Sociology, from first principles.

• A · The Full Canon at a Glance→A name-check of the whole tradition, so no one is missed
• B · A Starter Reading Spine→Where to begin, in order, if you want to read the real thing
• C · How to Use This Course to Reach Expert Level→The method that turns a library of lessons into a way of thinking

1.1 The Sociological Imagination

• 1.1.1 · The Central Flip - Troubles vs Issues→Why your most private pain is often a public fact
• 1.1.2 · The Three Habits of the Sociological Eye→How to actually spot invisible forces on an ordinary afternoon
• 1.1.3 · Society Is Partly Inside You→How your tastes, disgusts and ambitions arrived from outside

1.2 The Three Master Questions

• 1.2.1 · The Problem of Order→How do millions of strangers hold together at all?
• 1.2.2 · The Problem of Inequality→Why are wealth, power and honour shared so unevenly - and why is it accepted?
• 1.2.3 · The Problem of Change→How does something as heavy as a whole society ever move?

1.3 The Permanent Tensions

• 1.3.1 · Structure vs Agency→Are we shaped by society, or do we choose freely?
• 1.3.2 · Micro vs Macro (and the Meso in Between)→At what scale should we look - the handshake or the labour market?
• 1.3.3 · Objective vs Subjective→How shared beliefs harden into hard facts
• 1.3.4 · Consensus vs Conflict→Is society glued by shared agreement, or held together by who won?
• 1.3.5 · Individual vs Society→Where does one stop and the other begin?
• 1.3.6 · Material vs Ideal→Do economic conditions or ideas drive history?

1.4 What Makes Sociology Distinct

• 1.4.1 · Sociology vs Psychology→The mind, or the situation the mind is standing in?
• 1.4.2 · Sociology vs Economics→Why nobody gives cash as a birthday present
• 1.4.3 · Sociology vs Anthropology→A boundary drawn by empire, and why it is dissolving
• 1.4.4 · Sociology vs Political Science→All power, not just the state
• 1.4.5 · Sociology vs History→The particular event, or the pattern it belongs to?
• 1.4.6 · Sociology vs Common Sense→Why "everyone knows" is not evidence

1.5 What Sociology Is For

• 1.5.1 · Seeing Options and Constraints→What sociology gives you that you did not have before
• 1.5.2 · Debunking - Pulling Back the Official Curtain→Comparing what an institution says with what it does
• 1.5.3 · The Risk of Sociologism→The occupational disease of the discipline, and how not to catch it

2.1 Culture

• 2.1.1 · What Culture Is - Material and Non-Material→Everything humans make, mean, and pass on
• 2.1.2 · Values→A group's deep ideas about what is worth wanting
• 2.1.3 · Norms - Folkways, Mores, Taboos, Laws→The actual rules, and how to tell them apart by what breaking them costs
• 2.1.4 · Sanctions→Why a raised eyebrow can outperform a law
• 2.1.5 · Symbols and Language→How cloth becomes worth dying for - and whether words shape thought
• 2.1.6 · Beliefs, Ideologies, Worldviews→How a set of ideas becomes a lens you cannot see because you see with it
• 2.1.7 · Subcultures and Countercultures→Worlds inside a world - and what the reaction reveals
• 2.1.8 · Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativism→Judging others by your yardstick - and the trap on the other side
• 2.1.9 · Culture Shock and Xenocentrism→What happens to a person moved between cultural worlds
• 2.1.10 · Cultural Universals and Particulars→What every society has - and what varies without limit
• 2.1.11 · High, Popular, Mass and Folk Culture→Four categories that look like content and work like status
• 2.1.12 · Dominant Culture and Cultural Hegemony→How one group's way of life becomes the unmarked standard
• 2.1.13 · Cultural Capital and Taste→How knowing how to speak to a doctor turns into money
• 2.1.14 · Culture as Constraint vs Culture as Toolkit→Does culture push you, or do you reach for it?
• 2.1.15 · Cultural Lag, Change and Diffusion→How culture moves - and why the etiquette always arrives late

