Introduction: Bringing social theory back into issues of development

This article introduces the special edition that follows. It begins by outlining five important aspects of social theory-generalization, explanation, understanding change, comparison and knowledge building. It then goes on to highlight the four key common interests which the contributions to this collection share. These are a response to theoretical gaps in mainstream developing thinking, the need to theorize development processes, the value of theory for understanding specific development problems and the various ways of combining empirical research with theoretical abstraction. Finally, this introduction summarizes briefly each of the articles to come. © 2014 SAGE Publications.