Sociology The Basics Third Edition by Ken Plummer

Welcome to the social maze. At the heart of this maze is a new way of thinking and imagining social life. We will start on eight journeys to a possible grasping of these new ways for thinking about human social worlds. Never mind if you do not arrive at the centre of the maze, I hope you will enjoy some of the journeys. On the frst exploration, in Chapter 1, I want you to get a glimpse of sociology’s imagination – the domain of the social – and I give lots of examples. I will encourage you to develop a critical consciousness, to become an ‘outsider’, and suggest that sociology can look at anything – anything that engages you (from sport to science to sex). The second journey will examine just what we mean by the social and how we can think about it. It will look at some of the images we create to think about social things. It is an invitation to social theory. Chapter 3 will move us into the hurly-burly of teeming human life as it emerges across the world in the twenty-frst century and looks at some of the signifcant changes taking place in it. Many of these changes suggest the world is hurtling to a disaster! How can we possibly fnd ways of grasping this complexity? Our next puzzle (Chapter 4) will be to consider how sociology, the discipline designed to look at the social, developed in the Western world to deal with just this problem. It is a short history. Chapters 5 and 6 will then start laying out some road maps for doing sociology – for thinking about theory and research. I cannot give precise satnavs for this but will aim, from a vast literature on all this, to distil a few wisdoms that will help you orientate yourself to what sociologists try to do. The seventh pathway looks at a topic which haunts most of the other pathways – the human suferings and inequalities we fnd along our way. It is just one key PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION xiii area of sociological investigation but one which most sociologists would agree is central. On my fnal journey (Chapter 8), I ask why we should bother with all this anyway. I ask: why? What’s the point of it all? What role does sociology have to play in the modern world? Each chapter is a pathway that can stand on its own, and any one alone just might take you to the holy grail of sociology. Like all books in this series, I am only looking at the basics of sociology. A short introductory book can hardly do justice to a complex and inexhaustible subject. I have had to be very selective for a reader who I assume is a beginner and knows little about the subject. My hope is that what I can say in a short space will tempt you to expand your ways of thinking about the social and explore further the workings of the social in the world we live. Each chapter will end with some advice on going further (and each chapter will also provide boxes to help your thinking).