens on structure and practice). The publisher notes extensive references to further reading, which are the way on to the full works.