Sociology. Anthony Giddens
Introductory Readings (4th edn, Cambridge: Polity, 2021).
Additional information and support for this book at Polity: www.politybooks.com/giddens9
National Centre for Research Methods, UK – contains many resources and articles on methods. A very useful site: www.ncrm.ac.uk/
CESSDA – Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives – houses many social science data archives covering different types of research: www.nsd.uib.no/cessda/home.html
The UK Office for National Statistics, which includes lots of survey research, but other types as well: www.ons.gov.uk/ons/index.html
The American Sociological Association – their useful research methods section: www.asanet.org/topics/research-methods
The UK Data Archive – a large collection of digital data on a variety of subjects: www.data-archive.ac.uk/
Ipsos MORI – a merged company (Ipsos UK and MORI) focusing on market research and social research: www.ipsos-mori.com/
CONTENTS
1 Theories, theorists and perspectives
3 Positivism and ‘social evolution’
4 Karl Marx: revolution not evolution
6 Emile Durkheim: the social level of reality
7 Twentieth-century structural functionalism
8 Max Weber: capitalism and religion
9 Symbolic interactionism, phenomenology and ethnomethodology
10 Challenging mainstream sociology
11 Feminism against malestream sociology
12 Poststructuralism and postmodernity
14 Enduring theoretical dilemmas
15 Social structure and human agency
17 Societies and sociology in transformation
18 Reflexivity, risk and cosmopolitan theory
19 Conclusion: sociological theory in development
The theory of human-made global warming, despite being supported by the majority of natural scientists, has been the subject of acrimonious debate and theoretical disagreement.
The former US president, Donald Trump, has long argued that he does not believe in the theory of anthropogenic or ‘human-caused’ climate change. In 2017 he announced that the USA would withdraw from the Paris Climate Change Agreement in 2020. Then, in interviews following a state visit to the UK in 2019, he said:
I believe there’s a change in the weather, and I think it changes both ways. Don’t forget, it used to be called global warming, that wasn’t working, then it was called climate change. Now it’s actually called extreme weather, because with extreme weather you can’t miss…. I don’t remember tornados in the United States to this extent but then when you look back 40 years ago we had the worst tornado binge we ever had. In the 1890s we had our worst hurricanes. (Cited in Weaver and Lyons 2019; BBC News 2019e).
Donald Trump is clearly at odds with the overwhelming majority of natural scientists who say the evidence increasingly supports the theory of anthropogenic (human-forced) global warming. Trump questions both the evidence and the theory, while other