SOCIOLOGY THE BASICS A lively, accessible and comprehensive introduction to the diverse ways of thinking about social life, Sociology: The Basics examines: • The scope, history and purpose of sociology • Ways of understanding ‘the social’ • The state of the world we live in today • Suffering and social inequalities • Key tools for researching and thinking about the social • The impact of new technologies. The reader is encouraged to think critically about the structures, meanings, histories and cultures found in the rapidly changing world we live in. With tasks to stimulate the sociological mind and suggestions for further reading both within the text and on an accompanying web- page(http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415472067/), this book is essential reading for all those studying sociology, and those with an interest in how the modern world works. Ken Plummer is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, UK, and is internationally known for his research on sexualities and narrative. He is author of the best selling Sociology: A Global Introduction (with John Macionis, 5th edition, 2011). The Basics ACTING JUDAISM BELLA MERLIN JACOB NEUSNER ANTHROPOLOGY LANGUAGE (SECOND EDITION) PETER METCALF R.L. TRASK ARCHAEOLOGY (SECOND EDITION) LITERARY THEORY (SECOND EDITION) CLIVE GAMBLE HANS BERTENS ART HISTORY LOGIC GRANT POOKE AND DIANA NEWALL JC BEALL THE BIBLE MANAGEMENT JOHN BARTON MORGEN WITZEL BLUES MARKETING (SECOND EDITION) DICK WEISSMAN KARL MOORE AND NIKETH PAREEK BUDDHISM OPERA CATHY CANTWELL DENISE GALLO CRIMINAL LAW PHILOSOPHY (FOURTH EDITION) JONATHAN HERRING NIGEL WARBURTON CRIMINOLOGY POETRY SANDRA WALKLATE JEFFREY WAINWRIGHT ECONOMICS POLITICS (FOURTH EDITION) TONY CLEAVER STEPHEN TANSEY AND NIGEL JACKSON EUROPEAN UNION (SECOND EDITION) THE QUR’AN ALEX WARLEIGH-LACK MASSIMO CAMPANINI FILM STUDIES RELIGION (SECOND EDITION) AMY VILLAREJO MALORY NYE FINANCE ROMAN CATHOLICISM ERIK BANKS MICHAEL WALSH FOLK MUSIC SEMIOTICS (SECOND EDITION) RONALD COHEN DANIEL CHANDLER INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SHAKESPEARE (SECOND EDITION) PETER SUTCH AND JUANITA ELIAS SEAN MCEVOY INTERNET TELEVISION STUDIES JASON WHITTAKER TOBY MILLER ISLAM THEATRE STUDIES COLIN TURNER ROBERT LEACH JAZZ WORLD MUSIC CHRISTOPHER MEEDER RICHARD NIDEL SOCIOLOGY THE BASICS Ken Plummer First published in 2010 by Routledge This edition published in 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2010 Ken Plummer All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Plummer, Kenneth. Sociology : the basics / Ken Plummer. p. cm. – (The basics) Includes bibliographical references and index. [etc.] 1. Sociology. I. Title. HM585.P58 2010 301–dc22 2010001790 ISBN 0-203-84772-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-47205-9 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-47206-7 (pbk) ISBN10: 0-203-84772-5 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-47205-0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-47206-7 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-84772-5 (ebk) For all my students who taught me much CONTENTS List of illustrations viii Social hauntings ix Preface: welcome to the social maze x 1 In a world I never made 1 2 Thinking the social 18 3 Teeming social life 43 4 Standing on the shoulders of giants 72 5 Cultivating sociological imaginations 96 6 Engaging the empirical 125 7 Suffering inequalities 152 8 Why sociology? 183 Conclusion: The sociological imagination – twenty theses 206 Appendix: Epigrammatic sociology – twenty-five little wisdoms to ponder 209 Glossary 212 Websites: A short guide 220 References 222 Index 234 ILLUSTRATIONS Figures 2.1 A continuum of the social 22 5.1 Putting it together: mapping out the flows of ‘the social’ 123 6.1 Two ‘ideal type’ logics of research processes: deductive and inductive 133 6.2 The research tool kit 135 6.3 Whose perspective? The Rashomon Effect 143 7.1 The matrix of inequalities 181 8.1 The circle of sociological life 192 Tables 2.1 Metaphors of the social that we live by: opening images 30 2.2 Problems in living and their institutions 33 2.3 Conflict is everywhere in society 35 2.4 A basic guide to Foucault’s key writings 37 3.1 World populations 49 3.2 Emergent human social worlds – a classic basic typology (‘ideal types’) of Western societies 68 4.1 Rapid social change: the evolutionary typological tradition of Western thinkers 