Postmodern Social Theory - Softcover

Ritzer, George

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Softcover

ISBN 10: 007053019X ISBN 13: 9780070530195

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education, 1997

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George Ritzer's long-awaited text in Postmodern Social Theory is a readable and coherent introduction to the fundamental ideas and most important thinkers in postmodern social theory. Looking at this multidisciplinary field from a sociological perspective, Ritzer offers a modernist reading of the turbulent and often renegade world of postmodern thought, encouraging the reader to see how postmodernism offers a set of ideas that can invigorate and revitalize sociology and sociological theory.

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About the Author:

George Ritzer is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, where he has been a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and won a Teaching Excellence award by the American Sociological Association, and in 2004, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by LaTrobe University, Melborune, Australia. He has served as Chair of the American Sociological Association's Sections on Theoretical Sociology and organizations and Occupations. He held the UNESCO Chair in Social Theory at the Russian Academy of Sciences, a Fulbright-Hay Chair at York University in Canada, and a Fulbright-Hays award to the Netherlands. He has been Scholar-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences. Dr. Ritzer's main theoretical interests lie in metatheory as well as applied social theory. In metatheory, his contributions include Metatheorizing in Sociology(Lexington Books, 1991), Sociology: A Multiple Paradigm Science (Allyn and Bacon, 1975, 1980), and Toward an Integrated Sociological Paradigm (Allyn and Bacon). Professor Ritzer is perhaps best known for the McDonaldization of Society (4/e, 2004); translated into more than a dozen languages) and several related books (also with a number of translations, including Expressing America: A Critique of the Global Credit Card Society (1995), Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption (2/e, 2005),The Globalization of Nothing (2/e, 2007), and (with Craig Lair) Outsourcing: Globalization and Beyond. He edited the Encyclopedia of Social Theory (2005), and is the founding editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture. He just completed editing the eleven-volume Encyclopedia of Sociology (2007) and The Blackwell Companion to Globalization (2007). In 2006, McGraw-Hill published the second edition of Professor Ritzer's Contemporary Sociological Theory and Its Classic Roots: The Basics. In 2007, McGraw-Hill will publish the seventh edition of Modern Sociological Theory, and the fifth edition of Classical Sociological Theory. The latter texts, as well as this one, have been translated into a number of languages.

Synopsis:

This text offers an historical sketch of the development of postmodern social theory, major criticisms of it, and recent efforts to move beyond it. It focuses on the work of such leading postmodernists as Michael Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and on contemporary alternatives/reactions/interventions by such theorists as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck. American contributions by Daniel Bell and Frederic Jameson and the relationship between feminist and multiculturalist theory from a sociological perspective receives treatment. Ritzer discusses the implications postmodern social theory has for contemporary sociological theory and shows how it can be used to analyze contemporary consumer society.

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