[3] As a type of critical theory, engaged theory is cross-disciplinary, drawing from sociology, anthropology, and political studies, history, philosophy, and global studies to engage with the world whilst seeking to change the world.
[4] Examples of engaged theory are the constitutive abstraction approach of writers, such as John Hinkson, Geoff Sharp, and Simon Cooper, who published in Arena Journal;[5] and the approach developed at the Centre for Global Research of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia by scholars such as Manfred Steger, Paul James and Damian Grenfell, who draw from the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Benedict Anderson, and Charles Taylor, et al.[6] Engaged theory research is in the world and of the world, whereby a theory somehow affects what occurs in the world, but engaged theory does not always include itself into a theory about the constitution of ideas and practices, which the sociologist Anthony Giddens identifies as a double hermeneutic movement.
Each subsequent mode of analysis is more abstract than the previous one moving across the following themes: 1. doing, 2. acting, 3. relating, 4. being.
This leads to the 'levels' approach as set out below: The method begins by emphasizing the importance of a first-order abstraction, here called empirical analysis.
[12] For example, the Circles of Sustainability approach is a form of engaged theory distinguishing (at the level of empirical generalization) between different domains of social life.
Here the method draws upon established sociological, anthropological and political categories of analysis such as production, exchange, communication, organization and inquiry.
At this level, generalizations can be made about the dominant modes of categorization in a social formation or in its fields of practice and discourse.