Big ideas simply explained.

Includes index

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

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

Glossary