- What is the self and where does it come from? Answer this question in around 150 words (this should be more than a 1-sentence answer). Include a clear definition of self. Use Cooley’s “Looking-Glass Self,” this week’s lecture on the self, and if you find it useful, Newman’s chapter on “Socialization.” Take care to reference whatever reading you use in-text and in a bibliography.
- What is identity? Answer this question in around 150 words. Include a clear definition of identity. Be sure to consider the role of impression management in maintaining identity. Use Newman’s chapter on Supporting Identity and this week’s lecture on Impression Management.
- Reflecting on what you’ve learned about the self, especially including the crucial role of other people in its creation, answer the following set of questions in around 300 words. Your answer should be theoretically informed; that is, you should clearly and explicitly use the theories of self and impression management to support your assertions. Amy Cuddy’s TED talk could be very useful here.Do you have a “true self”?What is your” true self,” and where did it come from?Was your “true self” always “just there?”What part of you is your true self?Is it different from the roles you play every day, the different people you are in different situations, or are these just as much your self as anything else?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVmMeMcGc0Y
Sociology
Twelfth Edition
For Zach, Seth, and Hazel
Sociology
Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life
Twelfth Edition
David M. Newman
DePauw University
FOR INFORMATION:
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Newman, David M., author.
Title: Sociology : exploring the architecture of everyday life / David M.
Newman, DePauw University.
Description: Twelfth Edition. | Thousand Oaks : SAGE Publications, [2018] |
Revised edition of the author’s Sociology, [2017] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017044463 | ISBN 9781506388205 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Sociology.
Classification: LCC HM585 .N48 2018 | DDC 301—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044463
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
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Brief Contents
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Preface
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PART I • The Individual and Society
Chapter 1 • Taking a New Look at a Familiar World
Chapter 2 • Seeing and Thinking Sociologically
PART II • The Construction of Self and Society
Chapter 3 • Building Reality: The Social Construction of Knowledge
Chapter 4 • Building Order: Culture and History
Chapter 5 • Building Identity: Socialization
Chapter 6 • Supporting Identity: The Presentation of Self
Chapter 7 • Building Social Relationships: Intimacy and Families
Chapter 8 • Constructing Difference: Social Deviance
PART III • Social Structure, Institutions, and Everyday Life
Chapter 9 • The Structure of Society: Organizations, Social Institutions, and Globalization
Chapter 10 • The Architecture of Stratification: Social Class and Inequality
Chapter 11 • The Architecture of Inequality: Race and Ethnicity
Chapter 12 • The Architecture of Inequality: Sex and Gender
Chapter 13 • Demographic Dynamics: Population Trends
Chapter 14 • Architects of Change: Reconstructing Society
Glossary
References
Index
Detailed Contents
Title Page
Half Title
The Puhlisher
Title Page
Copyright
Brief Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PART I • The Individual and Society
Chapter 1 • Taking a New Look at a Familiar World
Sociology and the Individual
• Micro-Macro Connection: A Sociology of Sleep
The Insights of Sociology
The Sociological Imagination
• Émile Durkheim: All Suicides Are Not Created Equal
Conclusion
Your Turn
Chapter Highlights
Key Terms
Chapter 2 • Seeing and Thinking Sociologically
How Individuals Structure Society
Social Influence: The Impact of Other People in Our Everyday Lives
• Stanley Milgram: Ordinary People and Cruel Acts
Societal Influence: The Effect of Social Structure on Our Everyday Lives
Statuses and Roles
Groups
Organizations
Social Institutions
• Marion Nestle: You Are What You Eat: The Economics and Politics of Food
Culture
Values
• Micro-Macro Connection: Family Privacy Can Be Hazardous to a Child’s Health
Norms
Social Structure in a Global Context
Three Perspectives on Social Order
The Structural-Functionalist Perspective
The Conflict Perspective
Symbolic Interactionism
Conclusion
Your Turn
Chapter Highlights
Key Terms
PART II • The Construction of Self and Society
Chapter 3 • Building Reality: The Social Construction of Knowledge
Understanding the Social Construction of Reality
Laying the Foundation: The Bases of Reality
Culture and Language
• Micro-Macro Connection: The Words of War
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
Faith and Incorrigible Propositions
• Hugh Mehan and Houston Wood: The Infallible Oracle
Building the Walls: Conflict, Power, and Social Institutions
The Economics of Reality
The Politics of Reality
The Medium Is the Message
Moral Entrepreneurs
Appreciating the Contributions of Sociological Research
The Empirical Nature of Sociological Research
Qualitative and Quantitative Research
Theories, Variables, and Hypotheses
Modes of Research
Experiments
Field Research
Surveys
Unobtrusive Research
The Trustworthiness of Social Research
Samples
• Micro-Macro Connection: The WEIRDest People in the World
Indicators
Values, Interests, and Ethics in Sociological Research
• Laud Humphreys: Should Sociologists Study Anonymous Sexual Encounters in Public
Bathrooms?
Conclusion
Your Turn
Chapter Highlights
Key Terms
Chapter 4 • Building Order: Culture and History
Dimensions of Culture
Material and Nonmaterial Culture
Global Culture
• Micro-Macro Connection: The Chair
Subcultures
• Susan Blum: It’s OK, Everyone’s Doing It: Plagiarism and the College Subculture
History: The “Archives” for Everyday Living
Cultural Expectations and Social Order
• Micro-Macro Connection: Can You Hear Me Now?
Social Institutions and Cultural Norms
Norms and Sanctions
• Micro-Macro Connection: Can Culture Tell You What To Feel?
Cultural Relativism and Ethnocentrism
• Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo: Why Would You Buy THAT? How Culture Affects
the Purchasing Decisions of Poor People
Cultural Variation and Everyday Experience
Health and Illness
The Sexes
Conclusion
Your Turn
Chapter Highlights
Key Terms
Chapter 5 • Building Identity: Socialization
Genes, Social Structure, and the Construction of Human Beings
Socialization: Becoming You
The Acquisition of Self
The Differentiation of Self
Language Acquisition and the Looking-Glass Self
The Development of Role Taking
Resocialization
• Spencer Cahill: The Making of a Mortician: Professional Resocialization of Funeral
Directors
The Self in a Cultural Context
Socialization and Stratification: Growing Up With Inequality
Social Class
Race and Ethnicity
Gender
• Micro-Macro Connection: Girls’ Toys and Boys’ Toys
Institutions and Socialization
Education
Religion
Mass Media
Conclusion
Your Turn
Chapter Highlights
Key Terms
Chapter 6 • Supporting Identity: The Presentation of Self
Forming Impressions of Others
Social Group Membership
Physical Appearance
Is Beauty Only Skin Deep?
Sizing People Up
Verbal and Nonverbal Expression
Managing Impressions
• Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky: Can Your Clothes Make You Smarter?
