For the first time the historically significant accounts of modernity have been brought together, including essays by the main thinkers, such as Marx, Parsons, Mannheim, Giddens, Bourdieu and Adorno, as well as previously unseen material by lesser known figures. Modernity: Critical Concepts provides academics, students and researchers with the most comprehensive collection of material available and is aimed at all those seeking further information both within and beyond their own areas of interest. The articles included have been arranged into four volumes:
* Modernization
* Cultural Modernity
* Modern Systems
* After Modernity
The concept of modernity is central to sociology, philosophy and cultural studies and is used as a critique of numerous traditions and disciplines including economics, politics, ethics, selfhood and knowledge.

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In Daniel Bell Malcolm Waters provides a throughly comprehensive and clear exposition of Bell's work and contribution to social theory. Waters opens with an illuminating discussion of Bell's biography, his intellectual interests and associates, political affiliations and value commitments. Bell's conceptual and theoretical innovation is analysed and situated in relation to other theoretical tendencies within the field of sociological inquiry. Waters then follows Bell's intellectual trajectory from an esrly engagement with the questions of work, the labour movement and American capitalism, through to more detailed discussions of his politics, transformations in and of social structure and the problems of postmodern culture. The author concludes with an attempt to situate Bell, to place him within the sociological tradition and to determine his legacy. Throughout the discussion is well documented and carefully measured, Bell's arguments are presented clearly and fairly, as are the problems with his work. A timely and much needed account of a key, albeit highly controversial, contemporary sociological figure.

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Traditionally class has been the key concept for understanding society, enabling analysts to interpret social conflict and predict the course of social development. Critics argue that it is too crude and incapable of handling the nuances of the new identity politics. Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters take the radical position within the current debates that class is a purely historical phenomenon.

This stimulating book argues that concentration on class actually diverts attention from other more central and more morally problematic inequalities. The class perspective has become a political straitjacket which obstructs an accurate understanding of contemporary social, cultural and political processes.

This innovative textbook presents an up-to-date synthesis of the central debates in contemporary social thought. It offers a different framework for the study of social theory. By focusing on the core concepts and issues - rather than on schools of thought or individual theorists - Malcolm Waters relates past and present theory to the key concerns of sociology today. Modern Sociological Theory gives a lucid overview of: the core concepts that sociological theory must address and attempt to reconcile - agency, rationality, structure and system; and the main phenomena that sociological theory sets to explain - culture, power, gender, differentiation and stratification. It explains the major contributions to the analysis of each concept by classical and contemporary theorists, and links these ideas to current sociological issues such as change and globalization, feminism and sociological theory and the return to cultural analysis.