Drie boeken

Samenvatting

Three sociological works that are deemed personally relevant in their actualization of central sociological principles are described. (1) Karl Mannheim's Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction is considered an excellent illustration of the ultimate goal of understanding society as a whole; the relevance of its distinction between historical stages of finding, making, and planning life is acknowledged and related to the rise and (partial) collapse of the welfare state. (2) The Chicago school of the 1920s and 1930s, perhaps best represented in Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess's The City, illustrates the richness of ordinary life among ordinary people from a classical perspective; the relevance of the Chicago school's empirical methods is also discussed. (3) Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966) is recommended as an excellent description of the social construction of reality and the relativity of institutions and their legitimization; social construction theory is deemed more enduring than deconstructionism and other postmodern approaches. S. Paul