This reader provides over 40 selections of enduring intellectual value--classic articles, book excerpts, and research studies--that have shaped the study of sociology and our contemporary understanding of it.
The Sociological Perspective Selection 1 C. WRIGHT MILLS, from The Sociological Imagination (OxfordUniversity Press, 1959) 1
“The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals.”
Selection 2 HERBERT BLUMER, from “Society as Symbolic Interaction,” in Human Behavior and Social Processes, Arnold Ross, ed. (Houghton Mifflin, 1962) 4
“Under the perspective of symbolic interaction, social action is lodged in acting individuals who fit their respective lines of action to one another through a process of interpretation; group action is the collective action of such individuals.”
Culture
Selection 3 J. LAVELLE INGRAM, from “Understanding American Worldview,” in Life in the USA (2007) 9
“Our time sense is futuristic; our sense of nature involves mastery; our sense of human nature is that it is basically good or mixed; our social sense is individualistic; and our sense of the proper way of being is to value doing.”
Selection 4 HORACE MINER, from “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” American Anthropologist (June 1956) 12
“The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. Incarcerated in such a body, man's only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of the powerful influences of ritual and ceremony.”
Selection 5 ELIJAH ANDERSON, from “The Code of the Streets,” The Atlantic Monthly (1994) 15
“The code revolves around the presentation of self. Its basic requirement is the display of a certain predisposition to violence. Accordingly, one's bearing must send the unmistakable if sometimes subtle message to “the next person” in public that one is capable of violence and mayhem when the situation requires it, that one can take care of oneself.”
Selection 6 DEBORAH TANNEN, from You Just Don't Understand (William Morrow, 1990) 20
“The sociolinguistic approach I take … shows that many frictions arise because boys and girls grow up in what are essentially different cultures, so talk between women and men is cross-cultural communication.”
Socialization, Socializing, Human Biotech Potential, and the Social Construction of Society
Selection 7 MARGARET L. ANDERSEN and DANA HYSOCK, from Thinking about Women, 8/e (Allyn and Bacon, 2009) 25
“The fact that gender is a social, not a natural, phenomenon means that it is learned. Although rooted in institutions, gender is passed on through social learning and is enacted through what sociologists call gender roles. Gender roles are the patterns of behavior in which women and men engage, based on the cultural expectations associated with their gender.”
Selection 8 PHYLLIS MOEN and PATRICIA ROEHLING, from The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream (Rowman &Littlefield, 2005) 30
“What has not changed is the Career mystique, the myth that hard work, long hours, and continuous employment pay off. What has not changed is the career regime, the cultural bundle of roles, rules, and regulations built up around the mystification of this lockstep organization of paid work…. We see the career mystique as a false myth, standing in the way of creating new, alternative workplace and career flexibilities.”
Selection 9 D. STANLEY EITZEN, from “The Atrophy of Social Life,”Society (September/October 2004) 35
“I am concerned … by some disturbing trends in our society that hinder or even eliminate social interaction, and that indicate a growing isolation as individuals become increasingly separated from their neighbors, their co-workers, and even their family members.”
Selection 10 ALYSSA FORD, from “Humanity: The Remix,” Utne Reader (May/June 2005) 40
“Today human intelligence, in the form of technology, is about to make possible the elimination of pain and lives filled with unimaginable pleasure and contentment.”
Social Roles and the Presentation of Self
Selection 11 PETER L. BERGER, from Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective (Doubleday, 1963) 45
“Role theory … tells us that man plays dramatic parts in the grand play of society, and that, speaking sociologically, he is the masks that he must wear to do so … the person is perceived as a repertoire of roles, each one properly equipped with a certain identity.”
Selection 12 ERVING GOFFMAN, from The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Doubleday, 1959) 49
“Information about the individual helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what he will expect of them and what they may expect of him.”
Deviance, Crime, and Social Control
Selection 13 JOHN J. DONOHUE, from “Fighting Crime,” Milkin Institute Review (First Quarter 2005) 55
“We know more today than ever how to reduce crime. If we could get past the barriers of ideology and special pleading, we could see reductions in crime rivaling the magnitude of the gains in automobile safety (70% reduction in fatalities per mile driven).
