Product Description: The Concise Encyclopedia of Comparative Sociology presents the current state of knowledge in comparative sociology for students, scholars, and the educated lay public. The major aim of comparative sociological research is to identify similarities and differences among societies, studying variation across both geographical regions and historical periods...read more

Product Description: Stephen K. Sanderson s latest book recaptures a scientific theoretical sociology, one whose fundamental aim is the formulation of real theories that can be empirically tested. Sanderson reviews the major theoretical traditions within contemporary sociology, explicating their key principles, critically evaluating these principles and their applications, and showcasing exemplars...read more

Product Description: This new edition is a substantial abridgment and update of Randall Collins's 1975 classic, Conflict Sociology. The first edition represented the most powerful and comprehensive statement of conflict theory in its time. Here, Sanderson has retained the core chapters and added discussions on Collins's and others' work in recent years...read more

Product Description: This expanded, updated edition of Revolutions offers a new chapter on terrorism and on social movements, including jihadism. Revolutions and state breakdowns are the primary focus as Sanderson presents prominent theories and describes the process of revolutions...read more

Product Description: This expanded, updated edition of Revolutions offers a new chapter on terrorism and on social movements, including jihadism. Revolutions and state breakdowns are the primary focus as Sanderson presents prominent theories and describes the process of revolutions...read more

Product Description: First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Evolutionism and Its Critics is a critical history of evolutionary theories in the social sciences and a defense of them against their many critics. Sanderson deconstructs not only the wide array of social evolutionary theories, but the criticisms of the antievolutionists...read more

Product Description: In this book Sanderson turns a critical eye on theorists from Herbert Spencer and Talcott Parsons to contemporary thinkers such as Gerhard Lenski and Marvin Harris, examining in each case the logical and epistemological foundation of the theory, and drawing essential distinctions between theories...read more

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This outline of a general theory of social evolution was first articulated in "Social Evolution: A Critical History", and further elaborated and applied to the most important social transformations of the past 10,000 years of world prehistory and history. This account of that social evolution begins with the Neolithic revolution, which marked the shift from hunter-gatherer societies to societies based on agriculture. It charts the origins of civilization and the state, and depicts the transition, after the 16th century AD, from feudalism to modern capitalism in Western Europe and Japan, to culminate in the gradual emergence of the modern world. Not only does the author assess the extent to which evolutionary transformations have led to human progress, but he uses his interpretation of recent evolutionary changes to project the human future over the next century. Is humankind capable of avoiding nuclear war, ecological disaster and economic collapse? In the event of survival, what is the future likely to hold in terms of the form of social, economic and political organization? Eschewing popular trends of postmodernism and historical particularism in recent social theory, this book should be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, historians, philosophers and political scientists, indeed for all serious social thinkers concerned with the meaning of the human past and the possible direction of world society in the near future. Stephen K. Sanderson is the author of "Macrosociology: An Introduction" and "Social Evolutionism". (view table of contents)

A general sociology text written from a comparative, historical, and evolutionary perspective. The most important changes in this updated edition are a reworked discussion of the rise of modern capitalism and revised and extended discussions of the recent economic and political changes in the former (view table of contents)

Product Description: The grand historical and social theorizing of early in this century―works that conjure up names like Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, and Sorokin―has been out of favor for many years. Only recently have two new schools of research, comparative civilizational studies and world systems analysis, emerged to examine societies in the broadest possible terms...read more