Grand Theory is a term invented by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination to refer to the form of highly abstract theorizing in which the formal organization and arrangement of concepts takes priority over understanding the social world. In his view, Grand Theory was more or less separated from the concrete concerns of everyday life and it’s variety in time and space.

The main target of Mills was Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons was an American sociologist who served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1927 to 1973....

, also an American sociologist and the architect of structural functionalism, against whom he insisted that here is no Grand Theory in the sense of one universal scheme to understand the unity of social structures, according to Gregory. In Parsons view "grand theory" integrated not only sociological concepts, but also psychological, economic, political, and religious or philosophical components. He tried to integrate all the social sciences within an overarching theoretical framework.

By the 1980s the Grand Theory was reformulated and included theories such as; critical theory

Critical theory

Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...

, structuralism

Structuralism

Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...

, structural Marxism

Structural Marxism

Structural Marxism was an approach to Marxist philosophy based on structuralism, primarily associated with the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser and his students. It was influential in France during the 1960s and 1970s, and also came to influence philosophers, political theorists and...

, and Structuration Theory, all influenced human geography

Human geography

Human geography is one of the two major sub-fields of the discipline of geography. Human geography is the study of the world, its people, communities, and cultures. Human geography differs from physical geography mainly in that it has a greater focus on studying human activities and is more...

. Barnes and Gregory confirmed this and noticed in addition; “No matter the phenomenon investigated, it could always be slotted into a wider theoretical scheme. Nothing would be left out; everything would be explained.”

According to Gregory there are two critical responses to this (reformulated) Grand Theory. First there has been a continuing debate about the scope of theory in human geography, with the focus on the relation between theory and empiricism. Wherein some authors thought of a ‘theory-less world of empiricism’, in contrast to others which foresaw a fixation upon theory, meaning the threat of the ‘theorization of theories’, second order abstractions ‘doubly removed from the empirical world’. Secondly, that no single theoretical system can possibly ask all the interesting questions or provide all the satisfying answers.