Category Archives: Sociology

John W. Meyer (born 1935) is an American sociologist whose work reshaped the study of organizations, education, globalization, and institutional change. He founded world society theory and helped build sociological neo-institutionalism. His central argument cuts against the common view that … Continue reading →

Michèle Lamont (b. December 15, 1957) holds a central place in contemporary cultural sociology. As the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, she has reoriented … Continue reading →

Anthony Giddens (b. 1938) ranks among the leading sociologists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He built structuration theory to close the old quarrel between accounts that put human agency first and accounts that grant social structures the … Continue reading →

Saskia Sassen (born January 5, 1947) is a Dutch-American sociologist whose work reshaped the study of globalization, cities, migration, and sovereignty. She is best known for the concept of the global city, the claim that globalization concentrates strategic economic and … Continue reading →

Thomas Luckmann ranks among the central figures of twentieth-century interpretive sociology. With Peter L. Berger (1929-2023) he wrote The Social Construction of Reality (1966), a book that entered the disciplinary canon and carried the phrase “social construction” into anthropology, psychology, … Continue reading →

Peter L. Berger (1929-2017) ranks among the influential sociologists of the twentieth century and stands as a foremost scholar of religion in modern society. He is best known as co-author, with Thomas Luckmann (1927-2016), of The Social Construction of Reality … Continue reading →

Loïc Wacquant (b. August 26, 1960) is a French sociologist whose work on urban poverty, race, punishment, embodiment, and the state has made him an influential social theorist of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He holds a professorship … Continue reading →

Gabriella Turnaturi (b. 1944) builds her sociology by watching things break. She reads the moment a marriage collapses to see what held it up. She reads the instant a betrayal lands to recover the promises nobody spoke. Trust runs beneath … Continue reading →

Edgar Morin lost his mother when he was a boy. He spent the next century refusing to let anything stand alone. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) taught that a man builds his life as a defense against two terrors. The first is … Continue reading →