Sociology and The Global Crisis: An Introduction.

The article discusses issues related to sociology and the global crisis. It is a cardinal fact of the world situation that for the past ten years or so, there has been a world-wide experience of a crisis of enormous magnitude in socioeconomic terms. In drawing attention to sociologist Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, a crisis awareness was from the start an integral part of sociological consciousness and further, that sociological analysis of crisis as a multi-dimensional phenomenon has had two complementary channels. The present set of essays brings fresh perspectives on the theme of crisis from scholars of severed regions of the world--Western and Eastern Europe, North America, and East Asia. Each contributor was given full authority as to what facets of the global crisis he might choose to investigate. Yet, it is rather remarkable to note that a complementary division of labor emerged, in the sense that analyses of objective aspects of the global crisis and analyses of the crisis as involving sociological perception and conceptualization balance each other, and several papers dwell upon the interrelation between the two.