Workers in Arctic oil fields, it is said, make the following complaint about their gloves: You can't work with them, and you can't work without them.

Any independent thinker struggling to understand a particular slice of social life is apt to make the same complaint about theory. Theoretical advice is always cheap, as proponents of one approach or another offer to “theorize” our material, that is, to interpret it so as to reveal its latent, but authentic, ultimate significance. The question is, how is one to choose among the seemingly endless welter of such possibilities? Which approach ultimately serves the analytical purposes that matter most? Do the forms of understanding offered by available theories indeed address those purposes? Or do they ultimately reveal, as one often suspects, more about the obsolescent preoccupations of theorists past than about the subject matter at hand?

Yet we cannot work without theory either. Some form of theoretical reasoning is our only way of linking our own work with that of other analysts – past, present, and future. Few if any efforts at social analysis, after all, are absolutely sui generis. Instead, we almost always stand to learn something from the exertions of those who have gone before us – if only we can separate the useful insights from the rest.