Aimed at students and non-specialists, this is an overview of the major sociological developments from Marx to the present. Twenty-one chapters introduce key thinkers in the field: their driving impulses, issues central to their work, substantive examples of the theory in action, their legacy, and reading lists to stimulate further research. The range incorporates not only canonical figures such as Marx, Weber and Durkheim, but also feminist, post-structuralist and post-colonialist thinkers of recent decades, including Sigmund Freud, Georg Simmel, Herbert Blumer, Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton, Simone de Beauvoir, Norbert Elias, Erving Goffman, David Lockwood, Harold Garfinkel, Louis Althusser, Jurgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Arlie Hochschild and Anthony Giddens.