ABSTRACT
A broad disciplinary crisis was recognized and embraced across the humanities and social sciences from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Gouldner notably signaled the crisis in sociology in his book of 1970; it was associated with a revaluation of the classics of Durkheim, Weber and Marx, and an assimilation of hermeneutic and phenomenological critiques of social science-based methodologies and theories. Debate has circulated around their confident positivist premise that essentially deterministic processes can account for the complexity of social and cultural life and history.
