Sociology For Everyone

Sociology for Everyone (1986) by Martin Joseph – Polity Press

Have you ever looked at society and thought, “Well, this all seems unnecessarily complicated”? Excellent. You are already halfway to being a sociologist.

Martin Joseph’s Sociology for Everyone does exactly what the title suggests: it takes the vast, occasionally intimidating world of sociology and attempts to explain it without requiring you to spend three years in a seminar room arguing about Marx, Weber, class consciousness and whether anything anybody does can truly be considered an individual choice.

Published by Polity Press in 1986, this is a broad introduction to the study of society, social behaviour, institutions, relationships, class, power, culture and all the other invisible forces apparently responsible for why people behave as strangely as they do.

Sociology, after all, is essentially the academic discipline devoted to looking at perfectly ordinary things — families, jobs, schools, governments, fashions, arguments, money, social groups and people standing awkwardly in queues — and asking why they exist, who benefits from them and whether they might secretly be instruments of social control.

Joseph introduces the subject in an accessible way, making this a useful starting point for students, curious readers or anyone who has recently discovered that society consists of considerably more than simply “people getting on with their lives”.

Expect discussions of social structures, inequality, institutions and the various theories humans have invented to explain why some people have enormous houses while others spend half their monthly income attempting to keep a bedsit warm.

Being published in 1986 also gives the book a pleasingly historical quality. This was Britain before social media, smartphones and influencers, when sociologists had to study communities by physically going outside and talking to people rather than spending six months analysing arguments underneath a TikTok video.

Some of the terminology and examples inevitably reflect their era, but the central questions remain stubbornly familiar. Why are societies organised the way they are? Why do people behave differently depending upon class, status or upbringing? Who holds power? Why do institutions resist change? And why does almost every simple question about human behaviour eventually require a diagram?

This copy is in Good condition, which sociologically speaking means it has successfully survived several decades within the highly competitive ecosystem of bookshelves, house moves, charity shops and people saying, “I’ll definitely read that one day.”

Ideal for sociology students, collectors of vintage academic books, readers interested in social history, or anybody who would like to understand humanity without necessarily having to interact with too much of it.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where every second-hand book forms part of a complex social network involving authors, readers, postal workers, cardboard packaging and somebody eventually wondering why they own seven books about sociology.

ISBN: 0745601871

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