Social Theory Now Format: Paperback

The landscape of social theory has changed significantly over the three decades since the publication of Anthony Giddens and Jonathan Turner’s seminal Social Theory Today. Sociologists in the twenty-first century desperately need a new agenda centered around central questions of social theory. In Social Theory Now, Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause, and Isaac Ariail Reed set a new course for sociologists, bringing together contributions from the most distinctive sociological traditions in an ambitious survey of where social theory is today and where it might be going.

The book provides a strategic window onto social theory based on current research, examining trends in classical traditions and the cutting edge of more recent approaches. From distinctive theoretical positions, contributors address questions about how social order is accomplished; the role of materiality, practice, and meaning; as well as the conditions for the knowledge of the social world. The theoretical traditions presented include cultural sociology, microsociologies, world-system theory and post-colonial theory, gender and feminism, actor network and network theory, systems theory, field theory, rational choice, poststructuralism, pragmatism, and the sociology of conventions. Each chapter introduces a tradition and presents an agenda for further theoretical development. Social Theory Now is an essential tool for sociologists. It will be central to the discussion and teaching of contemporary social theory for years to come.

Claudio E. Benzecry is associate professor of communication studies and sociology (by courtesy) at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession and the coeditor of Social Theory Now, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Monika Krause is associate professor in sociology at the London School of Economics. She is the author of The Good Project: Humanitarian Relief NGOs and the Fragmentation of Reason and coauthor or coeditor of Social Theory Now, both also published by the University of Chicago Press. She is the winner of the 2019 Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting in Sociology.

Isaac Ariail Reed is professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture in Charlottesville, Virginia. In addition to Power in Modernity, he is the author of Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences, and the co-editor of Social Theory Now.