Further Reading
The best original source for Weber's philosophy of social science are the opening sections of The Theory of Economic and Social Organization (Weber 1922, 1947) and the discussion of ideal types and value freedom in The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Weber 1949); Diana Leat (1972) offers an excellent discussion of the meaning of verstehen; for an alternative, more traditional view, see W G.
Runciman's A Critique of Max Weber’s Philosophy of Social Science (1972).Schutz's The Phenomenology of the Social World (1972) is a thorough account of phenomenological sociology, and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmanns The Social Construction of Reality (1967) is an example of the phenomenological influence at its best.
Peter Abell in Rational Choice Theory (1991) offers a useful collection of studies employing this approach. For pragmatism and symbolic interactionism, Paul Rock's The Making of Symbolic Interactionism (1979) is an excellent account of the philosophical background. For a general discussion of pragmatism and social science, see J. D. Lewis and Richard L. Smith, American Sociology and Pragmatism (1980) and for a vigorous and impressive contemporary defence of pragmatism see Richard Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism (1982).