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Social theory is open to many passing currents. Claims to originality tend to thrive and past achievements are often ignored. In Sociologiocal Theory: What Went Wrong? Mouzelis claims that "problems" currently being isolated are not really problems, and that "achievements" claimed are little more than pretensions. He argues that we have been premature to dismiss thinkers from the late 1950s and early 1960s and that we can build on their ideas to produce a more effective, more relevant social theory. Written with precision and with clarity, Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong? is a compelling analysis of the central problems of sociological theory today and of the means to resolve them.
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SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY: WHAT WENT WRONG?
Theorizing in the social sciences today is in disarray. A disarray marked by the relative disconnection between theory and empirical research, the subordination of sociological to philosophical theorizing, the abolition of boundaries between social science disciplines and subdisciplines and the conflation of their internal logics. Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong? is a compelling analysis of the central problems of sociological theory today and the means to resolve them. By examining critically a variety of developments in post-Parsonian theorizing (various micro-sociological approaches, Giddens’ structuration theory, Elias’s figurational sociology, Bourdieu’s theory of practice, neofunctionalism, post-structuralism), the author both attempts to provide a diagnosis of what went wrong in the development of sociological theory and to offer suggestions of how to overcome the present impasse. The latter is done by the elaboration of a set of concepts which help us to view under a new light ongoing debates on the nature of functionalist explanations, the agency/structure distinction, micro-macro linkages, the social versus sociological theory controversy and so on. Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong? will be essential reading for all concerned with the state of theorizing in the social sciences today. Nicos Mouzelis is Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics.
SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY: WHAT WENT WRONG? Diagnosis and Remedies
Nicos Mouzelis
London and New York
First published 1995 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1995 Nicos Mouzelis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-41759-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-72583-2 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-12720-3 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-07694-3 (pbk)
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
ix
INTRODUCTION
1
1
Theory as tool and theory as end-product
1
2
The rise and fall of modem sociological theory
3
3
Conceptual pragmatism
8
Part I
Diagnosis 1
IMPASSES OF MICRO-SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIZING: OVERREACTION TO PARSONS
13
1
The debate on the nature of Goffman’s ‘interaction order’