2.2 Society, Structure and the Individual

• 2.2.1 · Status - Ascribed, Achieved, Master Status→The positions you occupy, and the one that speaks over the others
• 2.2.2 · Status Set and Status Inconsistency→When your positions don't agree with each other
• 2.2.3 · Role - Role Set, Role Strain, Role Conflict, Role Exit→What a position requires you to do, and what happens when it requires too much
• 2.2.4 · Groups - Primary and Secondary→The circle that made you, and the organisation that pays you
• 2.2.5 · In-Groups, Out-Groups, Reference Groups, Peer Groups→Us, them, and the people you secretly measure yourself against
• 2.2.6 · Group Size - Dyad and Triad→Why adding one person changes everything
• 2.2.7 · Social Networks - Ties, Hubs, Weak and Strong Ties→Why the people most useful to you are not the ones closest to you
• 2.2.8 · Social Institutions→The durable machinery that outlasts everyone in it
• 2.2.9 · Social Structure, System and Organisation→Describing a whole social world without naming a single person

2.3 Socialisation and Becoming a Self

• 2.3.1 · Nature vs Nurture - Feral and Isolated Children→What is left of a human being who was never socialised?
• 2.3.2 · Cooley - The Looking-Glass Self→You cannot see yourself, so you use other people as mirrors
• 2.3.3 · Mead - The I, the Me and the Generalised Other→How a person becomes able to be their own audience
• 2.3.4 · Borrowed Theories - Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg and Gilligan→What sociology took from psychology, and what it should not have
• 2.3.5 · Agents of Socialisation→Who does the teaching, what they teach, and what happens when they disagree
• 2.3.6 · Types of Socialisation - Primary, Secondary, Anticipatory, Resocialisation→Learning to speak, learning a trade, and being remade
• 2.3.7 · Total Institutions→Places built to take a self apart
• 2.3.8 · The Life Course, Cohorts and Generations→Why the year you were born is a social fact

2.4 Social Interaction and Everyday Reality

• 2.4.1 · The Social Construction of Reality→How a world gets built, forgotten, and experienced as simply there
• 2.4.2 · Dramaturgy - Front Stage, Back Stage, Impression Management→Life as theatre, and the door between the dining room and the kitchen
• 2.4.3 · Ethnomethodology and Breaching Experiments→The rules nobody knows they are following
• 2.4.4 · Conversation Analysis - The Deep Order of Ordinary Talk→What a two-second silence tells you before the words arrive
• 2.4.5 · The Thomas Theorem and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy→When a definition starts producing its own evidence
• 2.4.6 · Nonverbal Communication, Proxemics and the Self Online→Distance, gaze, touch - and what happens when the body is replaced by a screen

3.1 Social Thought Before Sociology

• 3.1.1 · Ibn Khaldun - The True Grandfather of Sociology→A causal science of society, four hundred years early
• 3.1.2 · Ancient Indian Social Thought→Statecraft, duty, hierarchy - and the traditions that fought them
• 3.1.3 · Ancient Chinese Social Thought→Four rival answers to the problem of order, argued out over three centuries
• 3.1.4 · Greek and Roman Roots→A design for a just city, and the first comparative research project
• 3.1.5 · Medieval and Early Modern Thought→Power without morality, the state as contract, and laws with social causes
• 3.1.6 · The Scottish Enlightenment→Society as the result of human action but not of human design

3.2 The Great Transformations

• 3.2.1 · The Enlightenment→The radical idea that society can be studied by reason
• 3.2.2 · The Industrial Revolution and the Social Question→A new kind of society, and the first people who tried to count it
• 3.2.3 · The French and Democratic Revolutions→When the old sacred order collapsed, and nobody knew who had the right to rule
• 3.2.4 · Urbanisation→A form of life in which most of the people you see are strangers
• 3.2.5 · Capitalism→What it actually is, and why the founders disagreed so sharply about it
• 3.2.6 · Secularisation→A thesis so loosely stated that its most famous advocate abandoned it
• 3.2.7 · Colonialism and Empire→The transformation that made the others global - and sociology's complicity

