This appendix is a map of names — a single place where the whole cast of the course is gathered, grouped by tradition, so that no major thinker slips through the cracks and so you can see, at a glance, how the discipline's people relate to one another. It is not a lesson; it is a reference. Use it three ways: to locate a thinker you have half-remembered ("which group was Goffman in again?"), to see the shape of a tradition as a cluster of names rather than a blur, and to find your next reading by spotting a name that recurs in a corner you want to explore.

A word of honesty about any canon, in the spirit of Part 6 and Part 13: a list like this is a construction, not a fact of nature. Every grouping is a simplification (many thinkers belong in several boxes at once); every inclusion and omission reflects choices; and the very shape of a "canon" has historically over-weighted the West and under-weighted everyone else — which is exactly why the Indian and world/decolonial sections below are as full as the classical Western ones, and why you should read the list as a map with a maker, not as the territory itself. With that caution held, here is the field, laid out by tradition.

The ancient and early roots

Long before "sociology" had a name, thinkers across many civilisations reasoned about society, order, and change. These are the deep ancestors (Parts 3 and 6).

The founders

The generation that made sociology a self-conscious discipline in the 19th and early 20th centuries — the people Parts 3 and 4 are built around.

The functionalists

The mid-20th-century tradition that saw society as a system of interlocking parts, each serving a function for the whole (Part 5).

The conflict and critical traditions

Those who saw society not as a harmonious system but as an arena of domination, struggle, and critique — Marx's heirs and the Frankfurt School (Parts 4 and 5).

The micro-sociologists

Those who located the social in face-to-face interaction, meaning-making, and the construction of everyday reality (Parts 2 and 5).

Exchange, rational choice, and network theory

Those who modelled society through exchange, individual decision, and the structure of ties (Part 5, and the network findings across Parts 8–12).

Feminist, gender, and queer theory

Those who exposed how deeply gender and sexuality structure social life, and who the discipline had ignored (Parts 5, 6, and 8).

Post-structuralism and practice theory

Those who reworked how we think about power, knowledge, the body, and the relation of structure to action (Parts 5, 8, 10, 11).

Macro and historical sociology

Those who studied whole societies, systems, and long-run change through history and comparison (Parts 5, 11; the historical-comparative method of 12.1.1).

Culture, postmodernity, and the risk society

Those who put meaning, media, and the distinctive condition of late modernity at the centre (Parts 5, 9, 12).

Science and technology studies (STS)

Those who turned the sociological eye on science, technology, and the more-than-human (Parts 7, 12; the frontier of 13.5).

Indian sociology and the sociology of caste

The rich tradition Part 6 restores to the centre — India's own sociologists and the thinkers of caste (Part 6, Topic 6.2).

World-systems, dependency, and decolonial theory

The global and decolonial thinkers who reframed sociology from the standpoint of the Global South (Part 6).