Sociology & Criminology for a Changing World
Homo Sociologicus. An Essay on the History, Meaning, and Critique of the Category of Social Role [Original: Homo Sociologicus. Ein Versuch zur Geschichte, Bedeutung und Kritik der Kategorie der sozialen Rolle] is one of the most concise and widely discussed contributions to role theory. First published in 1958 and revised in 1977, Ralf Dahrendorf’s essay
The Social Construction of Reality by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann is one of the most influential works of interpretive sociology in the 20th century. The book not only provides a theoretical foundation for the sociology of knowledge but has also shaped communication studies, media theory, and cultural analysis far beyond sociology itself. Berger
The Savage Mind (La pensée sauvage, 1962) is one of the most influential texts of French structuralism and marks an important bridge between ethnology, sociology, and cultural studies. In this work, Claude Lévi-Strauss challenges the conventional distinction between „primitive“ and „civilized“ thought. Using numerous ethnographic examples, he demonstrates that so-called „savage“ patterns of thought—in myths,
Talcott Parsons’ work The Social System (1951) is considered one of the key texts of sociology. In this major theoretical contribution, Parsons develops the AGIL scheme—a universal model for analyzing social systems that is still used in sociology, organizational research, and systems theory today. This article explains the theoretical foundations, the structure of social action,
Dialectic of Enlightenment is considered one of the key works of Critical Theory and a milestone in twentieth-century sociological analysis. Originally published in 1944 in exile in the United States under the title Philosophical Fragments, it was not released in its complete form under its current title until 1969. The work explores the dark side
The Structure of Social Action, first published in 1937, stands as Talcott Parsons’s inaugural major work and is widely recognized as laying the theoretical groundwork for his later structural functionalism. In this seminal text, Parsons undertakes an ambitious synthesis of European social theory and contemporary societal dynamics. Rather than treating the individual as a passive