Postmodernizing (Macro)sociology

A selective appropriation of postmodernist theories is undertaken with special reference to their applicability to macrosociology and to other branches of sociological inquiry that employ conceptions of social and cultural totality. The appropriation is premised on the thesis that theories of culture, such as postmodernism, can contribute to sociology by their analyses of cultural form, providing sociology with general descriptions of what social processes must mediate and with guidance on how to grasp its own cultural form(s). Three notions of cultural totality, “bricolage” (Claude Lévi‐Strauss), “discursive formation” (Michel Foucault), and “deconstruction” (Jacques Derrida), are considered. All have in common a description of cultural form that stresses nonsystematic order. They are contrasted to Talcott Parsons’modernist and systematizing macrotheoretic reflection on culture and society. A deconstruction of Parsons yields the alternative of a less‐than‐systematic, postmodernized (macro)‐ sociology.