Theories of Social Change: A Critical Appraisal

ISBN-13: 9780745609508 / Angielski / Miękka / 1991 / 264 str.

Raymond Boudon

Opis

Boudon provides a wide ranging critique of the existing theories of social change in sociology, documenting his ideas with empirical illustrations. He argues that social life is in a fundamental sense marked by disorder. Not only are there no laws of social life, but patterns of social change continually diverge from the outcome which social actors attempt to achieve.

Recenzje

′Ought to do almost all its readers a lot of good. And Boudon and his translator both deserve the reader′s gratitude for the clarity and consecutiveness of it all.′ New Society

′A critical reading of a wide range of texts concerning social change in various historical and cultural settings ...′ Contemporary Sociology

′This is a brave attempt at a new kind of textbook on the sociology of development.′ Political Studies Association

′Boudon′s arguments deserve the attention, if not always the assent, of scholars from a wide range of fields.′ Stephen Crook, University of Tasmania

Spis treści

Foreword.

1. Theories of Social Change.

2. Individual Action, Aggregation Effects and Social Change.

3. The Laws Governing Change: the Nomological Bias.

4. Structures and Change: the Structuralist Bias.

5. The Search for the Prime Mover: the Ontological Bias.

6. A Well–Tempered Determinism.

7. Giving Disorder its Due.

Epilogue.

Notes.

General Index.

O autorze

Raymond Boudon is the author of many other works including The Analysis of Ideology, (Polity Press, 1989).

Blurb

Now available in paperback, Theories of Social Change presents a classic statement of Boudon′s stance in social theory and empirical sociology. Boudon criticizes the theories of social change that dominated sociology between the early 1950s and the late 1970s, and elaborates his own distinctive account. Suitable for academics, students and researchers in sociology, politics, economics and anthropology.