Dead White Men and Other Important People

Dead White Men and Other Important People
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Praise for Dead White Men and Other Important People I read this book with great pleasure, enjoying how it took the beginner student reader on a voyage of sociological discovery. The combination of an engaging narrative with the systematic presentation of sociological thinking works very well and is a neat way of encouraging the newcomer to apply such ideas to their own circumstances. The book is a really novel, pedagogically efficacious, intellectual means of stimulating thought within and about sociology. David Inglis, Professor of Sociology, University of Aberdeen, UK I found the book engaging and wholly appropriate for the sorts of things I cover with fresh students, and thats where I think the beauty of this book lies: its accessibility to those alarmed by the task ahead because they feel not quite prepared for the rigors of a sociology degree. Joel Nathan Rosen, Associate Professor of Sociology, Moravian College, USA I really do think this will be popular because [it has] some great hook lines and clinchers as well as a really neat way of applying the big ideas to everyday life. Every lecturer in every land will be borrowing material this book is a real winner. Adrian Franklin, Professor of Sociology, UTAS, Australia The authors have a knack for presenting ideas in dramatic dialogue. The text conveys the interest and the central thoughts of sociology and sociologists in very graspable ways and with entertaining characters. Gregor McLennan, Professor of Sociology, University of Bristol, UK A thoughtful, engaging and lively contribution to the teaching of sociology. Dead White Men and Other Important People certainly is a novel approach to writing sociology for students and one that I found provided very clear with succinct explanations of the material covered. The style, tone, level of sophistication and the type of ideas being discussed are perfect for junior sociology students. Catriona Elder, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, USYD, Australia This book has a completely different approach to anything else Ive read on the subject. Its really refreshing and makes theory a lot easier to understand because its written in language that means I can concentrate and take it in for longer than with other textbooks. Holly, a sociology student Dead White Men and Other Important People really helps me to understand complex aspects of social science and the theory behind it. I found that other textbooks overcomplicate theory, but this book gives me a broader understanding of each topic as a whole and helps me to understand parts that I havent been able to grasp before. And I really like the modern-day comparisons. Its really easy to dip into certain chapters, or to read the book as a whole. Katy, a sociology student I think this book is absolutely fantastic. The idea of structuring social theory around conversations works really well and the style makes it both easy and exciting to read. Tony, a sociology student
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Sociologys Big Ideas
Ralph Fevre Angus Bancroft
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Ralph Fevre and Angus Bancroft 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 610 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martins Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 9780230232464 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
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For Claudia Fevre (because she has big ideas too). Kim and friends.
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Contents
Preface Acknowledgements 0 In the Beginning nobody is teaching and nobody is learning whats wrong with textbooks? simulated learning how to use this book 1 In at the Deep End 17 xi xiii 1
Mila decides to look for sociologys big ideas nds out what use social theory is for understanding people how theories change the way you think modernity is sociologys big bang theory the Enlightenment and a revolution of the mind making things new 2 In the Caf 35
what, if anything, determines human behaviour? August Comte and the idea of society the rational, self-interested individual mile Durkheim, cooperation and the moral conscience how society makes individuals specialization and the division of labour utilitarianism and moral individualism love on the brain 3 In the Picture 52
the sociology of emotions being yourself and touching things Sigmund Freud, desire, repression and civilization unreasonable women and controlling emotions Ren Descartes, separation of mind and body behaviourism anger and arousal communicating and thinking with emotions consciousness and clarity making judgements 4 In our Genes? male and female roles feminism and patriarchy Raewyn Connell and gender orders looking good for others biology, sex and gender hermaphrodite sociology Judith Butler and performing femininity being a drag career opportunities masculinity and singing the blues
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5 In Cahoots mind and society group formation and getting closer being on the same wavelength Charles Sanders Peirce, signs and living together semiotics and the science of signs Charles Horton Cooley and knowing how to fall in love masquerade, secrets and imagining people 6 In Donis Club George Herbert Mead, Herbert Blumer, the self and symbolic interactionism the individual against the crowd making choices and making society seeing ourselves and others in the mirror being different with different people interaction and accomplishing meaning the Generalized Other and the secret self 7 In the Night
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working at making things normal Alfred Schutz, making sense and looking away Harold Garnkel and ethnomethodology the illusion of order denitions of reality talking politics and giving directions to nowhere Alvin Cicourel, stimulating the senses and breaking laughter 8 In the Morning 119
Erving Goffman and pretending to be yourself making a drama and an impression frontstage and backstage playing different roles the odd one out stigma and spoiled identity passing normal crime asylums and the total institution resisting institutionalization 9 In Control the persona and the real me Erving Goffman and identity Michel Foucault and the panopticon surveillance and discipline sex, power, the body and appearance liberation, repression and resistance 10 In Doubt science, medicine, proof and evidence the Forer effect is sociology scientic? quote-ology common sense and data Noam Chomsky and universal grammar epistemology and acquiring knowledge Harry Collins and science as a social construct bad science 154 138
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Contents ix
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In Sickness and in Health
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doing what you are best at Talcott Parsons and functionalism structure, values and action sociology as a priestly caste the sick role, medicine as morality functional differentiation and the professional ethic society as an organism 12 In Two Acts 178
can sociology make you a better person? respect and the code of honour Pierre Bourdieu, disposition and habitus structure, agency, social capital and eld the rules of the game second nature language as an instrument of power 13 In and Against 191
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels surplus value, labour and exploitation materialism and the social relations of production serfs and lords, bourgeoisie and proletarians the contradictions of capitalism ideology and class struggle 14 In Between 209
Max Weber, rationality and the origins of capitalism the Protestant ethic bureaucracy and disenchantment the prison of rationalization markets, monopolies and social stratication class, status and party the state and geopolitics 15 In Pieces 225
Eleanor Marx and Marianne Weber listening to hidden voices observer bias inadequate categories limits of the Enlightenment universal truths speaking for others race, ethnicity and post-colonialism feminist standpoint epistemology 16 In and Out 244
Georg Simmel the stranger intimacy, fashion and obedience following the crowd the universal rule of money and the search for stimulation gossip, confession and possessing secrets making new things 17 In the End 257
reections on moral and intellectual development some references some bad news Frequently Asked Questions 270
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Preface
We wrote this book because we knew sociology had some big ideas, some of the biggest ideas you were ever likely to come across. But we also knew that these ideas sometimes passed people by, even when they were studying sociology. We thought a good part of the fault for this lay with people like us, the professionals who were meant to do a better job of explaining those ideas in the first place. We therefore set out to find the best way to explain both the ideas themselves, and how we hoped that people who came across those ideas would receive them, not just remembering the ideas but arguing with them, wrestling with them and applying them to their world and their problems. For us, this is what learning is actually about. If you are starting out on a sociology course at school or university, or are already on a course but do not always feel that the books you are asked to read are helping, then this book is for you. It is also for anyone who might just be interested in good ideas, anyone who thinks that there is more to explaining the way the world is, and the ways people behave, than saying, thats just the way things are. Whatever your background and your interests, the aim of this book is not to tell you how to think, or what ideas are best, but to show you how to think with ideas. The book is written very differently from standard textbooks. Most of these will guide you to a chapter on Erving Goffman, another one on feminism, and so on. We do not intend to give you neat summaries of ideas but instead show you how ideas work. That is why the book is written as a story about a young woman, Mila, starting on a sociology course at university, and each chapter is based around a set of experiences Mila has. It would be nice if all our readers had the time to read our book like a novel, one chapter after the other, but if you want to go straight to one particular idea or theorists, then the chapter headings will tell you where they are. If you have a class next Friday, or an essay or paper to write, or a test to prepare for, you should be able to find a section that will get you started. Unless we have failed utterly, you will then have the basic ideas that you need in your head and you will have begun to make your own judgements about them. Whether you read it like a novel or use it as a resource, we would like you to use this book to begin the process of nding out what you think before plunging into more conventional textbooks, or, better still, some of the reading listed in Chapter 17. To help you do this, you should pick out authors, themes and concepts when you are reading our book so you can take them further. The way we have organised the references in Chapter 17 should help you to nd what you need. We have listed them separately for each chapter and, where appropriate, we have provided sub-headings to show you what
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aspect of sociology the reference is particularly useful for. There are quotes from a few of the references scattered throughout the book. If you need to nd out exactly where one of these quotes is from, Chapter 17 will give you the answer because Amram lists all the right references for these quotes in one of his emails to Ima (see pp. 25860). You should also think about your own approach to learning when you are reading. Your approach will probably be very different to Milas, but the more you know about how you are learning the more, we believe, you will get out of the book. R. F. and A. B.