Dramaturgy: Actors on a Social Stage
Front Stage and Back Stage
Props
Image Making
The Surgical Alteration of Appearance
Political Portraits
Social Influences on Impression Management
Race and Ethnicity
• Elijah Anderson: The Public Faces of Young Black Men
Socioeconomic Status
Collective Impression Management
Mismanaging Impressions: Spoiled Identities
Embarrassment
Remedies for Spoiled Identities
Stigma
Conclusion
Your Turn
Chapter Highlights
Key Terms
Chapter 7 • Building Social Relationships: Intimacy and Families
Life With Others
• Micro-Macro Connection: That’s What (Facebook) Friends Are For
Social Diversity and Intimate Choices
Exogamy
Endogamy
Religious Endogamy
Racial and Ethnic Endogamy
Social Class Endogamy
Family Life
Defining Family
Historical Trends in Family Life
Trends in Family Structure
Trends in Household Size
Trends in Divorce
Cultural Variation in Intimacy and Family
Family and Social Structure
How Other Institutions Influence Family
The Influence of Law and Politics
• Micro-Macro Connection: I Now Pronounce You…Shifting Public Support for Legal
Same-Sex Marriage
The Influence of Religion
The Influence of Economics
• Micro-Macro Connection: Balancing Acts: Competing Work and Family Demands in
Dual-Earner Households
How Social Diversity Influences Family
• Mary Pattillo-McCoy: Privilege and Peril in Middle-Class Black Families
Family Challenges
Divorce
The Normalization of Divorce
Children, Divorce, and Single Parenting
Remarriage and Stepfamilies
Family Violence
Intimate-Partner Violence
Child Abuse and Neglect
Intimate Violence in a Cultural Context
Personal and Institutional Responses to Intimate Violence
Conclusion
Your Turn
Chapter Highlights
Key Terms
Chapter 8 • Constructing Difference: Social Deviance
Defining Deviance
Absolutist Definitions of Deviance
Relativist Definitions of Deviance
The Elements of Deviance
• Micro-Macro Connection: Sexual Abuse and the Clergy
Explaining Deviant Behavior
Deterring Deviance
Labeling Deviants
• Nancy Herman: Becoming an Ex-Crazy: How Former Mental Patients Struggle to
Overcome a Label
Linking Power, Deviance, and Social Control
The Criminalization of Deviance
The Social Reality of Crime
Wealthy, Corporate, and White-Collar Crime
The Menace of “Illegal” Drugs
The Medicalization of Deviance
• Micro-Macro Connection: The Pharmaceutical Personality
Individualizing Complex Social Issues
Depoliticizing Deviance
Conclusion
Your Turn
Chapter Highlights
Key Terms
PART III • Social Structure, Institutions, and Everyday Life
Chapter 9 • The Structure of Society: Organizations, Social Institutions, and Globalization
Social Structure and Everyday Life
• Micro-Macro Connection: Can Social Structure Overcome Catastrophe?
Social Dilemmas: Individual Interests and Structural Needs
The Tragedy of the Commons
The Free-Rider Problem
Solutions to Social Dilemmas
The Structure of Formal Organizations
Bureaucracies: Playing by the Rules
• George Ritzer: The McDonaldization of Society
The Hierarchical Makeup of Organizations
The Upper Echelons
The Middle Ground
The Lower Echelons
The Construction of Organizational Reality
Organizations and Institutions
Organizational Networks Within Institutions
• Micro-Macro Connection: Going to the Hospital: The Individual Patient Meets the
Massive Health Care System
Institutional Pressures Toward Similarity
Globalization and Social Institutions
Economics
Education
Religion
Conclusion
Your Turn
Chapter Highlights
Key Terms
Chapter 10 • The Architecture of Stratification: Social Class and Inequality
Stratification Systems
Slavery
Caste Systems
Estate Systems
Social Class Systems
Sociological Perspectives on Stratification
The Structural-Functionalist View of Stratification
The Conflict View of Stratification
The Marxian Class Model
Neo-Marxist Models of Stratification
Weber’s Model of Stratification
Class Inequality in the United States
Class and Everyday Life
Class Distinctions
The Upper Class
The Middle Class
The Working Class
• Mike Rose: “Unskilled” Jobs Require Lots of Complex Skills
The Poor
What Poverty Means in the United States
The Poverty Line
The Near-Poor
The Poverty Rate
The Consequences of Poverty
Poverty and Health
Poverty and Education
Out on the Streets
Why Poverty Persists
Enduring Disparities in Income and Wealth
• Michael Norton and Dan Ariely: Wealth Inequality in the United States: What We
Think, What We Want, and What We Actually Have
The Social “Benefits” of Poverty
The Ideology of Competitive Individualism
The Culture of Poverty
Global Development and Inequality
The Global Economic Gap
• Micro-Macro Connection: The Chances of Living a Healthy Life Vary Tremendously
Around the World
Explanations for Global Stratification
Global Financial Organizations
Multinational Corporations
Conclusion
Your Turn
Chapter Highlights
Key Terms
Chapter 11 • The Architecture of Inequality: Race and Ethnicity
Race and Ethnicity: More Than Just Biology
• Micro-Macro Connection: Why Isn’t Barack Obama White?
Histories of Oppression and Inequality
Native Americans
Latino/as
African Americans
Asian Americans
Muslim Americans
Racial and Ethnic Relations
Personal Racism
Stereotypes
Prejudice and Discrimination
Colorism
The Privilege of Colorlessness
• Micro-Macro Connection: Cultural Appropriation—Racial Celebration or Racial
Degradation?
Class, Race, and Discrimination
The Cultural Ideology of Racism
Racism in Language
The Myth of Innate Racial Inferiority
• Micro-Macro Connection: Why Are Black Athletes So Dominant?
Institutional Racism: Injustice Built Into the System
• Micro-Macro Connection: Gimme Shelter—Housing Segregation and Discrimination
Racial Inequality in the Economic System
Racial Inequality in the Health Care System
• Micro-Macro Connection: Racial Guinea Pigs and Medical Mistrust
Racial Inequality in the Educational System
Remedies for Institutional Racism
Global Perspectives on Racism
Conclusion
Your Turn
Chapter Highlights
Key Terms
Chapter 12 • The Architecture of Inequality: Sex and Gender
Sexism at the Personal Level
Sexism and Social Interaction
• Thomas Linneman: What Can “Uptalking” Tell Us About Gender?
• Micro-Macro Connection: Fighting Two Wars: Sexual Harassment in the Military
Sexual Orientation
Sexual Violence Against Women
Rape as a Means of Social Control
Victim Blaming
The Ideology of Sexism: Biology as Destiny
Institutions and Gender Inequality
Masculinized Institutions
Gender Inequality in Health and Health Care
Gender Inequality in the Media
• Micro-Macro Connection: Can Media Images Make You Sick?
