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 […]
Marxism: Class, Ideology and the Conflict Theory of Society
“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 open the Communist Manifesto with this claim. Hitherto (up to now) means every society that historians can study, from ancient slave-owning states to feudal Europe. In each case, they argued, […]
Functionalism: The Organic Analogy, Value Consensus and Social Order
“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) Herbert Spencer spent hundreds of pages comparing society to a living body. In this quote, though, he is being careful. He calls the comparison scaffolding: a tool […]
Grouping the Perspectives
Structural theory, social action theory and structuration: the framework behind every perspectives page on this site “The basic domain of study of the social sciences, according to the theory of structuration, is neither the experience of the individual actor, nor the existence of any form of social totality, but social practices ordered across space and […]
Different Ways of Seeing Society: A First Look at Perspectives
So far, this section has treated sociology as though all sociologists agree with each other. In reality, sociologists have developed different, competing theories, known as perspectives, about how society works and why. You will meet these perspectives applied to specific topics, such as education, the media and crime, elsewhere on histpology.co.uk. Some perspectives, broadly described […]
Social Order and Social Control
Most people, most of the time, follow the norms and values of their society without being forced to. Sociologists use the term social order to describe this general pattern of predictable, cooperative behaviour, which allows society to function smoothly on a daily basis. Social order does not happen automatically. It is maintained through social control: […]
Socialisation: Becoming a Member of Society
Socialisation is the lifelong process through which people learn the norms, values and culture of their society. Nobody is born already knowing how to behave; every skill from using language to knowing when to say “please” and “thank you” has to be learned from other people. Sociologists distinguish between primary socialisation and secondary socialisation. Primary […]