Social Theory for Today

Making Sense of Social Worlds

Pivoting on a theme appropriate to our dark times - the need to understand social crisis - this learned book reverses the conventional Parsonian focus on social order. Taking Hamlet’s brooding sense of “times out of joint” as the prism through which he approaches the modern social world, the author demonstrates throughout his exceptional breadth of knowledge, ending with a lucid and masterly comparison of  Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu. This book is distinctive for extending the usual sociological reach, reopening  territory that has lain fallow, set aside from the well-ploughed fields of orthodox social theory. In doing so, he not only produces fresh insight into familiar theorists but guards against collective forgetting of the sociological canon. The result is an illuminating work which repudiates ill-informed sniping at thinkers such as Auguste Comte, Otto Neurath, Siegfried Kracauer and Franz Borkenau, whilst  also showing the canonical figures in a new light.

This is a scholarly and engaging addition to the field of social theory that is focused upon the relationship between theory, crisis and history. An excellent book, it will be welcomed and read widely by advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars in sociology, cultural studies, social theory and beyond.

For tourism scholars who reflect seriously on the sociocultural production of meanings, how territorial development (place branding) influences the way in which people perceive themselves, how the local distribution of power marginalizes specific social groups and favors others, how cultural intangibles (social memory) are being transformed according to market rules, and how business-oriented policies are transforming differences in inequalities, Law's book is a must read.