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Acknowledgements
Maureen Fevre, Natasha Fevre, Jessica Fevre and Kim Masson read various drafts of this work and their encouragement was vital at crucial points in its development. Natasha and Jessica were students at the time, and their inside knowledge proved invaluable, but the views of hundreds of students who were not family members also had an impact on the book. These were the women and men who attended the various courses we taught at universities in Wales, Scotland and California. Some of them helped us very directly by commenting, sometimes in great detail, on draft chapters and others helped us to write the book without realizing they were doing so. They did this when they engaged in (or avoided) discussion in our seminars, wrote essays for us and lled in course feedback forms. They also contributed when they told us what they thought in the body language they employed during our lectures. There is nothing like a yawn in the front row to show you where you are going wrong. We were prompted to write this book by our desire to shrink the gap between the aims we had as university teachers and the outcomes we were able to measure in the learning accomplished by our students. All of the conscious and unconscious feedback we had from our students over the years helped us to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of our teaching materials, including the various textbooks we recommended to them. One or two of these titles have been particularly useful as stalking horses for Dead White Men because they served to show us precisely what we wanted to teach and how this translated, or failed to translate, into what we found our students had learned. But it was not until the success of Jostein Gaarders Sophies World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy that we realized that people might actually welcome a (literally) novel approach to academic study. Over the many years it is has taken to write Dead White Men, many sociology lecturers have read and commented on drafts of the book and we owe all of them an enormous debt of our gratitude. Our book would certainly not have been published without them. We want to thank those who commented anonymously, but also David Ford, Leila Dawney, Cassie Ogden and other members of the C-SAP workshop on teaching theory, including Reiner Grundmann, Mike McBell, Maggie Studholme and Simon Weaver. Very special thanks are due to Catriona Elder, Adrian Franklin, David Inglis, Gregor MacLennan, David Mellor, John Roberts, Joel Rosen, Andrew Thompson, Sarah Wilson and Pak Nung Wong. Early encouragement came from Kay Bridger and Mila Steele, but it was the team at Palgrave Macmillan who nally took the plunge with us. Vicki Lee has been helpful throughout and we have been very lucky to have had three wonderful commissioning editors in succession Emily Salz, Beverley Tarquini and Anna Marie Reeve all of whom have been unstinting in their support.
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1
In at the Deep End
Everyones rst day at university is a big deal. It doesnt matter whether you are from a rich family which has paid for your education since you were old enough to talk, or the rst member of your family ever to make it to university. Every single one of the young people waiting in line to complete registration in the sports hall had been in a heightened state of anxiety all day, but Mila, near the back of the line, had reason to be more anxious than any of them. Anyone who knew Mila well would have seen how nervous she was from the way she ddled with her glasses. They seemed to be slightly too small for her, and perhaps out of alignment, as Mila was twisting one of the legs to get it back into shape. She had been on her way into the university in the morning when she had realized the trial of the last of the four defendants had begun. Her fathers picture seemed to be on the front-page of every newspaper again. It was the same old photo from the rst day of his trial (his was the rst case to come to court). In it he was frozen in mid-stride up the courtroom steps, apparently striding condently to vindication, but the smile for the camera did not look easy. Her mother was on the step behind him, looking deantly at the camera. They both looked too young to have children of her age, yet there Mila was in the photo behind her mother: a young woman with round shoulders and a square jaw and, just like her mother, staring stupidly, straight at the camera. Mila had no idea now why she had offered herself up for identication by anyone who bought a newspaper. Of course she should have thought of the press and their cameras before she got out of the taxicab, or her mother should have. If only she had put on sunglasses, a hat or a scarf, it might have made all the difference. But even as unprepared as she was, she could have turned aside instead of looking straight at the camera. Doni, a yard behind her, had saved himself he had his hand up to his face to brush the hair out of his eyes and you couldnt identify him at all. Six weeks ago, as she stared at her face in the bathroom mirror, Mila had anticipated her rst day at university and realized that she could not endure
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it without making some attempt to undo the damage done on the steps of the court. Her mother had been very accommodating and efcient about the dentist. Mila had four impacted wisdom teeth removed and, as she had desperately hoped, the shape of her face was signicantly altered. It was cheaper than plastic surgery and, she hoped, almost as effective. To cure her round shoulders she now walked and sat as if she had a broom handle taped to her back but that, apparently, was the point. She had her hair cut and coloured and she stopped wearing contact lenses. Now she was never seen without the glasses she had last worn when she was 13 years old. Then she changed her name. So Mila was born, a young woman wearing a childs glasses who was starting university and praying that nobody recognized her as the person in the infamous photograph. This morning she had lost faith in her disguise. She found herself copying (six months too late) Donis gesture from the court steps her hand constantly fussing round her face. She was holding her stomach muscles in tight, preparing for the lurch inside that she would feel when someone showed they recognized her. She kept telling herself it wasnt instant recognition she had to fear but the teachers and fellow students she would be sitting with in classes with, week after week (we were talking the other day, you know, you look like the daughter of that man who stole all those poor peoples money). Nevertheless, she was close to running away throughout that rst morning. Now she was standing in a line waiting to conrm her fake identity one last time before making her way back to her residence and nding some respite from the fear of recognition and, worse than that, the fear of judgement. And, for a moment, she saw the disastrous photograph again. There was a big screen on the wall showing a news channel. They were covering the start of the trial of the last defendant and using it as an excuse to bring up her fathers trial again. The sound was down but Mila could read the headlines running along the bottom of the screen and, in any case, she could tell from the pictures being used to tell the story that it was more of the same oods of judgement that had begun as soon as the verdict on her father was reached. Up to that point, most of the commentators in the media had implied that his guilt or innocence was a matter of ne judgement. Looked at in one way, they said, it was a misdemeanour, but looked at in another way (and this was just as easy) there was no crime at all. They said he could easily be what Mila still knew he was a falsely accused man who should feel terribly aggrieved for all the pain and anguish that he and his family had endured. But when the announcement of her fathers guilt opened the oodgates, the family were submerged in torrents, which soon became deep, slowmoving oods, of other peoples judgement. Now there was no thin line between innocent man and criminal. Mila could see it all being replayed on the screen in front of her: disgraced business man, notorious fraudster. Since the trial, the media had called him the embodiment of self-serving duplicity; they called his crime heinous; they said that all right-thinking
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In at the Deep End 19
people would think of this as the trial of one of the most notorious whitecollar crooks. They revisited their judgement on the arguments of the defence too there it was on a screen again now: defence claimed he did not know his actions were illegal; common practice. Before the trial, it had seemed they agreed with this but now they said his defence had been as shameless as his crime: he had had the audacity to claim he did not know it was wrong. What a bare-faced liar to rob from the poor and then, unashamed, say he did not know he had done wrong at all! This showed, they said, that he had no understanding of the meaning of morality, or, worse still, thought he was not bound by it. Mila still believed her father had done no wrong. He had explained to her when the charges were rst made public that he had always told everyone the truth, including those people to whom he sold the stocks. It was because they were poor that they had to provide for their sickness and old age and he was helping them to do this by making an investment they could rely on in the lean times. He told them they might lose their money, and that they made their choice freely, and that is how things went in business. For her father (and in fact the family) the risks were not so great. They stood to gain whether the stocks made money or not, but that was the advantage of having professional expertise which no ordinary investor could acquire. In what her father insisted was an entirely separate arrangement, he and his friends were to be remunerated by a third party if the price of the stocks they were encouraging people to buy should rise. This was what Mila assumed was being referred to on the bottom of the screen now: massive stocks swindle. According to her father, the stocks themselves were a sound investment and it was on that basis that her father had been happy to sell them, and he would, he insisted, have done exactly the same even if it were not the case that he and his friends, might benet if the buying power of the poor people boosted the price of the stock in question. And, yes, it was also true that he and his friends, who were also now to be put on trial, had all bought the stock cheaply and taken their prots before the slide began. But this was what everyone did: it was common practice, there was nothing wrong and certainly nothing illegal in it. Now the news channel was showing some old lm of her father at a charity event. He looked very pleased with himself, smiling broadly for the cameras as he welcomed a line of well-heeled guests. In the long weeks that they picked over the verdict, and the sentence, the media always pointed out that the people who lost their money and her father, and most of his friends, were co-religionists. They harped on about the fact that her father, and one of his rich and powerful friends, were prime movers in a network of religious charities. The poor people were regular supporters of these charities with what little they had to spare. It almost seemed to be a kind of superstition with them: they never gave enough to get their donation publicly acknowledged, to
