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The article informs that Anthony Giddens is the most important sociologist Britain has produced in over a century. His ambition has long been both to recast social theory and to re-examine the understanding of the trajectory of "modernity." He has tackled these daunting tasks in an astonishingly imaginative manner, integrating sustained theoretical critique with an enviable capacity to conceptualize and explain changes in the world. Giddens does not write much, at least directly, about the "information society." It is not a concern of his to discuss this concept, not least because he is skeptical of the proposition. It is his view that we all live today in an epoch of "radicalized modernity," one marked by the accelerated development of features long characteristic of modernity itself. Giddens engages with classical social theorists, most notably Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. His aim, like that of the great trio, is to understand the cluster of changes, which is called the emergence of "modernity" from around the time of the mid-seventeenth century. Sociology's origin and purpose were to account for this break with "traditional" societies which was marked by the development of factory production, bureaucratization, urbanization, the growth of a scientific ethos, new ways of seeing nature--the set of institutional and attitudinal changes which is called "modernity."

This article presents the author's views on Erving Goffman as a social theorist. Goffman's writings have been more or less universally acclaimed for their luminosity, their charm and their insight. Probably no sociologist over this period has been as widely read both by those in neighboring social science disciplines and by the lay public. Goffman's writings have an intrinsically accessible style that has convinced not a few skeptics that sociology is a rather more interesting subject than they may have thought it to be. But all this having been said, Goffman would not ordinarily be ranked among the major social theorists. His work seems quite different in scope and intent from that of other authors. For one thing, unlike these authors, Goffman writes for the most part in plain language. His texts do not abound with the strange-sounding neologisms favored by those who are more self-consciously "theorists." Moreover, his method seems cavalier. In his writings, observations drawn from social research jostle with illustrations derived from fictional literature, and with casual assertions made with very little apparent empirical backing at all.

The article deliberates on the nature of structural constraints in society. The concept of contradiction can be usefully connected to notions of structural properties and structural constraint. The notion of contradiction can be given a clear sense in social theory, and that it is worth distinguishing from conflict, where the latter term denotes some form of active antagonism between actors and collectivities. The most important and interesting of recent attempts to give the concept of contradiction a definite empirical content are to be found in the work of authors influenced by game theory, who adopt a viewpoint explicitly linked to methodological individualism. In circumstances in which the economy is growing at such a pace as to absorb available sources of labor, wages will tend to increase as employers experience a scarcity of suitable labor power. To offset this, employers introduce technical innovations which save on labor costs. While individual industrialists may derive greater profitability from such a response, the overall amount of surplus value, and therefore of profit, in the economy declines, since the ratio of constant to variable capital has risen.

Chapter 106 of the book "Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective," Third Edition, edited by David B. Grusky, Manwai C. Ku and Szonja Szelényi is presented. It explores the class structure and class divisions of the post-industrial society which are associated with the knowledge or service economy. It also highlights the priorities of social justice in post-industrial social conditions.

Chapter 30 of the book "Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective," Third edition, edited by David B. Grusky, Manwai C. Ku and Szonja Szelényi is presented. It presents a Marxian perspective concerning the social structure of capitalism. It stresses the existence of a "governing class" without it necessarily being a "ruling class," that are compatible with the existence of a society which is "capitalist" in its organization.

Chapter 14 of the book "Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective," Third Edition, edited by David B. Grusky, Manwai C. Ku, and Szonja Szelényi is presented. It highlights the criticism of German economist Max Weber in the theory of classes of German economist Karl Marx and the deficiency of Weber's reinterpretation of Marxian standpoint. It also discusses the variations of mediate and proximate structuration of class relationship.

The article presents preface to the book "Society, Action and Space." This book will be of interest not only to geographers but to everyone working in social theory. "Space" has sometimes been claimed as the distinctive province of geography, but in this book, Benno Werlen demonstrates brilliantly that such a position is not plausible. "Space" has no distinctive content and therefore cannot be the specific object of study of a particular discipline. This conclusion does not imply that spatial issues lose their interest; on the contrary, they become of core importance for the social sciences as a whole. The concept of space, as Werlen indicates, is philosophically as problematic as that of time. A stress upon action can help counter the behaviourism and objectivism characteristic of many areas of geography, but of course "action" is a complex idea. Action presumes meaning and intentionality, even though what counts as action is not exhausted by what is done intentionally. Karl Popper's writings provide a major resource, Werlen proposes, for investigating these issues.

The article focuses on protestant ethic. The book titled "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," by Max Weber is being referred in the article. It has been ranked as one of the most renowned, and controversial, works of modern social science. German philosophy, political theory and economics in the nineteenth century were very different from their counterparts in Great Britain. The dominant position of utilitarianism and classical political economy in the latter country was not reproduced in Germany, where these were held at arm's length by the influence of Idealism and, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, by the growing impact of Marxism. Just as he accepted the thesis that history is of focal importance to the social sciences, Weber adopted the idea that the 'understanding' of meaning is essential to the explication of human action. In seeking to specify the distinctive characteristics of modern capitalism in The Protestant Ethic, Weber first of all separates off capitalistic enterprise from the pursuit of gain as such. A rationalized capitalistic enterprise implies two things, a disciplined labor force, and the regularized investment of capital.