Jose Lopez teaches social theory and sociology at the University of Nottingham. With John Scott he is the author of Social Structure, and he is the co-editor with Garry Potter of After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism.

"A quite outstanding achievement, Society and its Metaphors engages thoroughly with the implications of poststructuralist strictures on explanatory theorising, and with the heightened reflexivity about language now pervasive among social theorists. Yet the book still remains committed to an explanatory project of social theorising, one more cautious and circumspect, but none the less challenging and ambitious. The indispensable but problematic role of metaphor is the thread which binds together a remarkably integrated work." Ted Benton, University of Essex

• Introduction; 1. Durkheim's Structures: Writing the Emergence of the Social; 2. Marx: Labouring for Structure; 3. Weber's Structures: Deferral, Rationality and Heros of History; 4. Parsons' Structure: the 'Epistemological Obstacle' of Complexity; Conclusion: Reading Texts, Writing Theory: Against the Illusion of Transparency