Sociology

The Basics

Ken Plummer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000432213
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A lively, accessible and comprehensive introduction to the diverse ways of thinking about social life, Sociology: The Basics has been translated into six languages. The volume is packed with thought-provoking summaries, questions, quotations and activities. It offers an absorbing narrative about what we mean by the social, and how we can think about it, weaving in discussions of the personal, the political and social change, along with concepts and vivid contemporary examples, and answering questions such as:

• What is the scope, history and purpose of sociology?
• How do we cultivate ways of understanding society and 'the social'?
• What is the state of the world we live in today?
• How do we analyse suffering and inequalities?
• What are key methods and tools for researching and thinking about society?
• How has digitalism reshaped sociology and its method?
• How might sociology help us understand the changes brought about by Covid-19?
• Does sociology have values?
• What is the role of sociology in making a better world?

In this thoroughly revised and updated Third edition 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 website, this book is essential reading for all those studying sociology and those with an interest in how the modern world works.

1
IMAGINATIONS

ACTING IN A WORLD I NEVER MADE

DOI: 10.4324/9781003158318-1

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 2000 [1851]

At birth, we are – each one of us – hurled into a social world we never ever made. We will have absolutely no say about which country we are born into, who our parents and siblings may be, what language we will initially speak, or what religion or education we will be given. We will have no say about whether we are born in Afghanistan, Algeria, Australia, Argentina, or one of several hundred other countries in the world. We will have no say whether we are born into villages, nations or families considered super-rich or in abject poverty. We will have no say whether our initial family is Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, or any one of several thousand other smaller religions found across the world. What is significant here is that we are born into a world that pre-exists us and will continue after us. These days this world has become a global, digital world. Yet we are ‘thrown into’ this everyday social world: one that was quite simply one we had no say in making. This is the very world which sociologists study. Every day we confront social currents – ‘social facts’ – which ‘come to each one of us from outside and … sweep us along in spite of ourselves’. We look at worlds we cannot wish away – worlds that await us and shape us. They are ‘social facts’ over and above us.¹

1 This is a reference to the sociologist Émile Durkheim (Durkheim, 1982, pp. 52–3). There are very few further footnotes or references in this book. They are hereafter provided with an author reference only which will be in the bibliography; or page by page, often with links, on the website that accompanies this book. See http://kenplummer.com/sociology.

But then, very soon, most of us learn to find our own feet in this very world we have been ‘thrown into’. Most significantly, we start to become aware of other people in this world (usually initially our dear – or not so dear – mothers, fathers and siblings): we start to become attuned to them. We learn how to please them and others, and indeed how to annoy them. We slowly start to imagine the worlds that they live in and how they may respond to us. Like it or not, we become increasingly socialized to act towards them, to develop a primitive empathy or sympathy towards others. If we do not – if we fail to learn this empathy – then we will not be able to communicate, we will not be able to routinely go about our daily social life in any kind of satisfactory way. Sociology is also charged with studying this everyday life of adjustment – how the billions of people who dwell on Planet Earth get through the day living with each other. How do we adapt and conform, rebel and innovate, ritualize and withdraw? We look at the complicated relations between our bodies, our inner worlds (or ‘subjectivities’) and our ways of behaving with others in this living of everyday life so that social worlds can proceed in a fairly intelligible and orderly fashion most of the time. It will of course also be subject to serious conflict and breakdown, and sociology looks at this too.

What is fascinating about this everyday world is that we – that little child thrown into a strange but given world – actually also do make parts of it ourselves. It turns out that from the moment of birth, when we first confront this constraining world, till the moment we die and life comes to a dramatic end, we are given an active energy to keep going – to move through the world with a tremendous potential and creative ability to act in it and on it. We little human animals are the creators of social life all the time: we are active agents who make social worlds. Socialized into it, we then make it work for us. So sociology studies this too. Sociologists ask how people come to assemble their social lives and social worlds in radically different ways in different times and places. Yet whilst some of us can develop ways of being the active agents of our lives, many others may be restricted in doing so. While no one is determined, we are not all capable or knowledgeable actors in the world to the same degree. And here is a key problem for sociologists: inequalities (we will return to this often and especially in Chapter 7).

Sociology as consciousness: outsiders on the margins?