3.3 The First Self-Conscious Sociologists

• 3.3.1 · Auguste Comte and Positivism→The man who named the science, and the system nobody kept
• 3.3.2 · Herbert Spencer and Social Darwinism→The man who coined "survival of the fittest," and what was done with it
• 3.3.3 · Harriet Martineau - The Founder Written Out→A methodology of social research in 1838, and how a canon is made

4.1 Karl Marx

• 4.1.1 · Historical Materialism→Marx's one big idea - start from how people get their dinner
• 4.1.2 · Mode of Production, Base and Superstructure→The most argued-over metaphor in social theory
• 4.1.3 · Class and Class Conflict→Not how much you earn - what you own, and who needs whom
• 4.1.4 · Alienation→What the arrangement does to the person inside it
• 4.1.5 · Surplus Value and Exploitation→Where profit comes from, when nobody steals anything
• 4.1.6 · Commodity Fetishism→Why a price tag hides a thousand people
• 4.1.7 · Ideology and False Consciousness→How the ideas that suit the powerful come to seem like plain common sense
• 4.1.8 · Class-in-Itself and Class-for-Itself→The distance between having a position and knowing it
• 4.1.9 · Contradictions, Crisis and Transformation→Why Marx thought the system would keep breaking - and what happened
• 4.1.10 · The Key Texts→What Marx actually wrote, what Engels assembled, and where to start

4.2 Emile Durkheim

• 4.2.1 · Social Facts→The things that are outside you and press on you anyway
• 4.2.2 · The Division of Labour and the Two Solidarities→How a society of strangers holds together
• 4.2.3 · Anomie→What happens when the rules stop fitting
• 4.2.4 · Suicide→The study that proved a private act has social causes
• 4.2.5 · Collective Conscience and Collective Representations→The shared moral universe, and where it lives
• 4.2.6 · The Elementary Forms - Sacred and Profane→What a society is really worshipping
• 4.2.7 · The Seedbed of Functionalism→The school Durkheim did not found, named after him anyway
• 4.2.8 · The Rules of Sociological Method→The manifesto that told a new science how to work

4.3 Max Weber

• 4.3.1 · Verstehen→You have not explained an action until you know what it meant
• 4.3.2 · Types of Social Action→Four kinds of reason, and the one that is taking over
• 4.3.3 · Rationalisation and the Iron Cage→A world that knows how to do everything and not what to do
• 4.3.4 · Bureaucracy→The machine nobody likes and nobody can do without
• 4.3.5 · The Three Types of Authority→Why people obey, when nobody is holding a gun
• 4.3.6 · Class, Status and Party→Three ladders, not one
• 4.3.7 · The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism→How a doctrine about salvation built an economic order nobody wanted
• 4.3.8 · Ideal Types→A deliberately unrealistic picture, and why you need one
• 4.3.9 · Value-Neutrality→What a teacher owes you, and what they must not do
• 4.3.10 · The Sociology of World Religions→The most ambitious comparison anyone has attempted

4.4 Georg Simmel

• 4.4.1 · Forms and Contents→What sociology is actually about, according to its strangest founder
• 4.4.2 · Group Size - Dyad, Triad and the Web of Affiliations→Why adding one person changes everything
• 4.4.3 · The Stranger, the Secret and Social Distance→The person who is near and far at once
• 4.4.4 · The Philosophy of Money→The purest form of a social relation, and what it does to us
• 4.4.5 · The Metropolis and Mental Life→What a million strangers do to a mind

4.5 W. E. B. Du Bois

• 4.5.1 · The Philadelphia Negro and the Invention of Empirical Sociology→The first great community study, and the man written out of the discipline
• 4.5.2 · Double Consciousness and the Veil→Seeing yourself through the eyes of a world that despises you
• 4.5.3 · The Colour Line and the Global Frame→The prediction that took a century to be understood
• 4.5.4 · Black Reconstruction and the Wages of Whiteness→How a whole scholarly consensus was wrong, and one man said so
• 4.5.5 · The Atlanta School and the Erasure→A research programme on nothing, and how a discipline forgets
• 4.5.6 · Du Bois's Later Turn and Legacy→Seventy years of writing, and the mind that kept changing

