Reddit reviews Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures

Varieties is good but a bit outdated, and also heavily pushes Little's particular form of realism. It's a good read and one that I recommend to colleagues interested in boning up on the philosophy of social science, but am looking for a better alternative. Alexander Rosenberg's is even more dated. A scholar in my field, Patrick Jackson, has written a decent survey titled The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations that actually is more or less pertinent to any of the social sciences, and isn't all that specific to mine. The one downside is that it is somewhat unfair to realism, only really admitting into that category Bhaskarian Critical Realism. If I had to recommend anything, though, I'd say read that, read something like Dave Elder-Vass's The Causal Powers of Social Structures, some of the causal mechanism stuff, and Joas and Knobl's superb Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures. At this point you'd have a good basic grasp of the approaches out there and how they link up to particular social meta-theories.