Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (Sociological Review Monograph)

Sociological understanding of the way in which ideas and beliefs relate to social structure has undergone a revolution in the last ten years. This new work, inspired in part by the Marxist and Durkheimian traditions in the sociology of knowledge, has generated a range of theoretically sophisticated and empirically detailed studies in ideology and the production of culture and scientific knowledge.Power, Action and Belief is a collection of articles on a wide variety of subjects and marks a major contribution to this challenging 'new sociology of knowledge'. It draws upon a range of writers who have contributed to this fundamental transformation in focus of the sociology of knowledge, and shows how culture simultaneously reflects and helps reproduce class differences and asymmetries in power. It also explores the gradual dissolution of the classical contrast found in the sociology of knowledge between beliefs on the one hand and social structure on the other. Under the impetus of the work of such discourse analysts as Foucault, attention is increasingly directed to the way in which knowledge and power are reciprocally constituted in discursive and non-discursive practices. The focus in all the articles is therefore on the tactics and strategies of power and social control.