What is my passion? Why sociology? I love sociology for several reasons: first, because you study everything, and I mean everything can be “the sociology of….” Second, because it uncovers the layers of deceit, image, and make-up that cover the surface; third, because it deals with deviance and deviant behavior (see my other Five Best on Deviance); and fourth, it explains social conflict. I’m always learning something new, and I love to impart that love of the unknown and the everyday to my thousands of students.
I could easily have chosen The Power Elite, White Collar, or The Causes of World War Three; in fact, this list could have been composed of just books by Mills. Mills came along when the dominant theoretical outlook was a kind of conservative “functionalism” led by a now somewhat neglected Harvard sociologist named Talcott Parsons and his “grand theories” that could explain “everything."
These have fallen by the wayside and been replaced by Robert Merton's “theories of the middle range” and micro-theories. More powerfully, grand theory and functionalism were replaced by conflict theory; that is, we learn more about a society from its conflicts than from its harmony. But in truth, one needs both perspectives to understand society.
C. Wright Mills is best remembered for his highly acclaimed work The Sociological Imagination, in which he set forth his views on how social science should be pursued. Hailed upon publication as a cogent and hard-hitting critique, The Sociological Imagination took issue with the ascendant schools of sociology in the United States, calling for a humanist sociology connecting the social, personal, and historical dimensions of our lives. The sociological imagination Mills calls for is a sociological vision, a way of looking at the world that can see links between the apparently private problems of the individual and important social issues.…
In fact several of his other books are classics like Enter Plato or For Sociology. I knew Gouldner. Gouldner felt you could not have remote sociology, that sociology has its subjective aspects, and that one’s biases must be spoken and told upfront and will always be there.
Furthermore, sociologists whether Marxist or liberal academic can never be purely “value-free” but are necessarily political and ideological. This may not be a surprise today in 2025, but back in 1970, it was a bombshell since sociology was supposed to be like all sciences: totally objective, impartial, and detached.
The student and Black protests of the late 1960s changed all that.
In the social sciences, at least, no group of academics has been more sympathetic to the students of the New Left than have sociologists, and David Riesman has even contended that the profession has contributed in some measure to the development of the movement. Ironically, New Left students who are now becoming New Left Ph.D.’s in sociology have begun to rebel against what they consider the “conservatism” of some of their ex-professors. Alvin Gouldner’s book argues that all of this presages the emergence of a new “radical” sociology, and he tries to create a theoretical framework to serve as its…
This 1899 book is a classic not only in theory but in method; it was one of the first to analyze suicide rates in France according to one's religion, age, sex, marital status, and other factors, and Durkheim brilliantly explained three types of suicide: altruistic, egoistic, and anomic.
I explained these three on a national radio show (Dan Rea WBZ radio 1030 am Boston news radio), and it was still understandable 125 years later. Altruistic suicide is like when a soldier lands on a grenade to save his comrades; he or she gives her life for others; anomic suicide is a person who has given up on life due to alcoholism, mental illness, or drugs; the homeless “bum” is an example; and egoistic suicide is the most common and most well-known: it is when someone suddenly loses his money or his girlfriend or is hit with a scandal dealing with sex or money, and cannot face his or her family and friends so he or she kills themselves.
I also knew Merton, and he praised my book The Jew as Outsider, which I based on his essay Insiders and Outsiders.
He was an assimilated Jew; few knew he was Jewish; this tall, elegant man looked more like a WASP from Philadelphia but no one aside from Mills introduced more terms into sociology that have become common parlance: anticipatory socializations, dysfunctional roles, manifest and latent function, theories of the middle range, The Mathew Effect (from the Bible—“those who get, get more, and those who don’t get, get less; in short, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer).
Containing the most systematic statement of the theoretical foundations and framework of functional sociology, the essays included in this edition provide an authoritative approach to the functional analysis of social structures.
Featuring two new chapters that form an introduction to the three essays publishing in part one of Social Theory and Social Structure, Robert K. Merton reflects on some of the most important thinking in contemporary sociology.
On Theoretical Sociology presents a clear and precise overview of basic concepts and serves as an introduction to the unique intellectual achievements of one of America's foremost scholars.
One of the few true geniuses in sociology, he lifted the field up into new and innovation dimensions. If there were a Nobel Prize in sociology, he would most likely get it, followed by the three people above (Merton, Mills, and Gouldner). I knew him well. He could walk into a room and an hour later tell you all the power plays, conflicts, and inside dope.
Some of his terms have entered our language: front-stage, back stage (meaning what goes on in front of an audience, meaning your social interactions) are different from what goes on backstage, behind the scenes, kind of like a play. His book, Stigma, is used in many fascinating ways; not just someone blind or disfigured but also a Black person, a gay person, or a hippy; but mostly he shows in terrifying ways, how people hide or cope with their “stigma”—the subtitle tells it all—“the spoiled identity”.
A third book of his, Asylums is a classic in that it’s not just prisons or “insane asylums“ but an army boot camp, a monastery for monks or nuns, a closed-off cult, or an isolated private prep school.
All have total or near total control of not only your actions but your self-identity. He called these places “total institutions,” because they can control you totally, sociologically as well as physically.
One of the defining works of twentieth-century sociology: a revelatory analysis of how we present ourselves to others
'The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing ... it is a dramatic effect'
How do we communicate who we are to other people? This landmark work by one of the twentieth century's most influential sociologists argues that our behaviour in social situations is defined by how we wish to be perceived - resulting in displays startlingly similar to those of actors in a theatrical performance. From the houses and clothes that we use as 'fixed props' to…
This book covers three areas of Dr. Jack Nusan Porter's work: the role of sociological theory in society, the image of sociology in the media, and what he calls the "creative praxis" (the application of social theory to real-life problems). The theoretical section of the book covers such areas as conflict theory, situational and small group theory, and what could be termed as post-9/11 approaches as chaos, postmodern, and rational choice theory that address the questions of random murder, terrorism, and genocide.
The second section deals with an overview of sociology's image in the U.S. media and covers in detail how sociology was treated in radical textbooks in the 1960s. The final section applies new theoretical approaches to a host of contemporary political, business, technological, and urban issues.
