Full Description
While it was evident to the classics of social theory that modern societies are highly dynamic forms of social organization, and that this dynamic nature must be reflected explicitly and confronted directly in modes of analysis across the social sciences, over the course of the twentieth century, the acknowledgement of this fact has been weakening. As the social sciences became increasingly concerned with issues of professionalization and standards of validity inspired by more established disciplines, especially the natural sciences and economics, the focus on dynamic processes gave way to efforts to illuminate structural (i.e., static) features of modern social life. In recent decades, however, this preoccupation with structure has begun to give way to more process-oriented research orientations. In part, this renewed interest in dynamics rather than statics is reflective of the growing influence of Continental European traditions, especially in Germany and France. In this follow-up volume to "Theorizing the Dynamics of Social Processes (vol. 27)", the emphasis is placed on recent trends in Continental European social theory, and on the importance of political analyses to theorizing modern societies.
Contents
List of Contributors.
EDITORIAL BOARD.
Acknowledgements.
Introduction: Theorizing Historical Processes in Modern Societies.
Toward Bridging Analytics and Dialectics: Nonergodic Processes and Turning Points in Dynamic Models of Social Change with Illustrations from Labor Movement History.
Adorno, Advocate of the Nonidentical: An Introduction.
Developments of Analytical Logic and Dialectical Logic with Regard to the Study of Process Dynamics.
Communication, Language, and the Emergence of Social Orders.
Culture, Theory, and Critique: Marx, Durkheim, and Human Science.
Sociality-Normativity-Morality: The Explanatory Strategy of Günter Dux's Historico-Genetic Theory.
Politics Disembodied and Deterritorialized: The Internet as Human Rights Resource.
Civil Society and the State in the Neoliberal Era: Dynamics of Friends and Enemies.
The Social Construction of the European Society.
About the Authors.
Theorizing Modern Society as a Dynamic Process.
Current Perspectives in Social Theory.
Current Perspectives in Social Theory.
Copyright page.