Gender Inequality in Families
Gender Inequality in Education
Gender Inequality in the Economy
The Sex-Segregated Workplace
The Wage Gap
The Global Devaluation of Women
Conclusion
Your Turn
Chapter Highlights
Key Terms
Chapter 13 • Demographic Dynamics: Population Trends
The Influence of Birth Cohorts
Baby Boomers
Generation X
The Millennium and Post-Millennium Generations
• Micro-Macro Connection: Generation Wars?
Demographic Dynamics
Population Growth
Global Imbalances in Population Growth
Politics, Culture, and Population Growth
Age Structure
Geographic Distribution
Migration Within a Country
Migration From One Country to Another
Population Trends in the United States
Immigration and the Changing Face of the United States
The Immigrant Flow
Social Responses to Immigrants
• Micro-Macro Connection: The Peculiar Politics of Immigration
The “Graying” of the United States
Conclusion
Your Turn
Chapter Highlights
Key Terms
Chapter 14 • Architects of Change: Reconstructing Society
Social Change
• Micro-Macro Connection: Are Parents Putting Too Much Pressure on Their Children to
Excel at Sports?
The Speed of Social Change
Causes of Social Change
Environmental and Population Pressures
Cultural and Technological Innovation
• Micro-Macro Connection: The Internet Never Forgets: Technology and the Erosion of
Personal Privacy
Diffusion of Technologies and Cultural Practices
Social Movements
Types of Social Movements
Elements of Social Movements
Ideology
Rising Expectations
Resource Mobilization
Bureaucratization
Political Opportunity Structure
The Sociological Imagination Revisited
Conclusion and Farewell
Your Turn
Chapter Highlights
Key Terms
Glossary
References
Index
Preface to the Twelfth Edition
It was the first day of the fall semester several years ago. I had just finished making the final adjustments to an
earlier edition of this book, which was due to be published the following January. I felt pretty good about myself,
like I’d just accomplished something monumental. Let’s face it; being able to call yourself an author is pretty
cool. Even my two sons were impressed with me (although not as impressed as the time we went to a professional
hockey game and I leaped out of my seat to catch an errant, speeding puck barehanded). I walked confidently into
the first meeting of my Introduction to Sociology class eager to start teaching wide-eyed, first-year students a
thing or two about sociology.
In my opening comments to the class that day, I mentioned that I had just written this book. The panicked look in
students’ eyes—a curious combination of awe and fear—calmed when I told them I wouldn’t be requiring them to
read it that semester. I told them that the process of writing an introductory text helped me immensely in
preparing for the course and that I looked forward to passing on to them the knowledge I had accumulated.
The next day after class, one of the students—a bright-eyed, freshly scrubbed 18-year-old—approached me. The
ensuing conversation would leave a humbling impression that lasts to this day:
Student: Hi. Umm. Professor Newman . . . I called my parents last night to, like, tell them how my first day in
college went. I think they were, like, more nervous than I was. You know how parents can be.
Me: Yes, I sure do. I’m a parent myself, you know.
Student: Yeah, whatever. Anyway, I was telling them about my classes and my professors and stuff. I told them
about this class and how I thought it would be pretty cool. I told them you had written a book. I thought that
would impress them, you know, make it seem like they were getting their money’s worth and everything.
Me: Well, thanks.
Student: So, they go, “What’s the book about?” [He laughs sheepishly.] I told them I really didn’t know, but I’d
find out. So, like, that’s what I’m doing . . . finding out.
Me: Well, I’m glad you asked. You see, it’s an introductory sociology textbook that uses everyday experiences and
phenomena as a way of understanding important sociological theories and ideas. In it I’ve attempted to . . .
Student: [His eyes, which were already glazed over with boredom, suddenly jumped back to life.] Wait, did you
say it was a textbook?
Me: Why, yes. You see the purpose of the book is to provide the reader with a thorough and useful introduction to
the sociological perspective. I want to convey . . .
Student: [Quite embarrassed now] Oh . . . Professor Newman, I’m really sorry. I misunderstood you. I thought you
had written a real book.
Real book. Real book. Real book. Those words rang in my head like some relentless church bell. At first, I tried to
dismiss this comment as the remark of a naïve kid who didn’t know any better. But the more I thought about it,
the more I realized what his comment reflected. The perception that textbooks aren’t real books is widespread.
A couple of years ago, I heard a radio ad for a local Red Cross book drive. The narrator asked listeners to donate
any unused or unwanted books as long as they weren’t textbooks. Yep, that’s what he said. A torn copy of The
Cat in the Hat? Fine, they’ll take it. A grease-stained owner’s manual for a Ford Fusion? Sure, glad to have it. A
2003 guidebook on how to use Myspace? What a lovely addition to the collection. Textbooks? No way!
Sadly, these sorts of perceptions are not altogether undeserved. Textbooks hover on the margins of the literary
world, somewhere between respectable, intellectual monographs on trailblazing research and trashy romance
novels. Traditionally, they’ve been less than titillating: thick, heavy, expensive, and easily discarded for a measly
five bucks at the end-of-semester “book buy-back.”
My goal—from the first edition of this book to the current one—has always been to write a textbook that reads like
a real book. In the previous 11 editions, I tried to capture simultaneously the essence and insight of my discipline
and the reader’s interest. From what reviewers, instructors, and students who’ve read and used the book over the
years have said, I think I’ve been fairly successful. While no Hollywood movie studio has expressed interest in
turning this book into a movie (yet!), people do seem to like the relaxed tone and appreciate the consistent theme
that ties all the chapters together. Many instructors have commented on how the book enables students to truly
understand the unique and useful elements of a sociological perspective. Take that, Red Cross!
Features of the Twelfth Edition
To my sons—who believe that I have nothing important to say about anything anyway—continually revising this
book has always been clear evidence of my incompetence. Back when he was in middle school, my younger son
once asked me, “Why do you keep writing the same book over and over? My English teacher made me rewrite a
book report on To Kill a Mockingbird because I answered some questions wrong. Is that what’s going on here,
Dad? Is your publisher making you write the book again because you made too many mistakes?” I told him no
and that I’d make him read the whole book—cover to cover—if he continued to ask such questions. He stopped . .
. although to this day, he’s still not convinced I have anything useful to say.
Despite his concerns, sociology textbooks do need to be revised regularly and frequently to be of any use. No book
can be of lasting value if it remains static, locked into a particular style and content. So I keep my ears and eyes
open, always looking for some new example or current issue to include in the book. My office overflows with
stacks of books, newspaper clippings, photocopied journal articles, Post-it notes, and shreds of paper napkins
containing scribbled ideas that I write to myself at the breakfast table when I come across something interesting.
I’ve even been known to send myself e-mails at 3:00 in the morning so as not to forget the great idea that came to
me in the haziness between sleep and wakefulness.
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that when revising a book, it’s a lot easier to add new material than it is to
cut out the old stuff. But simply inserting bits and pieces here and there tends to make books fat and unwieldy. So
I’ve tried to streamline this edition wherever possible. I’ve replaced outdated material with new material where
appropriate, revised all the statistical information, condensed or deleted some sections, and changed the order of
others.
