
Concise Reader in Sociological Theory
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This Concise Reader in Sociological Theory contains excerpts from the writings of a wide range of key theorists who represent the dynamic breadth of classical and contemporary, macro- and micro-sociological theory. The selected writings elaborate on the core concepts and arguments of sociological theory, and, along with the commentary, explore topics that resonate today such as: crisis and change, institutions and networks, power and inequality, race, gender, difference, and much more.
The text contains editorial introductions to each section that clearly explain the intellectual context of the theorists and their arguments and reinforce their relevance to sociological analysis and society today. The excerpts include writings from the classicists Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, W.E.B. Du Bois to the contemporary Patricia Hill Collins, Dorothy Smith, Raewyn Connell. This indispensable book:
* Offers a concise review of the diverse field of sociological theory
* Includes contributions from a wide range of noted classical and contemporary theorists
* Incorporates engaging empirical examples from contemporary society
* Demonstrates the relevance and significance of the ideas presented in the theorists' writings
Designed for undergraduate and graduate students in sociology and in social and political theory, Concise Reader in Sociological Theory is an engaging and accessible guide to the most relevant sociological theorists.
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MICHELE DILLON is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Professor of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire, USA, and was educated at University College Dublin, Ireland, and the University of California, Berkeley, USA. She has many years of experience teaching sociological theory to undergraduate and graduate students, and, among a wide range of publications, she is the author of Introduction to Sociological Theory, Third Edition (Wiley, 2020).
Content
Introduction 1
Part I Classical Theorists 7
1 Karl Marx 9
1A Karl Marx from Wage Labour and Capital 12
II 13
1B Karl Marx and Frederick Engels from Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 17
Profit of Capital 19
1C Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels from The German Ideology 27
2 Emile Durkheim 31
2A Emile Durkheim from The Rules of Sociological Method 34
What is a Social Fact? 34
II 37
2B Emile Durkheim from Suicide: A Study in Sociology 41
3 Max Weber 47
3A Max Weber from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 50
Religious Affiliation and Social Stratification 50
3B Max Weber from Economy and Society 65
The Definition of Sociology and of Social Action 65
Types of Social Action 71
3C Max Weber from Essays in Sociology 75
Bureaucracy 75
Structures of Power 77
Class, Status, Party 78
The Sociology of Charismatic Authority 80
Science as a Vocation 83
Part II Structural Functionalism, Conflict, and Exchange Theories 89
4 Structural Functionalism 91
4A Robert K. Merton from On Social Structure and Science 94
The Ethos of Science 94
Universalism 94
"Communism" 95
Disinterestedness 95
Organized Skepticism 97
5 Conflict and Dependency Theories 99
5A Ralf Dahrendorf from Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society 101
5B Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto from Dependency and Development in Latin America 107
Theory of Dependency and Capitalistic Development 107
6 Social Exchange 111
6A Peter M. Blau from Exchange and Power in Social Life 113
6B James S. Coleman from Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital 116
Social Capital 116
Human Capital and Social Capital 118
Forms of Social Capital 118
6C Paula England from Sometimes the Social Becomes Personal: Gender, Class, and Sexualities 120
Defining Terms 121
Explaining the Gender Differences 123
Part III Symbolic Interaction, Phenomenology, and Ethnomethodology 129
7 Symbolic Interaction 131
7A George H. Mead from Mind, Self & Society 134
From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist 134
7B Erving Goffman from The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life 136
Introduction 136
8 Phenomenology 141
8A Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann from The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge 143
The Reality of Everyday Life 143
Origins of Institutionalization 147
9 Ethnomethodology 159
9A Harold Garfinkel from Studies in Ethnomethodology 161
Practical Sociological Reasoning: Doing Accounts in "Common Sense Situations of Choice" 161
9B Sarah Fenstermaker and Candace West from Doing Gender, Doing Difference: Inequality, Power, and Institutional Change 166
"Difference" as an Ongoing Interactional Accomplishment 166
Common Misapprehensions 168
The Dynamics of Doing Difference 169
Part IV Major Postwar European Influences On Sociological Theory 173
10 Critical Theory: The Frankfurt School 175
10A Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno from Dialectic of Enlightenment 179
10B Jurgen Habermas from The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society 184
11 Pierre Bourdieu 189
11A Pierre Bourdieu from The Forms of Capital 191
Cultural Capital 193
Social Capital 194
11B Pierre Bourdieu from Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste 196
Class Condition and Social Conditioning 198
The Habitus and the Space of Life-Styles 199
12 Michel Foucault and Queer Theory 209
12A Michel Foucault from The History of Sexuality 212
Method 214
12B Steven Seidman from Queer Theory/Sociology 217
Part V Standpoint Theories Amid Globalization 223
13 Feminist Theories 225
13A Charlotte Perkins Gilman from The Man-Made World or Our Androcentric Culture 229
13B Arlie Hochschild from Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure 231
