The Individual and Society

A Processual Approach

Bibliographic Data

ID20073627
AuthorsChris Harris (0000-0003-3081-8818, corresponding author)
Year1987
Pages17-29
Publication date1987-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueRethinking the Life Cycle (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/978-1-349-18919-9_2
OpenAlexW2500459731
ISBN9781349189199
LanguageEN
Citations received12

In the dark ages of the sociological past we worked within a dominant paradigm which could be loosely termed that of modernisation. In the terms of this paradigm contemporary society occupied a place between two conceptual poles associated loosely with the past and the future respectively. Past societies were religious, familial and communal; future societies scientific, industrial and associational. Contemporary society was well on the way to the embodiment of the future. In Parsonian terms, past societies were ascriptive and particularistic and modern societies achievement-oriented and universalistic. Ascriptive and particularistic groupings and relationships were on their way out, and of interest only as quaint survivals of the past, and this was reflected by the relative prestige accorded to industrial and urban sociology and to the sociology of stratification as opposed to the sociology of religion, the sociology of the family and the sociology of communities.KeywordsSocial SpaceSocial CategoryLocal Labour MarketCategory MemberSocietal EventThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves

Contemporary society · Epistemology · Historical sociology · Industrial society · Modernization theory · Political science · Prestige · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Law · Sociology and Norbert Elias · World Systems and Global Transformations

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