Episode #5 - When is Sociology? Pt. 1

One way of answering the question “when is sociology?” is to do an intellectual chronology of the discipline from its origins to the present.

This is your Neighborhood Sociologist’s take on it!

In this episode, I mention many of the discipline’s important thinkers, including Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Dubois, Mills, Goffman, and Ruha Benjamin. I also hit on the three major approaches used in the discipline, from its origins in positivism to the development of interpretivism starting in the mid-20th century to the rise of critical scholarship today.

Some useful links (pdf files):

• Overview of Sociology

• Positivism

• Symbolic Interactionism

• Critical Theory

I also mentioned books from:

• The classical scholar Max Weber - The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

• The modern critical scholar Ruha Benjamin - Race After Technology