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get invited to the concerts and dinners her father was seen at, but they kept giving. And through habit they came to trust her father and his friends. While Mila saw the charity work as good works to be weighed against the alleged misdemeanour, the media saw it as seriously compounding the crime. They said her father had deliberately clothed himself with the probity of the charities and the high morals of the religion itself. He had played on the poor peoples religious commitment, their altruism and naivety and he had suckered them. The news channel was running the killer quote about this now, the one that the prosecutor had given them on the courtroom steps after the trial. He had said her father was guilty of an obscene condence trick. This was the accusation that the media had been using ever since to turn her father into a hate gure. Mila was exhausted by the time she got back to her new accommodation. The last thing she wanted was another encounter with a stranger before she slept but, before she went to bed, she went to the communal kitchen for a drink of water. As she got nearer, she saw the light was on. She was learning that students left lights on everywhere they went but, too late, she realized there was someone sitting at the kitchen table. Someone was sitting on her own, snacking and reading the big book on the table in front of her. Hi. Im Jasmine, are you hungry, too? No, I just want a glass of water Im on my way to bed, Im so tired after today oh, Im Mila. Mila was turning on her heel, but trying not to be rude by turning her back on the girl before she looked back down at her book. Where are you from Mila?. Jasmine wasnt really interested in the answer Mila gave (and when Mila politely asked where she was from it was no place Mila had ever heard of ). But when Jasmine asked what Mila was here to study it was clear this was an answer that she was interested in hearing. Mila guessed that what she said now might keep her in the kitchen for at least another few minutes and she hoped utter indifference was the shortest route to end the conversation. In the throwaway (and sleepy) manner of someone with no interest in what she was going to be doing for the next three years, Mila said: Sociology, its all I could think of doing. Jasmine made a sound that might have been a snort and looked at Mila more intently. Im studying astrophysics, its what Ive wanted to do since I was 10. Its why I stay up late to read about it. Why did you bother coming if you dont really want to study your subject? Mila might have said, I dont know, see you in the morning, but she was not sure of herself in her new surroundings maybe there were lots more girls like this one (with an unhealthy interest in books) at university and Mila did not want to risk seeming too dumb. She did not want to risk doing anything which might make her stand out and draw attention to herself. Well, I do want to study it. I studied it for two years before I decided I wanted
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to do it at university. Its about people, and most of it is interesting. I get good grades. Jasmine smirked at the bit about good grades, and she had more questions. So what is it about sociology that gets you interested? What is it that you think studying sociology is going to teach you? Mila thought it sounded as if this might be sarcasm but, even it werent, her patience was being tested surely students didnt take themselves so seriously but one of her teachers before university had told her class that people often asked this question because sociology was quite a new subject to most people. It had been around for more than a century and a half but they did not know what it was. You should tell them it was about how and why people behaved the way they did. It was not about how individuals behaved because of who they were that was psychology but because of what they were. You should say sociology was about how peoples behaviour was shaped by the time and place they lived in. If the people who were asking you what sociology was about also wanted to know what it was good for, you could tell them sociology could make the world a better place. This was what Mila told Jasmine now, and when Jasmine asked how sociology could make the world a better place, Mila dutifully said governments could learn from sociology how to devise better ways of treating people and getting them to live more happy lives. Ordinary people could learn from it too, they could understand more about their lives and their choices. It was a good thing to study, good for everyone, and it was interesting nding out how different people could be from yourself (although Mila wondered whether maybe that was anthropology). This seemed to take some of the edge off the challenge in Jasmines voice; but there was still something she wanted to know. OK, so thats what its about, but what sort of thing do you learn from it? Astrophysics is about understanding the universe and how matter in the universe behaves like how stars are born and die and where it comes from and where it is going. But that does not tell you what you get out of studying it thats another list of things altogether. Thats things like, what evidence there is for and against the big bang, and black holes, and dark matter. Those are big ideas that are really exciting because they could explain so much maybe everything but we dont quite know how to put them all together yet. So what are sociologys big ideas? As far as Mila could tell, there was no sarcasm in this at least Jasmine was not already completely convinced that sociology could not possibly have any big ideas but there was still very denitely a challenge in it. Jasmine was saying: convince me that you care about what you are going to study, convince me that you even know what it is that you mean to do here. Mila was not up to the test she let the question slide through her mind and she found her thoughts bounced off it. Big ideas? Remembering her schooldays, a jumble of thoughts came into her head class, gender, ethnicity werent
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those concepts? Or, rich people live longer, people will inict pain if authority gures tell them its all right to do so wasnt that evidence? None of it sounded like ideas. Im denitely too tired for that one. Its been nice talking to you, though. See you tomorrow, maybe. Mila hoped she did not come over like her mother sounding at her most polite and insincere, but she was through the door now and she imagined the other girl was already reading from her book. So, off Mila went to bed, not realizing that, for the rst time in many weeks, she had stopped thinking about the unbearable injustice of other people making judgements of her family. She had been given an injection of curiosity that would spread through her head and get under her skin and give her an itch she had to scratch. She was not used to having a question slide through her mind without sparking off even the remotest hope of an answer and, deep inside her head, in the bit that never actually went to sleep, it annoyed her. As she slept, that question what were the big ideas she had come to university to study? was spiralling though her subconscious and it was still there in the morning, now half-acknowledged by her conscious mind. *** A quest to nd those big ideas was something totally alien to Mila. It was so different from anything she had bent her mind to before it might as well have been the series of difcult tasks that a hero in a Greek legend Hercules, maybe had to accomplish in order to win the daughter of a God, or maybe become a God. But there was something in her challenge to Mila which meant that Jasmine had thought her not very clever, not clever enough to take on a real subject with big ideas (the origins of the universe: beat that!). Mila thought she could tell this from the way Jasmine looked when she had told her that her grades were good. That look said: its easy for you because its easy for anyone, take a real subject that tests your brain and you wont nd it too easy. In those rst few days Mila thought she read a similar thought in the minds of some other people she met. They seemed to think that sociology was largely common sense and, perhaps, that studying it was a way of getting into university on false pretences. Here was more judgement by other people and this time it was even closer to home. Not since she was a child had Mila thought her own behaviour might be judged in this way. The subjects she had studied up to now did not excite her, and she was not convinced that you had to be excited by ideas and knowledge to deserve to be at university, but Mila had a strong sense of what was fair. She did not want to be where she did not belong, or was not good enough to be. So, she asked the question she had been asked in the middle of the night in the kitchen, but she asked it of the subject she had come to study. She asked the question in her head when she listened to her lecturers and read about her subject: is sociology big enough to justify my being here?
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Is it difcult enough and is it important enough? Her acid test for deciding this question would be the big ideas she could nd. What were the big ideas which you could tell to someone who studied medicine or law or linguistics or philosophy, or astrophysics, and get them to agree that sociology was a proper subject like the ones they were studying? Even if sociology had some big ideas, Mila knew that she would have a fundamental problem in recognizing them because she was so lacking in condence about her intellectual abilities and motivation. She did not really believe she would have the strength of mind to be able to carry through the project she had set herself. So, she pondered the way in which she could get other people to help her and eventually came up with a strategy. She would nd out whether something really was a big idea by explaining it to other people. If they were suitably impressed, or, at least, were not able to undermine her faith in the idea, then that would make it big enough and important enough to count. In this way Mila gave other people (several of whom turned out to be ill-equipped to act as judges) the right to decide what sociologys big ideas were. She also put her future in their hands because she had decided that she was going to have to consider seriously leaving university, and nding something better to do, if her quest for sociologys big ideas was a failure. Mila soon realized that the reason that she had been so completely fazed by Jasmines question that night in the kitchen was that she could not grasp what an idea was. Perhaps this meant she was incredibly stupid, but she could not remember anyone explaining it to her before she got to university. She remembered teachers saying she had good or interesting ideas it was something they sometimes wrote on her assignments but she had always thought it meant she could make connections between different parts of her course or, maybe, that her teachers agreed with her opinion about a particular issue. This was not what Jasmine had meant. For her, ideas seemed to be explanations for things which people were imagining might be true now black holes, dark matter, whatever which were not accepted by everyone yet but might be at some time in the future. The teachers Mila had before university certainly did mention theories to her, but this was not something she needed to understand in order to pass her assignments. It was not until a few weeks into university, listening to two other students try to impress a lecturer with the smart questions they could think of, that she began to grasp that theories might be the big ideas she was after. It was the end of her research methods class, and Mila was waiting to speak to the lecturer to ask her which textbook she should buy. She was loath to ask this in a class for the same reason she was loath to say anything there: she did not want to do draw anyones attention to herself. Her level of anxiety waxed and waned, but she had determined to remain as anonymous as possible in social situations. She also found it was as much as she could
