About the Book

This is a book both for students and for the educated reader who is interested in the present situation in sociological thought. Dr Cohen provides both an exposition and an important and origin-al critique of the present situation. In what is probably the most rapidly growing subject in our universities there is no other book, past or present, which covers the same ground. It is not a text book, for it does not survey the differences between various schools of thought and present the arguments of different theorists for their own sake, nor yet is it a treatise presenting a new body of theory. Its aim is to extract what is of most value from contemporary theories and from the sociological classics of Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Simmel.

Graduate students transferring from other disciplines should find this book particularly valuable, and every reader will be delighted by its lucidity and freedom from jargon. For students of sociology it will quite simply prove essential.

Contents

CONTENTS

1              The Nature of Sociological Theory

2              The Central Problems of Sociological Theory

3              Functionalism or the ‘Holistic’ Approach

4             The Action Approach

5              Social Action, Interaction, Structure and System

6             Social Structures and Social Systems

7              Explaining Social Change

8             Directions of Social Change

9             Conclusions

About the Author / Editor

PERCY COHEN, who is South African by birth, has studied at Witwatersrand, Jerusalem and the London School of Economics where he was both an undergraduate and a graduate. He did research for several years on immigrants from the Yemen in Israel and after writing his doctorate was Lecturer in Sociology at Leicester. He was Reader in Sociology in the University of London and Dean of Undergraduate studies at the London School of Economics.