4.6 Other Classical Voices

• 4.6.1 · Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells and the Women Written Out→The sociologists who were reclassified as social workers
• 4.6.2 · Elites, Organisation and the Limits of Democracy→Four theorists who thought self-government might be impossible
• 4.6.3 · Classical Sociology Outside the West→The traditions that developed in parallel, and mostly against
• 4.6.4 · What the Founders Left Us, and What They Missed→An accounting, before we move on

5.1 Functionalism

• 5.1.1 · Functionalism - The System and Its Ambition→The theory that tried to explain everything at once
• 5.1.2 · Merton and the Middle Range→The critic who saved functionalism by shrinking it
• 5.1.3 · The Collapse and the Return→What killed functionalism, and what came back wearing other names

5.2 Conflict Theory

• 5.2.1 · Conflict Theory - Coser, Dahrendorf and the Functions of Conflict→Opposition as the ordinary condition of social life
• 5.2.2 · Power - Three Faces and What Lies Beneath→The most contested concept in social science

5.3 Symbolic Interactionism

• 5.3.1 · Symbolic Interactionism - Meaning Made in the Moment→Society as something people are doing right now
• 5.3.2 · Goffman - The Interaction Order→The smallest domain of social life, and its own rules

5.4 Critical Theory

• 5.4.1 · The Frankfurt School - Reason Turned Against Itself→Writing about the society that had tried to kill them
• 5.4.2 · Habermas - Communicative Action and the Lifeworld→The other kind of reason, and what is eating it

5.5 Gramsci and Hegemony

• 5.5.1 · Gramsci - Hegemony and the Battle for Common Sense→Rule by consent, worked out in a Fascist prison

5.6 Feminist Theory

• 5.6.1 · Feminist Theory - The Discipline Rebuilt→Not a topic added, but a foundation reopened
• 5.6.2 · Intersectionality - What It Actually Claims→The concept that began with five women who could not sue

5.7 Structuralism and Post-structuralism

• 5.7.1 · Structuralism and the Turn to Language→The claim that meaning comes from difference, not from things
• 5.7.2 · Foucault - Discourse, Discipline and the Production of Subjects→Power that makes people rather than merely stopping them

5.8 Bourdieu

• 5.8.1 · Bourdieu - Habitus, Field and Capital→Why people choose what they were going to get anyway
• 5.8.2 · Giddens - Structuration and the Duality of Structure→Structure as something you do, not something you are in

5.9 Late Modernity

• 5.9.1 · Late Modernity - Risk, Reflexivity and Liquidity→What happens when the solid things stop being solid

5.10 Taking Stock

• 5.10.1 · The Schools Compared - A Working Map→Which tool, for which question

6.1 Orientalism and the Colonial Frame

• 6.1.1 · Orientalism and the Production of the Other→How a body of knowledge invented what it claimed to describe

6.2 Indian Sociology and Caste

• 6.2.1 · Caste - The Book View and the Field View→What the texts say, what the villages do, and why they differ
• 6.2.2 · Ambedkar - Caste as Closure, and the Argument with Gandhi→The theorist the discipline should have been teaching for a century
• 6.2.3 · Dumont, Hierarchy and Its Critics→Is caste about purity or about power?
• 6.2.4 · Caste, Democracy and the Reservation Question→What happened when a caste society got one person, one vote
• 6.2.5 · Adivasi, Tribe and the Politics of a Category→A word imposed by a state, and the people who took it up

6.3 Chinese and East Asian Social Thought

• 6.3.1 · Chinese Social Thought - From Confucius to Fei Xiaotong→A tradition that was abolished by decree and rebuilt

6.4 African Social Thought

• 6.4.1 · African Social Thought - Ubuntu, the Invented Tribe and the Bifurcated State→The sharpest account of how colonial rule built the categories still in use