77 4.2 From Comte to Bourdieu: twenty landmark male Western texts, 1824–1984 85 4.3 Expanding the concerns of sociology: the impact of feminism 90 4.4 Subject sections in the American Sociological Association in 2009 94 5.1 Doing a cultural analysis 108 6.1 Only connect: bringing together science and art 132 7.1 The facts of world inequalities 160 7.2 The subjective side of inequality 163 7.3 The intersecting orders of inequalities 165 7.4 The resources of a stratified life 175 SOCIAL HAUNTINGS So these are the hauntings of social things. Attuning to people and drenched with their presence, We do things together. We move with the other – The living, the dead, the soon to arrive. Sociality becoming the air that we breathe. Our life’s social worlds, so stuffed with the possible. Proliferating multiples and things on the move. Yet, here we all dwell in the rituals we make; The pounding of patterns to engulf and entrap us. These worlds not of our making that haunt till we die. The tiniest things and the grandest of horrors. Inhumanities of people and generations at war; Gendered classed races, sexy nations disabled; Excluding, exploiting, dehumanising the world. The stratified hauntings of pain we endure. Standing amazed at this chaos and complexity We celebrate, critique and cry in our shame. Our utopian dreamings of empowering lives. Each generation more justice, a flourishing for all? Sociology: the endless challenge for a better world. PREFACE WELCOME TO THE SOCIAL MAZE Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less travelled by Robert Frost, 'The Road Not Taken', 1916 Welcome to the social maze. At the heart of this maze is a new way of thinking and imagining social life. We will start on eight journeys to a possible grasping of these new ways for thinking about human social worlds. Never mind if you do not arrive at the centre of the maze, I hope you will enjoy some of the journeys. On the first exploration, in Chapter 1, I want you to get a glimpse of what we are looking for – the domain of the social – and I give lots of examples. I will encourage you to become an ‘outsider’ and suggest that sociology can look at anything – anything that engages you (from sport to science to sex). The second journey will examine just what we mean by the social and how we can think about it. It will look at some of the images we create to think about social things. Chapter 3 will move us into the hurly-burly of teeming human life as it emerges across the world in the twenty-first century and looks at a few changes taking place in it. How can we possibly find ways of grasping this complexity? Our next puzzle (Chapter 4) will be to consider how sociology, the discipline designed to look at the social, developed in the Western world to deal with just this problem. Chapters 5 and 6 will then start to struggle with laying out some road PREFACE XI maps for doing sociology – for thinking about theory and methods. I cannot give precise satnavs but will aim, from a vast literature on all this, to distil a few wisdoms that will help you orientate yourself to what sociologists try to do. The seventh pathway looks at a topic which haunts most of the other pathways – the human sufferings and inequalities we find along our way. It is just one key area of sociological investigation but one which most sociologists would agree is central. On my final journey (Chapter 8), I ask why we should bother with all this anyway. I ask: Why? What’s the point of it all? What role does sociology have to play in the modern world? Each chapter is a pathway that can stand on its own and any one alone just might take you to the holy grail of sociology. … Like all books in this series, I am only looking at the basics of sociology. A short introductory book can hardly do justice to a complex and inexhaustible subject. I have had to be very selec- tive for a reader who I assume knows nothing about the subject. My hope is that the little I can say in a short space will tempt you to expand your ways of thinking about the social and explore fur- ther the workings of the social in the world we live. Each chap- ter will end with some advice on going further (and each chapter will also provide boxes to help your thinking). There is a website (http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415472067/) organ- ised by pages of the book giving you sources and leads to follow things up further.