Framing Rules and Feeling Rules: Issues in Ideology 231
13C Dorothy E. Smith from The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge 233
Relations of Ruling and Objectified Knowledge 235
Women's Exclusion from the Governing Conceptual Mode 235
Women Sociologists and the Contradiction between Sociology and Experience 236
The Standpoint of Women as a Place to Start 238
13D Patricia Hill Collins from Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment 238
Black Feminist Thought as Critical Social Theory 238
Why U.S. Black Feminist Thought? 242
Black Women as Agents of Knowledge 243
Toward Truth 246
13E Patricia Hill Collins from Intersectionality's Definitional Dilemmas 249
Racial Formation Theory, Knowledge Projects, and Intersectionality 249
Epistemological Challenges 252
13F R.W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt from Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept 254
What Should Be Retained 257
What Should Be Rejected 258
Gender Hierarchy 258
14 Postcolonial Theories 263
14A W. E. Burghardt Du Bois from The Souls of Black Folk 267
14B Edward W. Said from Orientalism 270
14C Frantz Fanon from Black Skin, White Masks 273
The Fact of Blackness 273
14D Stuart Hall from Cultural Identity and Diaspora 276
14E Raewyn Connell, Fran Collyer, Joao Maia, and Robert Morrell from Toward a Global Sociology of Knowledge: Post-Colonial Realities and Intellectual Practices 279
Southern Situations and Global Arenas 280
14F Alondra Nelson from The Social Life of DNA: Racial Reconciliation and Institutional Morality after the Genome 282
Postgenomic 282
Reconciliation Projects 284
Slavery and Justice 285
15 Globalization and the Reassessment of Modernity 287
15A Zygmunt Bauman from Liquid Modernity 290
After the Nation-state 290
15B Anthony Giddens from Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age 296
15C Ulrich Beck from Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity 300
On the Logic of Wealth Distribution and Risk Distribution 300
15D Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande from Varieties of Second Modernity: The Cosmopolitan Turn in Social and Political Theory and Research 305
15E Jurgen Habermas from Notes on Post-Secular Society 307
The Descriptive Account of a "Post-Secular Society" - and the Normative Issue of How Citizens of Such a Society Should Understand Themselves 307
Index 311
INTRODUCTION
Sociological theory offers a rich conceptual tool-kit with which to think about and analyze our contemporary society. As we reflect upon what it means to live and to understand others in today's complex world, the insights of sociological theorists provide us with concepts that greatly illuminate the array of social and institutional processes, group dynamics, and cultural motivations that drive the patterns of persistence and change variously evident across local, national, and global contexts. Sociology is a comparatively young discipline. It owes its origins to the principles and values established by eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers, namely the core assumptions that human reason is the source of knowledge, and though of different orders, the source of moral truth and of scientific truth; and that, by virtue of being endowed with human reason, all people are created equal and thus should be free to govern themselves in all matters, including political governance - thus motivating the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century in America (1776) and in France (1789) and leading to the decline of monarchies and the establishment instead of democratic societies.
It was the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) who coined the term sociology in 1839. He was influenced by the Enlightenment emphasis on scientific principles and believed that a science of the social world was necessary to discover and illuminate based on rigorous empirical observation how society works, that is to identify, as he saw it, a "social physics" parallel to the laws of physics and other natural sciences, and to advance social progress as a result of the data yielded from the scientific study of society. In his view, because sociology could and should study all aspects of social life, he argued that sociology would be the science of humanity, the science of society, and would outline "the most systematic theory of the human order" (Comte 1891/1973: 1). Harriet Martineau (1802-76), the English feminist and writer, commonly regarded as the first woman sociologist, translated Comte's writings into English in 1855 (Hoecker-Drysdale 1992). Additionally, in her own influential writing she emphasized both the breadth of topics that sociologists can/should study as well as the importance of studying them with rigor and objectivity. In her well-known book How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), morals and manners referencing the substantive, wide-ranging content of sociology (and its encompassing of social class, religion, health, suicide, pop culture, crime, and the arts, among other topics), Martineau also argued that because social life is human-centered it is different to the natural world. Unlike atoms, for example, humans have emotions. Hence, Martineau pointed to the need for sociologists as scientists to develop the empathy necessary to the observation and understanding of the human condition and to how it manifests in the course of their inquiry. She wrote:
The observer must have sympathy; and his sympathy must be untrammeled and unreserved. If a traveler be a geological inquirer he may have a heart as hard as the rocks he shivers, and yet succeed in his immediate objects . if he be a statistical investigator he may be as abstract as a column of figures, and yet learn what he wants to know: but an observer of morals and manners will be liable to deception at every turn, if he does not find his way to hearts and minds.