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manage to concentrate on maintaining her new identity in these situations. On a couple of occasions, she had been dangerously slow to realize that someone was calling her by her new name. Getting involved in things, even a seminar discussion, would make her very uneasy about her ability to keep her cover story going. The two other students were standing in front of her. Unlike the three hundred students ling out of the lecture room and talking about anything but sociology, these two seemed to be desperate to show the lecturer that they were really interested in her subject. The lecturer was answering a question that Mila had not heard. Its like an explanation for something that we dont know is really true yet. One of the two students in front she looked much younger than Mila, perhaps not even old enough to be at university dived in almost before the lecturer had nished, speaking very quickly. Its like your best friend stops speaking to you and you dont know why and you say to another friend why is she being like this?. And the other friend says they dont really know but maybe its because shes angry at you because of something you did before, or maybe shes ashamed of something she did. So those are two different theories, arent they? Maybe one of them explains whats going on but you wont know which, or either, until you nd out Mila was thinking, when your best friend doesnt speak to you, and some other kid says its because they dont like you anymore, that was how children ended up being horrible to each other. Then you make it worse by being bad to your friend, and it turns out that wasnt what was going on at all. The lecturer was now telling the young-looking student that she agreed with a part of what she had said: A theory is an explanation which might be true. You are right when you say we are waiting to nd out if the theory will turn out to be true but instead of explaining what your best friend does, there are theories to explain what atoms do, or the stars or our genes, or The second student in front of Mila saw a chance to jump in now and show how intelligent she was; maybe, she seemed to be thinking, more intelligent than this lecturer: So theories are never about what people do? How can sociology have theories, then? Yes, sociology does have theories but in sociology you need different kinds of evidence to work out whether a theory is right or not. When you deal with explanations about people it can be trickier deciding what the right evidence is and thats one of the reasons sociology can never be a science like physics. Maybe student number two was smarter than the lecturer. But scientists, psychologists even, say that we do stuff because we are programmed to do things. They think we are all like big bald mice or rats who ght each other and are only interested in passing on our genes. Mila was getting tired of waiting. She only wanted to ask a simple question about a textbook and she wanted the lecturer to notice that she was
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waiting to ask it. She thought she had better say something and, without thinking too hard about it, she remembered something she had read in a magazine: Some psychologists say thats why men cant help being promiscuous because they are programmed to have lots of babies with different girls so then its OK for men to behave in this way. Its just an excuse for bad behaviour. Men can choose to live like people, they dont have to behave like rats. This was pretty daring for Mila, but she liked the joke about rats. The lecturer brought her into the conversation Sure, well some theories are better than that. They help you to judge things as well as explaining them help you to make things better and not just keep them as they are. Theories should not be about justifying the way things are, but about making them better. Mila thought this was familiar. It sounded like what her old sociology teacher used to say about sociology being able to make the world better and fairer, but, all the same, she was confused. Wasnt it what sociology found out, what it told us was true, that helped us to make the world a better place? To her surprise, Mila now found she had a genuine question. You are saying theories can change the world, then. I thought it was what we found out about the world that changed the world. The lecturer focused more closely on Mila. Theories have changed the world. They do it by changing how people see the world. When they see it in a different way, its like they want to change the way they act or the way other people act, maybe even corporations and governments. You need these theories to make all this change possible. The rst student thought she had been out of the conversation for much too long. How do you know which is the right theory what about all the theories that are making trouble, they wont make the world better, will they? How do people know they are not going to change the world in the wrong way, and make things worse? This question pleased the lecturer too. She smiled again as she answered. This is why you need to test the theories to see which ones are right, which ones help and which ones cause trouble. If you think people are just like big rats, you can test your theories in a laboratory, but with most theories about people it is a bit more like nding out why your best friend wont talk to you. You have to ask around and see what other people think, and you go on how they normally are. You never know for sure with people, the theory is never 100 per cent right. And sometimes you can only test the theory by trying it out. Mila felt that what the lecturer was saying mattered to her in a way she was not yet sure of. And thats when all the bad things happen like bad governments and dictators that kill all sorts of people? Theyre doing a kind of experiment with people? Yeah its true, that can happen. There have been good theories that turned out to be very bad when people tried to live by them.
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And you still think if people want to make things better they need to come up with more theories? Well, thats a bit of it. Youve got to have new ideas about how to live. To Mila this sounded lame and the lecturer seemed to be able to tell because she hurried on. But you have to know which questions to ask. You cant make theories out of nothing. You make them out of questions like the ones you are asking. You have to have questions to start with. You cant have theories without questions. We need more questions to make us think of more theories. Student number two decided that asking questions might, after all, make her seem smarter than answering them: Where do the questions come from rst of all? Some of the best times for new theories are when lots of big, exciting changes are going on because the changes make people ask questions they havent thought about before. In sociology youve got to go back 150, maybe 200 years, to understand this. Go back to the time before electricity, and antibiotics, and when hardly anyone thought women should vote. The rst student, the very young-looking one, wasnt having any of this. But how can something written a century ago help us now? If I wanted something xed, or I had something wrong with me, I would want the latest ideas, not what people knew centuries ago. OK, I know what you mean, but, as I said just now, sociology isnt like those other kinds of knowledge medicine, chemistry, pharmacology. Science really does build on previous scientic work but this kind of process only produces small changes in sociological theories. Sociological theory changes in a radical way only when its subject matter society changes. Thats when the new questions come up. For scientists, every problem has a built-in solution. For sociologists, every solution comes with built-in problems. Mila had heard little of this. She had not been able to sustain her interest in this conversation and was feeling deeply frustrated that she had not been able to ask her question about the textbook. Still they carried on showing off to each other. Student number two thought the time was up for questions, and it was now time to show the lecturer that she understood all of this and more. I get it. You are saying that what happened in history gave people new things to think about but we are still supposed to be basically the same. Thats it. Our times are not yet different enough to produce hugely different theories. Or just maybe there are big changes going on but we havent yet come up with the right questions about them. Sociological theories from a 100 or 150 years ago have plenty to say about the economy and also the family, but economies and families are so different now that its probably time to start coming up with some new theories again. But you still have to understand what the old theories say to understand what we are changing from. You cant see what is changing if you dont know how things used
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to be. And there are plenty of things that are still basically the same but look at the time! Im late for my next lecture already. Nice talking to you all. Another quick smile and the lecturer had gone. Mila had not even asked about the textbook but she had, unwillingly and completely by accident, learned that the big ideas she was looking for would be theories. *** A few more weeks went by and Mila had to return to her home for the night, because she had a family duty to perform: her mother needed to show her off to her three sisters. None of the women in her family had been to university, and Mila was quite a novelty. The three aunts had made the trip from different corners of the country to Milas house for a special celebration meal to mark Milas achievement. It was more than likely, Mila knew, that this meal would give her the rst opportunity to nd out whether the rst big idea she thought she had learned in those rst two months was big enough and important enough to justify her being at university at all. Modernity, she was pretty sure, was a very short way of describing a big sociological theory. It was just like that big bang in astrophysics, a short label you could remember for something that was actually huge and could explain lots of things we did not know it could be complex enough to make your head spin. Mila had wanted to be sure that big ideas were always theories and she had actually asked Jasmine about this, in the kitchen again, but this time over breakfast. Mila asked her what those big ideas in astrophysics were, such as the idea of the big bang, and, Jasmine said the big bang was an idea about how the universe started. She explained that nobody just knew that the big bang was the point at which the universe was created, but there was evidence of the big bang all around us: in the way the universe was expanding and in the measurement of background radiation (the echo of the big bang). Some scientists still werent convinced and there were gaps and things that didnt t, but maybe the big bang was a major part of the explanation for the origin of the universe and what you needed were other theories to ll in the gaps. Even if you needed to ask what came before the big bang, you would still need a theory which explained the origin of the universe we now live in. So now Mila knew what she was looking for an idea that was a label which led you into a theory about something big. Modernity was certainly the biggest thing she came across in those rst few weeks. She knew that some ways of behaving were called modern, which usually just meant new or unconstrained by convention or tradition. Modernity was a term that described how many societies around the world came to value novelty making new things and abandoning tradition making things new. It described a historical change, whereby more than two hundred years in the past, European societies underwent a signicant and quite rapid change in
