Introduction

Abstract

This is a book about how sociology should respond to the time in which it finds itself. I call the response I would like to see ‘past-modern realism’ or ‘realism beyond modernism’. I argue that contemporary social theory has consolidated a much richer and more sophisticated view of the social world than the one with which modernist sociology worked. This rich and complex social ontology (what sorts of things the social world is made up of) has not, however, been matched by a corresponding development in the sophistication of research guidelines. In this latter sphere of epistemology and methodology, the state of the art is trailing forlornly some way behind. This uneven development is extremely important because sophisticated research guidelines are a necessity if we are to find out about the particular shapes, colours and details that the basic social entities of ontology take on in specific times and places. My argument is that sociology needs to provide itself with guidelines on how to traverse the bridges and the junctions that connect the insights of ontology and high theory to the empirical evidence necessary to make claims about the real world of any one moment. I argue strongly that we need to maintain a clear sense of the real, but that we also need to acknowledge the complexity of that real and the enormous demands of subtlety that this imposes upon anyone wanting to come anywhere near an apprehension of it in a given time and place.