The sociology book : Big ideas simply explained /
[contributors, Christopher Thorpe, consultant editor, Chris Yuill, consultant editor ; Mitchell Hobbs, Megan Todd, Sarah Tomley, Marcus Weeks].
- First American edition.
- 352 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 24 cm
- Big ideas simply explained .
- Big ideas simply explained. .
Includes index.
A physical defeat has never marked the end of a nation / Mankind have always wandered or settled, agreed or quarreled, in troops and companies / Science can be used to build a better world / The Declaration of Independence bears no relation to half the human race / The fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable / Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft / Society, like the human body, has interrelated parts, needs, and functions / The iron cage of rationality / Many personal troubles must be understood in terms of public issues / Pay to the most commonplace activities the attention accorded extraordinary events / Where there is power there is resistance / Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original / Social inequalities. I broadly accuse the bourgeoisie of social murder / The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line / The poor are excluded from the ordinary living patterns, customs, and activities of life / There ain't no black in the Union Jack / A sense of one's place / The Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined / The ghetto is where the black people live / The tools of freedom become the sources of indignity / Men's interest in patriarchy is condensed in hegemonic masculinity / White women have been complicit in this imperialist, white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy / The concept of "patriarch" is indispensable for an analysis of gender inequality / Strangers are not really conceived as individuals, but as strangers of a particular type / The freedom to remake our cities and ourselves / There must be eyes on the street / Only communication can communicate / Society should articulate what is good / McDonaldization affects virtually every aspect of society / The bonds of our communities have withered / Disneyization replaces mundane blandness with spectacular experiences / Living in a loft is like living in a showcase / Abandon all hope of totality, you who enter the world of fluid modernity / The modern world-system / Global issues, local perspective / Climate change is a back-of-the-mind issue / No social justice without global cognitive justice / The unleashing of productive capacity by the power of the mind / We are living in a world that is beyond controllability / It sometimes seems as if the whole world is on the move / Nations can be imagined and constructed with relatively little historical straw / Global cities are strategic sites for new types of operations / Different societies appropriate the materials of modernity differently / Processes of change have altered the relations between peoples and communities / The "I" and the "me" / The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned / The civilizing process is constantly moving "forward" / Mass culture reinforces political repression / The danger of the future is that men may become robots / Culture is ordinary / Stigma refers to an attribute that is deeply discrediting / Ibn Khaldun -- Adam Ferguson -- Auguste Comte -- Harriet Martineau -- Karl Marx -- Ferdinand Tönnies -- Émile Durkheim -- Max Weber -- Charles Wright Mills -- Harold Garfinkel -- Michel Foucault -- Judith Butler -- Friedrich Engels -- W.E.B. DuBois -- Peter Townsend -- Paul Gilroy -- Pierre Bourdieu -- Edward Said -- Elijah Anderson -- Richard Sennett -- R.W. Connell -- Bell Hooks -- Sylvia Walby -- Georg Simmel -- Henri Lefebvre -- Jane Jacobs -- Niklas Luhmann -- Amitai Etzioni -- George Ritzer -- Robert D. Putnam -- Alan Bryman -- Sharon Zukin -- Zygmunt Bauman -- Immanuel Wallerstein -- Roland Robertson -- Anthony Gidens -- Boaventura de Sousa Santos -- Manuel Castells -- Ulrich Beck -- John Urry -- David McCrone -- Saskia Sassen -- Arjun Appadurai -- David Held -- G.H. Mead -- Antonio Gramsci -- Norbert Elias -- Herbert Marcuse -- Erich Fromm -- Raymond Williams -- Erving Goffman -- Foundations of sociology. Modern living. Living in a global world. Culture and identity. We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning / Modern identities are being decentered / All communities are imagined / Throughout the world, culture has been doggedly pushing itself center stage / Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure / The Puritan wanted to work in a calling-- we are forced to do so / Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination / The more sophisticated machines become, the less skill the worker has / Automation increases the worker's control over his work process / The Romantic ethic promotes the spirit of consumerism / In processing people, the product is a state of mind / Spontaneous consent combines with coercion / Things make us just as much as we make things / Feminization has had only a modest impact on reducing gender inequalities / Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature / The iron law of oligarchy / Healthy people need no bureaucracy to mate, give birth, and die / Some commit crimes because they are responding to a social situation / Total institutions strip people of their support systems and their sense of self / Government is the right disposition of things / Religion has lost its plausibility and social significance / Our identity and behavior are determined by how we are described and classified / Economic crisis is immediately transformed into social crisis / Schooling has been at once something done to the poor and for the poor / Societies are subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic / The time of the tribes / How working-class kids get working-class jobs / Differences between the sexes are cultural creations / Families are factories that produce human personalities / Western man has become a confessing animal / Heterosexuality must be recognized and studied as an institution / Western family arrangements are diverse, fluid, and unresolved / The marriage contract is a work contract / Housework is directly opposed to self-actualization / When love finally wins it has to face all kinds of defeat / Sexuality is as much about beliefs and ideologies as about the physical body / Queer theory questions the very grounds of identity / Jean Baudrillard -- Stuart Hall -- Benedict Anderson -- Jeffrey Alexander -- Thorstein Veblen -- Max Weber -- Daniel Bell -- Harry Braverman -- Robert Blauner -- Colin Campbell -- Arlie Russell Hochschild -- Michael Burawoy -- Daniel Miller -- Teri Lynn Caraway -- Karl Marx -- Robert Michels -- Ivan Illich -- Robert K. Merton -- Erving Goffman -- Michel Foucault -- Bryan Wilson -- Howard S. Becker -- Jürgen Habermas -- Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis -- Stanley Cohen -- Michel Maffesoli -- Paul Willis -- Margaret Mead -- Talcott Parsons -- Michel Foucault -- Adrienne Rich -- Judith Stacey -- Christine Delphy -- Ann Oakley -- Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim -- Jeffrey Weeks -- Steven Seidman -- Work and consumerism. The role of institutions. Families and intimacies. Glossary.
Profiles the world's most renowned sociologists and more than 100 of their biggest ideas, including issues of equality, diversity, identity, and human rights; the effects of globalization; the role of institutions; and the rise of urban living in modern society.