Selection 14 DAVID A. ANDERSON, from “The Aggregate Burden of Crime,” Journal of Law and Economics (October 1999) 61
“As criminals acquire an estimated $603 billion dollars worth of assets from their victims, they generate an additional $1,102 billion worth of lost productivity, crime-related expenses, and diminished quality of life.”
Social Organization: Groups, Associations, Social Movements, Communities, and Rational Organizations
Selection 15 ROBERT WUTHNOW, from “How Small Groups Are Transforming Our Lives,” Christianity Today (February 1994) 67
“The small group movement has been effecting a quiet revolution in American society. Its success has astounded even many of its leaders. Few of them were trying to unleash a revolution at all. Rather, they were responding to some need in their own lives or in the lives of people they knew.”
Selection 16 FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, from “Social Capital and Civil Society” (International Monetary Fund, 2000) 71
“Social capital is important to the efficient functioning of modern economies and is the sine qua non of stable liberal democracy. It constitutes the cultural component of modern societies, which in other respects have been organized since the Enlightenment on the basis of formal institutions, the rule of law, and rationality.”
Selection 17 AMITAI ETZIONI, ET AL., from “Diversity within Unity: NewApproach to Immigrants and Minorities,” The Communitarian Reader: Beyond the Essentials (Rowan and Littlefield, 2004)76
“The basic approach we favor is diversity within unity. It presumes that all members of a given society will fully respect and adhere to those basic values and institutions that are considered part of the basic shared framework of the society. At the same time, every group in society is free to maintain its distinct subculturethose policies, habits, and institutions that do not conflict with the shared coreand a strong measure of loyalty to its country of origin, as long as this does not trump loyalty to the society in which it lives.…”
Selection 18 CHARLES TILLY, from “Social Movements,” in Regimes and Repertoires (University of Chicago Press, 2006) 81
“Social movements differ from other forms of contentious politics in their combination of sustained campaigns of claim-making performances, and concerted displays of supporters' worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment…. Once social movements establish themselves in one political setting, modeling, communication, coalitions, and collaboration facilitate their adoption in other connected settings.”
Selection 19 FRED SIEGEL, from “The Death and Life of America's Cities,” The Public Interest (Summer 2002) 86
“America's larger cities are on the upswing after a wave of reformist mayors in the 1990s…. When the federal government was locked in a decade of trench warfare, reform currents flowed through city halls. Innovations in school, welfare, and crime policy all had a local address.”
Selection 20 CHARLES PERROW, from Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2002) 91
“The things that organizations do, beyond producing goods and services, combine to produce inequalities in the distribution of wealth and power: A system with many small organizations deconcentrates wealth and power; a system with a few big ones concentrates it.”
Social Inequality
Selection 21 DOUGLAS S. MASSEY, from “How Stratification Works,” from Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (Russell Sage Foundation, 2007) 97
“Stratification refers to the unequal distribution of people across social categories that are characterized by differential access to scarce resources. The resources may be material, such as income and wealth; they may be symbolic, such as prestige and social standing; or they may be emotional, such as love, affection, and, of course, sex.”
Selection 22 KARL MARX and FRIEDRICH ENGELS, from The Communist Manifesto (1848) 103
“The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.”
Selection 23 JEFF MADRICK, from “Goodbye, HoratioAlger,” The Nation (February 5, 2007) 108
“Today the United States is two nations, but not so much divided between rich and poor … as between the well-educated and the rest. A college degree is not a guarantee of a middle-class life, but it has become pretty close to a necessity.”
Selection 24 DAVID K. SHIPLER, from “Connecting the Dots,” in John Edwards, et al., Ending Poverty in America (The New Press, 2007) 112
“The far-flung problems that burden an impoverished American–housing and health, transportation and debt–may seem unrelated to one another, but they are all part of a whole, and they interact in surprising ways. Each element of vulnerability is worsened by the entire whirlwind of hardship.”
