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Sociological Theory in the Contemporary Era: Text and Readings. Scott Appelrouth and Laura Desfor Edles, eds. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge. 2007. 667 pages. $64.95.
Editing a reader on contemporary theory is a thankless task. By definition, the field is in a constant state of formation and, by extension, a constant state of contention. Flipping through the seven different contemporary theory readers on my bookshelf, I find very little agreement on the substantive categories of contemporary theoretical work, let alone the actual theorists to include in those categories. Most teachers of theory will determine the usefulness of a theory reader by examining one or the other-either the substantive categories, or the theorists-so I have included those details in this review, but it should be noted that the editors do a better job than most of integrating the theorists, categories, and reading selections into a unified overview of the state of theory today, with a focus on both social order and social action.
This book is clearly designed with a keen eye towards the ebb and flow of the semester. It is easy to translate the ten chapters into a fourteen week syllabus, allowing a couple extra weeks for the early chapters as well as a week for the midterm and perhaps a week for a relevant documentary. Alternatively, the book can be combined with a reader on classical theory, which will force-or allow, depending on your perspective-the professor to prefer certain chapters over others. These same editors offered such a reader in 2005 with Sociological Theory in the Classical Era, also from Pine Forge.
But working just with this text on contemporary theory, I will examine a possible way to use this book across a semester. The first week of class demands a series of introductions-of the professor, of the students, of the text, and most importantly, of the material. But the first week of class is also often made quirky by the time consuming character of basic administrative work, by the fact that it is hard to assign reading for the first day's class, and by the fact that many schools start the semester somewhere in the middle of the week. Conveniently, Appelrouth and Edles have offered a very straightforward, 20-page introduction that addresses...