6.5 Latin American Sociology

• 6.5.1 · Latin American Sociology - Dependency and Its Legacy→The one theory the periphery exported to the centre

6.6 Islamic Social Science

• 6.6.1 · Islamic Social Thought - From Ibn Khaldun to the Captive Mind→The longest record, the most disrupted transmission

6.7 Postcolonial and Decolonial Theory

• 6.7.1 · Postcolonial and Decolonial Theory→Two traditions, one argument, and a disagreement worth understanding

6.8 Taking Stock

• 6.8.1 · Is a Global Sociology Possible?→The question this Part has been deferring

7.1 The Philosophy Underneath

• 7.1.1 · Positivism, Interpretivism and What Lies Between→The argument that has been running under this entire course
• 7.1.2 · Objectivity, Values and Reflexivity→You chose the question because you cared. Now what?
• 7.1.3 · Ontology, Epistemology and Why They Matter in Practice→Two questions nobody asks out loud, that decide the whole design

7.2 From Question to Design

• 7.2.1 · What a Research Question Has to Do→The difference between a topic and a question, and why almost everything fails here
• 7.2.2 · Concepts, Variables and Operationalisation→The chain from a word you care about to a number on a page
• 7.2.3 · Hypotheses, Theory-Testing and Theory-Building→What a prediction has to risk before it counts as tested

7.3 Who You Study

• 7.3.1 · Populations, Samples and Why Sampling Works→How 1,200 people can speak for 200 million — and when they cannot
• 7.3.2 · When Samples Lie→The missing are never missing at random

7.4 The Quantitative Toolkit

• 7.4.1 · Surveys→Why the wording is the finding
• 7.4.2 · Experiments and the Logic of the Counterfactual→What randomisation actually does, and what it still cannot do
• 7.4.3 · Natural Experiments and Quasi-Experimental Designs→When the world does the randomising for you
• 7.4.4 · Secondary Data, Official Statistics and Big Data→Somebody else made this, for their own reasons

7.5 The Qualitative Toolkit

• 7.5.1 · Ethnography and Participant Observation→When the instrument is a person, and the person is in the room
• 7.5.2 · Interviews→An account is not a window, and asking is not neutral
• 7.5.3 · Focus Groups, Documents and Content Analysis→What a group produces, what a document is doing, and what counting text can and cannot find
• 7.5.4 · Comparative-Historical Method→Reasoning about causes when there are eight cases and a hundred differences

7.6 Making Sense of Numbers

• 7.6.1 · Description Before Inference→What a summary throws away, and why it usually matters
• 7.6.2 · Correlation, Causation and the Confounder→Five reasons two things move together, only one of which is cause
• 7.6.3 · Significance, Effect Size and What p Actually Means→The most misunderstood number in science, in plain words
• 7.6.4 · The Ecological, Individualistic and Other Fallacies→A finding is always about some level of reality, and it is rarely the one you want

7.7 Making Sense of Words

• 7.7.1 · Coding, Grounded Theory and Saturation→What to do with nine hundred pages of transcript
• 7.7.2 · Validity in Qualitative Work→How to judge a study without borrowing standards built for something else

7.8 The Trouble With Research

• 7.8.1 · Ethics→Consent is the core principle, and in sociology it usually does not work
• 7.8.2 · The Replication Crisis→What happened when people checked
• 7.8.3 · Mixed Methods and Triangulation→Combining methods is a design problem, not extra work

7.9 Taking Stock

• 7.9.1 · How to Read a Study Without Believing It or Dismissing It→Everything in Part 7, as a procedure you can run in twenty minutes

8.1 What Inequality Is

• 8.1.1 · Difference, Inequality and Injustice→Three things that are constantly confused, and the questions that separate them
• 8.1.2 · Measuring Inequality→How much of the argument is a disagreement about definitions
• 8.1.3 · Inequality of What?→Sen's question, and why the answer decides everything downstream

