The Anthem Companion To Talcott Parsons

‘The Anthem Companion to Talcott Parsons’ offers the best contemporary work on Talcott Parsons, written by the best scholars currently working in this field. Original, authoritative and wide-ranging, the critical assessments of this volume will make it ideal for Parsons students and scholars alike. ‘Anthem Companions to Sociology’ offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with both an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

Talcott Parsons was the leading theorist in American sociology—and perhaps in world sociology—from the 1940s to the 1970s. He created the dominant school of thought that made "Parsonian" a standard description of a theoretical attempt to unify social science, as reflected in the fact that his contributions to the discipline cover a range of issues, including medicine, the family, religion, law, the economy, race relations, and politics—to name but a few. This volume brings together leading scholars working in the field of "Parsonian Studies" to explore the background of Parsons’s work, the content of his oeuvre, and his subsequent influence. Thematically organized, it covers Parsons’s contributions and impacts in areas including the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences; cultural sociology; personality, mental illness, and psychoanalysis; and economics and political and economic sociology. In addition, it considers his influence in different areas of the world and on particular students, and offers insights into the Parsonian tradition’s practical application to contemporary social issues. An authoritative, comprehensive, and in-depth critical assessment of the Parsonian legacy, The Routledge International Handbook of Talcott Parsons Studies will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and in sociology and social theory in particular, with interests in the history of sociology and the enduring relevance of Talcott Parsons.

This edited volume will illustrate the continuing interest in Bauman’s work through a number of chapters each dealing with the important aspects of his work and shedding light on some new angles and perspectives on his life and work. It seeks to position Bauman within the field of sociology and to provide some examples of his lasting contribution to and relevance for the discipline. Bauman’s ideas remain an important source of inspiration for many scholars and researchers working within a variety of different fields and sub-fields, appealing equally to empirical work and theoretical elaboration. This book contains ten chapters, and all chapters are devoted to the presentation and discussion of themes and ideas that were characteristic of Bauman’s way of doing and writing. The purpose of this volume – as with the other volumes published in the Anthem Press ‘Companion to Sociology’ series – is to provide a comprehensive overview of Zygmunt Bauman’s continued importance within the field of sociology and related social science disciplines.

The Anthem Companion to Harold Garfinkel brings together leading scholars and upcoming researchers in contemporary ethnomethodology to bring out the experimental character of Garfinkel’s legacy in the social sciences and beyond. Therefore, the Companion takes its cue from Garfinkel’s noted “breaching experiments,” enabling the reflexive investigation of “trust conditions” in situ, and asks how this research interest has been productively pursued and distinctively rearticulated, both within and beyond Garfinkel’s oeuvre. Whilst Garfinkel’s experimental legacy is often acknowledged, no systematic introduction to its distinctive outlook, tension-riddled diversification, and heuristic interest(s) is available to date. The Anthem Companion to Harold Garfinkel both fills and reflects upon that “gap in the literature,” thereby articulating ethnomethodology’s experimental outlook, if not recasting its current research directions.

The book presents an authoritative assessment of Norbert Elias (1897–1990). It recognizes Elias as one of the major contributors to the development of sociological tradition in the past century and charts the continuing relevance of his conception of sociology for contemporary society. Only toward the end of his career as an academic did Elias’s work begin to attract the attention of English-speaking sociologists, historians, and scholars of cultural studies. The book provides an authoritative and broad representation of Elias’s oeuvre and work inspired by it. While Elias is best known for his major study of The Civilizing Process, the reach and subtle depths of Elias’s conception of process sociology has been cemented more recently by the English-language publication of Elias’s collected work of 18 volumes. The baton of process sociology is being passed on to further generations of sociologists. Chapters from leading contributors outline the nature of the sociological practice of Elias and address fundamental questions of historical sociology, democratization, gender, racialization processes, and embodiment. Later chapters highlight the contribution of process sociology for understanding developments in nation, state and global sociology, criminology, art, and education.

Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the most influential yet controversial sociologists of the past half-century, is a touchstone in innumerable debates about globalization and the power of capitalism, the nature of development in the modern era, and how to come to grips with widespread inequalities while recovering the potential for social change. The Anthem Companion to Immanuel Wallerstein offers a compelling guide to his writings and ideas, his influences and reception, and the reasons for his enduring significance, with 10 original interpretive essays written by a distinguished group of international scholars. Importantly, the contributors also advance Wallerstein’s work into neglected areas such as climate change, global pandemics, racism, and gender and demonstrate his importance, not just to debates in his intellectual context, but to those of our times as well. This companion provides a multifaceted tool for thinking with Wallerstein, while showing where those engaging with Wallerstein’s thought can take his work in the contemporary world.

Raymond Aron is an exceptional figure among twentieth-century sociological and political thinkers. The book focuses on the sociological work of this author of the century, who analyzed his age both in its grand-scale political and socio-economic traits and in the complex social ramifications of its day-to-day life. Aron experts from a total of seven countries examine Aron’s sociology in detail starting with his road from philosophy to sociology not least under the impression of the Great Depression and its aftermath, especially the rise of National Socialism in Germany. His epistemological studies on the limits of objective knowledge in history and the social sciences in which he moves away from Durkheim's approach and instead adopts Max Weber's sociology of understanding are analysed. This acknowledgment of the limits of knowledge laid the foundations for Aron’s liberalism and humanism. His sociology of industrial society as an economy of economic growth in its market economy and planned economy versions, its social stratification, his criticism of the Marxist concept of social class, the structure of the ruling elites and the pluralistic and one-party, totalitarian political regimes are presented, as is Aron's analysis of the dialectic of modern society between the idea of equality and the authority structures in the state and the economic process. This is accompanied by Aron's lifelong criticism of those intellectuals above all in the pluralist and liberal democracies who hope that a messianic ideology will abolish all social contradictions. Aron’s sociology of international relations in the age of industrial society and globalization, which for Aron brought about the dawn of universal history, complete the overview of Raymond Aron's sociological work.

The Anthem Companion to Philip Selznick is a collection of essays by renowned authors on the preeminent sociologist, Philip Selznick (1919–2010). He is widely recognized for his major contributions to a number of fields, including general sociology, sociology of organizations, industrial sociology, sociology of law and moral sociology. The contributions in the book cross disciplinary boundaries, bridge disciplinary divides, and display an awareness of and respect for Selznick’s humanist sensibility. Selznick would have felt very comfortable in this company. In that sense, all the chapters of The Anthem Companion to Philip Selznick are true companions to Selznick’s sociology.

This book seeks to place Halbwachs in his historical and intellectual context, showing that his work was sensitive to the events of his time, and that the development of his analysis could be influenced by happenstance. The book does this, not by summarizing or synthesizing his thinking, by the growing literature embodied by many sociologists and historians of social sciences, published for the most part in scientific journals, that focus on the sociological thought that Halbwachs developed in his writings. Then come many studies that emerge from the history of ideas and epistemology: these are entirely devoted to a particular facet of Halbwachs’ work, either to place it in its scientific context or to discuss it on the basis of fundamental cognitive issues.

"The Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah" is the first major collection of essays on the life and work of Robert N. Bellah (1927–2013), one of the foremost sociologists of religion of the twentieth century. Bellah’s work was central to many fields: the sociology of Japanese religion; the relationship between sociology and the humanities; the relationship between American religion and politics; the cultures of modern individualism; evolution and society. Bellah’s seminal work on “civil religion” in the early 1970s created a huge debate across the disciplines that continues into the present times; his coauthored book "Habits of the Heart" (1985) was a best seller and the object of sustained discussion in the general public sphere; his last magnum opus, Religion in Human Evolution, published at 84, was a monument to an extraordinary scholarly and intellectual career. The object of this collection of essays by top American and European scholars from the social sciences and humanities is to highlight the richness of Bellah’s work. Each essay has a double character: it introduces a single topic in an accessible and complete way and then presents a reflection on the viability and import of Bellah’s ideas for interpreting contemporary phenomena.