The Sociology of Social Change by Piotr Sztompka (Jagiellonian University at Krakow, Poland and UCLA)
Intended primarily as an advanced textbook for upper-division and graduate students, as well as researchers, this book covers the four grand visions of social and historical change which have dominated the field since the 19th century: the evolutionary, the cyclical, the dialectical, and the post-developmentalist. In so doing, it provides indispensable analytic discussions of the concepts focal to contemporary debates such as social process, development, progress, social time, historical tradition, modernity, post-modernity , and globalization.