Here are some of the specific changes I’ve made to enhance the features that worked so well in the previous
editions.
Updated Examples and Statistical Information
As in the first 11 editions, I’ve peppered each chapter with anecdotes, personal observations, and accounts of
contemporary events that serve as illustrations of the sociological points I’m making. Many of the examples you
will read are taken from today’s news headlines; others come from incidents in my own life.
It would be impossible to write an introduction to the discipline of sociology without accounting for the lifealtering occurrences—wars, natural disasters, school shootings, political upheavals, court decisions, economic
meltdowns, the latest Kardashian escapade—that we hear about every day. So throughout this book, I’ve made a
special effort to provide some sociological insight into well-known contemporary events and trends, both large
and small. In doing so, I intend to show you the pervasiveness and applicability of sociology in our ordinary,
everyday experiences in a way that, I hope, rings familiar with you.
As you will see, it is impossible to understand what happens to us in our personal lives without taking into
consideration broader social and historical phenomena. Several specific recent developments have had—and will
continue to have—a dramatic impact on sociological thought and on people’s everyday lives: the political
changeover brought about by the 2016 election, trends in the global economy, the stream of fatal encounters
between police and unarmed people of color, and the continued dramatic growth of communication technology,
particularly ever-present social networking sites:
As I’m writing this preface, the new Trump administration has been in office for one year. How will it shift
global politics, the course of the nation, and the rhythm of our everyday lives after 8 years of a Democratic
administration?
When the economy suffers (or improves), everyone—from tycoons to unemployed welfare recipients—
experiences some kind of alteration in her or his day-to-day routine. It’s been quite a challenge to keep up
with the most current information on joblessness, hiring trends, home foreclosures, spending patterns, and
so on.
Each new incident of racially or ethically connected violence—whether at the hands of law enforcement,
hate groups, or lone assailants—alters the trajectory of race relations in this country.
And how can we analyze the sociology of everyday life without acknowledging the powerful role online
social networking has had in shaping the way we learn, work, relate to others, and ultimately define
ourselves?
Thus, you will see references to these—and many other—developments throughout the book to illustrate the
interconnections between private life and massive historical occurrences.
I also want to call your attention to the fact that many extended examples of sociological theories and concepts
throughout the book focus on some aspect of health, illness, and medicine. I have done this for two reasons. First
of all, no matter who we are or where we come from, all of us must deal with health matters from time to time.
Our own physical and mental well-being is perhaps the most personal and immediate thing in our lives. At the
same time, whenever we seek medical attention—whether in a doctor’s office, a local pharmacy, or a hospital—or
try to figure out how to pay for it, we enter a massive health care system that can sometimes feel immensely
bureaucratic and impersonal. And as medical costs continue to rise, changes to our health care system—both
proposed and enacted—will dominate economic forecasts, newspaper headlines, and legislative action for years to
come. Second, students taking the Medical College Admissions Test now must take a course in sociology. And so
these health care-related examples will provide such students with applications and illustrations that are directly
relevant to their needs and, hopefully, make them better doctors in the future.
I’ve also tried to provide the most current statistical information possible. I’ve updated all the graphic exhibits and,
in the process, changed some of them from statistical tables to more readable charts and graphs, making trends
and relationships more obvious. Much of the new statistical information is drawn from the most recent data from
sources such as the U.S. Census Bureau, the Population Reference Bureau, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Bureau of
Justice Statistics, and the Pew Research Center.
Updated “Sociologists at Work” and “Micro-Macro Connections”
In the previous 11 editions, I provided many in-depth features that focused either on a specific piece of
sociological research or on some issue that illustrates the connection between the everyday lives of individuals
and the structure of their society. These extended discussions link social institutions to personal experiences and
provide insight into the methods sociologists use to gather information and draw conclusions about how our world
works.
Instructors and students alike have found these features very useful in generating classroom discussion. The
features that I’ve thoroughly updated from previous editions focus on topics such as suicide, the vocabulary of
war, family privacy, smartphone usage, cultural influence on emotions, children’s toys, dual-earner households,
clergy sexual abuse, the cultural impact of antidepressants, same-sex marriage, the global health divide, interracial
identity, residential segregation, racial mistrust of medical research, sexual harassment in the military, dangerous
media images of eating disorders, intergenerational conflict, and the shifting politics of immigration. In addition,
I’ve also added a few new features on the effect of clothing on the way we think, the mismatch between
perceptions and the reality of wealth inequality, cultural appropriation of race and ethnicity, and online privacy.
Teaching Resources and Website to Accompany the Book and
Companion Reader
SAGE edgeTM edge.sagepub.com/newman12e
SAGE edge offers a robust online environment you can access anytime, anywhere, and features an impressive
array of free tools and resources to keep you on the cutting edge of your learning experience.
SAGE edge for Students provides a personalized approach to help students accomplish their coursework goals in
an easy-to-use learning environment.
Mobile-friendly eFlashcards strengthen understanding of key terms and concepts
Mobile-friendly practice quizzes allow for independent assessment by students of their mastery of course
material
Video and multimedia content that enhances student engagement and appeals to different learning styles
EXCLUSIVE! Access to full-text SAGE journal articles that have been carefully selected to support and
expand on the concepts presented in each chapter
SAGE edge for Instructors supports teaching by making it easy to integrate quality content and create a rich
learning environment for students.
Test banks provide a diverse range of prewritten options as well as the opportunity to edit any question
and/or insert personalized questions to effectively assess students’ progress and understanding
Editable, chapter-specific PowerPoint® slides offer complete flexibility for creating a multimedia
presentation for the course
EXCLUSIVE! Access to full-text SAGE journal articles have been carefully selected to support and
expand on the concepts presented in each chapter to encourage students to think critically
Video and multimedia links include original SAGE videos that appeal to students with different learning
styles
Lively and stimulating chapter activities can be used in class to reinforce active learning. The activities
apply to individual or group projects.
A course cartridge provides easy LMS integration
A Word About the “Architecture of Everyday Life”
I chose the image of architecture in the subtitle to convey one of the driving themes of this book: Society is a
human construction. It is not “out there” somewhere, waiting to be visited and examined. It exists in the minute
details of our day-to-day lives. Whenever we follow its rules or break them, enter its roles or shed them, work to
change things or keep them as they are, we are adding another nail, plank, or frame to the structure of our society.
In short, society—like the buildings around us—couldn’t exist were it not for the actions of people.
At the same time, however, this structure that we have created appears to exist independently of us. We don’t
usually spend much time thinking about the buildings we live, work, and play in as human constructions. We see
them as finished products, not as the processes that created them. Only when something goes wrong—the pipes
leak or the walls crack—do we realize that people made these structures and people are the ones who must fix
them. When buildings outlive their usefulness or become dangerous to their inhabitants, people must renovate
them or, if necessary, tear them down.
