, Sociological Theory
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, Eighth Edition
Sociological Theory
George Ritzer
University of Maryland
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, SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY, EIGHTH EDITION
Published by McGraw-Hill, a business unit of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 1221 Avenue of the
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ritzer, George.
Sociological theory / George Ritzer.—8th ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-07-811167-9 (alk. paper)
1. Sociology. 2. Sociologists—Biography I. Title.
HM585.R57 2010
301.01—dc22
2010006523
www.mhhe.com
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, About the Author
George Ritzer is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland,
where he has also been a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and received a Teaching
Excellence Award. In 2000, he received the Distinguished Contributions to Teaching
Award of the American Sociological Association, and in 2004, he received an honor-
ary doctorate from LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia.
Dr. Ritzer has served as Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Sec-
tions on Theoretical Sociology and Organizations and Occupations. He held the
UNESCO Chair in Social Theory at the Russian Academy of Sciences and a Fulbright-
Hays Chair at York University in Canada, and he received a Fulbright-Hays award to
the Netherlands. He was Scholar-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced
Study and at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences.
Professor Ritzer’s main theoretical interests lie in metatheory and in applied
social theory. In metatheory, his contributions include Sociology: A Multiple Paradigm
Science (1975, 1980), Toward an Integrated Sociological Paradigm (1981), and
Metatheorizing in Sociology (1991). George Ritzer is perhaps best known, however,
for The McDonaldization of Society (5th ed., 2008), translated into more than a dozen
languages, and for several related books (also with a number of translations), includ-
ing Expressing America: A Critique of the Global Credit Card Society (1995), Enchant-
ing a Disenchanted World: Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption (2nd ed.,
2005), The Globalization of Nothing 2 (2007), and the forthcoming (with Craig Lair)
Outsourcing: Globalization and Beyond. He edited the two-volume Encyclopedia of
Social Theory (2005), the eleven-volume Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (2007),
and The Blackwell Companion to Globalization (2007), and he is the founding editor
of the Journal of Consumer Culture.
In 2010, McGraw-Hill published the third edition of Professor Ritzer’s
Contemporary Sociological Theory and Its Classic Roots: The Basics. Also in 2010,
McGraw-Hill published the sixth edition of Classical Sociological Theory. The latter
text, as well as this one, have been translated into a number of languages.
v
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, Sociological Theory
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, To David,
With Love
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, Brief Contents
Biographical and Autobiographical Sketches xvi
Preface xviii
PART I Classical Sociological Theory 1
CHAPTER 1 A Historical Sketch of Sociological Theory: The Early Years 1
CHAPTER 2 Karl Marx 43
CHAPTER 3 Emile Durkheim 76
CHAPTER 4 Max Weber 112
CHAPTER 5 Georg Simmel 158
PART II Modern Sociological Theory: The Major Schools 189
CHAPTER 6 A Historical Sketch of Sociological Theory: The Later Years 189
CHAPTER 7 Structural Functionalism, Neofunctionalism, and Conflict
Theory 236
CHAPTER 8 Varieties of Neo-Marxian Theory 277
CHAPTER 9 Systems Theory 331
CHAPTER 10 Symbolic Interactionism 351
CHAPTER 11 Ethnomethodology 391
CHAPTER 12 Exchange, Network, and Rational Choice Theories 416
CHAPTER 13 Contemporary Feminist Theory 454
vii
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, viii Brief Contents
PART III Recent Integrative Developments in Sociological Theory 499
CHAPTER 14 Micro-Macro and Agency-Structure Integration 499
PART IV From Modern to Postmodern Social Theory (and Beyond) 547
CHAPTER 15 Contemporary Theories of Modernity 547
CHAPTER 16 Globalization Theory 574
CHAPTER 17 Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Postmodern
Social Theory 605
CHAPTER 18 Cutting-Edge Developments in Contemporary Theory 645
Appendix A-1
References R-1
Credits C-1
Name Index I-1
Subject Index I-13
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