The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the discipline of sociology:
Social theories are analytical frameworks, or paradigms, that are used to study and interpret social phenomena. A tool used by social scientists, social theories relate to historical debates over the validity and reliability of different methodologies, the primacy of either structure or agency, as well as the relationship between contingency and necessity. Social theory in an informal nature, or authorship based outside of academic social and political science, may be referred to as "social criticism" or "social commentary", or "cultural criticism" and may be associated both with formal cultural and literary scholarship, as well as other non-academic or journalistic forms of writing.
Mark Sanford Granovetter is an American sociologist and professor at Stanford University. He is best known for his work in social network theory and in economic sociology, particularly his theory on the spread of information in social networks known as The Strength of Weak Ties (1973). In 2014 Granovetter was named a Citation Laureate by Thomson Reuters and added to that organization’s list of predicted Nobel Prize winners in economics. Data from the Web of Science show that Granovetter has written both the first and third most cited sociology articles.
In social science, antipositivism is a theoretical stance which proposes that the social realm cannot be studied with the methods of investigation utilized within the natural sciences, and that investigation of the social realm requires a different epistemology. Fundamental to that antipositivist epistemology is the belief that the concepts and language researchers use in their research shape their perceptions of the social world they are investigating and seeking to define.
Hossein Bashiriyeh, is an Iranian scholar in political theory and political sociology, who was born in 1953 in Hamedan, Iran.
Ágnes Heller was a Hungarian philosopher and lecturer. She was a core member of the Budapest School philosophical forum in the 1960s and later taught political theory for 25 years at the New School for Social Research in New York City. She lived, wrote and lectured in Budapest.
György Márkus was a Hungarian philosopher, belonging to the small circle of critical theorists closely associated with György Lukács and usually referred to as the Budapest School.
Raewyn Connell, usually cited as R. W. Connell, is an Australian sociologist and Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney, mainly known for co-founding the field of masculinity studies and coining the concept of hegemonic masculinity, as well as for her work on Southern theory.
Jock Young was a British sociologist and an influential criminologist.
The following events related to sociology occurred in the 1980s.
The following events related to sociology occurred in the 1990s.
Andrew John Milner is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Monash University. From 2014 until 2019 he was also Honorary Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. In 2013 he was Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at the Institut für Englische Philologie, Freie Universität Berlin.
Peter Beilharz is an Australian sociologist. He is professor of critical theory at Sichuan University, Chengdu, PRC. Previously he was professor of sociology and remains Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is adjunct professor at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. Beilharz is founding editor of the international journal of social theory Thesis Eleven published by Sage.
The British Journal of Sociology is a peer-reviewed academic journal that was established in 1950 at the London School of Economics. It represents the mainstream of sociological thinking and research and publishes high quality papers on all aspects of the discipline, by academics from all over the world.
Peter Osborne is a British philosophy teacher who is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University, London. He is a former editor of the journal Radical Philosophy.
A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States is a sociological study of the Wiccan and wider Pagan community in the Northeastern United States. It was written by American sociologist Helen A. Berger of the West Chester University of Pennsylvania and first published in 1999 by the University of South Carolina Press. It was released as a part of a series of academic books entitled Studies in Comparative Religion, edited by Frederick M. Denny, a religious studies scholar at the University of Chicago.
The Budapest School was a school of thought, originally of Marxist humanism, but later of post-Marxism and dissident liberalism that emerged in Hungary in the early 1960s, belonging to so-called Hungarian New Left. Its members were students or colleagues of Georg Lukács. The school was originally oriented towards developing Lukács' later works on social ontology and aesthetics, but quickly began to challenge the paradigm of Lukácsian-Marxism, thus reconstructing contemporary critical theory. Most of the members later came to abandon Marxism. The school also critiqued the "dictatorship over needs" of the Soviet states. Most of the members were forced into exile by the pro-Soviet Hungarian government.
Maria Renata Márkus was a Polish sociologist and philosopher. She was educated in philosophy at the Lomonosov University in Moscow from 1952 to 1957 and was awarded her master's degree in Poland in 1957. She moved to Hungary in 1957 and became a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and was a founding member of the Institute of Sociology at the Academy where she worked closely with András Hegedüs. In 2010, a Festschrift was published in her honour. The journal Thesis Eleven published an issue to commemorate her in 2019.
Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is an American academic, philosopher, social scientist, and author. He is currently Professor in the Department of Religion and chair in Science and Technology Studies at Williams College. He also holds affiliated positions in Asian studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College. Storm's research focuses on Japanese religions, European intellectual history from 1600 to the present, and theory in religious studies. His more recent work has discussed disenchantment and philosophy of social science.
