New Right in 5 Minutes
A 5-minute read | sociological perspectives, condensed Full study notes: Sociological Perspectives: The New Right, elsewhere on histpology.co.uk. “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families… It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbour.” — Margaret Thatcher, interview […]
Feminism in 5 Minutes
A 5-minute read | sociological perspectives, condensed Full study notes: Feminism, elsewhere on histpology.co.uk. “The personal is political.” — title given to Carol Hanisch’s 1970 essay by editors Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt Hanisch’s 1970 essay said that private problems, such as doing all the housework or living with a controlling partner, are not personal […]
Marxism in 5 Minutes
A 5-minute read | sociological perspectives, condensed Full study notes: Marxism: Class, Ideology and the Conflict Theory of Society, elsewhere on histpology.co.uk. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848) Marx and Engels meant that every society, right up to their […]
Functionalism in 5 Minutes
A 5-minute read | sociological perspectives, condensed Full study notes: Functionalism: The Organic Analogy, Value Consensus and Social Order on histpology.co.uk. “I have used the analogies, but only as a scaffolding to help in building up a coherent body of sociological induction.” Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology (1876) Spencer compared society to a living […]
Late Modernity: Risk, Reflexivity and the Uncertain Self
“A runaway engine of enormous power which, collectively as human beings, we can drive to some extent but which also threatens to rush out of our control.” Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (1990) Giddens used this image of a juggernaut to describe modernity itself: a runaway vehicle of enormous power that carries huge benefits, […]
Postmodernism: Media, Consumption and the Death of the Grand Narrative
“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1979) Lyotard wrote this line in a report commissioned by the Quebec government on the state of knowledge in advanced societies. A metanarrative is a grand, overarching story a culture tells itself to explain and justify the whole of […]
Culture and Identity – Introduction
“Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think.” So wrote the cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1990), arguing that identity is never a finished fact. Hall described identity as something always being built and rebuilt, shaped by history, culture and power, rather than something a person simply has. A single teenager growing up in […]
Interactionism: Meaning, Labelling and the Social Construction of Everyday Life
“If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” W. I. Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, The Child in America (1928) W. I. Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas wrote this line, now known as the Thomas theorem, while studying how children and families interpret their own circumstances. It is a claim about […]
The New Right
“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families… It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbour.” Margaret Thatcher, interview for Woman’s Own, 1987 Margaret Thatcher made this remark partway through her third term as Prime Minister. It became […]
Feminism
“The personal is political.” — title given to Carol Hanisch’s 1970 essay by editors Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt This phrase became one of the best-known slogans of the women’s liberation movement. Hanisch’s original 1970 essay argued that problems women experienced privately, such as an unequal division of housework or a controlling husband, were not […]