On Social Closure
Theorizing Exclusion, Exploitation, and Elimination
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
Published:24th Mar '25
Should be back in stock very soon
On Social Closure reinvigorates the idea of social closure as a basic sociological concept for understanding the strategies powerful groups use to improve their life chances at the expense of the less powerful. Jürgen Mackert provides sociological tools for analysing three critical forms of closure in the world today: exclusion in the context of neoliberalism; exploitation within global capitalism; and elimination in the ongoing legacy of settler colonialism, thereby transcending Eurocentric analyses. Mackert puts forward a mechanism-based explanatory approach identifies two critical social mechanisms that operate in various kinds of social closure struggles. The first explains how human beings, social groups, or communities are denied access to resources, rights, or critical networks, while the second explains how the powerful exert control that leaves the less powerful vulnerable and unable to fight back. Through a critical reconsideration and revision of existing concepts and by bringing in new ones, Jürgen Mackert develops a novel theoretical approach to social closure.
Bridging a classical locus of social theory, Mackert produces a new and robust theory of social closure that contributes to the growth of a genuinely global theory. The book breaks solid ground for our understanding of the effects of capitalism and the resilience of colonial formations. Mackert's ability to connect empirical and historical analysis with refined and very clear conceptual and theoretical steps is prodigious and unparalleled. * Benoit Challand, New School for Social Research *
Jürgen Mackert's On Social Closure is a masterful recovery and reworking of some classical themes introduced by Max Weber about how group power is manifested through processes of social closure. The book takes us far beyond earlier work, most notably that of Frank Parkin in the late 1970s, to consider how closure operates in the global context. A major contribution to contemporary social theory. * Jeff Manza, New York University *
On Social Closure is driven by two dissatisfactions namely the limitations of existing theories of closure from Max Weber to contemporary sociology and the neglect of the Global South in the sociological obsession with western modernity. Mackert comprehensively corrects both limitations by developing a general theory of closure, consisting of exclusion, exploitation, and elimination in which social life as such is collective struggle. * Bryan S. Turner, Australian Catholic University *
The book offers plenty of description and a paucity of novel explanatory theory. * P. Kivisto, Choice *
ISBN: 9780197781685
Dimensions: 238mm x 167mm x 28mm
Weight: 703g
384 pages