Views of the Top and the Bottom
Selection 25 ROBERT PERRUCCI and EARL WYSONG, from “Care and Feeding of the Privileged Class,” The New Class Society (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008) 118
“This volatile mix of increasing influence and decreasing responsibility has produced the double-diamond class structure, where one in five Americans is doing very well indeed, enjoying the protection that comes with high income, wealth, and social contacts. Meanwhile, the remaining four out of five Americans are exploited and excluded.”
Selection 26 JONATHAN KOZOL, from “Poverty's Children: Growing Up in the South Bronx,” The Progressive (October 1995) 123
“Of course the family structure breaks down in a place like the South Bronx! Everything breaks down in a place like this. The pipes break down. The phone breaks down. The electricity and heat break down. The spirit breaks down. The body breaks down. The immune agents of the heart break down. Why wouldn't the family break down also?”
Racial and Sexual Inequality
Selection 27 NORMAN KELLEY, from “Virtual Equality, Virtual Segregation,” Society (July/August 2006) 130
“Structural inequality (a.k.a. white privilege) remains and it is that which has been the hardest to confront because it tends to be invisible, and whites have a vested interest in keeping it invisible. It provides whites with the privilege of being white, or, more exactly, not being black.”
Selection 28 SILVIA ANN HEWLETT and CAROLYN BUCK LUCE, from “Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success,” Harvard Business Review (March 2005) 137
“Off-ramps are around every curve in the [career] road, but once a woman has taken one, on-ramps are few and far betweenand extremely costly.”
Selection 29 ALICE LEUCHTAG, from “Human Rights, Sex Trafficking, and Prostitution,” The Humanist (January/February 2003) 144
“Of all forms of slavery, sex slavery is one of the most exploitative and lucrative with some 200,000 sex slaves worldwide bringing their slaveholders an annual profit of 10.5 billion.”
The Political System
Selection 30 G. WILLIAM DOMHOFF, from Who Rules America? (McGraw-Hill, 2006) 150
“The owners and top-level managers in large income-producing properties are far and away the dominant power figures in the United States. Their corporations, banks, and agribusinesses come together as a corporate community that dominates the federal government in Washington.”
Selection 31 LILLIAN B. RUBIN, from “Sand Castles and Snake Pits: Homelessness, Public Policy, and the Law of Unintended Consequences,” Dissent Magazine (Fall 2007) 155
“The large structural forces that have changed the face of homelessness are no mystery: an increasingly stratified society with little opportunity for the unschooled and unskilled, a minimum wage that doesn't approach a living wage, unemployment and underemployment, cuts in public assistance, and urban rents that continue to rise well beyond what an unskilled worker can afford.”
Selection 32 DAVID OSBORNE and TED GAEBLER, from “Reinventing Government,” in The New Democrat (March 1992) 160
“Our thesis is simple: The kinds of governments that developed during the industrial era, with their sluggish centralized bureaucracies, their preoccupation with rules and regulations, and their hierarchical chains of command, no longer work very well…. They became bloated, wasteful, ineffective. And when the world began to change, they failed to change with it.”
The Economy
Selection 33 BETSY MORRIS and PATRICIA NEERING, from “The New Rules,” Fortune (July 24, 2006) 167
“But the time has come: Corporate America needs a new playbook. The challenge facing U.S. business leaders is greater than ever before, yet they have less control than everand less job security. The volatility of the markets is so unpredictable, the pressure from hedge funds and private-equity investors so relentless, the competition from China and India so intense, that the edicts of the past are starting to feel out of date.”
Selection 34 THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, from “It's a Flat World, After all,” New York Times Magazine (April 3, 2005) 172
“There is no sugar coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living…. After sailing to the edges of the flat world for a year, I am telling my own daughters, ‘Girls, finish your homeworkpeople in China and India are staving for your jobs.”
