Classic and Contemporary Readings in Sociology

Ian Marsh, Rosie Campbell, Mike Keating

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138836617
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317882015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Classic and Contemporary Readings in Sociology introduces the reader to sociological issues, theories and debates, providing extracts of primary source material, from both classical and contemporary theorists. Theorists are examined within their historical and sociological framework and the text provides an analysis of developments in sociological thought and research. The text is divided into four main sections: Part One, Origins and Concepts, surveys the history of the discipline of sociology and examines key themes which have influenced sociological theorising and investigation, in particular, social control, culture and socialisation. Parts Two and Four, Sociological Theories and Sociological Research, include a number of readings from the founding theorists and investigators, including Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Max Weber and Charles Booth, and also include more recent theoretical writing and research approaches. The focus on theory and research is extended by a selection of readings centred around the theme of Differences and Inequalities (Part Three); these readings provide students with examples of work from an area where sociological theorising and research has been widely applied.

	Part I
	Origins and Concepts

1	Introduction
2	The two revolutions Robert Nisbet
3	Social control Peter Berger
4	Cultural diversity (1): Religion and witchcraft Edward Evans-Pritchard
5	Cultural diversity (2): Learning sex roles Margaret Mead
6	Culture and civilization Sigmund Freud
7	Socialisation and gender roles Marianne Grabrucker
8	Culture and socialisation: The role of the soap opera Jack Levin

	1
	Introduction

Sociology as a separate area of study is a relatively new discipline and there has been a tendency to see it as a less essential subject than more traditional disciplines. This view is perhaps due to the fact that relatively few people will have encountered sociology at school. However, the areas and issues that it investigates – including, for example, the relationship of the family unit to wider society, the causes of deviant behaviour, the role of religion – have long been a source of intellectual examination and debate and to that extent we would argue that sociology has a rich and diverse history. The readings in this section illustrate how contemporary sociology has been influenced and shaped from a number of directions.

The Social Sciences in general, and sociology as a distinct academic discipline, developed in response to the massive technical, economic and social changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: changes that transformed the social order of the Western world. Scientific and technological developments encouraged the hope that scientific methods would be able to explain the social as well as natural worlds. The Industrial Revolution that began in Britain in the late eighteenth century led to the growth of mechanised industry and a population migration to urban areas to work in the new factories. All of the major ‘classic’ sociological writers reflected on and offered analyses of these drastic changes and of the transformation from ‘simple’ societies to complex, industrial ones.

In his analysis of the origins of sociology, Robert Nisbet (1970) suggests that it was in the years 1830 to 1900 that the conceptual framework of modern sociology was created. He argues that ‘the fundamental ideas of European sociology are best understood as responses to the problem of order created at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the collapse of the old regime under the blows of industrialism and revolutionary democracy’. The Industrial Revolution and the democratic revolutions in France and America were the key events in the history of sociological thought. Indeed, it would be hard to find any area of thought and writing in the nineteenth century that was not affected by one or both of these events. As Nisbet puts it: ‘The cataclysmic nature of each is plain enough if we look at the responses of those who lived through the revolutions and their immediate consequences.’ Today we tend to see particular historical events, including revolutions, as part of the long-term process of change; we tend to emphasise evolution rather than revolution. Nisbet points out that to intellectuals of that age, radical and conservative alike, the changes were of almost millennial abruptness. ‘Contrast between present and past seemed stark – terrifying and intoxicating, depending upon one’s relation to the old order and to the forces at work on it.’ Reading 2 is taken from Nisbet’s analysis of ‘The Two Revolutions’ and their influence on the development of sociology.

Nisbet’s argument that sociology developed in response to the ‘problem of order’ of the newly industrialised Western world suggests that social control is at the heart of society and sociology. This is the focus of the second reading, taken from Peter Berger’s introduction to sociology, Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, in which Berger provides a personal argument for studying sociology. Although only brief, and freely written, this introductory book had a tremendous impact on the expansion of sociology in the 1960s and 1970s. Along with C. Wright Mill’s The Sociological Imagination, Berger’s book captured the excitement and challenge of studying society and inspired a generation of students and teachers. As he says at the end of the first chapter, ‘Sociology is more like a passion. The sociological perspective is more like a demon that possesses one, that drives one compellingly, again and again, to the questions that are its own. An introduction to sociology is, therefore, an invitation to a very special kind of passion.’ This excitement is well illustrated in the extract here (Reading 3) in which Berger introduces the key sociological concept of social control. He describes various systems of social control, including physical violence, economic pressure, ridicule, gossip, morality, custom and manners, and examines how they can influence our day-to-day lives.

In their attempts to understand how societies ‘worked’ – how they developed and held together – many of the early, ‘classic’ sociologists studied pre-modern societies; perhaps in the hope that finding out how ‘simpler’ societies were structured and organised would help an understanding of modern, industrial societies. Durkheim’s study of Australian aborigines (from written reports, not his own fieldwork) helped him develop his views on social solidarity and the collective conscience. Marx, Weber, Tonnies and Spencer, among others, all referred to earlier forms of society in their analyses of social development.

This tradition was continued in the pioneering work of social anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Bronislaw Malinowski (both of whom carried out fieldwork in the Pacific in the first half of this century), Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (whose work included studies of the Andaman Islanders, 1922, Australian tribes, 1931, and African kinship systems, 1950) and Edward Evans-Pritchard (who carried out extensive fieldwork in Africa in the 1930s and 1940s). As well as providing a model from which comparison with modern societies can be made, such studies also reveal the extent of cultural diversity. They illustrate very graphically that terms such as ‘acceptable’ or ‘normal’ are difficult to apply across time or space. Evans-Pritchard’s believed that systems of magic and religion had their own internal logic and Reading 4, taken from his famous work Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, shows how practices that we may regard as cruel or ridiculous were used by the Azande to explain everyday misfortunes. Margaret Mead’s work on child-rearing in the Pacific made an enduring contribution to the nature/nurture; although Mead did not deny the importance of biology and the natural environment, her research demonstrated the central role of culture in shaping human behaviour and attitudes. Reading 5 is taken from her study Growing up in New Guinea and, in particular, her examination of the way in which gender-specific behaviour is learned by the ‘untouched people’ on the island of Manus, north of New Guinea.