8.2 Class

• 8.2.1 · Marx and Weber Compared as Working Schemes→Two sets of instructions for sorting a real population
• 8.2.2 · Modern Class Schemas→What happens when a theory has to classify thirty million people from two questions
• 8.2.3 · Does Class Still Explain Anything?→The death-of-class argument, at its strongest, and what survives it

8.3 Mobility

• 8.3.1 · Absolute and Relative Mobility→The distinction that resolves almost all public confusion about social mobility
• 8.3.2 · How Mobility Is Actually Measured→The country whose mobility halved without anything changing
• 8.3.3 · The Mechanisms of Transmission→How a family's position at your birth becomes your position at thirty-five

8.4 Race and Racism

• 8.4.1 · Race as a Social Category→No natural basis, enormous consequences, and why both are true at once
• 8.4.2 · Measuring Discrimination→Three ways to answer one question, and why they disagree
• 8.4.3 · Racial Capitalism and Structural Accounts→Who benefits, through what mechanism, and which of these claims can be tested

8.5 Gender

• 8.5.1 · The Structure of Paid and Unpaid Work→The largest sector of the economy, and it is not in the accounts
• 8.5.2 · Explaining the Pay Gap→Four numbers from one payroll, and what each one is for
• 8.5.3 · Social Reproduction Theory→Where does the workforce come from?

8.6 Poverty

• 8.6.1 · Defining and Measuring Poverty→The country where poverty fell because everyone got poorer
• 8.6.2 · Explanations and the Underclass Argument→Two centuries of the same argument, and the evidence that settles parts of it

8.7 Intersectionality

• 8.7.1 · Intersectionality — What It Claims Empirically→The case it was built to solve, and what happened when people tested it

8.8 What Would Change It

• 8.8.1 · What Would Change It→The evidence on what actually moves the distribution

9.1 Education

• 9.1.1 · What Schooling Is For→Four answers, and a school day that supports all of them
• 9.1.2 · Does School Make a Difference?→The most misread finding in the sociology of education
• 9.1.3 · Selection, Tracking and Choice→Any sorting system sorts on the criterion and on everything correlated with it
• 9.1.4 · Credentialism and the Graduate Premium→What a degree is worth, and why the answer is a distribution

9.2 Family and Intimacy

• 9.2.1 · The Family as a Historical Form→The traditional family is neither traditional nor typical
• 9.2.2 · What Changed and What Did Not→Three reproductive lives, and the transformation that made a third of adulthood new
• 9.2.3 · Care, Kinship and the Life Course→The phase of life the demographic transition created and nobody planned for

9.3 Work and Organisations

• 9.3.1 · Bureaucracy in Practice→Every organisation runs on a system nobody wrote down
• 9.3.2 · The Labour Process and Control→Who knows how the work is done, and what follows from the answer
• 9.3.3 · Precarity, Platforms and What Is Actually New→Separating the change from the vocabulary

9.4 Religion

• 9.4.1 · The Secularisation Thesis and Its Failure→A central prediction, its public retraction, and what survives
• 9.4.2 · What Religion Does Sociologically→Two founding answers, treated as research programmes

9.5 Health and Medicine

• 9.5.1 · The Social Determinants of Health→Why the gradient runs all the way up
• 9.5.2 · Medicalisation and Professional Power→How something becomes a disease, and who decides

9.6 Media

• 9.6.1 · Effects, Agenda-Setting and What the Evidence Supports→A century of trying to measure what the media does to us
• 9.6.2 · Platforms, Algorithms and the Public Sphere→What changed, and what the evidence actually shows

9.7 Taking Stock

• 9.7.1 · How Institutions Reproduce and How They Change→Why the machinery persists, and the conditions under which it doesn't

10.1 What Deviance Is

• 10.1.1 · Deviance as a Property of the Response→The act is not where the sociology is
• 10.1.2 · The Functionalist Tradition→Deviance as normal, and as the product of a gap
• 10.1.3 · Labelling, Stigma and the Deviant Career→What the response does to the person it lands on

10.2 Crime

• 10.2.1 · Measuring Crime and the Dark Figure→The crime rate is a rate of processing
• 10.2.2 · Explaining the Crime Drop→The largest social change nobody predicted or can fully explain
• 10.2.3 · Who Gets Punished, and Why→The gap between who offends and who is imprisoned

