• • • PART ONE
WHAT IS SOCIOLOGY?
The idea that Australians now live in a time characterised by endless change has become a cliché. Indeed, the permanence of change has been accepted among social theorists ever since Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto back in 1848 and pointed to the way the European middle classes were creating a modern capitalist economy that set loose a permanent condition of change so total that ‘everything that is solid melts into air’. That combination of economic change and political reform driven by the middle classes kick-started a permanent process of revolution in modern societies. It has become conventional to talk about this process of change by using terms like ‘the modernising process’ or ‘modernity’. This in turn has led to much talk about the way we have moved into a period described as ‘post-modern’. More recently, the word ‘globalisation’ has been used to define or describe this latest manifestation of change.
There is no doubt that those of us who live in Australia now, as well as those who have been writing sociology for the past two centuries, have been part of complex processes of social, economic, political and intellectual change. Yet what does this idea of permanent change mean? And what does ‘modernity’ mean, let alone ‘post-modernity’ or ‘globalisation’?
Given that the development of social sciences like sociology took place in societies that were going through often-dramatic processes of social change, the claim of sociologists to be able to explain change takes on an extra level of interest. How, for example, have sociologists talked about processes of change, and have they anything useful or important to say?
What was an important sociologist like Zygmunt Bauman (1991) thinking when he attempted to explain the effort by the Nazi state after 1941 to kill as many of Europe’s Jews as it could? This is the event widely referred to as ‘the Holocaust’—a process that led to the murder of over five million Jewish people. Bauman used the idea of ‘modernity’ to explain this awful crime against humanity. Bauman (1991: 15) argues that features of modernity such as bureaucracy, science, technology, a modern army and modern political advertising can be used to explain the Nazi Holocaust. Is this an example of using an idea like modernity to obscure things rather than to illuminate or explain them?
In the first part of this book, we pay attention to sociology as a social science. In Chapter 1 we discuss the emergence of sociology as a distinctive way of thinking about the world, indicating some of the ways this developing intellectual tradition connected with the process of modernisation that was set loose some centuries ago.
In Chapter 2 we ask a basic question that anyone coming to sociology might find useful: how should we read sociology? Far from assuming that reading is a simple, uncomplicated activity, we outline a disciplined approach to reading that emphasises the need to be active and analytical, and to take nothing for granted.
In Chapter 3 we consider some of the ways sociologists have ‘done’ sociology. As with every other social science discipline, there are many different ways people who call themselves sociologists approach sociology. While we pay attention to some of these differences, we also offer a broad overview of how what C. Wright Mills called the ‘sociological imagination’ works.
In Chapter 4 we sketch out some of the ways in which this ‘sociological imagination’ can work to inform good research practices. We consider how sociological research can inform and promote change that is careful and respectful of people as well as being both effective and reflective.
Finally, in Chapter 5 we look at some of the issues at stake in the relationship between ethical ideas and values and the practice of sociology. As we argued in the Introduction, the question of ethical values is as significant as any issue when it comes to the search for truth.