Sociology & Criminology for a Changing World
With his major work Economy and Society (1921/22), Max Weber created a foundational text of modern sociology that remains one of the central reference points for sociological theory today. Published posthumously and edited by Marianne Weber and other students based on his lectures and manuscripts, it offers a comprehensive system of categories for analyzing social
Max Weber’s essay “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” (1905) is considered one of the most important works in sociology. In it, Weber analyzes the cultural and religious conditions that contributed to the development of modern capitalism. This work enables students to analytically examine the interplay between culture, economy, and society, especially the
With his work Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (1969), Herbert Blumer laid the theoretical and methodological foundation of symbolic interactionism. As a student of George Herbert Mead, he not only coined the term for this school of thought but also shaped one of the most influential microsociological theories of the 20th century. Blumer’s approach places
Frank Tannenbaum’s concept of “tagging”, developed in his 1938 work Crime and the Community, is widely regarded as a foundational contribution to labelling theory. Long before Howard Becker or Edwin Lemert formalized the labelling approach, Tannenbaum argued that crime is not simply a quality of the act itself but emerges through social reactions and the
Crime is a form of meaningful social action that can only be understood by situating it within its cultural, emotional, and interactional contexts. Both offending and the social reaction to it are shaped by contested symbolic frameworks and affective dynamics. Theories within this category approach crime as a culturally and emotionally meaningful form of social
Interactionist and labelling approaches constitute a paradigm shift in criminological theory. Rather than explaining crime as the outcome of static individual pathologies or deterministic social factors, these perspectives emphasise the social construction of deviance through processes of interaction, attribution, and power. Crime, in this view, is not a self-evident act but an outcome of societal