Neil J. Smelser, one of the most important and influential American sociologists, traces the discipline of sociology from 1969 to the early twenty-first century in Getting Sociology Right: A Half-Century of Reflections. Examining sociology as a vocation and building on the work of Talcott Parsons, Smelser discusses his views on the discipline of sociology and shows how his perspective of the field evolved in the postwar era.

IntroductionPart I Early Searching1. The Optimum Scope of Sociology (1969)2. Sociology and the Other Social Sciences (1967)3. Some Personal Thoughts on the Pursuit of Sociological Problems (1969)Part II Later Explorations4. Biography, the Structure of Explanation, and the Evaluation of Research in Sociology (1980)5. External Influences on Sociology (1990)6. Sociology's Next Decades: Centrifugality, Conflict, Accommodation (1990)7. Sociology as Science, Humanism, and Art (1994)8. Problematics in the Internationalization of Social Science Knowledge (1991)9. Social Sciences and Social Problems: The Next Century (1995)10. The Questionable Logic of "Mistakes" in the Dynamics of Knowledge Growth in the Social Sciences (2005)Part III Some Recent Reflections11. Looking Back at Twenty-Five Years of Sociology and the Annual Review of Sociology (1999)12. Sociological and Interdisciplinary Adventures: A Personal Odyssey (2)AfterwordIndex