Sociology brings a fresh imagination for seeing social life. As sociologists we enter the human social worlds of others and are likely – at least momentarily – to feel challenged by the differences of others. For people – in other groups, countries and times – live different lives to yours. To see this clearly, I will need to temporarily abandon my own taken-for-granted view of the world and develop an empathy with the worldview of others. As sociologists, we must suspend our own world and for a while hold back on all judgements about others. At this most basic level, there are some sociologists (like Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) in a classic study, Studies in Ethnomethodology) who have conducted ‘breaching experiments’ to make our everyday life experiences very strange. Garfinkel invited his students to question everything going on around them, to ask and probe every convention of the daily round. A friend says, ‘how are you?’ They ask back: ‘what do you mean by that?’ They go to a shop and barter over the price of goods (in many cultures, this is the norm; but it is not so in the UK or North America). They move their face right up to the face of the person they are speaking to, almost rubbing noses. They sit with friends and question everything that is said. These little experiments in breaking the routine soon show how much our society depends on trust, kindness and understanding each other. Others are soon threatened by strange questionings.

This leads us to one of sociology’s little problems: the need to challenge ethnocentrism and the closely linked issue of egocentrism. Here are stances that put our own ‘taken-for-granted’ ways of thinking at the centre of the social world, as if we are always right and know the truth. Ethnocentrism assumes that our culture (our ethno – way of life) is at the centre of the world; whereas egocentrism assumes that the world revolves around us. We need to purge ourselves from their influence. Sociology demands as a pre-requisite that we get rid of this self-centred view of the world and that, as the contemporary and influential sociologist Zygmunt Bauman puts it, we learn to defamiliarize ourselves with the familiar. It stresses the need to always see the differences (and value) of other lives and cultures and, indeed, the value of the differences of other standpoints. At its strongest, it absolutely forbids us to pronounce on others’ worlds and instead to take them seriously on their own terms. It makes us humble in the face of the world’s differences.

To take the simplest example of this in everyday life: you are going on a holiday to a country you do not know. You are the outsider, the stranger. Now you can of course just go to another culture and ‘trample’ on it: assume your own culture is best and not bother with what you find there. You would become one of those ignorant, crass holidaymakers that are an embarrassment to everyone! You would speak only in your own language; not bother to learn any of the new customs expected of everyone; and take little interest in what is going on that makes that culture historically different – its politics, its religion, its family life. Worst of all, you will probably extol the virtues of your own country when you face different foods, different ways of queuing, different modes of talking to each other. You will be, in short, a narrow-minded, uncouth holidaymaker abroad!

But if you are a more sensitive soul, then travelling can be very difficult. You often come to feel a complete fool as you stumble against a language you cannot speak and customs, mores and folkways you do not understand. I know that I sometimes feel I am like a very young child when I cannot even say ‘excuse me’ or ‘where is this or that?’ in the host language. Or simply when I want to ask for a cup of coffee and cannot express myself. What a bumbling, incompetent fool I am! How can they – why should they – bother with me? People are usually kind and they try to help. But without a basic knowledge of a culture’s language, it is hard to move around easily in it. And it goes much further than that. The meanings of cultures lie deep: the meaning of the garden in Japan, the bullfight in Spain, the veil in Iran. (Kate Fox’s Watching the English (2014) is a now classic and bestselling field study of the English which gets at the taken-for-granted oddities of English culture.)

Here is the social as outsider, not insider: outsiders are people who do not belong, who dwell on the margins, who are deviants and strangers. The social is defined not just by who belongs, but by who does not. Often it is best studied and analysed not through the eyes of the people who belong and are in it – but rather through the eyes of those outside. It is only the outsider who can see (and question) what is truly taken for granted. Hence sociology takes seriously the voices and eyes of immigrants, refugees, the strangers in town, the ‘invisible man’, the alienated young, the disenfranchised and deviant, the gothic and the queer. Their differences throw a sharp light on what is taken for granted and normal.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION AS CRITIQUE AND WONDER

The physicist looks at the skies and stands in amazement at the universe. The musician listens to Mozart, Beethoven or Stravinsky – or ABBA, Adele, Taylor Swift – and stands in amazement at the wondrous works that little human beings can produce on earth. The sportsperson finds their adrenalin gushing at the thought of running or going to a sports stadium. And the sociologist gets up every day and stands in wonder at the little social worlds – and indeed human societies – that we have created for ourselves: their meaning, order, conflict, chaos and change. For the sociologist, social life is sometimes sensed as something quite inspiring, and sometimes as something quite horrendous which brings about disenchantment, anger and despair. Sociologists stand in awe and dread, rage and delight at the humanly produced social world with all its joys and its sufferings. We critique it and we critically celebrate it. Standing in amazement at the complex patterns of human social life, we examine both the good things worth fostering and bad things worth striving to remove. Sociology becomes the systematic, sceptical study of all things social.

