Bio: (1947-) American sociologist. Jeffrey Alexander received his doctorate from Berkeley University in 1978, where he remained to teach until 2001 when he became a professor at Yale. He advocates a post-positivist epistemological approach, which is in the middle between radical relativism and classical positivism. He became famous for his book Neofunctionalism (1985). He believes that functionalism should not be viewed as a monolithic theory, but more as a school of thought, similar to Marxism. Alexander advocates his multidimensional approach as a solution to the problem of social order. He believes that individuals, in society, rationally adjust their actions to real external circumstances, as well as their subjective values ​​and goals. Alexander's neo-functionalism rejects monocausal determinism and pays equal attention to both order and changes in society. Integration, in his opinion, is only a possibility, not a necessity, and he believes that in addition to the static, there are also partial and dynamic types of equilibrium. He later dealt with the topics of human interaction, collective identity, civil society, cultural sociology, as well as cultural pragmatism.

Main works

Neofunctionalism (1985);

Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates (1990);

Neofunctionalism and After (1998);

Diversity and its Discontent (1999);

The Meanings of Social Life (2003);

Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics and Ritual (2006); 

The Civil Sphere (2006);

Trauma: A Social Theory (2012);

Breaching the Civil Order: Radicalism and the Civil Sphere (2019);

What Makes a Social Crisis?: The Societalization of Social Problems (2019).