Likewise, society is so massive and has been around for so long that it appears to stand on its own, at a level
above and beyond the toiling hands of individual people. But here, too, when things begin to go wrong—
widespread discrimination, environmental degradation, massive poverty, lack of affordable health care, escalating
crime rates—people must do something about it.
So the fascinating paradox of human life is that we build society, collectively “forget” that we’ve built it, and live
under its massive and influential structure. But we are not stuck with society as it is. Human beings are the
architects of their own social reality. Throughout this book, I examine the active roles individuals play in
designing, building, maintaining, renovating, or tearing down society.
A Final Thought
One of the greatest challenges I have faced in three decades of teaching sociology is trying to get my students to
see the personal relevance of the course material, to fully appreciate the connection between the individual and
society. The true value of sociology lies in its unique ability to show the two-way connection between the most
private elements of our lives—our characteristics, experiences, behaviors, and thoughts—and the cultures, groups,
organizations, and social institutions to which we belong. The “everyday life” approach in this book uses realworld examples and personal observations as a vehicle for understanding the relationship between individuals and
society.
My purpose is to make the familiar unfamiliar—to help you critically examine the commonplace and the ordinary
in your own life. Only when you step back and examine the taken-for-granted aspects of your personal
experiences can you see that there is an inherent, sometimes unrecognized organization and predictability to them.
At the same time, you will see that the structure of society is greater than the sum of the experiences and
psychologies of the individuals in it.
It is my conviction that this intellectual excursion should be a thought-provoking and enjoyable one. Reading a
textbook doesn’t have to be boring or, even worse, the academic equivalent of a painful trip to the dentist
(although I personally have nothing against dentists). I believe that one of my responsibilities as a teacher is to
provide my students with a challenging but comfortable classroom atmosphere in which to learn. I have tried to do
the same in this book. Your instructor has chosen this book not because it makes his or her job teaching your
course any easier but because he or she wants you, the student, to see how sociology helps us to understand how
the small, private experiences of our everyday lives are connected to this thing we call society. I hope you learn to
appreciate this important message, and I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Have fun,
David M. Newman
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
E-mail: dnewman@depauw.edu
Acknowledgments
A book project such as this one takes an enormous amount of time to develop. Over the span of 12 editions, I’ve
spent thousands of hours on this book—typing away at my computer, endlessly searching the web, fretting over
what I should and shouldn’t include, proofreading for mistakes—either holed up in my isolated and very cluttered
third-floor office or tucked away in the quiet corner of a library. Yet as solitary as this project was, I could not
have done it alone. Over the years, many people have provided invaluable assistance to make this book a reality.
Without their generous help and support, it wouldn’t have been written, and you’d be reading some other
sociologist’s list of people to thank. Because I have revised rather than rewritten this book, I remain indebted to
those who have helped me at some point during the writing of all 12 editions.
First, I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the former publisher and president of Pine Forge Press, Steve Rutter.
More than two decades ago, when I was a brand new (and naïve) author, he pushed, prodded, and cajoled me into
exceeding my expectations and overachieving. The numerous suggestions he offered on the early editions of this
book made it a better one. Likewise, my former editor, Becky Smith, must be thanked for helping me through the
maze of details and difficulties that cropped up during the many previous versions of this book. Even though she
no longer edits my books, hers is the grammar-correcting, thesaurus-wielding voice in my head whenever I write.
As for this edition, I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to Jeff Lasser, Adeline Wilson, and Nevair
Kabakian at SAGE for their insight and guidance in putting together this newest edition. Having already written
eleven editions of this book, I was definitely an old dog with absolutely no desire to learn any new tricks when
these individuals became involved. To their credit, they let me write as I have always written. For their trust, I am
eternally grateful.
I would also like to express my thanks to Jamie Chapman for creating the student study site materials and
instructor teaching resources.
As always, I appreciate the many helpful comments offered by the reviewers of the 12 editions of this book:
Sharon Abbott, Fairfield University
Deborah Abowitz, Bucknell University
Stephen Adair, Central Connecticut State University
Rebecca Adams, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Ron Aminzade, University of Minnesota
Afroza Anwary, Carleton College
George Arquitt, Oklahoma State University
Carol Auster, Franklin and Marshall College
Ellen C. Baird, Arizona State University
Ellen Berg, California State University, Sacramento
Mildred Biaku, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Michael G. Bisciglia, Southeastern Louisiana University
David Bogen, Emerson College
Frances A. Boudreau, Connecticut College
David L. Briscoe, University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Todd Campbell, Loyola University, Chicago
Wanda Clark, South Plains College
Thomas Conroy, St. Peter’s College
Norman Conti, Duquesne University
Maia Greenwell Cunningham, Citrus College
Doug Currivan, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Karen Dalke, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay
Jeff Davidson, University of Delaware
Kimberly Davies, Augusta State University
Tricia Davis, North Carolina State University
Michelle Deming, University of South Carolina
James J. Dowd, University of Georgia, Athens
Laura A. Dowd, University of Georgia, Athens
Charlotte A. Dunham, Texas Tech University
Donald Eckard, Temple University
Charles Edgley, Oklahoma State University
Rachel Einhower, Purdue University
June Ellestad, Washington State University
Shalom Endleman, Quinnipiac College
Rebecca Erickson, University of Akron
Kimberly Faust, Winthrop University
Patrick Fontane, St. Louis College of Pharmacy
Michael J. Fraleigh, Bryant University
Volker Frank, University of North Carolina, Asheville
Sarah N. Gaston, Texas A&M University
Farah Gilanshah, University of Minnesota–Morris
Barry Goetz, University of Dayton
Lorie Schabo Grabowski, University of Minnesota
Valerie Gunter, University of New Orleans
Roger Guy, Texas Lutheran University
John R. Hall, University of California, Davis
Charles Harper, Creighton University
Douglas Harper, Duquesne University
Tara Hardinge, California State University, Long Beach
Lori Heald, East Carolina University
Peter Hennen, University of Minnesota
Max Herman, Rutgers University
Cynthia Hewitt, Morehouse College
Christine L. Himes, Syracuse University
Susan Hoerbelt, Hillsborough Community College
Amy Holzgang, Cerritos College
Kate Hovey, Central New Mexico Community College
W. Jay Hughes, Georgia Southern University
Gary Hytreck, Georgia Southern University
Valerie Jenness, University of California, Irvine
Kimberly Johanek, Boise State
Kathryn Johnson, Barat College
Richard Jones, Marquette University
Tom Kando, California State University, Sacramento
Steve Keto, Kent State University
Peter Kivisto, Augustana College
Lisa Konczal, Barry University
Marc LaFountain, State University of West Georgia
