A Counteractant to the Anodyne of My Middle-Range Concepts

What socio - cultural theories of the middle range constitute your taken-for-granted analytic "iron-cage" of at- hand conceptual tools?  For me the big four are (1) Robert Merton's manifest and latent functions and dysfunction, (2) ethnoscience's emic and etic  levels of analysis, (3) the paradigmatic analysis of  binary oppositions,  and  (4) Max Weber's  methodology of “ideal type” (Idealtypus) and “rationalization thesis.”

Thanks to the blog Paralipomena (2), whose posting  " Has the theory of the Protestant work ethic just collapsed?"  reproduces Damian Thompson's article of the same name in the Telegraph,  I now have a hot-off-the grill empirical study to serve as a temporary counteractant to the anodyne of idealism as manifest in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  Now let me see if I can appreciate the latent function of Mr. Thompson's squibb.