Why should we think about sociology as being about theory?
To begin with, it’s important to realize that it’s actually impossible to escape from theorising, we
do it all the time to make sense of the complexity of social organisation - something we’re
provoked to do whenever our tried and trusted recipes for living fail us.
This is why the most productive periods in social thought are those in which taken-for-granted
assumptions are particularly unstable, when, for any number of reasons there’s no longer a
widely shared consensus about how society should be organised.
Really there’s no such thing as non-theoretical, purely empirical research in the social sciences.
Theory is simply another word for thought, for
how we make sense of and organise what we see, draw conclusions, and speak.
So it matters a lot which theory we start with, and whether we are even conscious of the theory we are using.
Our choice of theory has a decisive impact on what we will count as facts, evidence, and what
we will recognise as valid conclusions and inferences.
If a researcher chooses not to talk about their theoretical orientation, all that means is that it’s
buried deep within their definition of their research problem, their identification of the
issues worth paying attention to, their methodology, and the kinds of conclusions they regard as plausible and persuasive.
You can have enormous fun, if you’re so inclined, digging out the theoretical presumptions of work
produced by social researchers who say nothing about their theoretical orientation.
So, what is a sociological theory?
There’s lots of ways to answer this question, but to begin with it’s a conceptual framework
organised around a particular set of concepts and ideas, as well as a set of arguments around
how those concepts and ideas relate to each other.
Much of your study in sociology is about becoming familiar with the language of sociology,
and, pushing that analogy a bit further, the different dialects that are spoken – that’s more or less what different theories are.
One of the main reasons it’s useful to pay some detailed attention to the possible theoretical
approaches to sociology is that they point us towards different aspects of social life in order to explain the form that social relationships take.
The theorists we’ll look at identify ways that we can analyse social life, and we often have these
ways of thinking buried in our understanding of the social world without thinking about it.
They have become ways in which we unthinkingly explain the world as if we made it up
ourselves, becoming part of our culture and our everyday life, available to all to use in explaining,
eg, poverty, mental illness, gender behaviour, crime.
Next question: Why do sociologists still think about some writers that get characterized as 'classical'?
They're long-dead, so much has been written since, and surely things just better all the time?
Why read something written in 1895 when you can something on the same topic written in 2015?
There are lots of different responses to this question, and one would be that there was
something particular about this historical period – the late 19th and early 20th century – that
enabled these thinkers to see with particular clarity what kind of new society was emerging, a
particularly ‘modern’ society with a structure and dynamics that we’re still living in today, even as it’s also changed enormously.
In many respects they had a particularly clear insight into modern social life, because they could
still remember what kind of society came before, that remains useful today.
But I'd actually like to side-step it for the time being, and make the claim that looking at the early
sociological thinkers in detail is a useful way to engage with the problem of 'perspectives' in sociological thought.
If you’re using different conceptual frameworks, different bodies of terms and concepts that link
together in their own particular way – and that’s what any theorists’ work involves – then you will see different things.
You’ll notice different things about the world, and you’ll emphasise different things.
If you get on top of these four theorists – Durkheim, Marx, Weber and Simmel – you’ll have
a very solid foundation for understanding any sociological theory at all, they are the foundations
upon which everything that’s been said since has been built.
It’s also true that all the theoretical work that’s been done since is extremely interesting, and lots
of new concepts and forms of analysis have been developed after these sociologists.
More than that, there are many earlier thinkers that also deserve attention – the obvious people
one should look at when one has the time are Mandeville, Adam Smith, de Tocqueville, August Comte and Herbert Spencer.
But if you’re short for time, and just as a starting point, these four theorists give you a very solid foundation.
All the later theorists you’ll encounter, even if they speak the language of sociology in a dialect that
seems quite distant from these four thinkers, will be drawing on central aspects of their way of
thinking about society and social change in one way or another.
By becoming familiar with their ideas and arguments, you’ll be well-placed to grasp any
new theoretical perspectives you encounter much more quickly, as you recognize what
seems to be an entirely new way of thinking about the social world as essentially a variation
on one or more of the themes outlines by one or more of these four sociologists.
Finally, I’d like to emphasise the concept of ‘translation’.
You should always try and express the ideas and arguments you’re encountering in ways that
are different from what you’ve actually read, either in your own words or using a vocabulary you might have learned somewhere else.
So if Marx says ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’, don’t
remain ‘caught’ in his words, try and capture the underlying idea in a different way, perhaps adding some nuances.
You could translate this as something like: “society has changed a lot, but when you look at
the history of social life closely, it’s really always organized around conflicts between groups of
people that should be seen as distinct ‘classes’, so the history of society is essentially the history of the different forms taken by those class
struggles – everything else gets organized around class struggle”.
Something like that!
If you do that, sociological theory will open all sorts of new doors in the way you think about
the world around, and there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy it enormously!