George Ritzer and the Crisis of the Public Intellectual

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Notes

This is very unusual for a sociology book today, especially one one that makes no pretence to be a textbook. In the '60s and '70s sociology books commanded large readerships. Arguably, the most successful post-war sociologist, in terms of cumulative book sales, was Erving Goffman. However, as the public profile of the subject diminished with the rise of the New Right in the mid '70s, sales of individual texts have significantly diminished.

Different house may employ variations on this four-fold categorization, but it constitutes a template in academic publishing that any academic publisher will recognize.

An institution of normative coercion is an organization that seeks to instil standards of normal behaviour in subjects. Examples, include schools, courts, the family, the police, leisure groups, and so on. For more on normative coercion in relation to problems of scarcity and surplus see Turner and Rojek (2001).

Mills himself was a popular sociologist of some note. His work was situated on the Left and demonstrated much higher levels of political engagement than Ritzer's. However, like Ritzer, Mills was interested in large-scale social processes and their influence on everyday life. Interestingly, neither Mills or Ritzer have shown much serious interest in taking the turn to philosophy that is a pronounced feature of much post-war sociological theory.

Although Hall's relation to sociology is, I think, problematic (see Rojek 2003). Hall's work on the cultural turn has leant much more on philosophy, social theory and politics than sociology.