Anthony Giddens is an almost impenetrably abstract social theorist. But he is really smart, so my theory class will slog through his The Constitution of Society.
A running problem in social theory is that from the macro perspective, society seems to reproduce its main social structures. Yet from the micro perspective, we seem free to choose how we act.
Giddens offers the interesting idea that it is in the ritual interactions of day-to-day life that we reproduce the social structure.
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I was exposed to Giddens in grad school by a student of Herbert Blumer and Symbolic Interactionism. I appreciated more of Gidden's stuff (what I could understand) than most sociological theory. His more recent work on globalization is interesting as well.
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