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Good Companions: Decorative, Informative or Interrogative? The Role of Social Theory Textbooks

The editor of the newly revised Companion to Social Theory describes his volume as an 'attempt to offer the student a prescriptive and critical, rather than bland and neutral, pathway through the literature' (Turner 2000:xiv). The rest of the introduction certainly lives up to this promise. In a bold, incisive and sharply worded defence of sociology as a distinct mode of conceptualisation, with a unique object of enquiry - the social - Bryan Turner makes a passionate plea for social theory to engage with the central political issues of our times. Yet as I turned the pages of this skilfully edited, beautifully presented and lavishly referenced collection I grew increasingly uneasy. Then, in the opening of Terry LovelPs chapter on 'Feminisms of the Second Wave', I found my disquiet pointedly expressed. She recognises a further aspect of the role of a sociology text for students, the full appreciation of which is missing from several of the volumes under review. Citing Raymond Williams's notion of the 'selective tradition', Lovell writes: 'Reference books are social artifacts which may help in fixing disciplines and establishing or upsetting canons' (Lovell in Turner 2000:299). She tellingly asks readers to judge for themselves whether the feminist contribution to social theory has been well integrated into the volume. Unfortunately, I would have to say it has not. I would go further and argue that to varying degrees each of the books under discussion shies away from radically redrawing the teaching map, and leads the student reader into calm, conventional waters. These four texts are missed opportunities for the introduction of a British 213