The frameworks used to explain social order and change.
10 topics · 12 curated works
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Study of Sociology
Herbert Spencer · 1873
Makes the case for sociology as a science subject to natural laws like any other, and argues that social phenomena must be explained by their…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Division of Labour in Society
Émile Durkheim · 1893
Argues that social solidarity shifts from a shared collective conscience in simple societies to interdependence produced by an increasingly…
+8 more at this level
12 works
Herbert Spencer
Makes the case for sociology as a science subject to natural laws like any other, and argues that social phenomena must be explained by their function in the evolving social organism rather than by the intentions of the people involved.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ralf Dahrendorf
Recasts Marx's class conflict as a conflict over authority within any imperatively coordinated association, arguing that conflict is generated by the distribution of authority rather than only by ownership of property.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ivan Szelenyi (YaleCourses)
Reads Hobbes through Weber as successive attempts to explain how social order holds without coercion, and treats their disagreements as still unresolved rather than superseded.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Émile Durkheim
Argues that social solidarity shifts from a shared collective conscience in simple societies to interdependence produced by an increasingly specialised division of labour, making the division of labour itself the basic mechanism holding complex societies together.
link checked 17 Sept 2026W. I. Thomas & Florian Znaniecki
Introduces the 'four wishes' and the concept of the definition of the situation through a life-history study of Polish immigrants, and founds the Chicago School's use of personal documents as sociological data.
link checked 17 Sept 2026George Herbert Mead
Argues that the self is not given at birth but arises through social interaction, especially through taking the attitude of others toward oneself, making mind and self products of communication rather than its precondition.
Kingsley Davis & Wilbert E. Moore
Argues stratification exists in every society because it is the mechanism by which positions requiring scarce talent and long training get filled, with unequal reward acting as the incentive that motivates people to endure the training.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Herbert Marcuse
Argues that advanced industrial society absorbs and neutralises dissent by satisfying manufactured needs so thoroughly that even opposition gets expressed only in terms the system already provides, closing off genuine alternatives.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Fredric Jameson
Argues postmodern culture's pastiche, flattened history and image-saturation are not free-floating aesthetic choices but the cultural expression of a new, multinational stage of capitalism.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Pierre Bourdieu
Argues that economic capital is only one of several convertible forms -- alongside cultural and social capital -- and that treating them separately hides how advantage in one form is routinely converted into the others to reproduce a position in a field.
link checked 17 Sept 2026James S. Coleman
Treats social capital -- the networks and norms of trust embedded in relationships -- as a resource individuals draw on for their own purposes, giving rational-choice theory a way to explain outcomes usually credited to culture or community.
link checked 17 Sept 2026William H. Sewell Jr.
Reworks Giddens's structuration theory by arguing that structures are made of both resources and cultural schemas, which is what makes structures simultaneously constraining and transformable by the very agents they shape.
link checked 17 Sept 2026