Stephen P. Turner is Graduate Research Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Florida. He is the author of many books including "Sociological Explanation as Translation "(1980). He is also editor of the "Cambridge Companion to Max Weber "(2000).

Paul A. Roth is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He is the author of "Meaning and Method in the Social Sciences" (1987). He co-founded and co-organizes the annual St. Louis Roundtable in the Philosophy of Social Science and is a member of the editorial board of "Philosophy of the Social Sciences,

Jonathan Turner is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UC, Riverside. He has authored dozen of articles and over thirty books, including THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY, a companion volume to this book.

Tracing the history of American sociology since the Civil War, the authors of this important volume explain the field's diversity, its lack of unifying paradigms, its broad, eclectic research agenda and its general weakness as an institutional force in either academia or the policy arena. They highlight the equivocal and often contradictory missions that sociologists prescribe for themselves and the variable nature of human, financial and intellectual resources available to the profession.