Short description:

This timely Handbook celebrates and contributes to the recent revitalisation of the sociology of knowledge. A diverse group of leading experts from the global North and South provide a state of the art overview of a field, which is developing rapidly with the growth of poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist approaches.

Long description:

This timely Handbook celebrates and contributes to the recent revitalisation of the sociology of knowledge. A diverse group of leading experts from the global North and South provide a state of the art overview of a field, which is developing rapidly with the growth of poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist approaches.

Fran Collyer and contributing authors explore the theoretical frameworks underpinning the sociology of knowledge and demonstrate how these can address new issues, problems and circumstances. They shed light on how the sociology of knowledge is applied to and impacts contemporary challenges including racial and gender inequality, climate change, and the growth of neoliberalism. They also offer insights into the association between theories of knowledge and other conceptual and theoretical developments such as the sociology of science, constructivism, pragmatism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism. This Handbook provides a comprehensive map of the area for both early and experienced scholars exploring the broad array of approaches, methods, concepts and theories which are now being applied within this rapidly changing field.

The Research Handbook on the Sociology of Knowledge is an essential resource for scholars and students in sociology, and throughout the social sciences, interested in knowledge, its history, production, translation, circulation and exchange.

?The Research Handbook on the Sociology of Knowledge is a major achievement. In it, eminent sociologist Fran Collyer assembles an international group of more than two dozen sociologists, philosophers, and other scholars to address, with great success, the long unmet need for a comprehensive guide to the sociology of knowledge, which is at once deeply informed by the field?s complex history and finely geared to the variegated intellectual landscape of the 21st century. The Handbook carries the reader, authoritatively, from the contributions of the field?s founders and early advocates (Karl Mannheim, Robert Merton, Norbert Elias) to later-day constructivist and hermeneutic approaches, as well as approaches influenced by the sociology of the professions and Science Studies. Theoretically rich, and attuned especially to the nexus of power, inequality, and knowledge, the Handbook also charts new empirical territory with original and stimulating chapters on subjects such as regional knowledge ecosystems, climate knowledge, audit cultures, commercial publishing, and ?resistant knowledge? (as created by social groups oppressed by systems of gender, race, and class), among many other important topics. An indispensable resource for social scientists and humanists who specialize in the study of knowledge-making and knowledge-utilization, the Handbook will also greatly reward non-specialists who are at all concerned with the multiple and mutable forms of contemporary knowledge.?