What is the difference between classical and contemporary social theory?

Résumé du document

Calhoun argues that big changes in history (WWI, WWII, the Great Depression) influence sociological writing by posing new questions. The Cold War changed American sociologist's way to look at other societies. USA were concerned to compete with USSR, and thus believed that they needed experts on foreign societies. They thus funded such research, which enormously orientated the sociological research of the time.
Calhoun draws a line in the 1960's between classical and contemporary social theory, as he argues that it was the period where the historical context of sociology had changed the most. The events of the 1960's 1970's (Vietnam, Third world, Cold War, gay rights, environment) reshaped what the social scientists saw as being most important in the world. They thus started to work on themes such as social change, power, social inequality, processes of marginalization and exploitation, etc.

The individual and the society
Calhoun sees the relation between the individual and the society as the most important of these new sociological themes. Many sociologists worked on this theme, such as Erwin Goffman and his sociology of dating, or Herbert Marcuse which argued that capitalism did not have to discipline workers anymore but rather to motivate consumers. There was a widespread sense that people had more choices in their life and about their social role. The identity of a person and its social role are both socially constructed.

Extraits

[...] What is the difference between classical and contemporary social theory? Craig Calhoun, Contemporary Sociological Theory, Introduction 4 elements help us define classical social theory: - Classical social theory is constituted of elements that have stood the ordeal of time; we are still interested in it - Continuity exists with today's sociological work. Classical social theory defines broad orientations for today's social scientists - A work becomes classical when new developments have been brought to it by others. Example: Talcott Parsons's functionalism and Jeffrey Alexander neofunctionalism. [...]

[...] The goal in the study of network was to abstract the form of the relationship from their content and then to compare formal structures and analyze the effects of variations. The study of actors' strategies in the society is representative of the global change in the perception of the link between the individual and the society Conclusion Contemporary Social theory is thus enormously diverse and multifaced. It is constituted of numerous theories, and not any of them is dominant. It includes a variety of contending and/or complementary perspectives and is informed by the work of neighbouring disciplines and interdisciplinary fields. It is also inspired by several theoretical traditions. [...]

[...] Another criticism was that it neglected power, especially the one of the leading societies over the less developed. It also neglected the social and cultural differences of the different “less advanced” countries. Empirical Research During the classical epoch (i.e. of Marx and Engels), empiric research was only in its infancy. Marx and Engels worked on second hand documentation or collected their data themselves in artisanal fashion. It was barely better in the 19th century where Durkheim and Weber worked; government had only begun to collect information about population. [...]

[...] The Social and Cultural Construction of Knowledge Classical social theory of George Herbert Mead (pragmatism): the value of an object in the world depends of the activity in which people are engaged and the ways others they care about grasp the same object. No one does simply and directly get reality right; different cultures and/or scientific theories can demonstrate opposite things with equal validity. The social construction of knowledge has become a major concern of the post 1960's contemporary sociological theory. It focused on both history and the new awareness of cultural diversity. Ex: transformation of the Western culture. Foucault wanted to understand the different approaches of knowledge. [...]

[...] This led to the appearance of a gap between the classical broadly encompassing theories and the new sociological research which was mainly composed of statistical work. C. Wright Mills called this the differentiation between the “grand theory” and the “abstracted empiricism”. Robert Merton, who was also aware of the existence of this gap proponed to value a hybrid type of theory which he defined as being middle-range theories. They were meant to be less wide than those of the classics (Durkheim, Parsons, etc) but also more generalizable than specific empirical findings. His examples included theories of social deviance, social roles or reference groups. [...]