10.3 Control

• 10.3.1 · Discipline, Surveillance and the Carceral→From punishing the body to producing the person
• 10.3.2 · Moral Panics and the Sociology of Fear→When the reaction is out of proportion to the threat

10.4 Taking Stock

• 10.4.1 · What Deviance and Control Reveal About Order→The study of rule-breaking is really the study of rule-following

11.1 Power

• 11.1.1 · The Three Faces of Power and Beyond→The hardest power to see is the power you never notice
• 11.1.2 · The State and Its Theories→The one organisation that claims the right to make you obey
• 11.1.3 · Elites, Pluralism and Who Actually Governs→How a fight about one small city taught us to see the power we were missing

11.2 Social Movements

• 11.2.1 · What Social Movements Are and Why They Emerge→Why people who have suffered for generations rise in one particular year
• 11.2.2 · Why People Join — Collective Action and the Free-Rider Problem→Why the smart, selfish move is to stay home — and why people march anyway
• 11.2.3 · How Movements Live and Die — Careers, Outcomes and the Iron Law→Why the things that let a movement survive can quietly capture its cause

11.3 Democracy and Its Discontents

• 11.3.1 · What Democracy Is — and What It Can and Cannot Do→The most praised word in politics, and the hardest one to pin down
• 11.3.2 · The Discontents — Trust, Polarisation and the Strains on Democracy→Sorting the real dangers from the exaggerated ones

11.4 Taking Stock

• 11.4.1 · Taking Stock — Power, Order and Change→How order is held, how it is contested, and how it is remade

12.1 The Specialised Subfields

• 12.1.1 · What a Specialism Is, and the Foundational Ones→Why sociology can be pointed at absolutely anything
• 12.1.2 · The Sociology of Emotions and the Body→How society reaches into the most private thing you have
• 12.1.3 · The Sociology of Everyday Life, Time and Memory→The dense social achievement hidden inside "nothing happening"
• 12.1.4 · The Sociology of the Life Course and Its Endings→How society scripts the ages of a life — even the last one

12.2 Public and Applied Sociology

• 12.2.1 · Burawoy's Four Sociologies→There is not one sociology but four, and they need and unsettle each other
• 12.2.2 · Applied, Clinical and Policy Sociology→What happens when a way of seeing becomes a tool for doing

12.3 Digital and Computational Sociology

• 12.3.1 · Studying Digital Life — Platforms, Algorithms and Datafication→What is genuinely new about a mediated, recorded, sorted social world
• 12.3.2 · Surveillance Capitalism, AI and Digital Inequality→Who owns your recorded life, and who gets sorted by it

12.4 Taking Stock

• 12.4.1 · The Uses of a Specialised Sociology→A perspective that reaches everywhere, and a discipline that acts

13.1 The Great Unresolved Debates

• 13.1.1 · Why the Debates Don't Resolve — and Why That's the Point→The mark of mastery is not picking a side but holding the tension
• 13.1.2 · Arguing All Sides→The technique of inhabiting a position you do not hold

13.2 Reading and Critiquing Sociological Work

• 13.2.1 · How to Read a Theorist, an Article, and a Data Study→Three kinds of writing, three completely different ways to read
• 13.2.2 · Dismantling an Argument→The anatomy of a claim, and the classic places it breaks

13.3 Building Your Own Toolkit

• 13.3.1 · Matching Theory and Method to a Question→The question comes first — everything else is chosen to fit it
• 13.3.2 · The Sociological Instinct→The reflex questions a trained mind asks before it picks a tool

13.4 Writing and Communicating Sociologically

• 13.4.1 · Writing and Communicating Sociologically→A mind that cannot share what it sees helps no one

13.5 The Living Frontier

• 13.5.1 · The Living Frontier→The open questions now driving the field — and how you meet them

13.6 Taking Stock

• 13.6.1 · Thinking Like a Sociologist→What you carry now, and what it means to see this way