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all aspects of their social, cultural, political and economic lives. This involved getting rid of old traditions and relationships such as relationships of obligation and deference between a feudal lord and his serfs. It also meant creating new conventions and obligations, and new ways of thinking. Modernity was also exported to other parts of the world, either because it was so successful as in the case of the United States of America in the eighteenth century or Singapore in the twentieth century or by force. Some countries, such as China and Japan in the nineteenth century, were simply made to accept the new way of doing things. Modernity meant new ways of organizing thought and belief, so it was secular private religious beliefs were not to be allowed to inuence politics, law or intellectual inquiry. It meant new ways of organizing time. Once, the day, the month and the year were organized around religious festivals and agricultural seasons. Now, they were organized around the precise rhythms of the clock, so work, and leisure, started and nished when they were scheduled to. At all points, modernity involved tearing up the old and established, not accepting that something should be done a certain way because that was the way it had always been done. That was all modernity was, in a way: the idea that all the major changes that men and women had been through in the last few hundred years were part of an even bigger change, a massive revolution, in which the world was turned into a new kind of place. It wasnt such a difcult thing to say in your head, but Mila thought that to persuade people why it could give you a completely fresh outlook on the world you lived in would be very hard. To explain it to her three aunts and her mother so proud of her for getting to university sounded like a test that Hercules would refuse. After all, her aunts were so different. Aunt Ima might have gone to university herself if she had been born a few years later. She was a tough woman who held down a demanding job in a large corporation and who seemed to thrive on the grudging respect of colleagues. They respected her because she told them, as she told everyone, the truth, but did not like her because she said the truth so bluntly. Surely she would expect Mila to be studying something useful, something that would lead, sooner or later, into a professional job and, however well you explained it, modernity did not sound like something you needed to know for a job. Aunt Enid was, everyone knew, a champion gossip who was fascinated by people, but they had to have names and addresses, and mothers and spouses (and maybe lovers) and modernity was so abstract Mila was surely going to lose Enids attention as soon as she started to explain it. Aunt Bee-Bee was the most fastidious of the four sisters fastidious in matters of cleanliness and good taste (especially where food was concerned). Mila hoped Auntie B would be the one who asked her about her university course. This seemed likely because Bee-Bee had always been the most interested of the three in Milas progress, but there was a risk in this. Auntie B had a great sense of humour,
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and this was sometimes exercised at other peoples expense. She could never resist making fun where she thought people were being pompous or ridiculous and Mila feared that a lecture on modernity might be both. Any thoughts of gentle mockery vanished as soon as Mila entered the family home. She sensed the return of the deant misery that had dominated her for the last few months before leaving for university. It was a stubborn, blinkered feeling, which meant she voluntarily curbed her own happiness and joined her mothers silent protest against the injustice of other peoples judgements of them. Mila now thought she had been foolish to think her mother wanted to show her off to her aunts. Her mothers expression and demeanour showed she had her mind on stoic deance. Her resolve to be unhappy seemed as strong now as it was on the day her fathers trial ended. From that time onwards, her mother had drowned herself in the sea of judgement that owed into the house. She surrounded herself with all the newspapers, combing them for the most pitiless condemnation, and reading them over and over again. Mila thought this was not done in order to come to terms with the verdict, but simply to take in the awfulness of what people were saying. It was as if her mother were constantly trying to convince herself that the unthinkable had in fact happened. Mila did not want to drown in other peoples judgement. She put her effort into distancing herself from it. When she said that she wanted to change her name and assume a new identity for university it was her mother and one of her friends who arranged everything for her. She could not tell whether her mother approved, but she made it easy, and this included not asking Mila why. They did not talk about her motives, so Mila never told her mother that it was not shame she was running from but simply establishing for the benet of everyone else that none of this had anything to do with her. She did not think she was running away, far from it: she was making solid and undeniable that which she had never doubted. Mila thought she knew why her mother made it so easy for her, though. Her mother felt guilty because she was to blame for putting Mila in a situation where she might be touched by the loathsome tide of judgement. It was not that her mother shared complicity in her fathers crime because, of course, Mila believed that he was innocent. Instead it was like the failure to protect her from the photographer outside the courthouse. Mila believed her mother felt guilty because she should have found a way to make it clear from the start that neither of them had anything to do with the allegations. How this might have been done was, however, something Mila was very hazy about. At the meal, Milas aunties took pains to steer the conversation away from the trial and its aftermath. Aunt Bee-Bee asked Mila whether the showers in her block worked and what she was eating. Aunt Enid wanted to know whom she had met. Aunt Ima asked Mila how she was getting on meaning what sort of results was she getting, was she doing well and what sort of job she
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hoped to get when she was nished. Mila did not deal with this well. Even though she had known it was coming, she felt her reply was short and defensive. Aunt Ima gave her a long look and said something tepid in response, and Mila thought that might mean they would be having this conversation every time they met from now on. After that, the conversation somehow steered away from Mila until towards the end of the meal when Aunt BeeBee said: What is it you are studying? What is it exactly you know my own education was cut short, so it does not help if you tell me the name of the subject. Just tell me the sort of thing you are learning. This was it, and with her eyes xed on Bee-Bee, looking for a stied yawn or any sign of merriment in her Aunts eyes, Mila began. We are learning about human control over the natural world. Modernity meant that we found that nature is not something we need to live by, but something we can control and reshape. Work moved out of elds and into factories, where machines produced much more than could ever have been made by human hands alone. It was called industrialism. Bee-Bee was horried. But we know better than that now, dont we dear? Those factories made people ill and people lived in slums and died young of terrible diseases. Mila was surprised by this and her response was hesitant. We do it a different way now. But we still make things and provide services. We think this is the way for our country to get richer. We think we need to do more, and create more jobs, for things to get better. Thats still industrialism even if we dont have all those horrible factories. Or have put them somewhere out of sight, put in Aunt Enid. Mila went on to say that the basic idea has been around for a very long time. Industry expanded from the late eighteenth century onwards only in a few places like England to start with, and then in other countries, and nally nearly everywhere. This meant people had jobs in industry instead of farming. They started making things in factories, not in peoples homes; then, later on, there was steam power and machinery; then making thousands of the same items and selling them to thousands of people at a time. That was when mass production started. So were doing a history lesson now? I thought you were studying sociology. Are you studying history then? said Aunt Ima. Mila turned to face her other aunt while keeping one eye on Aunt Bee-Bee, who could sabotage her with one smirk. Well youve got to know what those big changes were, the ones that put questions in peoples heads that led them to start doing sociology. They looked at the new industry and thought: where is all this leading? What might be possible with this kind of power? For the rst time it seemed realistic to imagine a world in which everyone might have enough to eat. Aunt Enid interjected again. So it was all wonderful then? I thought there were bad changes, too, like Bee-Bee said?
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Yes. Both kinds of changes happen at the same time: everyone is packed together in the new cities, they have no proper sanitation, and disease can spread more easily. Sometimes the food is poorer than it has been in the countryside: bread adulterated with chalk, beer adulterated with opium. Mila said that living standards, and life expectancy, fell dramatically. Lots of people wondered if these changes were really for the good at all. There were also big social changes, especially when everyone moved to the towns from the countryside. There were lots of places where these changes were still going on today. Whenever they happened, traditional family and religion no longer meant as much, and people no longer paid attention to the authority of family or religious gures. Aunt Enid frowned to show how disappointed she was that people no longer cared for their families, but Mila said: Lots of people thought this kind of thing was terrible when it rst happened, but then some of them thought it was great because there was more freedom in the cities and new possibilities. Peoples living standards eventually rose, but improvements in the quality of life were never certain. The towns and cities gave you more possibilities, but they took things away too. Freedom could mean breaking old bonds but creating new ones, so people who once served a feudal lord now served a factory owner. Milas mother had been silent until now. The truth was that Mila had forgotten that she was even there, the big idea test was for her Aunts, not her mother, but it seemed that Milas mother had also been listening to what she had to say. She asked Mila gently, why she had not mentioned the people who had got rich while so many went to live in unhealthy squalor? Very carefully not looking at Aunt Ima, Mila said this was what people meant when they started talking about capitalism. They wanted to understand why industry was expanding so fast and what it was all leading to. One important answer was that, as her mother had said, some people were making money out of it. They were not making money to spend and show off, but to accumulate more and more. The purpose of money in feudalism was to create works: to build cathedrals, castles, to pay artists to paint you in a attering light. The purpose of money in capitalism was to generate more capital. Money became more and more about itself. It became a value in itself, as well as a way of buying other values. Money became the basis for competition between companies and individuals. More and more activities were judged solely on their market value, in money terms. Their worth became their price. So people often say, you cant put a price on happiness, but then act the rest of the time as if you can. In one way, this was good. Competition for markets stimulated new technologies, new ways of working, which brought us the railways, steam power and electricity. Markets that worked required laws that were, if not just, at least fair and transparent. However, this could also lead to a situation where everything was valued in terms of its market value, rather than its moral or social worth.
