Social Mindscapes

“The author—a sociologist—proposes that sociology takes into account cognition and the ideas of cognitive science, only to return to the problem of knowledge from a sociological perspective and denounce cognitive science’s emphasis on the individual thinker and the discovery of universal laws of cognitive functioning, at the expense of contextual and cultural factors. The book is very well written and will be of interest to psychologists who dislike individualistic accounts of intelligence and look for a more contextualised approach to cognition.”—Infancia y Aprendizaje [Italy]

“Zerubavel, who has done pioneering work on the social construction of time, here expands his approach to include a broad spectrum of cognitive processes. This is an important book—sophisticated, well argued, comprehensive—and, last not least, eminently readable.”—Peter L. Berger, Boston University

“This book extends the tradition of Karl Mannheim and Erving Goffman in an exciting search for the social roots of ideas.”—Lewis A. Coser, Boston University

“One can perceive a cognitive turn in much of sociology over the past decade, but its progress has been more halting than in other fields, in part because we have had no natural framework for thinking about the role of cognition in social relations. Social Mindscapes provides such a framework. Eviatar Zerubavel has given us the field-defining primer we have needed, an invitation to cognitive sociology written with sufficient sophistication that senior scholars will find it engaging and persuasive, yet with such grace and clarity that students will also understand and learn from it.”—Paul DiMaggio, Princeton University