Talk:Social theory

The Grand Theory

SOCIAL PHENOMENA by Teng Wang

Anon edits/vandalism?

Recently some anon has done extensive edits: some look good, but he also removed a significant part of old material. Somebody should go over it and see what needs to be restored. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 13:23, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

Could the attention tag be made more specific? The article seems to perhaps suffer from a lack of referencing and some formatting problems, but otherwise seems to be a fairly accurate account of social theory defined in opposition to other areas of social studies. --Phnord 12:47, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Social Theory vs. Sociological Theory

Is there such a distinction? If so what exactly is it?

Maybe a translation stemming from the German controversy of Theorie der Gesellschaft ("theory of society", mostly used for Marxist sociology) as against gesellschaftliche Theorie ("social theory", mostly used for 'bourgeois' sociology)? -- €pa 01:28, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

The latest I heard from an academic is that sociological theory used to be what theorising withing the field of sociology used to be at the time the discipline was attempting to establish itself as a separate entity. Today, however, it is going back towards opening up to various other disciplines and, hence, the preference of using social over sociological theory. :) Kaloyan* 09:11, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Social theory is an inter-disciplinary field that crosses over various disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, literature studies, cultural studies, history, etc. to name a few. In contrast, sociology is a specific discipline of the social sciences. Sociological theory is still quite distinct as an area and much new theory claims to be precisley sociological rather than general social theory. Although they have similarities they exist as separate bodies of knowledge. JenLouise 06:24, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

I am inclined to disagree. Sociology might just be one of many social sciences in modern terms, but it is also irrefutably the social science in historical terms (assuming we categorise philosophy and political theory as different things). The Anglo-American umbrella term 'social science' arrived much later than the original continental sociologists and their attempts to establish, and consequently disestablish, the science of society. This umbrella term, which I think constitutes any casual differentiation between "sociological theory" and "social theory" today, owes to the attempt to inject anthropology and economics back into the mix at a later date. 'Social theory' is not really synonymous with 'social science' in general - it refers predominantly to the work which stems back to Comte, Durkheim, Marx, Simmel, Weber, and the others. It would be unfair for economists or communications theorists or cultural theorists to bandy-about terminology like "gemeinschaft" or "agency" or "instrumental action" as if these terms had always existed independent of everything. Most social theory is, above all else, sociological theory. --Tomsega (talk) 00:25, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

I've recently attempted to clarify the distinction between social and sociological theories, you can see a dedicated section in the sociological theory article. Of course, social theory and social science are not the same. Social theory is subjective, values and judges. Sociological theory is more objective and scientific. Social science is the umberalla term, the counterpart to natural science. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 20:36, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

removal of "main" template

I removed the "main" template from the social theory and hard science section as the an article called Sociology versus social theory shouldn't contain information on hard or natural sciences and therefore would not be a more in-depth discussion of the section it was added to. I have also dropped the heading for that section down a level because it is part of social theory as a discipline. If someone feels strongly they may want to add sociology vs social theory as a second heading in this section and then link to the article. JenLouise 08:10, 2 January 2007 (UTC)ff

Post-modern social theory section

The Post-modern social theory section at the moment is just a see also list. Unless some content regarding the nature of post-modern social theory can be added (as per the commentary for Classical social theory, Modern social theory, etc), this section should be deleted with the 3 articles just appearing in the See Also section. JenLouise 06:27, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Merge from Social thought

It seems to me that Social thought is a poor fork of this article. It should be merged here, and either redirected, or turned into a disambig between social theory and social science. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 20:34, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't know enough about Wikipedia to take a view on redirect vs disambig, and I don't know enough about social theory to handle the proposed merge - but I have read enough social theory to feel confident in agreeing with Piotrus that a merge of the Social thought page with this one would be a good plan. Doctor Girl (talk) 15:42, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Since I don't see any disagreement, I copied and pasted everything from Social thought into this page, as step one of Wikipedia:Merge#How to merge. It recommends "do any necessary copyediting and rearranging in a separate, second edit rather than when you first paste the moved text." I agree with User:Bgwhite that this article needs some post-merge editing to merge stuff into a single References section, a single External links section, etc. It appears that we disagree on the relative importance of the essays WP:NORUSH vs WP:OWNFEET, but I still hope we can work together to make an excellent article by building from the best parts of both articles that were merged into it. --DavidCary (talk) 14:24, 8 June 2014 (UTC)