The Family
Selection 35 FRANK FURSTENBERG, from “Can Marriage Be Saved?,” Dissent Magazine (Summer 2005) 179
“In this country, marriage, divorce, and non-marital child bearing have jumped since the 1960s among the bottom two-thirds of the educational distribution but have not changed much at all among the top third, consisting, today, of college graduates and postgraduates.”
Selection 36 PEPPER SCHWARTZ, “Peer Marriage,” The Communitarian Reader (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) 183
“Our generation has been the first to witness the emergence of ‘partnership or ‘peer marriages on a large social scale…. Men and women in these relationships regard each other as full social equals; both pursue careers; partners share equal authority for financial and other decision making; and … husbands typically assume far greater responsibility for child-rearing than in the past.”
Selection 37 HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN, from “Answers to Questions About Marriage Equality” (Family Net Project, 2004) 189
“Many same-sex couples want the right to legally marry because they are in loveeither they just met the love of their lives, or more likely, they have spent the last 10, 20 or 50 years with that personand they want to honor their relationship in the greatest way our society has to offer, by making a public commitment to stand together in good times and bad, through all the joys and challenges family life brings.”
Other Institutions: Education, Health Care, and Religion
Selection 38 CHESTER E. FINN, JR., from “Can the Center Find a Solution That Will Hold?,” Education Next (Winter 2006) 195
“Americans hold disparate goals for high schools, conflicting priorities for strengthening them, and dissimilar yardsticks for tracking progress.”
Selection 39 ROBERT LANGRETH, from “Fixing Hospitals,” Forbes Magazine (June 20, 2005) 200
“Shoddy quality control plagues American medicine, killing at least a hundred thousand people every year and running up an estimated $500 billion a year in avoidable medical costs, or 30% of all health care spending. The quality crisis fuels the litigation crisis: Medical malpractice costs hit $27 billion in 2003.”
Selection 40 JERRY ADLER, from “In Search of the Spiritual”, Newsweek (August 29–September 5, 2005) 205
“Along with diversity has come a degree of inclusiveness that would have scandalized an earlier generation. According to the Newsweek/Beliefnet Poll, eight in 10 Americansincluding 68 percent of evangelicalsbelieve that more than one faith can be a path to salvation.…”
Population, Environment, and Society
Selection 41 LESTER R. BROWN, from Plan B 3.0 (Earth Policy Institute, 2008) 212
“We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize … Among the other environmental trends undermining our future are shrinking forests, expanding deserts, falling water tables, collapsing fisheries, disappearing species, and rising temperatures.”
Selection 42 SARAH DEWEERDT, from “Climate Change, Coming Home: Global Warming's Effects on Populations,” World Watch Magazine (May/June 2007) 217
“Climate change might have a few pluses for our species … but most of the effects of climate change are likely to be harmful ones: declining agricultural production and more hungry people, increased spread of infectious diseases, dangerous heat waves and floods.”
Global Social Change
Selection 43 SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON, from “The Clash ofCivilizations?” Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993) 223
“As People define their identity in ethnic and religious terms, they are likely to see an “us” versus “them” relation existing between themselves and people of different ethnicity or religion.”
Selection 44 MARVIN J. CETRON, from “DefeatingTerrorism: Is ItPossible? Is It Probable?” The Futurist (May/June 2007) 230
“Terrorists events will be more common and bloody in the years ahead than they have been to date…. Al-Qaeda, often under other names, will grow much larger and more dangerous…. Jihadists, or Muslim extremists, will acquire nuclear weapons within the next 10 years…. The war on terror will drag on for decades, with many tactical successes but little or no strategic benefit. In the long run, this could leave the Western world facing choices even more horrific than the attacks themselves.”
Selection 45 STEVEN WEBER, ET AL., from “Globalization Went Bad,” Foreign Policy (January/February 2008) 236
“The bad news of the 21st century is that globalization has a significant dark side. The container ships that carry manufactured Chinese goods to and from the United States also carry drugs. The airplanes that fly passengers nonstop from New York to Singapore also transport infectious diseases. And the Internet has proved just as adept at spreading deadly, extremist ideologies as it has e-commerce.”