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As with industrialism, capitalism did not simply happen, said Mila. People got caught up in it to the extent that they started to believe it was the best way to run all sorts of things, because it promised so much prosperity and such an improvement in peoples living standards, But, again as with industrialism when people did not like the undermining of traditional authority and the family there were critics. Critics of capitalism did not like the way that money had replaced God, or faith. They did not understand how a recent human creation could have so much power over so many aspects of life. They pointed out the costs of accumulation. What happened to those who could not compete if everyones living depended on the market? If accumulation was the be-all and end-all, then wouldnt capitalists work their workers too hard and pay them too little to make sure they accumulated more? It was Aunt Ima who supplied the answers to these questions: But those critics were very wrong. We have been able to nd ways of living with capitalism which allow us all to benet from growth. We are all more prosperous and more healthy because of capitalism. You are giving us a history lesson again. Capitalism was harsh years ago. Mistakes were made, but people learned from those mistakes. For the rst time in her self-imposed ordeal by aunties, Mila felt she ought to give up and she was not made to feel any better by Aunt Enid taking her sisters side: Life was so different back then dear. Ordinary people had no say over what happened to them women had no say at all. Now Mila gratefully took the chance to change direction. I was getting round to that, because it wasnt just the market that changed peoples way of thinking about their place in the world. Democracy is part of modernity too. There were big changes already going on when capitalism started to have an impact. Mila said the idea that more and more people should have some sort of say in who governed them had been around for hundreds of years, but at the end of the eighteenth century the idea of democracy got its biggest boost with the French Revolution. That revolution, just as much as the industrial one, was part of modernity. It made people think about how far this process might go, how far it should go. Before the French Revolution happened there had been another set of events that made both it, and industrialism and capitalism, possible. The Enlightenment was the time in the rst half of the eighteenth century when freethinkers tried to apply reason to all the problems that had, up to that point, either been simply accepted as not needing an explanation, or being a consequence of Gods will. It started in France, Scotland and a few other countries, but then gradually spread to the rest of the world. In the Enlightenment, people came round to the idea that humans werent just pawns of fate or divine will. Because human beings mattered, and because they had reason, they didnt just have to wander through life being blindly buffeted by the things that happened to them. They could become
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authors of their own destiny and seek the answers to what had been hidden. They believed that nothing could really be hidden from human reason, nothing would remain inexplicable for ever. The Enlightenment meant that light could be shone everywhere. It was not just that there were new things to ask questions about in modernity. It actually became OK, even compulsory, to ask questions about everything: where humans came from, what it was to be human, to think, to live. This compulsion to ask questions was the result of the Enlightenment. According to Mila, the Enlightenment was so fundamental, that it wasnt simply the foundation of democracy and industrialism and capitalism: it set off lots of things that could not be summarized under any of these headings, like science. When all of these things started to turn the world upside down, then you got modernity. Mila spoke. If the idea of modernity works for you, then you think there is something that tied all of these major changes together. Thats all modernity is. Its the theory that all the major changes that people all over the world have been through are part of an even bigger change, a massive revolution, in which the world was turned into a new kind of place. Its because of this massive change that the subject I am studying, sociology, was invented. It wasnt needed before, but once you get modernity you need sociology to describe and explain the new world that is being created. It is needed to understand the new relationships, ways of working and thinking that are constantly being created by modernity. Mila found she was looking at her Aunt Ima for a response, waiting for the next pithy comment that would leave her self-condence in tatters, but Ima smiled: If you ever came to work with me you might nd modernity is taking a long time to arrive in some places in this country. Aunt Bee-Bee saw the room for a joke (how long she had waited!), but this was at her sisters expense, not Milas: But Ima, you are always telling us how modern you are. When our niece tells us modernity is really two or three hundred years old maybe she is talking about your dress sense. At the end of the laughter, with Bee-Bee, as ever, taking the lead in laughing at her own joke, Mila thought she could even try some summing up. She looked at her Auntie B with gratitude as she went on. So, auntie, we are learning that sociology has a theory that a new kind of world was created from the eighteenth century onwards. It was like the big bang in astrophysics that made the stars and the universe. It created lots of different ways of doing things and they all tted together things as different as laws, science, religion, entertainment, work, politics and the way men and women treated each other. Mila smiled at Aunt Enid and carried on. The idea of modernity sums up the newness of all this and the kind of feeling it gave people of opportunities and possibilities. The new world was about getting rid of the old life with its superstition and tradition, and
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everyone living where they were born until they died, and nothing ever really changing for anyone. This is one of sociologys really big ideas: there was this great break in history, a new world opened up, good and bad, and set us on tracks that we are still following now. Modernity was the short label that summed all of this big idea up. It is such a big idea that it has been taken up by all sorts of people outside sociology. All her aunts were beaming at her and Mila could feel herself relaxing. It was beginning to dawn on her that her rst big idea had passed the test and this was quite something: sociology even had its own equivalent of the big bang! But then her mother spoke. What Enid says is not such a joke. Have we really gone forwards so much? If your grandfather was alive today he might tell you otherwise. There are things that he fought for all his life that many people dont have, not even here, things like good health and a feeling of being valued by others. People used to care about these ideals, but they dont seem to care about them any longer. How can we say we have gone forwards not backwards? Here it was again, the misery that you could never escape surely that was what was behind her mothers negativity? And wasnt that allusion to not being valued by others just self-pity? Yet what her mother said reminded Mila of something she had briey glimpsed herself when she rst heard about modernity. This insight now became much clearer: when you really understood that modernity had changed the world once because people decided the world could be changed and needed changing then you realized that it could happen again. The idea of modernity showed us we could have another big revolution in the way we lived. Now Mila remembered something else. She remembered something one of her lecturers had said about it being possible that things have now changed so much that we are not on those same tracks anymore. Did this mean the world was no longer really modern and modernity was a theory that was becoming out of date? The lecturer had said something about families having changed so much recently that they were no longer like the ones created by modernity. Mila looked round the table at her aunts and her mother: were they the sort of family that tted modernity? Since the trial, she had felt they did not t in anywhere, but at least her mother and father were loyal to each other, her mother and her sisters were close and she, Mila, felt her membership of the family was the most important thing in the world to her. Would these feelings and even these relationships also turn out to be impermanent? Mila could not imagine what her world would be like if this ever happened.
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Frequently Asked Questions

People
Blumer, Herbert
Q: Why does Blumer focus on interaction? A: Blumers key role in symbolic interactionism was to identify the process of interaction in constructing meaning, as opposed to meaning being socially structured and given to people pre-prepared (pp. 1067).
Bourdieu, Pierre
Q: How does Bourdieu tackle the structureaction problem? A: Like some other thinkers, Bourdieu was trying to understand how peoples decisions, talk and action were shaped by structure without being reduced to it. His concept of habitus was at the core of this (pp. 17990). Q: What is the relationship between social capital, eld and practice? A: Social capital is a resource held by individuals. Field is the arena in which capital is given value. Practice is the way each individual brings social capital into play (pp. 1824). Q: What is the role of honour? A: Honour is like a common reference system for social worth, which people recreate in every honourable or dishonourable action they take (pp. 1812, 184, 186, 190, 2056).
Butler, Judith
Q: What does Butler mean by performing gender? A: Butler means that we create gender in every gendered interaction we become involved in. Butlers idea of gender as a performance is central to her criticizing the distinction between biological sex and social gender (pp. 812). Q: Why is drag important to Butler? A: Drag, gender cross-dressing, is an example of gender trouble, where individuals perform gender in a way that highlights how malleable it is (p. 81).
Chomsky, Noam
Q: How is Noams Chomskys universal grammar relevant to sociology? A: Chomsky proposed that every human being shared deep linguistic structures that made up the natural rules of language acquisition. One was the taxonomic assumption, by which we natively identify nouns with classes of objects. This is one example of a shared epistemology, a framework for acquiring knowledge about the world (p. 159).
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Cicourel, Alvin
Q: How do we create reality out of experience? A: Cicourel thought we used the rules of language or talk to create a reality, a process that draws on sensory experience but cannot reect the richness of it (p. 117).
Comte, Auguste
Q: Why did Comte want to make society the object of study for sociology? A: Comte made the claim that we have to consider individuals as being the product of society, rather than the reverse. To understand individuals, we have to understand the society that forms them (p. 40).
Collins, Harry
Q: How does Collins think sociologists should approach the study of the natural sciences? A: Collins argues in favour of methodological relativism, which means examining scientic discovery as a form of work without necessarily taking scientists own references to the natural world as the driving force in what is happening (pp. 1635).
Connell, Raewyn
Q: How does Connell think gender roles are maintained? A: Through the gender order, which is a feature of every setting in any society that is divided along gender lines (pp. 745, 812).
Cooley, Charles Horton

Q: What did Cooley think was real? A: For Cooley, what was real for each person was to what and to whom they could relate in their imagination (pp. 867, 926).
Descartes, Ren
Q: Was Descartes right to separate mind and body? A: Descartes implicit distinction between mind and body has been criticized for asserting that mind exists outside of its biological framework (pp. 615).
Engels, Friedrich
Q: Apart from giving Marx money, what was Engels contribution to social theory? A: As well as being Marxs sometime co-author and benefactor, Engels contributed to dening the historical stages that are central to the Marxist concept of history (pp. 1927, 2015). He also wrote extensively on the topics of family, socialism, state and science, which are not referenced in this book.
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Durkheim, mile
Q: How does Durkheim think that people can act as individuals without society spinning apart? A: How social order was maintained in a free, open society was of burning importance to Durkheim. He thought that individuals possessed a moral sense that embodied social norms and values. The moral sense derived from the organic solidarity that was part of the complex division of labour in modern society (pp. 409). Q: Why did Durkheim think that crime was normal and necessary for society to function? A: Durkheim thought that crime was functional, as it dened what was normal and acceptable by what it was not (p. 132). Q: What did Durkheim think was wrong with utilitarianism? A: Herbert Spencers utilitarianism envisioned individuals making choices with reference to their own best interests. Durkheim thought that people did not really behave in this way, but adhered to social norms and values that may not have been in their purely self-centred, immediate interests. This moral individualism, as Durkheim termed it, required adherence to shared standards (pp. 401, 479).
Garfinkel, Harold
Q: Why did Garnkel ask his students to carry out breaching experiments? A: He asked his students to break repeatedly the simplest everyday expectations of them. He did this to show that we all conspire to create the illusion of normality. When we stop the conspiring, normality and the normal social order break apart (pp. 11215).
Goffman, Erving
Q: Why is frontstage and backstage central to Goffmans role theory? A: Goffman studied social life as like a drama, in which we present ourselves as tting our roles. A lot of work is put into the front, the presentation of self that is prepared backstage (pp. 1235, 127, 141). Q: What happens when you cannot be yourself? A: Goffman studied cases where the sense of self was violated in total institutions, or disrupted in cases of stigma. These were instances where society, social norms or the setting of the institution, prevented individuals presenting their preferred front (pp. 12936, 13940).
