Modern and Postmodern Social Theorizing: Bridging the Divide

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ISBN: 9780521515856 | 0521515858
Cover: Hardcover
Copyright: 12/22/2008

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There is a growing conflict between modern and postmodern social theorists. The latter reject modern approaches as economistic, essentialist and often leading to authoritarian policies. Modernists criticize postmodern approaches for their rejection of holistic conceptual frameworks which facilitate an overall picture of how social wholes (organizations, communities, nation-states, etc.) are constituted, reproduced and transformed. They believe the rejection of holistic methodologies leads to social myopia - a refusal to explore critically the type of broad problems that classical sociology deals with. This book attempts to bridge the divide between these two conflicting perspectives and proposes a novel holistic framework which is neither reductionist/economistic nor essentialist. Modern and Postmodern Social Theorizing will appeal to scholars and students of social theory and of social sciences in general.

List of figures page	p. xii
Acknowledgements	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
The theoretical background: the development of the agency-structure problematic	p. 7
From Parsons' to Giddens' synthesis	p. 9
Introduction	p. 9
Parsonian functionalism: the emphasis on system/structure	p. 12
Interpretative micro-sociologies: the emphasis on agency	p. 15
The rational-choice paradigm	p. 17
Decentring the subject I: hidden codes	p. 21
Decentring the subject II: subjectless practices	p. 24
Decentring the subject III: texts	p. 27
Transcending the subjectivist-objectivist divide: attempts at a post-Parsonian synthesis	p. 34
The overall abolition of boundaries	p. 38
Conclusion	p. 39
Parsonian and post-Parsonian developments	p. 41
Parsons and the development of individual rights	p. 43
T.H. Marshall: civil, political and social rights	p. 43
T. Parsons: rights and revolutions	p. 45
Differentiation and the mechanisms of change	p. 49
Integration: balanced and unbalanced forms	p. 51
Conclusion	p. 54
Evolution and democracy: Parsons and the collapse of communism	p. 57
Evolutionary universals	p. 57
The limits of modernization from above	p. 61
Some critical remarks	p. 62
Post-Parsonian theory I: neo-functionalism and beyond	p. 65
Introduction	p. 65
The theory of action	p. 67
The theory of culture	p. 68
Action and culture: a critical assessment	p. 70
The theory of civil society	p. 73
The basic dilemma in the conceptualization of civil society	p. 74
Conclusion	p. 77
Postscript: Alexander's cultural sociology	p. 78
Introduction	p. 78
On the conceptualization of culture	p. 79
The environments of action	p. 81
Cultural narratives as second-order discourses	p. 84
Conclusion	p. 85
Post-Parsonian theory II: beyond the normative and the utilitarian	p. 86
Introduction	p. 86
Three problematic presuppositions	p. 87
Constitutive theories of action and systemic theories of differentiation	p. 89
Some critical remarks	p. 90
Conclusion	p. 94
Agency and structure: reworking some basic conceptual tools	p. 95
Social and system integration: Lockwood, Habermas and Giddens	p. 97
Lockwood	p. 97
Habermas	p. 101
Giddens	p. 104
Conclusion	p. 105
The subjectivist-objectivist divide: against transcendence	p. 107
On the concept of social structure	p. 108
The impasse of transcendence strategies	p. 115
A concrete example: the reproduction of the LSE as a social system	p. 121
Concluding remarks: bridging rather than transcending the divide	p. 127
Habitus and reflexivity: restructuring Bourdieu's theory of practice	p. 131
Introduction	p. 131
Dispositions, positions, and interactions	p. 132
Reflexivity	p. 133
Bourdieu's conception of the subject	p. 136
Restructuring the SDP scheme	p. 139
Bridges between modern and late/postmodern theorizing	p. 143
Modernity: a non-Eurocentric conceptualization	p. 145
Introduction	p. 145
Modernity: mobilization/incorporation into the centre	p. 147
Modernity: institutional differentiation	p. 148
Modernity: a non-Eurocentric conceptualization	p. 154
Modernity and the West	p. 156
Variants of modernity	p. 156
Late modernity and globalization	p. 159
Conclusion	p. 161
Ethical relativism: between scientism and cultural relativism	p. 164
The golden rule perspective	p. 164
On the self-evidence of the golden rule	p. 166
Basic assumptions and difficulties of the relativist position	p. 167
Stepping stones towards growing socio-cultural interpenetration	p. 169
Eurocentrism	p. 171
Conclusion	p. 173
Cognitive relativism: between positivistic and relativistic thinking in the social sciences	p. 175
Objectivity and the issue of mediation	p. 175
The postmodern critique of representation and empirical evidence	p. 178
The 'internality' of a discipline's subject matter	p. 183
Conclusion	p. 188
Social causation: between social constructionism and critical realism	p. 191
Introduction	p. 191
The Harré thesis	p. 192
Giddens' conflationist strategy	p. 197
Archer's anti-conflationist strategy	p. 199
Articulation of agentic and structural properties	p. 206
Conclusion	p. 211
Towards a non-essentialist holism	p. 215
Grand narratives: contextless and context-sensitive theories	p. 217
'Grand narratives': context-sensitive and insensitive	p. 217
Holistic conceptual frameworks: open and closed	p. 221
Non-essentialist holism: three types of openness	p. 224
The actor-structure dimension: anti-conflationist holism	p. 225
Introduction	p. 225
Structures and actors	p. 226
On the linkages between the causal powers of actors and of structures	p. 232
The micro-macro dimension: anti-essentialist holism	p. 237
Introduction	p. 237
Strong and weak types of essentialism	p. 237
Interpretative sociologies: obstacles to micro-macro bridges	p. 249
Three guidelines for bridging micro and macro approaches	p. 253
The inter-institutional dimension: beyond economism and culturalism	p. 261
Economism	p. 261
Culturalism and the priority of the lifeworld: from Marx to Parsons and Habermas	p. 266
Beyond economism and systemic culturalism	p. 270
Instead of Conclusion: Twelve rules for the construction of an open-ended holistic paradigm	p. 274
The actor-structure dimension: anti-conflationist holism	p. 274
The micro-macro dimension: anti-essentialist holism	p. 275
The inter-institutional dimension: anti-economistic holism	p. 276
Appendix. In defence of 'grand' historical sociology	p. 279
The conflation of history and sociology	p. 279
The comparison with Spencer	p. 280
On the tenuous linkages between evidence and interpretation	p. 281
On the arbitrary character of grand historical sociology's interpretations	p. 283
References	p. 285
Index	p. 299
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Modern and Postmodern Social Theorizing: Bridging the Divide

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