This innovative textbook presents an up-to-date synthesis of the central debates in contemporary social thought. It offers a different framework for the study of social theory. By focusing on the core concepts and issues - rather than on schools of thought or individual theorists - Malcolm Waters relates past and present theory to the key concerns of sociology today. Modern Sociological Theory gives a lucid overview of: the core concepts that sociological theory must address and attempt to reconcile - agency, rationality, structure and system; and the main phenomena that sociological theory sets to explain - culture, power, gender, differentiation and stratification. It explains the major contributions to the analysis of each concept by classical and contemporary theorists, and links these ideas to current sociological issues such as change and globalization, feminism and sociological theory and the return to cultural analysis.