Fanon, Frantz
Q: Why did Fanon quit psychiatry? A: Fanon thought that colonialism was psychologically damaging to all concerned, and to be a psychiatrist under colonial rule was therefore an impossible task (pp. 2323).
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Foucault, Michel
Q: How did Foucault think discourse was related to power? A: He thought that the way of talking and thinking about an aspect of life denes what it is and what we do with it. He used the examples of sex, homosexuality and madness to illustrate this (pp. 1414, 146, 1513). Q: How does Foucaults model of power differ from that of other theorists? A: He claimed that Marx, Weber and others thought of power as being largely a top-down process, whereas he examined it as something that was everywhere and nowhere, using the example of the panopticon (pp. 13941, 14451).
Hall, Stuart
Q: Why does Hall think there is a problem with being colour-blind? A: He thought that every identity had a hidden other, and that supposedly race or ethnically neutral identities in reality hid what and who they excluded (pp. 2379).
Ibn Khaldun
Q: Was sociology invented in Africa? A: The Arabic North African scholar Ibn Khaldun (13321406 CE) wrote on many topics, one of which was an attempt to account for social development and social organization. In many ways his work makes him an early sociologist, if not the founder of sociology as a discipline (pp. 2367).
Marx, Eleanor
Q: Was Karl Marxs daughter, Eleanor, a hidden voice? A: Eleanor Marx suffered from not being willing to t into the expected social role of middle-class women in her time. In the end this contradiction tragically cut short the life of someone who could have been an impressive contributor to social thought (pp. 22931, 233, 242).
Marx, Karl
Q: Did Marx think that economics determined social relationships? A: Marx has been described as an economic determinist, someone who reduces social relationships to economic ones. There was a lot more to him than that, for example, he thought that social classes have their foundation in the economy but that class struggle involves much more than economic relationships (pp. 2035, 236). Q: Is ideology just ideas? A: Marxs concept of ideology was as a set of beliefs that are at variance with material reality, rather than being simply a set of ideas (pp. 2056).
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Q: How is the concept of ideology important in Marxs theories? A: Marx says you cannot have class domination without it, and even the dominated classes have ideologies, its just that their ideologies arent very useful to them (pp. 2069, 220, 224). Q: What is the labour theory of value? A: Workers produce value but do not receive all of its worth. The surplus value is added to the wealth of the capitalist employer, which strengthens their hold over the worker, so workers create what enslaves them (pp. 1923). Q: What is a mode of production? A: Every society has its mode of production, which combines the social relations of production and the forces of production effectively, social structure and economic development (pp. 1945, 197, 203). Q: What are the contradictions of capitalism? A: According to Marx, capitalism was forever undermining its own logic by squeezing prots and wages. He thought that this tension would lead inevitably to a revolution (pp. 1956).
Mead, George Herbert

Q: What does it mean to say that we treat others objectively? A: Mead thought that the process of learning to be adult involves looking on ourselves as we expect others would, objectively. Learning to think of ourselves and others in this way is a key part of becoming competent social beings (pp. 98, 1004).
Parsons, Talcott
Q: Why did Parsons say that society was like an organism? A: He thought that any society had common needs that had to be satised, and that societies evolved as organisms do. You could understand much about professional ethics, norms, values and institutions, such as the family, by thinking in this way (pp. 1723). Q: In what way is sickness a social experience? A: For Parsons, being ill, and having this illness conrmed by a doctor, meant adopting the sick role (pp. 16971, 177). The sick role exempts the patient from normal social demands, on condition that they try to get well again. Q: What is Parsons general theory? A: This was Parsons attempt to combine structure and action together. He argued that any society had four functional requirements: adaptation, goal attainment, integration and latency (pp. 712, 834, 1678, 1725, 180). Q: What is the role of functional differentiation in ethics? A: Functional differentiation involves a complex division of labour that produces new social classes, such as the professions, which are supposed to embody an ethic of generalized responsibility to society (pp. 1712).
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Peirce, Charles Sanders

Q: Why does Peirce think we share the same thoughts? A: According to Peirce, ideas and thoughts are constructed by linguistic signs, which have a limited number of ways in which they can link together meaningfully. Every member of society shared this linguistic sign system (pp. 86, 8992).
Schutz, Alfred
Q: Why does Schutz think we should study what is taken for granted? A: He thought that typications, commonly accepted meanings and interpretations, were the basic groundwork made before meaning was created (pp. 10913).
Simmel, Georg
Q: Why do groups both need and are unsettled by strangers? A: Simmel thought that the stranger was a special role, an outsider who can look objectively at a group, and whose ability to move across boundaries is both useful to society and the source of their strangeness (pp. 2445). Q: What kind of value does money have? A: Simmel thought that money was a particular kind of universal value, which could be substituted for other values, and which became the standard measure for all worth (pp. 24752). Q: What is attractive about secrecy? A: For Simmel, secrecy created mystery but also value. It gives the holder of the secret something that has a unique, distinct quality (pp. 2524).
Weber, Marianne
Q: What was Mariannes role in feminism? A: Marianne Weber was a member of the German womens movement from the late nineteenth century well into the twentieth century. However, her activities were curtailed by the rise of Nazism (pp. 22933).
Weber, Max
Q: Why did Weber think that religion was instrumental in the rise of capitalism? A: Weber described the Protestant ethic as driving the process of accumulation identied by Marx, and giving it a socially valued rationale (pp. 168, 21315). Q: What is the iron cage of rationality? A: It is the process whereby rationalization comes to dominate every human need. Weber was concerned that the very things that developed society and the economy also hollowed out what made life worthwhile. So rationalization also means disenchantment. Complexity means bureaucracy (pp. 21113, 21516).
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Q: What is Webers theory of social class? A: Rather than an economically based theory of class, as with Marx, Weber developed a theory of stratication which included status group and party alongside, and often cutting across, class (pp. 21724).
Themes
Body
Q: Is the mind separate from the body? A: Sociologists had inherited the Cartesian idea that the mind is a pilot in the body, but this has recently been criticized as not reecting reality. There are many versions of the body in sociology. Some focus on the body as adornment (p. 246), as working and labouring (pp. 151, 203) and gendered and sexualized (pp. 612, 745, 1423).
Capitalism
Q: What are the origins of capitalism? A: It is probably easier to say how capitalism developed, through the collapse of feudalism and the dominance of money-mediated relationships, than exactly where or when this happened, though some suggestions are given (pp. 313, 149, 2023, 21314). Q: Is capitalism about making money? A: Sociologists like Max Weber, George Simmel and Karl Marx have examined the nature of capitalism. Money existed before capitalism. Capitalism means judging activities on the basis of their market value (pp. 312, 251, 254), accumulation of capital (pp. 312, 214), and money becoming a value in itself (24750).
Colonialism
Q: How did colonialism shape sociology? A: The dominance of European countries in the globe shaped social thought, and in particular, the idea of that progress involved societies moving towards a West European or USA model. Post-colonialists, among others, have challenged this (pp. 2323, 236, 2389).
Democracy
Q: Is sociology a democratic science? A: Sociology has been called the science of democracy since it in part came into existence to study public opinion, mass culture and other aspects of life in modern, democratic societies (pp. 323, 3940, 235).
Division of labour
Q: Why is there a division of labour? A: Every society assigns particular tasks to particular people, usually claiming that they are the ones best suited to it, perhaps because of their education, sex, social origin, ethnicity, beliefs or for other reasons. Sociologists want to
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study that process and those justications, which they call the division of labour (pp. 41, 489, 712, 1712, 1934, 247). Q: What is the signicance of specialization? A: Specialization in the division of labour requires the existence of cooperation, as everyone cannot do everything, and cooperation requires trust (pp. 401, 49, 1712).
Economics
Q: What is the relationship between sociology and economics? A: Questions of economics are important to sociology. Economic relationships are a key part of society (Parsons, Weber, Marx), and sociologists are also concerned to examine the ways in which economic relationships are always also social relationships (Durkheim) (pp. 402, 478, 167, 172, 174).
Emotions
Q: Are emotions a part of social life? A: Certain emotions can be required for society to work. For instance, the modern division of labour requires and promotes trust. Society also creates frameworks for interpreting physical feelings as human emotions (pp. 5270, 834, 923).
Enlightenment, the
Q: How did the Enlightenment change human thought? A: The Enlightenment was an eighteenth-century revolution in thought, which claimed to replace religion with reason. Many of the approaches common to sociology, other social sciences and the natural sciences are grounded in the Enlightenment (pp. 323, 162, 194, 210, 213, 215, 2313, 238, 241).
Ethnomethodology
Q: How do ethnomethodologists think we work at making things appear real? A: Ethnomethodologists are sociologists who examine the work individuals put into successfully accomplishing interaction and the appearance of a settled reality (pp. 109, 11217).
Fashion
Q: Why are some people fashion obsessed? A: According to Simmel, fashion is both a way of being individual while also being part of a crowd (pp. 2456).
