The Dialogical Turn: New Roles for Sociology in the Postdisciplinary Age

The discipline of sociology was born - and has been recurrently reconstituted - in response to the fragmentation of ideas about the social world. For two centuries, sociologists have sought refuge in synthesis: programs designed to integrate multiple perspectives within a unifying framework. Yet even as this cause has inspired many of the discipline’s major thinkers, past and present, its objective has proven elusive, leaving nearly as many syntheses as synthesizers. This volume considers an alternative response that has recently developed within sociology to the crisis of intellectual fragmentation: the dialogical turn. Rather than decry the multiplicity of social theories, research methods, and results, this response welcomes a plurality of orientations and approaches as the essential basis for establishing and maintaining productive dialogue.