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This paper analyzes the work of two Indian sociologists who defined the contours of sociology in India in the immediate post-independence decades, M. N. Srinivas and A. R. Desai. It argues that their scholarship can be linked to sociology's legacy as anthropology in India and its embeddedness in the episteme of colonial modernity. It contends that Srinivas's methodology, the field view, attempted to make a break with earlier methods, such as book view. However, his three concepts, that of dominant caste, Sanskritization and Westernization were perceived as civilizational attributes and which had organized social change in India. A. R. Desai, a Marxist historical sociologist, made an incisive critique of capitalist exploitation and elaborated the material conditions that led to peasant and working-class revolts. However, his sociology could not unravel the caste-class linkages that organized the Indian 'social' which was embedded in Indian nationalism. This paper suggests that a definitive understanding of modernity emerges in Indian sociology in the late 70s when the feminist, dalit and tribal movements interrogated the material basis of contemporary India's developmentalism and its capitalist and exploitative character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discipline is at a crossroads. Will sociology answer ASA past president Aldon Morris' call for an emancipatory sociology? Or will sociology, as Morris puts it, "continue pretending to be an aloof, objective, detached science"? Recently, Hirschman and Garbes issued a call for an economic sociology of race, wherein they contend that race and racism are not central to economic sociology and that economic sociologists don't engage with contemporary race scholarship. In this paper, I assess and build upon their call. I argue that while the article importantly calls for understanding race and racism in economic sociology, in practice, it—used here as an example of a broader pattern within economic sociology—re‐centers whiteness and men, reifies elitism, and erases marginalized scholars and their contributions. I set forth an alternative perspective. To rise to the Du Boisian challenge, scholars need to critique racialized modernity as Itzigsohn and Brown importantly argue. We must also root our sociological consciousness, citation practices, and conversations in existing, yet marginalized, research. Failure to do so means future research risks reproducing inequities in the discipline and continuing to marginalize the very people, theories, and research that an emancipatory sociology is meant to address. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert Fine was among the most original social theorists in Britain of the past 30 years, and the aim of this paper is to offer a first systematic assessment of his intellectual contribution. There are sound intellectual reasons to explore Fine's scholarship. He maintained a problematic relation with mainstream sociology and, against the reduction of sociology to questions of method, culture, or class, he argued that sociologists must continue to ask difficult normative questions as part of the social world they ought to explain. And there are also pressing political concerns that justify a reconsideration of his writings. Global politics is currently marked by a populist wave that decries the very ideas and values that were central to Fine's social theory: the need to uphold the rule of law at home and abroad, the politics of cosmopolitan solidarity, and the significance of antisemitism and its relationships with different forms of authoritarian politics. My main argument is that there is a dialectics of universality that drives forward Fine's intellectual project. By this, I mean that a universalistic idea of humanity—an all‐inclusive conception of all human beings—is the most important normative intuition of modern times. This idea of humanity moves forward in history through a dual process of emancipation and domination: successful forms of social, legal, and political inclusion help make visible previous dynamics of exclusion but may also create or recreate discriminatory practices. Building on the work of French historian Michael Löwy on heterodox Jewish thinkers, I explain the three main tenets of Fine's work: (a) his reconstruction of critical social theory; (b) the notion of cosmopolitan solidarity; and (c) the significance and main features of modern antisemitism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The modern increase in opportunities for social activities also brings with it unintended side effects posed by the liberating potential and the acceleration of modern life. In this paper it is argued that the views reflected in Georg Simmel's formal approach and in American sociologist Edward A. Ross' reformative sociology are (1) complementary and (2) offer fresh insights for our current sociological understanding of unexpected consequences in contemporary "high modernity" or knowledge societies. A long forgotten nexus between the ideas of Simmel's and the work of Ross will be reviewed in order to point out affinities between the two authors' takes on the unintended and sometimes tragic moments in modern culture and their relevance for sociology today. Based on these discussions a fundamental mode for framing the unexpected in modern society as a recursively-linked component to the intended is illustrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of 'identity' is central to much contemporary sociology, reflecting a crisis that manifests itself in two ways. Firstly, there is a view that identity is both vital and problematic in this period of high modernity. Secondly, while this awareness is reflected in sociology, its accounts of identity are inconsistent, under-theorized and incapable of bearing the analytical load required. As a result, there is an inherent contradiction between a valuing of identity as so fundamental as to be crucial to personal well-being, and a theorization of 'identity' that sees it as something constructed, fluid, multiple, impermanent and fragmentary. The contemporary crisis of identity thus expresses itself as both a crisis of society, and a crisis of theory. This paper explores the diverse ways in which 'identity' is deployed before turning to case-studies of its use by Anthony Giddens and Manuel Castells. This strategy demonstrates the widespread and diverse concern with identity before exploring how problematic it has become, even in the work of two of the world's leading sociologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologist Constantin Schifirneţ is a researcher who constantly draws attention on studies and advanced ideas. Lately, the same thing happened with Tendential Modernity. Reflections about modern evolution of society (Tritonic Publishing House, Bucharest, 2016, 199 p.). Through the proposed perspective, but also by the depth of the research, we consider this paper as a work of reference, especially since the ideas that generated it are the result of long reflections on modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the most salient works in which the sociologist Werner Sombart saw the dimension of globality as a social element, constitutive of modernity and its future. The aim is to understand the role of globality, as an idea and a phenomenon, in the constitution in all aspects of society (economic, political, cultural, anthropological). The Works to which the article refers show a global society, one that goes from the time of Sombart to the present day, as the author had already envisioned in all their potentialities and criticalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper uses three of Bauman's interlocutors—Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Cornelius Castoriadis—to open issues of the worlds we create, for better and more often for worse. Bauman uses Foucault to rethink the sociology of the factory as a site of discipline, though the fibre of his argument is also open to Marxist social history from below. He borrows more selectively from Agamben, in order to address more general problems of modernity and violence. The work of Castoriadis appears in a more positive register in Bauman's work, for his is also a modern and classical enthusiasm for cities as a counterpoint to camps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I offer a discussion of Simmel's Philosophy of Money in comparison with the analyses of money in the writings of Marx, Weber and Durkheim. Based on this analysis, I argue that Simmel's ambiguous status as a classic can be accounted for by some of the characteristics of his approach as well as the historical (non-)reception of his work. Simmel's relative neglect in sociology for the better part of the century as well as his recent revival with the rise of the new cultural studies and the postmodern paradigm shift hint at an important interdependence between the history and systematics of sociological theory. The theme of money has not managed to be accepted as an undisputed topic of sociological reflection because of its non-independent status in most social theories (apart from Simmel's) as well as the factual resistance to totalizing accounts (like Simmel's) in the history of sociology. Recent transformations in social theory, however, indicate that money may, and to some extent already has, become a more autonomous topic of inquiry. In conclusion, I argue that Simmel's work does lend itself to be taken up in postmodern perspectives and that the sociological study of money can likewise be appropriated by the new cultural studies. However, these new perspectives will have to come to terms with the modernist resistance of Simmel and the other sociological classics' remaining influence in contemporary sociological theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]