Feminism
Q: Can women be equal to men in a society that is not equal? A: This is the conundrum faced by feminism in explaining why actual inequality between sexes exists alongside legal and formal equality of opportunity (pp. 714, 779).
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Q: Does feminism really speak for all women? A: Black feminists, among others, have criticized the way in which feminist ideas hich claimed to speak for all women in fact only spoke for a few (p. 75). Q: Are women excluded from social thought? A: Feminist epistemologists have pointed to how supposedly universal ideas of the human subject rights, wants and needs are in fact based on male rights, wants and needs (pp. 82, 22933, 242).
Feudalism
Q: Why are we no longer feudal? A: Feudalism was the set of economic and social relations that pre-dated modernity. A combination of economic development, the changed function of money and the decline of religion in political life contributed to the destruction of the old feudal bonds (pp. 278, 31, 2035).
Functionalism
Q: Can every behaviour be described in terms of its functions? A: It depends on who you listen to. There is a strong divide in sociology between functionalists, who look at systems and how behaviour contributes to them, and others, such as symbolic interactionists, who examine meaning and the accomplishment of social order in individual interaction (pp. 601, 72, 79, 1678). Q: What are the criticisms of functionalism? A: Common criticisms include its overemphasis on stability and inability to account for conict, although some of these criticisms rest on a crude interpretation of functionalism (pp. 723, 75, 823).
Gender
Q: What is the difference between sex and gender? A: A frequently used formulation is that sex is biological nature and gender is the psychological and sociological identity and sense of self built on it (pp. 56, 62, 80). Q: How do we learn masculinity and femininity? A: Gender roles and identities are socialized and also performed, so we never entirely learn about how to be feminine or masculine, as we constantly recreate what these identities are (pp. 723, 75, 823). Q: Is being male and female determined by our genes? A: A common explanation particularly when it comes to male and female behaviour is that both are driven by biological, reproductive necessity (p. 79). However, often what we think is biologically given is in fact a part of gender, something shifting and culturally specic (pp. 801).
Industrialism
Q: Is industrialism necessary for modern society to exist? A: Industrialism is thought by sociologists to be one of the components of modernity, along with capitalism, democracy and the Enlightenment. It
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means the process of developing a division of labour around work, mass production and the replacement of human labour with machinery. These changes in the organization of work led to many changes in social and personal life (pp. 307, 401, 45).
Inequality
Q: How does sociology explain inequality? A: Sociologists have been concerned with explaining inequality, and sometimes explaining it away. For Parsons, it can be socially functional. For Marx, it is an inevitable product of capitalism, and will get worse. For Weber, it is about control over markets and political power. (pp. 72, 74, 84, 1334, 1723, 176, 216, 218, 2217, 231, 235, 242, 2501, 2556).
Learning
Q: Whats the problem with learning at university? A: It is sometimes the case that students are implicitly encouraged to engage in simulated learning and marked down for using their own voices and experiences. We wrote this book to show how you can use your own life to explore sociology, and vice versa (pp. 17). Q: Can you learn sociology from reading ction? A: Fiction is a sourcebook on life. The work of ction that you have in your hand shows how sociological ideas can come alive in the mind of an enthusiastic student (pp. 715, 2578).
Liberalism
Q: Is liberalism for everyone? A: It has often been assumed that there will be universal progress towards the liberal, universal rights enshrined in Enlightenment, although in fact many people around the world reject liberal rights on various grounds (pp. 734, 235, 238).
Love
Q: What does sociology have to say about falling in love? A: Simmel wrote that lovers think that they are unique in their love, and when this feeling of uniqueness ends, so does the love (pp. 42, 245, 250).
Modernity
Q: What has modernity got to do with sociology? A: Modernity is described as a combination of revolutions in economics, society, politics and thought, which created a world very different from that which had existed before (pp. 278, 334, 39, 238). Sociology has a close relationship with modernity because it was created as a way of explaining the many changes wrought in modernity. Modernity brings both new freedoms and new restrictions and forms of social control (pp. 28, 323, 1412, 14853, 170, 201, 238).
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Q: Is society still modern? A: We know what modernity came after but are not sure what comes after modernity, if anything. Postmodernists have claimed that we have entered an era of postmodernity where surface is all (pp. 1401).
Morality
Q: Is morality purely personal? A: Morality is something that affects individuals personally. This personal relationship with morality is viewed by Weber as an aspect of the Protestant ethic and a fundamental requirement of being an individual in modernity (pp. 46, 1423, 204, 21415). Q: Is morality largely about religion? A: Many sociologists have thought that morality is functional and were concerned to see how morality would be sustained against religion decline. Morality can bind individuals to socially functional values. Parsons and Durkheim each looked to the professions and the division of labour to generate and sustain a secular morality (pp. 28, 3940, 2045).
Nationality
Q: Is society the same as the nation? A: Not exactly, but modern societies came into being along with the rise of national movements in nineteenth-century Europe, South America and elsewhere. When we talk of a specic society we often mean a nation as well (pp. 28, 3940, 2045).
Popular culture
Q: Why should we study popular culture? A: Fashion, media, music, video and other aspects of popular creativity tell sociologists a lot about society and its values, and also about the personal ways of relating to these objects and to each other through them (pp. 237, 2456).
Post-colonialism
Q: Is sociology just specic to the Western world? A: The question of whether sociology can come up with universal claims is a bone of contention. Some critics, such as feminists and post-colonialists, have argued that sociological thought is awed in that is claims to be universal when it is in fact particular (pp. 236, 2389).
Power
Q: What is power, and who has it? A: The question of power bedevils sociology. Some think it is a quality or a resource; the ability to get others to do what you want; or the ability to dene want (pp. 54, 81, 84, 1334, 1389, 14153, 164, 1815, 187, 189, 170, 172, 174, 203, 2056, 21920, 223, 233, 244, 248, 253).
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Science and knowledge

Q: Is science scientic? A: Sociologists examine science as being shaped by social forces to varying degrees, in the weak and strong approaches to the sociology of scientic knowledge (pp. 15565, 183).
Social bonds
Q: Why do sociologists worry about social bonds? A: Sociology was borne out of a time when social bonds were being broken and reformed. It often seems that the bonds of modern society are brittle and easily broken (pp. 41, 445, 48).
Social class
Q: Is social class always based on economic relationships? A: There are all sorts of ways of grouping people and one is by social class which is generally dened in terms of an individuals position in the division of labour. Some writers, such as Weber, add other elements that do not rely directly on the division of labour (pp. 192, 2036, 21721, 2234, 2348).
Social constructionism
Q: What is socially constructed? A: For some sociologists, every fact of life should be studied in terms of the meaning and signicance they are given in society, which is social constructionism. Others argue that this ignores material reality, economics, psychology and other processes that are not immediately apparent in terms of individual meaning and that are independent of conscious human control (pp. 59, 648, 1613).
Society
Q: Can society affect our actions? A: Sociologists use the term society to mean a powerful conuence of social forms of culture, values, economics and politics which shapes thought and action. The division of labour requires that people act towards society as if it were an entity in itself, even if they dont think that is what they are doing (pp. 26, 3950). Q: Is it all societys fault? A: It is sometimes said that sociology blames every damaging human action on society (pp. 389). Different approaches to human behaviour, sociology, psychology and biology provide different levels of explanation. Each provides part of the context for what people do, and that means what pushes them in one direction or another (pp. 501). Q: Is there society at all? A: Sociologists have argued over whether there is a real object called society that exists outside of human interaction (pp. 11214).
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Sociology
Q: What is sociology? A: Sociology aims to explain the actions of human beings in society, to describe social problems and look for ways of solving them. Sociology emerged as a study because society was changing rapidly, creating new opportunities but also new difculties, and people needed to understand why that was (pp. 213, 26). Q: Is sociology relevant? A: Some writers think that society has changed too quickly, too much, for sociology to keep up, although this may just suggest we need new and better ideas and theories. Studying the theorists in this book can help as we can understand more about where society is changing from and many of the problems involve the same dynamics (pp. 278, 334, 39, 238). Q: Is sociology scientic? A: Sociology has in its history often tried to be like the natural sciences, partly because they have been so successful. However, human behaviour is not like that of the molecules and gravity waves studied by natural scientists. There are other ways of being scientic, creating knowledge that is not merely subjective or the sum of its parts (pp. 212, 267, 185, 2312, 241). Q: What is a social theory? A: A social theory is a framework for interpreting the context of human behaviour. The different theories outlined in this book take different approaches to this, and work on different levels. Some examine human interactions. Others look at institutions, economics and society itself (pp. 247).
State, the
Q: How does the state affect society? A: Marx, Weber and Parsons had a lot to say about the state and its role in society and social change. The state can be seen as embodying some of the values of society, or as supporting the interests of the most powerful (pp. 140, 216, 2224).
Symbolic interactionism
Q: Why should we study interaction? A: Symbolic interactionists thought that each interaction, each encounter with another individual, was where meaning and signicance were created (pp. 100, 102, 1067, 110).
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