ABSTRACT
The sociology of knowledge is not a specialized area within sociology like the sociology of the family or the study of stratification. Its ideas address the broadest sociological questions about the extent and limits of social and group influences in people’s lives and the social and cultural foundations of cognition and perception. Its special place within sociology is not unlike that of its sister field, cultural studies, which addresses general sociological questions within its own distinctive approach to the broad range of symbolic and signifying systems (Williams 1981, p. 14; cf. Stehr and Meja 1984, p. 7).
