ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 is given over to critical expositions, and brief assessments, of sociology’s main schools of thought and their relevance to the sociology of health generally and to the sociology of health inequalities in particular. The perspectives considered are structural-functionalism; interactionism; phenomenology and ethnomethodology; social constructionism; post-structuralism and postmodernism; conflict and critical theory; and feminist, post-colonial and disability theory. The lessons learned from these discussions is that each of these non- or post-positivist perspectives has much to teach; that their questions and answers often overlap; and that no perspective, nor indeed sociology in its entirety, should aspire to wraps things up.
