Join us at King's College London on Tuesday 24 June for a public lecture with Prof Sylvia Walby. The lecture will be held in Nash Lecture Theatre, Strand, London WC2R 0RN, from 17:00 till 18:30, followed by refreshments.

Thinking about the concept of society

The concept of society has been a core concept in Sociology and is widely used in the social sciences and popular thinking. Yet Sociology has so criticised this concept that it has been nearly abandoned and replaced by the vaguer concept of the ‘social’. I am arguing for the revision of the concept of society. The talk is a reflection on the method of rebuilding a concept, so it is fit for purpose again. This draws on reflections on theory building, including the classic defence of sociology by C. Wright Mills as an analysis of private troubles as public issues, Burawoy’s distinction between four sociologies as critical, professional, policy, and public, and Swedberg’s distinctions between the processes of discovery and devising from those of justification and testing. While Turner is not convinced that responding to pressures outside the discipline has been good for sociology, I argue that the dynamic response to politicised societal developments had driven good theory development. In rebuilding the concept of society, I have been addressing the challenges of feminism, postcoloniality, environmentalism, and capitalism to the traditional concept of society, melding different sociological traditions on differentiation and inequality, and drawing on the complex systems theory developed in the natural sciences.

Sylvia Walby

Sylvia Walby is a Professor in the Department of Law and Criminology, School of Law and Social Sciences, Royal Holloway, University of London. She is Fellow of the British Academy and Chair Elect of the Sociology Section, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and was awarded an OBE for services to equality and diversity. She was the founding President of the European Sociological Association, has held the UNESCO Chair in Gender Research, and is founding co-President of WG11 on Violence and Society of the International Sociological Association. She has held visiting university positions at UCLA, Harvard, Wisconsin, Aalborg, Malaysia, Duisburg-Essen, and Malta. Books include Theorising Patriarchy; Globalization and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities; The Concept and Measurement of Violence against Women and Men; Stopping Rape: Towards a Comprehensive Policy, and Trafficking Chains: Modern Slavery in Society. Her next book will be For Society: The Authoritarian Turn. Website: Sylvia Walby — Royal Holloway Research Portal