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What is Sociology? Some Quotes

‘Sociology, in particular, has an extraordinary mandate as far as academic disciplines go: to conjure up social life. Conjuring is a particular form of calling up and calling out the forces that make things what they are in order to fix and transform a troubling situation’.

Avery F. Gordon Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 22).

‘Yet I have wondered sometimes whether, for example, we have truly taken seriously that the intricate web of connections that characterizes any event or problem is the story’ Avery F. Gordon Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 20).

‘Sociologists usually start from the idea that there are processes and institutions to be studied over and above the individuals who form them.’

Michael Haralambos, Robert van Krieken, Philip Smith and Martin Holborn Sociology: Themes and Perspectives (Australian edition, South Melbourne: Longman, 1996, p.3).

‘Sociology is the most ambitious of all the social sciences. It is concerned with all that happens to people in terms of their relations with each other …’

Steve Taylor Sociology: Issues and Debates (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999, p.1).

‘Sociological thinking is a vital help to self-understanding, which in turn can be focused back upon an improved understanding of the social world. Studying sociology should be a liberating experience: sociology enlarges our sympathies and imagination, opens up new perspectives on the sources of our own behaviour, and deepens a sense of cultural settings different from our own’.

Anthony Giddens, Sociology (2 nd edn. Cambridge: Polity, 1993, pp. 1-2).

‘Sociology lifts the lid on the ordinary and extraordinary, digs around in the hidden meanings and contexts of our lives, and shows that what we take for granted rests on complex and dynamic social processes’.

Tony Bilton, Kevin Bonnet, Pip Jones, David Skinner, Michelle Stanworth and Andrew Webster, Introductory Sociology (3 rd edn. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1996, p. 4).

‘To ask sociological questions, then, presupposes that one is interested in looking some distance beyond the commonly accepted or officially defined goals of human actions. It presupposes a certain awareness that human events have different levels of meaning, some of which are hidden from the consciousness of everyday life. It may even presuppose a measure of suspicion about the way in which human events are officially interpreted by the authorities, be they political, juridical or religious in character’.

Peter L. Berger Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective (Harmondsworth: penguin, 1968/1963, p. 41).

‘The fascination of sociology lies in the fact that its perspective makes us see in a new light the very world in which we have lived all our lives. This also constitutes a transformation of consciousness’.

Peter L. Berger Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective (Harmondsworth: penguin, 1968/1963, pp. 32-3).

‘The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise’.

C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971/1959, p.12.

‘For that imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another – from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self – and to see the relations between the two.’

C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971/1959, p.12.

‘As a first and tentative summation, we may say that what sets sociology apart and gives it its distinctive character is the habit of viewing human actions as elements of wider figurations: that is, of a non-random assembly of actors locked together in a web of mutual dependency (dependency being a state in which the probability that the action will be undertaken and the chance of its success change in relation to what other actors are, or do, or may do)’.

Zygmunt Bauman Thinking Sociologically (Oxford & Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991, p. 7).

‘Many of the basic theoretical concepts of sociology, despite fundamental variations in their meaning, such as “social structure”, “culture”, “group”, “institution”, and others, embody, indeed formulate, the idea that human actions are situated in complexes of other actions and actors. Sociology takes this feature of human life as something that can be studied, investigated and theorised about, as a significant domain not reduced to the interests of other disciplines.’

R.J. Anderson, J.A. Hughes and W.W. Sharrock The Game: An Introduction to Sociological Reasoning (London & New York: Longman, 1985, p. 18).

‘Sociology originated in the impulse to criticize the principles of the society with which it found itself confronted’.

Theodor W. Adorno Prisms (trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press 1981, p. 46).