Twentieth-century developments

In the early 20th century, sociology expanded in the U.S., including developments in both macrosociology, concerned with the evolution of societies, and microsociology, concerned with everyday human social interactions. Based on the pragmatic social psychology of George Herbert Mead, Herbert Blumer and, later, the Chicago school, sociologists developed symbolic interactionism.^[29] In the 1930s, Talcott Parsons developed action theory, integrating the study of social order with the structural and voluntaristic aspects of macro and micro factors, while placing the discussion within a higher explanatory context of system theory and cybernetics. In Austria and later the U.S., Alfred Schütz developed social phenomenology, which would later inform social constructionism. During the same period members of the Frankfurt school developed critical theory, integrating the historical materialistic elements of Marxism with the insights of Weber, Freud and Gramsci —in theory, if not always in name— often characterizing capitalist modernity as a move away from the central tenets of enlightenment.

In Europe, particularly during the Interwar period, sociology was undermined by totalitarian governments for reasons of ostensible political control, but also by conservative universities in the West. This was due, in part, to perceptions of the subject as possessing an inherent tendency, through its own aims and remit, toward liberal orleft wing thought. Given that the discipline was founded by structural functionalists; concerned with organiccohesion and social solidarity, this view was somewhat groundless (though it was Parsons who had introduced Durkheimian theory to American audiences, and his interpretation has been criticized for a latent conservatism beyond that which was intended).^[30] In the mid-20th century there was a general—but not universal—trend for U.S.-American sociology to be more scientific in nature, due to the prominence at that time of action theory and other system-theoretical approaches.

In the second half of the 20th century, sociological research became increasingly employed as a tool by governments and businesses. Sociologists developed new types of quantitative and qualitative research methods. In 1959 C. Wright Mills presented The Sociological Imagination, encouraging humanistic discourse and a rejection of abstracted empiricism and grand theory. Parallel with the rise of varioussocial movements in the 1960s, particularly in Britain, the cultural turn saw a rise in conflict theories emphasizing social struggle (such as neo-Marxism, second-wave feminism and ethnic relations) that countered functionalist perspectives. The sociology of religion saw a renaissance in the decade with new debates on secularisation thesis, the interaction of religion with globalization, and the very definition of religious practise. Theorists such as Lenski and Yinger formulated 'functional' definitions of religion; enquiring as to what a religion does rather than what it is in familiar terms. Thus, various new social institutions and movements could be examined for their religious role. Marxist theorists in the tradition of Lukács and Gramsci continued to scrutize consumerism in analogous terms.

In the 1960s and 1970s so-called post-structuralist and postmodernist theory, drawing upon Nietzsche and thephenomenologists as much as the classical social scientists, made a considerable impact on frames of sociological enquiry. Often understood simply as a cultural style 'after-Modernism' marked by intertextuality,pastiche and irony, sociological analyses of postmodernity have presented a distinct era relating to (1) the dissolution of metanarratives (particularly in the work of Lyotard), and (2) commodity fetishism and the 'mirroring' of identity with consumption in late capitalist society (Debord; Baudrillard; Jameson).^[31] Postmodernism has also been associated with the rejection of enlightenment conceptions of the human subject by thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss and, to a lesser extent, in Louis Althusser's attempt to reconcile Marxism with anti-humanism. Most theorists associated with the movement actively refused the label, preferring to accept postmodernity as a historical phenomenon rather than a method of analysis, if at all. Nevertheless, self-consciously postmodern pieces continue to emerge within the social and political sciences in general. Sociologists working in the Anglo-Saxon world, such as Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman, have tended to focus on theories of globalisation, communication, and agential reflexivity in terms of a 'high phase' of modernity, rather than propose a distinct "new" era per se.

The positivist tradition remains ubiquitous in sociology, particularly in the United States.^[32] The discipline's two most widely cited American journals, the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review, primarily publish research in the positivist tradition, with ASR exhibiting greater diversity (the British Journal of Sociology, on the other hand, publishes primarily non-positivist articles).^[32] The twentieth century saw improvements to the quantitative methodologies employed in sociology. The development of longitudinal studies that follow the same population over the course of years or decades enabled researchers to study long-term phenomena and increased the researchers' ability to infer causality. The increase in the size of data sets produced by the new survey methods was followed by the invention of new statistical techniques for analyzing this data. Analysis of this sort is usually performed with statistical software packages such as SAS, Stata, or SPSS.Social network analysis is an example of a new paradigm in the positivist tradition. The influence of social network analysis is pervasive in many sociological sub fields such as economic sociology (see the work of J. Clyde Mitchell, Harrison White, or Mark Granovetter, for example),organizational behavior, historical sociology, political sociology, or the sociology of education. There is also a minor revival of a more independent, empirical sociology in the spirit of C. Wright Mills, and his studies of the Power Elite in the United States of America, according toStanley Aronowitz.