Sharon Melissa Latimer, West Virginia University
Joseph Lengermann, University of Maryland, College Park
Linda A. Litteral, Grossmont Community College
Julie L. Locher, University of Alabama at Birmingham
David G. LoConto, Jacksonville State University
David A. Lopez, California State University, Northridge
Fred Maher, Temple University
Kristen Marcussen, University of Iowa
Benjamin Mariante, Stonehill College
Joseph Marolla, Virginia Commonwealth University
Michallene McDaniel, University of Georgia
James R. McIntosh, Lehigh University
Jerome McKibben, Fitchburg State University
Ted P. McNeilsmith, Adams State College
Dan Miller, University of Dayton
Melinda Milligan, Sonoma State University
John R. Mitrano, Central Connecticut State University
Susannne Monahan, Montana State University
Harvest Moon, The University of Texas at Arlington
Kelly Murphy, University of Pittsburgh
Elizabeth Ehrhardt Mustaine, University of Central Florida
Daniel Myers, University of Notre Dame
Anne Nurse, College of Wooster
Marjukka Ollilainen, Weber State University
Toska Olson, Evergreen State College
Liza A. Pellerin, Ball State University
Larry Perkins, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater
Bernice Pescosolido, Indiana University, Bloomington
Mike Plummer, Boston College
Edward Ponczek, William Rainey Harper College
Tanya Poteet, Capital University
Sharon E. Preves, Grand Valley State University
Kennon J. Rice, North Carolina State University
Judith Richlin-Klonsky, University of California, Los Angeles
Robert Robinson, Indiana University, Bloomington
Mary Rogers, University of West Florida
Sally S. Rogers, Montgomery College
Wanda Rushing, University of Memphis
Michael Ryan, University of Louisiana, Lafayette
Scott Schaffer, Millersville University
Aileen Schulte, State University of New York, New Paltz
Dave Schweingruber, Iowa State University
Mark Shibley, Southern Oregon University
Thomas Shriver, Oklahoma State University
Toni Sims, University of Louisiana, Lafayette
Kathleen Slevin, College of William and Mary
Melissa Sloan, Drew University
Lisa White Smith, Christopher Newport University
Eldon E. Snyder, Bowling Green State University
Nicholas Sofios, Providence College
George Spilker, Clarkson College
Melanie Stander, University of Washington
Beverly Stiles, Midwestern State University
Kandi Stinson, Xavier University
Richard Tardanico, Florida International University
Robert Tellander, Sonoma State University
Kathleen Tiemann, University of North Dakota
Steven Vallas, George Mason University
Tom Vander Ven, Indiana University, South Bend
John Walsh, University of Illinois, Chicago
Gregory Weiss, Roanoke College
Marty Wenglinski, Quinnipiac College
Stephan Werba, Catonsville Community College
Cheryl E. Whitley, Marist College
Norma Williams, University of North Texas
Janelle Wilson, University of Minnesota, Duluth
Mark Winton, University of Central Florida
Judith Wittner, Loyola University, Chicago
Cynthia A. Woolever, Hartford Seminary
Don C. Yost, Mountain State University
Ashraf Zahedi, Stanford University
Stephen Zehr, University of Southern Indiana
I also want to express my appreciation to the many colleagues, students, and friends who have offered cherished
assistance throughout the production of all 12 editions of this book and have put up with my incessant whining
about how hard it all was. Some offered bits of advice on specific topics; others provided general support and
encouragement, which helped me retain my sanity. Jodi O’Brien, after close to 30 years of friendship and more
than a decade of coediting, continues to graciously remind me that there’s more to life than writing a book. And
I’d also like to acknowledge the library staffs at my school, DePauw University, and at Bates College in Maine,
where I spent many hours over the summers putting the final touches on this book.
I’m pleased to express deep gratitude to my sons, Zach and Seth, my new baby daughter, Hazel, and my students,
who, over the years, have kept me curious and prevented me from taking myself too seriously. And finally, my
deepest thanks must go to my wife, Rebecca Upton, whose love, eternal optimism, kind support, and unwavering
confidence consistently inspire me to push beyond my intellectual limitations, and to C. Mokolodi Underfoot,
whose crooked grin and wagging tail never fail to brighten my day.
About the Author
David M. Newman
earned his BA from San Diego State University in 1981 and his graduate degrees from the University of
Washington in Seattle (MA 1984, PhD 1988). After a year at the University of Connecticut, David came to
DePauw University in 1989 and has been there ever since. David teaches courses in Contemporary Society,
Deviance, Mental Illness, Family, Social Psychology, and Research Methods. He has published numerous
articles on teaching and has presented research papers on the intersection of gender and power in intimate
relationships. Recently most of his scholarly activity has been devoted to writing and revising several
books, including Sociology: Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life: Brief Edition (Sage, 2017);
Identities and Inequalities: Exploring the Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality (McGrawHill, 2017); and Families: A Sociological Perspective (McGraw-Hill, 2009). His most recent book,
Redemption or Stigma? The Promise, Practice and Price of Second Chances in American Culture
(Lexington Books), is projected to be published in 2019. It examines the cultural meaning, institutional
importance, and social limitations of “second chance” and “permanent stigma” narratives in everyday life.
Part 1 The Individual and Society
What is the relationship between your private life and the social world around you? Part I introduces you to the
guiding theme of this book: Our personal, everyday experiences affect and are affected by the larger society in
which we live. In Chapters 1 and 2 I discuss the sociological perspective on human life and the ways in which it
differs from the more individualistic approaches of psychology and biology. You will read about what society
consists of and get a glimpse into sociologists’ attempts to understand the two-way relationship between the
individual and society.
As you read on, keep in mind a metaphor that will be used throughout the book to help explain the nature of
society: architecture. Like buildings, societies have a design discernible to the alert eye. Both are constructed by
bringing together a wide variety of materials in a complex process. Both, through their structure, shape the
activities within. At the same time, both change. Sometimes they change subtly and gradually as the inhabitants
go about their lives; other times they are deliberately redecorated or remodeled. As you make your way through
this book, see if you can discover more ways in which buildings and societies are alike.
1 Taking a New Look at a Familiar World
■ Sociology and the Individual
■ The Insights of Sociology
■ The Sociological Imagination
André graduated from college in 2017. He had been a model student. When not studying, he found time to help kids read at
the local elementary school and actively participated in student government at his own school. He got along well with his
professors, his grades were excellent, he made the dean’s list all 4 years, and he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. As a computer
science major with a minor in economics, André thought his future was set: He would land a job at a top software company
or perhaps a stock brokerage firm and work his way up the ladder so that he’d be earning a six-figure income by the time he
was 30.
But when André entered the job market and began applying for jobs, things didn’t go exactly according to plan. Despite his
credentials, nobody seemed willing to hire him full time. He was able to survive by taking temporary freelance programming
jobs here and there and working nights at the Gap. Although most of his classmates had similar difficulties finding jobs,
André began to question his own abilities: “Do I lack the skills employers are looking for? Am I not trying hard enough?
