- Responds to current issues, debates, and new social movements
- Reviews sociological theory from a contemporary perspective
- Reveals how the universal theorist and the era of rival schools has been replaced by networks of clustered debates that are relatively 'autonomous' and interdisciplinary
- Features updates and in-depth discussions of the newest clustered debates in social theory—intimacy, postcolonial nationalism, and the concept of 'the other'
- Challenges social scientists to renew their commitment to the important moral and political role social knowledge plays in public life