The Cambridge Handbook of Sociology

In a way, sociology explains the complexity of the obvious about ourselves and society: it piggy-backs on every other discipline, illuminates it to its practitioners and recipients and articulates and interprets how we feel about the self and identity, how social organizations and institutions work, how we are socialized by culture and politics and how we make policy that shapes and is shaped by history. We reach for sociology when discussing race and gender and class, social inequality and change, framing our thinking with reference (often unconscious) to ideas formulated by Marx and Weber, Durkheim and the Frankfurt School. Sociology...