What the heck is wrong with me?” His friends and family were as encouraging as they could be, but some secretly wondered
if André wasn’t as smart as they’d thought he was.
Michael and Louise were both juniors at a large university. They had been dating each other exclusively for the past 2 years.
By all accounts, the relationship seemed to be going quite well. In fact, Michael was beginning to think about marriage,
children, and living happily ever after. Then one day out of the blue, Louise dropped a bombshell. She texted Michael that
she thought their relationship was going nowhere and perhaps they ought to start seeing other people.
Michael was stunned. “What did I do?” he asked her. “I thought things were going great. Is it something I said? Something I
did? Tell me. I can change.”
She said no, he hadn’t done anything wrong; they had simply grown apart. She told him she just didn’t feel as strongly about
him as she used to.
Even though he let his friends talk him into immediately changing his relationship status on Facebook, Michael was
devastated. They tried to comfort him. “She wasn’t any good for you anyway,” they said. “We always thought she was a
little creepy. She probably couldn’t be in a serious relationship with anybody. It wasn’t your fault; it was hers.”
In both of these stories, notice how people immediately try to explain an unfortunate situation by focusing on the personal
characteristics and attributes of the individuals involved. André blames himself for not being able to land a job in his field;
others, although supportive, harbor doubts about his intelligence and drive. Michael wonders what he did to sour his
relationship with Louise; his friends question Louise’s psychological stability. Such reactions are not uncommon. We have a
marked tendency to rely on individualistic explanations, attributing people’s achievements and disappointments to their
personal qualities.
So why can’t André, our highly intelligent, well-trained, talented college graduate, land a permanent job in his field? It’s
certainly possible that he has some personal flaw that makes him unemployable: lack of motivation, laziness, negative
attitude, bad hygiene, a snooty demeanor, and so on. Or maybe he just doesn’t come across as particularly smart during job
interviews.
But by focusing exclusively on such individual “deficiencies,” we risk overlooking the broader societal factors that may have
affected André’s job prospects. For instance, the employment situation for college graduates like André was part of a broader
economic trend that began with the global financial crisis of 2008 and continued to suppress the job market by the time he
got his degree. At the time I was writing this chapter, 4.1% of American adults (about 7 million people) were officially
unemployed and about a quarter of them had been unemployed for at least 27 weeks. Incidentally, the official unemployment
rate only counts people who have been actively seeking employment for the past month. Thus it doesn’t include the 5.3
million people who were employed part time even though they wanted to work full time, the 1.6 million “marginally
attached” unemployed people who had looked for a job sometime in the past year (just not in the past month), and the
514,000 so-called “discouraged” workers who had lost hope and given up looking for employment (U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics, 2017c). So you see, even though the unemployment rate is lower than it was, say 10 years ago, a lot of people
remain in André’s boat.
But he’s got a college education. That should help, right? Well, it turns out that college degrees are not necessarily a
guarantee of fruitful employment. Even though the economy has been steadily improving over the past decade, the
unemployment rate for recent college graduates has remained fairly stable: 5.6% today compared with 5.5% in 2007 (the
year prior to the Great Recession). To put it another way, in 2000, 38% of college graduates between the ages of 22 and 27
were underemployed (that is, working in jobs that didn’t require a college degree); by 2016, that figure increased to over
45%. In addition, less than 30% of employed college graduates work in a job that provides retirement or pension benefits.
And 1 out of 10 recent college graduates is neither employed nor pursuing more education in graduate or professional school
(Kroeger, Cooke, & Gould, 2016).
New graduates do fare better than other young people who don’t have college degrees (Pew Charitable Trusts, 2013). For
instance, college graduates earn 98% more per hour on average than people without a degree (cited in Leonhardt, 2014).
However, the average starting salary for college graduates has stagnated in recent years. In fact, since 2000, the wages of
young college graduates has actually dropped by 7.7% (Shierholz, Davis, & Kimball, 2014). To make money matters worse,
the average 2016 college graduate has $37,172 in student loan debt, up 6% from the previous year (Student Loan Hero,
2017).
In addition, their future outlook may not be so great. In a survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and
Employers (2016), only about 5% of employers indicate that they intend to hire more college graduates than they did the
previous year; a third said they intend to hire fewer graduates. Indeed, according to some economists, for the next 10 to 15
years, recent graduates will probably earn less and have more bouts of unemployment than if they had graduated at a time
when jobs were more plentiful (Kroeger, Cooke, & Gould, 2016).
So you see, André’s employability and his chances of earning a good living were as much a result of the economic forces
operating at the time he began looking for a job as of any of his personal qualifications. Had he graduated only 5 years earlier
—when the unemployment rate hovered around 10%—his job prospects would have been much worse. But had he graduated
5 years later—when employment opportunities are projected to improve even more for graduates in his field—his prospects
would have been much brighter.
And what about Michael and Louise? It seems perfectly reasonable to conclude that something about either of them or the
combination of the two caused their breakup. We tend to view dating relationships—not to mention marriages—as successes
or failures based solely on the traits or behaviors of the two people involved.
But how would your assessment of the situation change if you found out that Lee—to whom Louise had always been secretly
attracted—had just broken up with his longtime girlfriend, Julie, and was now available? Like it or not, relationships are not
exclusively private entities; they’re always being influenced by forces beyond our control. They take place within a larger
network of friends, acquaintances, ex-partners, coworkers, fellow students, and people as yet unknown who may make
desirable or, at the very least, acceptable dating partners. On Facebook, people routinely post up-to-the-minute changes in the
status of their relationships, thereby instantaneously advertising shifts in their availability.
When people believe they have no better alternative, they tend to stay with their present partners, even if they are not
particularly satisfied. When people think that better relationships are available to them, they may become less committed to
staying in their present ones. Indeed, people’s perceptions of what characterizes a good relationship (such as fairness,
compatibility, affection) are less likely to determine when and if it ends than the presence or absence of favorable
alternatives (Felmlee, Sprecher, & Bassin, 1990). Research shows that the risk of a relationship ending increases as the
supply of potential alternative relationships increases (South & Lloyd, 1995).
In addition, Louise’s decision to leave could have been indirectly affected by the sheer number of potentially obtainable
partners—a result of shifts in the birthrate 20 years or so earlier. Today, there are roughly 126 U.S. men between 25 and 34
who are single, divorced, or widowed for every 100 women in the same categories (K. Parker, Wang, & Rohal, 2014). For a
single, heterosexual woman like Louise, such a surplus of college-age men increases the likelihood that she would eventually
find a better alternative to Michael. Fifty years ago, however, when there were 180 single men for every 100 single women,
her chances would have been even better. The number of available alternatives can also vary geographically. For instance,
Michael’s prospects would improve if he were living in Auburn, Maine, where there are 81 unmarried men for every 100
unmarried women, but his chances would sink if he lived in Mansfield, Ohio, where there are 215 unmarried men for every
100 unmarried women (Pew Research Social and Demographic Trends, 2014). In sum, Michael’s interpersonal value, and
therefore the stability of his relationship with Louise, may have suffered not because of anything he did but because of
population forces over which he had little, if any, control.