Introductory texts in sociology rarely spend much time looking at the contribution of Sigmund Freud to the discipline. This is perhaps not surprising given that Freud is most famous for his psychoanalytic approach to personal problems and that much of his work focused on the instinctual dispositions of individuals. However, from about 1914, after his earlier work on hysteria and dreams and after his break with Jung, Freud began thinking and writing more about the social implications of his theories (evidenced in his studies The Ego and the Id, 1923, and Civilization and Its Discontents, 1929). Freud’s description of the characteristics of contemporary civilisation in Civilization and its Discontents is the subject of Reading 6; and it is a description that is very close to the way in which sociologists use the term culture. Essentially, he sees civilisation as the sum of achievements and regulations that distinguish the lives of humans from those of animals. Freud was convinced of the inherent conflict between civilisation and instinctual pleasure, suggesting that civilisation was built on a renunciation of instinctual pleasure and thus demands instinctual sacrifice. It is worth noting here that Freud’s ideas on the family, socialisation and gender are also of particular relevance to sociology, perhaps especially through their impact on feminism, either through those who have criticised him (over his notions of patriarchy and ‘mothering’, for instance) or those who have been influenced by him (in psychoanalytic work, for example).

In general usage, the term ‘culture’ is associated with the traditional arts such as ballet, literature, classical music and painting. However, in sociology a much broader usage is adopted, with ‘culture’ referring to the values, customs and modes of behaviour of a society or of a particular social grouping. Sociologists emphasise the importance of culture, rather than biological instinct, as the key to understanding human behaviour and lay great stress on the processes by which individuals learn and internalise the culture of the society and social groupings to which they belong. Socialisation is the term given to this learning process and is, therefore, one of the key sociological concepts; it helps explain social cohesion and cultural endurance. There are various agencies of socialisation, including the family, the education system and the mass media. Reading 7 is taken from Marianne Grabrucker’s diary of her first three years of motherhood in which she recounts her experience of trying to bring up her daughter free from gender stereotyping. It includes her comments on her reasons for keeping the diary and on how her best intentions were ‘subverted’, and extracts from the diary itself. Although a personal reflection, Grabrucker’s account illustrates some of the many influences outside her control that communicated messages about gender differences. In Reading 8, American sociologist Jack Levin reflects on the role of the media, and in particular television soap operas, in the socialisation process. From an initially hostile view of ‘soaps’, as a sort of modern day ‘opiate of the masses’ socialising young people to accept the status quo, Levin explains how and why he has reconsidered his opinion.

	Reading 2
	The two revolutions
	Robert Nisbet

The two revolutions (the title of the second chapter of Nisbet’s study), that Nisbet is referring to are the Industrial Revolution and French Revolution, both of which begun in the late eighteenth century. Although there were other democratic revolutions around this period, most notably the American Revolution, the French Revolution, according to Nisbet, was the ‘first thoroughly ideological revolution’ (the aim of the American Revolution was limited almost completely to independence from England). These revolutions, Nisbet argues, stimulated the birth of sociology. In the first section of this extract he highlights a number of key elements that emerged as a social response to the conditions created by rapid industrialisation; the second part focuses on the French Revolution as an example of ‘Democracy as Revolution’ and examines some of the changes in the relationship of individuals to the state; the final part summarises three of the processes that Nisbet feels particularly characterised the ‘two revolutions’.

The Themes of Industrialism

[ … ]

What were the aspects of the Industrial Revolution that were to prove most evocative of sociological response, most directive in the formation of sociological problems and concepts? Five, we may judge, were crucial: the condition of labour, the transformation of property, the industrial city, technology, and the factory system [ … ]

Beyond question, the most striking and widely treated of these aspects was the condition of the working class. For the first time in the history of European thought, the working class (I distinguish ‘working class’ from the poor, the downtrodden, the humble, which, of course, form timeless themes) becomes, in the nineteenth century, the subject of both moral and analytical concern. Some recent scholarship has suggested that the condition of the working class under even the first stages of industrialism was better than that which had prevailed for a couple of centuries before. This may be true. But it was rarely the view of independent observers in the early nineteenth century. For radical and conservative alike, it was the undoubted degradation of labour, the wrenching of work from the protective guild, village, and family, that was the most fundamental, and shocking, characteristic of the new order [ … ]

The likeness between the conservative Southey and the radical Cobbett here is reflective of a certain affinity between conservatism and radicalism that was to last throughout the century. (I am referring, of course, to the evaluation of industrialism and its byproducts. There was little if any affinity when it came to political matters.) What conservatives such as Tocqueville, Taine, and the American Hawthorne were to write in horrified reaction to the scene presented in Manchester and other cities of the Midlands in England did not differ in descriptive character or emotional intensity from what Engels was to write [ … ]

(Indeed) the indictment of capitalism that comes from the conservatives in the nineteenth century is often more severe than that of the socialists. Whereas the latter accepted capitalism at least to the point of regarding it as a necessary step from past to future, the traditionalists tended to reject it outright, seeing any development of its mas...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Origins and Concepts
• Part II Sociological Theories
• Part III Differences and Inequalities
• Part IV Sociological Research
• References
• Index