(Martineau 1838: 52)
As sociology became further established in the mid-to-late nineteenth century it did so amid major societal changes, propelled by industrial capitalism, factory production, the expansion of manufacturing and of railroads, increased urbanization, mass immigration of Irish, Italian, Swedish, German, Polish, and other European individuals and families to the US, the bolstering of democratic institutions and procedures (e.g. voting rights), nation-building, and mass-circulating newspapers. Living in a time swirling with change, sociology's founders were thus well situated to observe and to recognize how large-scale, macro societal forces take hold, interpenetrate, and structure institutional processes, community, and the organization of everyday life, as well as to ponder the relationship of the individual to society.
This Reader presents a selection of key excerpts from major writings in sociological theory, the classics from the foundations of the discipline to contemporary approaches. As with all disciplines, the classics are so defined not merely because they originated in a different time, but precisely because they contain the essential points or concepts that have endured through a long swath of time and have proven resilient in their explanatory relevance of the dynamic complexity of society even, or especially, amid its many ongoing patterns of change. Sociology, as a social science, is an empirical discipline; this means that sociologists are interested in and committed to knowing the truth about reality - how things actually are and why they are as they are, rather than how ideally they ought to be. Consequently, sociologists embrace scientific method as a way of studying the social world and accept the objective facticity of (properly gathered) data. Sociologists use both qualitative (e.g. ethnographic description, interview and blog transcripts, historical documents) and quantitative (e.g. surveys, census data) data-gathering methods, and in using data they tend to lean either toward investigating the relationship between a number of macro-level variables (e.g. education, crime, income inequality, gender) or focusing on how individuals in a particular micro-context and small groups or communities carve meaning into and make sense of their lives. Regardless of the research method(s) chosen (a decision made based on the specific research question motivating the sociologist's empirical study), sociologists do not and cannot let the resulting data stand on their own. Data always need to be interpreted. And this is why sociological theory is so important. Theory provides the ideas or concepts that sensitize sociologists about what to think about - what questions to ask about the social world and how it is structured and with what consequences - and theory is equally fundamental in helping sociologists make sense of what they find in their actual research, both of what they might have (empirically or theoretically) expected to find but also of the unexpected. As such, sociological theory is the vocabulary sociologists use to anchor and interpret empirical data about any aspect of society, and to drive the ongoing, back-and-forth conversation between theory and data. This, necessarily, given the dynamic nature of social life, is always an energetic and dynamic dialogue. Sociological theory does not exist for the sake of theory, but for the sake of sociological understanding and explanation of the multilayered empirical reality in any given sociohistorical context.
This Reader is organized into five sections. Each section includes excerpts from a core set of theorists, and I provide a short commentary or introduction prior to each specific theorist or to a cluster of theorists in the given section. The Reader begins with a lengthy first section with excerpts from sociology's classical theorists: Karl Marx (chapter 1), Emile Durkheim (chapter 2), and Max Weber (chapter 3). These three dominant theorists largely comprise the foundational canon of sociology; their respective conceptual contributions have well withstood the test of time despite, from the hindsight of our contemporary experience, some notable silences in their writings with respect to, for example, sexuality and a limited discussion of the significance of gender and race.
The classical tradition was largely introduced to English-speaking audiences by the towering American social theorist, Talcott Parsons. The excerpts in section II comprise an amalgam representing Parsons's theorizing, generally referred to as structural functionalism, and different theoretical perspectives that it, in turn, gave rise to based on specific critiques of some of Parsons's emphases. I briefly introduce Parsons's ideas (in chapter 4) but because much of his writing is quite dense I do not include an excerpt from him but instead an excerpt from his student and renowned fellow-theorist Robert K. Merton, exemplifying the structural functionalist perspective. Parsons was famously concerned with how values consensus translated into the social roles and social institutions functional to maintain social order. Countering this focus, conflict theory, exemplified by Ralf Dahrendorf, highlighted the normalcy and functionality of conflict (as opposed to consensus) in society. From a different context, critiquing Parsons's focus on American society as the paradigm of modernization, neo-Marxist dependency theorists including Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto highlighted the conflicting power interests between the West and Latin America, and within Latin American countries dependent on the US (chapter 5). Still other theorists pushed back against Parsons's main focus on macro structures and what they saw as his diminishment of the individual (even though Parsons affirmed the relevance of the individual as a motivated social actor). With a micro focus on individuals and small groups...
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