ABSTRACT
Theories differ not by their appetite for selection, but by what they select. Selection as such they cannot (and shall not, if they wish to be of use) avoid; the point is to make the right selection, or rather a better selection than the one the theory intends to improve on, complement or replace. That is, to focus the searchlights and the spotlights in a way that would assist orientation and help to find the way; on paths and crossroads, but also on bogs and landmines …
As that most perceptive of 20th-century philosophers, Michel Foucault, once observed, how any thinker – including, though not exclusively, sociologists – classifies and explains away social phenomena tells readers more about the thinker, about his or her ‘stance on how things are, than it does about any truth … It tells more about that which is true to the namer’.2
