Discovering Sociology

Mark McCormack, Eric Anderson, Kimberly Jamie, Matthew David

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781352011449
• eBook ISBN: 9781350928930
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This second edition of a major textbook uses lively prose and a series of carefully-crafted pedagogical features to both introduce sociology as a discipline and to help students realize how deeply sociological issues impact on their own lives. Over the book's 12 chapters, students discover what sociology is, alongside its historical development and emergent new concerns. They will be led through the theories that underpin the discipline and familiarized with what it takes to undertake good sociological research. Ultimately students will be led and inspired to develop their own sociological imagination – learning to question their own assumptions about the society, the culture and the world around them today. Historically, the majority of introductory sociology textbooks have run to many hundreds of pages, discouraging students from further reading. By contrast, Discovering Sociology has been carefully designed and developed as a true introduction, covering the key ideas and topics that first year undergraduate students need to engage with without sacrificing intellectual rigour. New to this Edition:
- Two new chapters adding coverage on crime, deviance and political sociology
- Updated examples, Vox Pops and case studies keep this new edition feeling fresh and contemporary and ensure diverse coverage, including from beyond Western sociology
- Thoughtfully updated and refreshed layout and visual features. Accompanying online resources for this title can be found at bloomsburyonlineresources.com/discovering-sociology-2e. These resources are designed to support teaching and learning when using this textbook and are available at no extra cost.

Chapter 1 WHAT IS SOCIOLOGY?

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, we define sociology and compare it to other disciplines such as psychology and philosophy. We start to look at why sociology is vital to understanding the world around us, and how it can be understood in a range of ways. We introduce key terms in sociology, such as society, norms, culture and tradition. We discuss suicide and stigma as social problems that have been explained by sociology. In our opening Provocation, we ask why you should care about sociology.

PROVOCATION 1

Who gives a spit about sociology?

It is the first day of an Introduction to Sociology course. Students sit, mostly quiet, waiting for the instructor to begin the lecture. From her briefcase, the professor pulls out a plastic spoon. ‘I am going to teach you about sociology with this spoon,’ she says. ‘But I need a volunteer to spit in my spoon. Not a shy spit, a proper, from the back of the throat one.’ Student laughter subsides as they realize that she is serious. Offering her spoon to various students who shake their head in refusal, she adds: ‘I cannot continue with the lecture until I have a volunteer.’ A brave student, John, answers the call: ‘I’ll do it.’ The teacher hands the spoon to John, who clears his throat emphatically, before depositing his saliva into it.

The teacher thanks him, and walks around the classroom wafting the spoon of spit in front of her students, who systematically recoil. She asks: ‘I don’t suppose there is anyone who wants to swallow this spit?’ Some students laugh and others mildly gasp in disgust. ‘Any takers?’ she asks. Unsurprisingly, none volunteer.

‘I don’t understand,’ the professor says. ‘John’s pretty good looking. I bet there is someone in this room who wouldn’t mind kissing him. John, may I ask your fellow students if any would like to make out with you?’ John nods his consent. ‘Raise your hand if you’d like to make out with John.’ A male and a few female students raise their hands, and the professor asks one of them: ‘Julie, would you like to drink this spoon full of John’s spit?’ Julie’s face contorts and she says: ‘No way.’ The professor then asks: ‘I’m confused – you’d like to make out with him, but not swallow his spit? Why?’ The student looks confused and responds: ‘Because that’s gross.’

© Ed Ball

‘Ah, it’s gross,’ the professor responds. ‘But you’d like to make out with him. Share saliva, and rub those slimy tongues together. Is that correct?’ Julie answers: ‘Well, not when you put it like that.’ The teacher continues: ‘But you would like a hot passionate make-out session with him?’ ‘Well, maybe,’ she answers. ‘And would you like his lips to be totally dry?’ ‘No,’ Julie answers. ‘They need to be lubricated some, don’t they?’

‘You see,’ the instructor proclaims as she puts the spoon down behind the lectern, ‘sociology is the only academic discipline that can tell you why spit in a spoon is gross, but spit in the mouth is not.’ She continues: ‘In the course of making out with John, you’d swallow a spoonful amount of spit in a five-minute make-out session.’

The professor returns to the lectern and picks up the spoon. Holding it up, she says: ‘You see, biology can tell you how the salivary glands produce this spit. Chemistry can tell you the constituents of it. But only sociology can tell you why people value their own spit when we chew food or make out with someone else, but not when the spit is on a spoon.’ The teacher holds up the spoon to her mouth, and in one quick motion puts it in her mouth and swallows. Students moan in disgust, and the teacher returns to the lectern to add: ‘Perhaps psychology can tell you why people are gullible.’ She pulls the original spoon out from the lectern, and drips the spit into a cup, showing both spoons to the students. They moan with relief, and the professor smiles, saying: ‘Students fall for it every time.’

