WHY STUDY SOCIOLOGY?

Who are sociologists and who might want to study sociology?

The Sociologist (that is, the one we would really like to invite to our game) is a person intensively, endlessly, shamelessly interested in the doings of [human beings]. [Their] natural habitat is all the human gathering places of the world, wherever [humans] come together. The sociologist may be interested in many other things. But his [or her] consuming interest remains in the world of [human beings], their institutions, their history, their passions.

-- Peter L. Berger, An Invitation to Sociology, 1963.

Does this describe you? Perhaps you should consider a career in sociology. But what exactly is sociology? According to Clair M. Renzetti and Daniel J. Curran in Living Sociology…

… Sociology is the scientific study of human societies. Societies are composed of people, or, more specifically, social actors. In studying human societies, sociologists examine the collective interactions of social actors within a particular social structure and the collective meanings that these actors give to their interactions with one another.

This is what the sociologist does. So what exactly is their aim? Sociologists examine the larger social forces that structure and govern the world in which we live. Humans are born into a natural world that is not already prepared for them. They must build one to live in and in doing so they shape themselves, each other, and the world in turns shapes them again.

Sociologists are ultimately interested in how the modern world came to be and how it continues to unfold. C. Wright Mills noted in 1959 what people in the modern world need:

What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It is this quality, I am going to contend, that journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors are coming to expect of what may be called the sociological imagination.

See: http://www.camden.rutgers.edu/~wood/207socimagination.htm

The implications from the fact that humans are social animals and the ongoing problems of social organization absorb the interests of sociologists. How and why do we develop and pass down the institutions and forms of knowledge we do? How and why do humans become divided into identifiable groups based on ethnicity, sex, class, and power? How do technology and collective action shape and change the world? From where have we come and where are we going? These types of questions animate the sociological imagination.