Much of our recent work with criminology theory has led us to recognize, as Calhoun is saying, than no identities are stable and safe anymore in the postmodern era. Part of the problem stems from the identity instability of the faculty, the professionals of the academy, whose professionalism has been denied, who have been maligned publicly in the press and by the dissipation of their faculty governance system. This is a draft process text. . . We will be developing it. . . We have been discussing the role of theory in relation to policy and practice.
Theory provides more than a skeleton.
Most social science is decription of the familiar social world with slightly differing contexts and particulars. . Critical Social Theory , at. Calhoun reminds us that theory is more than just interconnected ideas about the patterns we can identify in the social setting we are trying to describe and predict. Such interconnection, he says, is much like a taxonomy, a categorization. In developing an overview, in seeking to situate the factual patterns within larger patterns, we are sometimes able to make better sense of the whole, and, in consequence, of its parts.