The dark side of society: the miseries and sufferings of human social life

So here is the bad news. On a bad day I can hardly get out of my bed. The weight of the world and its suffering bears down upon me: the human misery, as it has confronted the billions before me. Luckily, I am not a depressive; so I have my ways of getting up and springing into action. But lying there some mornings, I see the long historical march of humanity’s inhumanities, the horrors of the world and the sufferings of humankind. And I squirm. How can it be that for so long and with such seeming stupidity and blindness, human beings have continued ceaselessly to make human social worlds in which so very many suffer – that are so manifestly dehumanized and inhuman? Here is a world full of wars and violence, poverty and inequality, despotisms and corruption. Here is the horrendous treatment of other peoples who are different from us and the vast neglect and denial of these sufferings. Billions of people throughout history have gone to their deaths with wasted lives. Studying this is one of the routine topics for sociology.

For sociology might be seen as born out of an awareness of human fragility, vulnerability and suffering. Everywhere it seems societies cast ‘others’ into the roles of enemies and monsters – creating hierarchies of ‘the good’ to value and ‘the bad’ to dehumanize. It was, after all, human beings that designed slavery for much of history – a system that still exists (the Global Slavery Index in 2020 claims there are some 40.3 million including 24.9 million in forced labour and human trafficking; and 15.4 million living in forced marriages). It was also human activity – apparently supported by gods – which created the ‘caste’ system of social stratification, as Aryan-speaking people moved into India around 1500 BCE, creating a group of people called the untouchables who were to be designated outside of regular human life and left with all the dirty jobs (see Chapter 7). It is all a history of kings, rulers and popery dominating in splendour over the vast immiserated masses. There has been no period free from wars – over land, status, wealth and religion – and by all accounts the twentieth century was the bloodiest century of all, with its genocides, world wars, purges, revolutionary mass slaughters, its ‘fascisms’ and its ‘communisms’. There is controversy over how to count the number of actual ‘mega-deaths’, but somewhere between 180 million and 200 million is a number often cited. That is to say that probably one in ten of the population of the world born around 1900 were slaughtered through war or genocide in the twentieth century. And the widespread problems of wars, poverty, hunger, Holocaust and disease throughout time may have only been marginally diminished in the current time. To all this must now be added the accelerating threat of environmental crisis and an imminent ecological catastrophe and existential crisis. We humans do not seem to have made a very good job of living together peacefully, creatively and happily. All this is the stuff of great literature, poetry and film-making. And a core concern for sociology.

Sociology, then, generates concern at the billions of wasted and damaged lives engulfed by ‘man’s inhumanity to man’. Sociologists are interested in the social conditions that produce human social suffering. We are concerned with the ways in which private and individual sufferings have origins from within our societies: how what might seem to be personal problems are also public issues. For example, we may try to grasp the contemporary problems of refugees by trying to understand the problems of an individual life. But usually, it will be much more helpful to look at the wider structural problems of state conflicts, nationalism, racism, religions and economic inequalities (see Chapter 3; Chapter 7). Sociology is charged with linking the personal to the social, the private to the public. The analysis of human suffering becomes a central interest.

Always look on the bright side of life: the joys and potentials of human social life

Given this, it’s not surprising to find many saying that sociology is the dismal science – a dark, bleak, pessimistic discipline. Don’t hang around with sociologists, they say, because the trade of sociologists makes them pretty gloomy people. Indeed, all this may have been enough to make you put this book down. But hold on. Is it really all such bad news? Critical we sociologists are. But at the same time, we cannot stop seeing – much of the time – how people also go about their daily rounds in society working with each other, caring for each other, loving each other and often in ease and co-operation. Societies are often remarkable human achievements.

A few years ago, as I lay in my modern hospital bed shortly after ten hours of major life-saving surgery, I pondered just how all this had come to be. My life-threatening illness – chronic liver cirrhosis – had killed millions of people throughout history; but...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Social Hauntings
• Preface to the first edition
• Preface to the third edition
• 1 Imaginations: Acting in a World I Never Made
• 2 Theory: Thinking the Social
• 3 Societies: Living in the Twenty-First Century
• 4 History: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
• 5 Questions: Cultivating Sociological Imaginations
• 6 Research: Critically Engaging with Empirical Truth
• 7 Trouble: Suffering Intersecting Inequalities
• 8 Vision: Creating Sociological Hope
• Conclusion: The Sociological Imagination: Twenty-One Theses
• Appendix: Epigrammatic Sociology
• Glossary
• Webliography
• Filmography: A Select Guide to Sociology and Film
• Select Bibliography
• Index