This Handbook provides the hidden common threads that tie sociological inquiry together and
featuring eminent scholars it separates itself from its predecessors in substance and
organization. Rather than rehashing old debates or longingly gazing at the past this book
presents sociologists with new ways of conceptualizing the organization and presentation of
sociological theory. At the heart of this Handbook's vision is the twin goals of making theory
a viable enterprise by reconceptualizing how we teach theory and keeping theory closely tied to
its empirical applications. Three strategies are offered: (1) Elucidating how classic issues
like integration or interaction are interrogated today (2) Presenting a coherent vision of the
social levels of reality that theorists work on such as communities groups and the self as
well as how the coherence of these levels speaks to the macro-micro link and (3) Theorizing
the social world rather than celebrating theorists or theories that is one can look at how
theory is used holistically to understand the constraints the social world places on our lived
experience or the dynamics of social change. Hence in the second decade of the 21st century
it has become clear that sociology is at a crossroads as the number of theorists and amount of
theory available is increasingly unmanageable and unknowable by the vast majority of
professionals and students. As such this Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory presents
the novice and the expert with the a roadmap for traversing this crossroad and building a more
coherent robust and cumulative sociology.
