ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. Foucault's analysis of power and knowledge proved to be especially suggestive, as it re-framed the debate by focusing on the concrete tools of social control and questioned, through the notion of discourse, the very analytic significance of tools such as structure and belief. Barry Barnes's early work should be situated precisely within the 1960s theoretical and methodological renewal of the sociology of knowledge. Barnes's interest analysis and the associated methodological relativism offered to sociologists a model of explanatory social constructivism that allowed for the empirical study of knowledge in a post-foundationalist context. In brief, resources from both the Marxist and Durkheimian traditions were mobilised to question monocausal, deterministic models for the production of knowledge, and particularly those strains of sociological and anthropological research that had reified illegitimately, it was now believed the notion of social structure.
