There has been a curious gap between theoretical debate and quantitative research on social inequality throughout the history of sociology. The theoretical debates on inequality have above all revolved around the concept of class, and in particular around the adequacy of the Marxist theory of class. From Weber, to Parsons, to Dahrendorf and Giddens, the point of departure of theorizing the natu...

Political developments in the last ten years have led to a very considerable renewal of interest in Marxist economic and political analysis, and to a concerted attempt to reinvigorate Marxist theory as a revolutionary force. The focus of this movement is the attempt to develop a Marxist critique of Stalinist dogmatism and of post-Stalinist revisionism. Its material conditions are the end of the...

The centenary of Max Weber's death raises the question wider significance 1920 as marking a break in history social theory. This essay focuses on Germany and Austria, where political with past was particularly sharp discontinuities intellectual configuration sciences were most obvious. Three trends are striking: development neo-Marxist theory GyĂśrgy LukĂĄcs Karl Korsch later emergence critical...

When I began writing about class in the mid-1970s, I saw Marxism as a comprehensive paradigm confronting positivist social science. 1 I argued that Marxism had distinctive epistemological premises and distinctive methodological approaches which were fundamentally opposed to the prevalent practices of mainstream social science. While I argued that this battle should be engaged on an empirical as...

lnterpretivist movements in anthropology and sociology have recently merged with neo-Marxist and feminist theory to produce a unique genre of research in the field of education known as "critical ethnography." Critical ethnographers seek research accounts sensitive to the dialectical relationship between the social structural constraints on human actors and the relative autonomy of human agency...

The concept of reification is used by Marx to describe a form of social consciousness in which human relations come to be identified with the physical properties of things, thereby acquiring an appearance of naturalness and inevitability. This essay presents a systematic reconstruction of Marx's theory of reification, with an emphasis on the social-structural dimensions of the concept. This rec...

Western societies have developed into a historically new stage in the evolution of capitalism, one which is characterized by corporations exercising monopolistic power and sustaining demand by advertising through the media. While this theme has been emphasized e.g., by J. A. Schumpeter in Business Cycles; A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, chapter III,...