In this fundamental contribution to the study and application of sociological theory, Wallace examines a wide range of theories within a framework that clarifies their interrelationships and illustrates their implications for empirical research

I: Overview of Contemporary Sociological Theory; II: Readings in Contemporary Sociological Theory; 1: Ecologism; Human Ecology; Cultural, Behavioral, and Ecological Perspectives in the Study of Social Organization; 2: Demographism; Notes on the Concept of a Population 1; 3: Materialism; The External System; 4: Psychologism; The Institutional and the Subinstitutional; 5: Technologism; The Hypothesis of Cultural Lag; Organic Energy and the Low-Energy Society; 6: Functional Structuralism; Social Structure and Anomie; 7: Exchange Structuralism; The Structure of Social Associations; 8: Conflict Structuralism; Dialectic and Functionalism: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis; Toward a Theory of Social Conflict; 9: Symbolic Interactionism; Play, the Game, and the Generalized Other; Sociological Implications of the Thought of George Herbert Mead; 10: Social Actionism; The Changing Foundations of the Parsonian Action Scheme; 11: Functional Imperativism; Pattern Variables Revisited: A Response to Robert Dubin