Sociology John Macionis y Kenneth Plummer

The book Sociology: A Global Introduction has fast become one of the more prominent sociology texts in many countries, and this third edition aims to consolidate some of its past achievements. Its key goals are:

• to introduce all the main areas of study, the key concepts, the historical debates and basic approaches to the discipline. It assumes you know nothing about sociology; and thus it is not an advanced text. It sets its goals as opening up the field of enquiry for the very first time. If you wish to go further, there are suggestions at the end of each chapter for doing this, as well as a website which has been designed to give you further links, readings, questions and food for thought.
• to tell a story about the parallel rise of sociology and the modern world and how its is persistently shaped by both technologies and inequalities. This is not a text which just summarises vast streams of sociological studies. It aims, rather, to tell a narrative which suggests how the modern world developed from more traditional ones, and how now in ther twenty first century it may well be moving into yet another new phase.
• to recognise that sociology these days must be global. Many textbooks focus upon one country. Whilst this textbook does often focus on UK, Europe and North America, it also takes its orbit to be the world. We suggest that increasingly it is impossible to understand one country in isolation from others. Indeed, a recurrent theme through this book is that the modern world is becoming progressively globalised.

What is sociology?

We can start by saying that sociology is the systematic study of human society. At the heart of sociology we may say there is a distinctive point of view. It should be more than you find in a good documentary on a social issue. It is certainly more than listings of facts and figures about society. Instead it becomes a form of consciousness, a way of thinking, a critical way of seeing the social. It takes a while, sometimes years, for this ‘consciousness’ to become clear.

In this section, and subsequently in the whole book, we ask what is distinctive about this way of seeing? The box below gives a few standard definitions which you may like to consider.

John J. Macionis is Professor of Sociology at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, having graduated from Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania. At Kenyon, he has chaired the Anthropology-Sociology Department, directed the multidisciplinary programme in Humane Studies and presided over the College’s Faculty. He has also been active in academic programmes in many other countries.

His publications are wide-ranging, focusing on community life in the US, interpersonal intimacy in families, effective teaching, humour and the importance of global education. He is co-editor of Seeing Ourselves: Classic, Contemporary and Cross-Cultural Readings in Sociology, co-author of Cities and Urban Life and author of the concise introductory text, Society: The Basics.

Ken Plummer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, and has been actively involved in teaching introductory sociology for the past thirty years. He has been a Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University, and a visiting Professor at the University of California (Santa Barbara) and the University of New York (Stony Brook), as well as giving lectures in many countries around the world.

Apart from an interest in introductory teaching, his major research interests lie in the fields of sexuality, stigma, methodology and symbolic interactionist theory. He is the author of Sexual Stigma (1975), Telling Sexual Stories (1995) and Documents of Life-2 (2001) as well as the editor of The Making of the Modern Homosexual (1981), Symbolic Interactionism (1991, 2 vols), Modern Homosexualities (1992), The Chicago School (1997, 4 vols) and Sexualities: Critical Assessments (2001, 4 vols). He is also the editor of the journal Sexualities.