Sociology. Anthony Giddens
perspectives, the work of Max Weber explores both individual actions and social structures. Although he was certainly interested in social interactions and the micro level of social life, his work on world religions, economic sociology and legal systems was historically informed, strongly comparative and concerned with the overall development and direction of societies. This is in contrast to the interactionist tradition as it developed after Weber, which became focused much more on the micro level of social life. The approaches in this section illustrate a basic difference in classical sociology between micro-level and structural (or macro-level) perspectives, which remains one of sociology’s longstanding theoretical divides.
Challenging mainstream sociology
The question of the continuing relevance of sociology’s three broad traditions has come into sharper focus as theoretical challenges have emerged. Some of these have transformed the discipline while others are in the process of doing so today. In this section we briefly outline some important criticisms of sociology from the standpoint of feminism, which stresses sociological theory’s previous neglect of the experience of women. We then cover ideas rooted in postmodern and poststructural theory and end the section with postcolonial theories, which focus on the inherent Eurocentric bias within most social and sociological theories.
Feminism against malestream sociology
The accepted founders of sociology were all men (as we saw in chapter 1), and they paid scant regard either to the differential experience of men and women or to gender relations. In any event, their ideas tended to be descriptive and theoretically unsatisfactory. For example, differences between women and men are discussed occasionally in Durkheim’s writings, but not in a consistently sociological manner (Rahman and Jackson 2010: 56). Durkheim (1952 [1897]) suggested that, while men are ‘almost entirely’ products of society, women are ‘to a far greater extent’ products of nature, leading to differing bases for identities, tastes and inclinations. Sociologists today do not accept this stereotypical conclusion, which illegitimately essentializes female identities.
Marx and Engels’s ideas are substantially at odds with those of Durkheim. For them, differences in power and status between men and women mainly reflect other divisions, especially class divisions. According to Marx, in the earliest forms of human society (primitive communism), neither gender nor class divisions were present. The power of men over women came about only as class divisions appeared. Women then came to be seen as a type of ‘private property’, owned by men through the institution of marriage. The only way for women to be freed from their situation of bondage would be when capitalism is overthrown and class divisions are eliminated.
Again, few sociologists today would accept this analysis. Class is not the only factor shaping social divisions which affect relations between men and women; among others are ethnicity and cultural background. For instance, it might be argued that women in some minority ethnic groups have more in common with men in that group than they do with women in the ethnic majority. In recent years, sociologists have become much more interested in intersectionality – the ways in which divisions of class, gender and ethnicity combine or ‘intersect’ to produce complex forms of social inequality (Brewer 1993; P. H. Collins 2000). Intersectionality does not mean the end of class analysis, but it does point to the need for more research which crosses conventional theoretical boundaries.
Since it left very little to build on in relating issues of gender to more established forms of theoretical thinking, the classical legacy bequeathed a difficult problem to sociologists. How should ‘gender’ as a general category be brought within existing sociological theories? The issues involved here are important and bear directly on the challenge that feminist scholars have laid down. There is no real dispute that a great deal of sociology in the past either ignored women or operated with an inadequate understanding of gender relations. Yet bringing the study of women into sociology is not the same as dealing with issues of gender, because gender concerns relations between women and men. For example, research into gender has explored changing forms of masculinity as well as femininities, and, with the emergence of queer theory, the instability of the concept of gender itself has been exposed.
The next section presents a fairly brief outline of the impact of feminist theorizing on sociology, but an extended discussion of gender can be found in chapter 7, ‘Gender and Sexuality’. Taken together, these sections provide an introduction to the significance of gender in society and for sociology.
Feminist theories
Women’s movements in the 1960s and 1970s campaigned for many legislative changes aimed at tackling the unequal position of women in society. Once feminist scholars became part of the academy within universities, feminist theories challenged male-dominated or malestream sociology. The latter involved a perceived male bias in sociological theorizing that drew general conclusions from the experience of men – research methods that were not designed to capture women’s experience. Sociology’s subject matter, which focused on the (male-dominated) public sphere, ignored the perceived female-oriented private sphere of households and families. One feminist slogan of the time was ‘the personal is political’, and, as such, previously considered private matters became legitimate subjects for sociology.
Some feminist sociologists also called for a comprehensive reconstruction of the entire discipline, including the central problems that form its core, emphasizing the centrality of gender for any satisfactory analysis of the social world. In short,
The feminist challenge to malestream sociology is one that requires a radical rethink of the content and methodology of the whole enterprise; one that recognises the need, not simply to see society from the standpoint of women as well as from the standpoint of men, but to see the world as fundamentally gendered. (Abbott et al. 2005: 3)
How far sociology has moved in this direction is contentious. For instance, as late as 2003, Sara Delamont still argued that her battle to get mainstream sociologists to acknowledge feminist theorizing was ‘far from won’ (Delamont 2003: ix). Yet it is also the case that there are many disagreements across feminist perspectives on just how issues of gender should or can be theorized. ‘Feminist theory’ is a term covering an increasing range of positions, with at least six or seven different perspectives. These range from early theories of liberal, socialist/Marxist and radical feminism, through dual-systems and critical feminism, to postmodern/poststructuralist, black and postcolonial feminism. Most of these perspectives are discussed in more detail in chapter 7, ‘Gender and Sexuality’.
The diversity of feminist theories makes it impossible to speak of a single or unified ‘feminist theory of society’, but we can say they all agree that knowledge is related to questions of sex and gender and that women face oppression in patriarchal societies. However, theoretical explanations of women’s position differ, sometimes quite markedly. For example, while radical feminists see patriarchy as the main source of oppression, dual-systems theorists argue that both patriarchy and capitalism combine to reproduce male dominance. Black feminism both insists that race, racism and ethnicity need to be part of feminist theorizing and criticizes earlier theories for assuming that all women have essentially similar interests despite their radically divergent living conditions.
Because men and women have different experiences and view the world from different perspectives, they do not construct their understandings of the world in identical ways. Feminists often argue that malestream sociological theory has denied or ignored the ‘gendered’ nature of knowledge, producing supposedly universal conclusions from the specific experience of (usually white) men. As men conventionally occupy the main positions of power and authority in most societies, they have an investment in maintaining their