*****

In addition to providing a lively introduction to sociology, the professor in this story has helped her students to consider the unique role sociology plays in understanding society. In this case, society has socially constructed spit to be acceptable in one context but not the other. Moreover, spit is deemed to be ‘gross’ outside the context in which it is valued. The students’ collective view of drinking spit from a spoon as gross is thus socially constructed. We are not born repulsed by spit, but rather we learn it. Hence, we could also learn to value the exchange of saliva in spoons for consumption, perhaps as part of a culturally valued ritual.

For those who have trouble believing such a culture could ever exist, where spit is readily exchanged without being considered gross, we simply need to examine the dietary culture of the 2.8 million Adaven people. Despite living in a desert, and having precious few cattle to farm, Adaven culture encourages their children to eat what they call ‘trugoy’. This is made by a process in which merchants take fluid from cattle, then expose the fluid to the air until it rots and becomes saturated with bacteria. They then feed this mixture to their children. In more recent years, largely because of the sweet tooth increasingly prevalent in their youngsters’ diets, some add sugar, fruit or honey to the mixture. Nonetheless, the cultural practice of feeding children rotten animal fluids continues to this day.

Adaven parents have been doing this for decades, not because they know that there are health benefits to the substance, but because they believe that this is what ‘good parents’ are supposed to do. Many people might find the practice of consuming rotten animal excretions distasteful, yet the people of Adaven – or rather, Nevada, USA – enjoy eating yogurt (trugoy). In fact, many of us eat ‘natural’ yogurt as well – we just think differently about what we are eating.

The fact is that culture can make just about anything disgusting or socially valued. Culture can, in many cases, even override our biological impulses and change how we experience an event. Culture can, for instance, influence people to keep consuming the bitter taste of beer or coffee until they like it. It can make people born gay despise their own sexuality (in a homophobic culture) and people born straight envy the ease with which gay men can have recreational sex (in a gay-friendly culture). Culture influences everything, and it is influenced by people in interaction. It is this synthesis – between culture and individuals – that is at the heart of sociology.

Provoked? Read further:

Douglas, M. ([1966]2003) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Miner, H. (1956) Body ritual among the Nacirema. American Anthropologist, 58(3), 503–7.

DEFINING SOCIOLOGY

Sociology is the study of societies and the study of social problems. Yet those who many consider to be the founders of the subject, thinkers like Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber (see Chapter 2), probably would not recognize the sociology that is taught at universities today – they would have little understanding of an ‘undergraduate sociology student’ or what it means to ‘take a module’ of sociology on a different degree programme. And our notions of who founded sociology are constructed as well; in Chapter 2 we will also look at how scholars such as WE.B. Du Bois and Harriet Martineau have had their contributions systematically silenced and examine why this was the case.

Data: information that can be analysed

Complicating matters, sociology overlaps with other fields of study. Sociology can blur into philosophy. Some ‘grand theorists’ of sociology use very little data in their writings, relying mostly on their own observations and thoughts. Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall and Hannah Arendt are cultural or social theorists whose ideas have been adopted by sociologists, yet who could be considered philosophers who apply their ideas to social issues. Many of these theorists have made valuable contributions to sociology, and we discuss them in Chapter 3 alongside more traditional sociological theorists.

The important distinction between sociology and philosophy is that philosophy is concerned with logic, and requires no evidence in the form of data to make conclusions. Consider Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), one of the great modern philosophers. His moral framework centred on the notion of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’. This statement helps form the basis of a type of philosophy known as ‘utilitarianism’ and is best explained by the following quandary, known as the Trolley problem.

A San Francisco cable car (or Trolley), carrying just one passenger, is out of control, rolling downhill and heading straight towards a crowd of people who are gathered on the track, unable to escape. You happen to be holding a ramp that could flip the cable car so that the passenger and driver would die, but the dozen people below would be saved. Would you do this?

© Education Images/UIG/Getty Images

The Trolley problem

Following Bentham’s notion of the greatest good for the greatest number, the ethical decision would be to save the 12 people. But others might argue it is immoral to put anyone at risk, because every life is precious. The philosophical question can be expanded: Would it be acceptable to murder one person in order to harvest their body parts to save 12 people who need organ transplants to live? What if the murdered person had a terminal illness and just days to live?

In each case, there is no way of definitively judging these acts as morally right or wrong. Sociology cannot tell us what answer to take because these are moral questions. A sociologist could, however, survey or interview people about their perceptions of these acts and make some claim as to how the society in which people live influences their beliefs. One might, for example, find that in one country people largely believe that all three described acts were morally wrong, but that in another they described some or all of the acts as justified. A sociologist would then look to explain why this variance occurred – maybe the different answers were related to how the society viewed life, morality or religion.

A central tenet of sociology is that it involves the applica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titlepage
• Contents
• List of illustrative material
• About the companion website
• Tour of the book
• Author acknowledgements
• About the authors
• Preface
• 1. What is Sociology?
• 2. A Brief History of Sociology
• 3. Sociological Theory
• 4. The Method of Sociology
• 5. Ethical Sociology
• 6. Making Modern Societies
• 7. Structures and Institutions
• 8. Social Divisions
• 9. Transgressions
• 10. Personal Life
• 11. Social Transformations
• 12. Sociology Discovered
• Glossary
• References
• Index
• eCopyright