Saïd Amir Arjomand 
Social Theory and Regional Studies in the Global Age [EPUB ebook] 

In this pioneering volume, leading international scholars argue for the development of a new approach to social theory that draws on regional studies for the conduct of comparative analysis in the global age.
Social Theory and Regional Studies in the Global Age moves beyond facile generalizations based on the historical experience of modernization in the West by highlighting differences rather than similarities and contrasts rather than commonalities, and by examining civilizational processes and culturally specific developmental patterns distinctive of different world regions. Essays combine comparative and historical sociology with civilizational analysis and the study of multiple and alternative modernities. Different patterns of modernization are compared within the framework of global/local compressed communication and interaction that results from globalization. The introductory chapter puts the present effort in the context of the seminal work of three generations of comparative sociologists, and what follows is a penetrating analysis of modernization and globality, opening the way for rectifying the erasure of the historical experience of a very sizeable portion of humankind from the foundation of social theory.

Spis treści

Foreword: Pangaea II: Global/Local Studies

Preface



Introduction: The Challenge of Integrating Social Theory and Regional Studies




Part I. Comparative Sociology, Civilizational Analysis, and Regional Studies



1. Three Generations of Comparative Sociologies


Saïd Amir Arjomand



2. History, Sociology, and the Reconfiguration of Civilizations


Björn Wittork



3. Civilization in the Global Era: One, Many… or None?


Edward A. Tiryakian


4. Power: Nation-States, Civilizations, and Globalization—A Multiple Modernities Perspective


Willfried Spohn



5. Reconfiguring Area Studies for the Global Age


Wolf Schäfer




Part II. Historicizing Axial Shifts and Patterns of Evolution and Modernization



6. Historicizing Axial Civilizations


Johann P. Arnason



7. Crystallization of Islam and Developmental Patterns in the Islamicate Civilization


Saïd Amir Arjomand



8. Evolutionary Grades within Complex Societies: The Case of Ethiopia


Donald N. Levine



9. From Civilizations to Modernity: Divisions and Connections of the World, and Their Legacy—A Historical Social Geology


Göran Therborn




Part III. World Regions, Colonial and Subaltern Modernities in the Global Periphery


10. World-Sociology Beyond the Fragments: Oblivion and Advance in the Comparative Analysis of Modernities


Peter Wagner



11. The Americas, Civilized Analysis, and Its Current Competitors: Bringing (Revolutionary) Politics Back In!


Wolfgang Knöbl



12. Atlantic Capitalism, American Economic Cultures


Jeremy C. A. Smith



13. Second Slavery versus Second Serfdom: Local Labor Regimes of the Global Periphery


Menuela Boatcă


14. Subaltern Modernity: The Case of the Arab Iranian Community of Bushehr


Babak Rahimi



15. The Construction of Regional Identities in East Asia


Thomas Kern, Lotta Mayer, and Sang-hui Nam



16. Gazing Backward or Looking Forward: Colonial Modernity and Making of a Sociology of Modern India


Sujata Patel



Contibutors

Index

O autorze

Saïd Amir Arjomand is Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and Director of the Stony Brook Institute for Global Studies at Stony Brook University, State University of New York. He is the author and editor of many books, including (with Nathan J. Brown)
The Rule of Law, Islam, and Constitutional Politics in Egypt and Iran, also published by SUNY Press.