Let’s take this notion beyond Louise and Michael’s immediate dating network. For instance, the very characteristics and
features that people consider desirable (or undesirable) in the first place reflect the values of the larger culture in which they
live. Fashions and tastes are constantly changing, making particular characteristics (e.g., hairstyle, physique, clothing),
behaviors (smoking, drinking, sharing feelings), or life choices (educational attainment, occupation, political affiliation)
more or less attractive. And broad economic forces can affect intimate choices even further. In China, where there are about
41 million more unmarried young men than women (Tsai, 2012a), single women can be especially choosy when it comes to
romantic partners, often requiring that suitors be employed and own their own homes before they’ll even consider them for a
date (Jacobs, 2011).
The moral of these two stories is simple: To understand experiences in our personal lives, we must move past individual traits
and examine broader societal characteristics and trends. External features beyond our immediate awareness and control often
exert as much influence on the circumstances of our day-to-day lives as our “internal” qualities. We can’t begin to explain an
individual’s employability without examining current and past economic trends that affect the number of jobs available and
the number of people who are looking for work. We can’t begin to explain why relationships work or don’t work without
addressing the broader interpersonal network and culture in which they are embedded. By the same token, we can’t begin to
explain people’s ordinary, everyday thoughts and actions without examining the social forces that influence them.
Sociology and the Individual
Herein lies the fundamental theme of sociology—the systematic study of human societies—and the theme that will guide us
throughout this book: Everyday social life—our thoughts, actions, feelings, decisions, interactions, and so on—is the product
of a complex interplay between societal forces and personal characteristics. To explain why people are the way they are,
believe the things they believe, or do the things they do, we must understand the interpersonal, historical, cultural,
technological, organizational, and global environments they inhabit. To understand either individuals or society, we must
understand both (C. W. Mills, 1959).
Of course, seeing the relationship between individuals and social forces is not always so easy. The United States is a society
built on the image of the rugged, self-reliant individual. Not surprisingly, it is also a society dominated by individualistic
understandings of human behavior that seek to explain problems and processes by focusing exclusively on the character, the
psychology, or even the biochemistry of each person. Consequently, most of us simply take for granted that what we choose
to do, say, feel, and think are private phenomena. Everyday life seems to be a series of free personal choices. After all, we
choose what to major in, what to wear when we go out, what and when to eat, who our mates will be, and so on.
But how free are these decisions? Think about all the times your actions have been dictated or at least influenced by social
circumstances over which you had little control. Have you ever felt that because of your age or gender or race, certain
opportunities were closed to you? Your ability to legally drive a car, drink alcohol, or vote, for instance, is determined by
society’s prevailing definition of age. When you’re older, you may be forced into retirement despite your skills and desire to
continue working. Gender profoundly affects your choices, too. Some occupations, such as bank executive and engineer, are
still overwhelmingly male, whereas others, such as registered nurse and preschool teacher, are almost exclusively female.
Likewise, the doctrines of your religion may limit your behavioral choices. For a devout Catholic, premarital sex or even
divorce is unlikely. Each day during the holy month of Ramadan, a strict Muslim must abstain from food and drink from
sunrise to sunset. An Orthodox Jew would never dream of drinking milk and eating meat at the same meal. Even universal
bodily needs can be influenced by our social context.
Micro-Macro Connection: A Sociology of Sleep
Everybody sleeps. Indeed, at certain moments in our lives—when we’ve pulled an all-nighter studying for finals, when we’re sick, when we
become new parents—sleep may be the most all-encompassing preoccupation we have. Indeed, one of the major ailments of modern life is
lack of sleep. According to one poll, nearly two thirds of Americans complain that they don’t get enough sleep. In the United States alone,
there are over 2,000 sleep clinics to treat people’s sleep problems. “Fatigue management” is now a growing therapeutic field (cited in Kolbert,
2013).
Sleep is obviously experienced differently by different individuals. I’m sure you know people who say they can’t function on less than 10
hours of sleep a night while others say they’re wide-awake and perky on just four.
But sleep preferences are not just a matter of individual adaptation. Children, for example, typically require much more sleep than adults,
especially in their first several years of life. Even here, though, individual needs can be overridden by broader social concerns. A major
accomplishment of parenting is getting children to fit their sleeping patterns into the parents’ schedule. “My baby slept through the night last
night!!” is a celebratory exclamation all new parents long to shout. But it’s not always easy. What parent hasn’t experienced the struggle of
trying to get a fussy baby or combative toddler to sleep at night? But parent-child conflict over sleep never completely disappears. Try waking
up a surly teenager on a school day morning sometime. Incidentally, the problem of dozy teenagers has become so bad that the American
Academy of Pediatrics (2014) recently issued a policy statement recommending a later start of the school day in middle and high school so
that teens can get enough sleep at night.
According to sociologist Simon Williams (2011), sleep is “a window onto the social world” (p. 27). How, when, where, how much, and with
whom we sleep is always a product of social, cultural, historical, and even economic forces. For homeless people on the streets of Delhi, India,
for instance, finding some way and somewhere to sleep is a nightly struggle:
The bicycle rickshaw pullers . . . fold their bodies into strange angles on the four-foot seats of their vehicles. The day laborers curl
their bodies on the frigid sidewalk, sometimes spooned against other men for warmth (E. Barry, 2016, p. A6).
With so many people in such desperate need of sleep, dishonest vendors—what the locals call the “sleep mafia”—sell filthy blankets to those
who can scarcely afford food, jacking up their prices when the temperature drops. Essentially, these individuals decide who sleeps where, how
well they sleep, and for how long.
All societies must organize the sleep of their members in some way. Think about when and where it’s appropriate to sleep. At night? In the
privacy of your own home? Of course. American adults are expected to go to sleep somewhere around 11:00 at night and wake up around 7:00
in the morning—what one anthropologist refers to as “consolidated sleeping” (Wolf-Meyer, 2012). Anything else—“sleeping during the day,
sleeping in bursts, waking up in the middle of the night”—is considered unsound, even abnormal and perhaps subject to some kind of
therapeutic intervention (Kolbert, 2013, p. 25).
At times, going without sleep can be worn as a boastful badge of honor or pride. “If you snooze, you lose,” “I’ll have time to sleep when I’m
dead,” and all that. But this clearly can be taken too far. “Drowsiness . . . is increasingly regarded as the new drunkenness: a culpable state,
since, we are every bit as dangerous behind the wheel when we’re drowsy as when we are drunk” (S. Williams, 2011, pp. 27–28). Indeed, the
U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that “driving while drowsy” causes 40,000 injuries and over 1,500 deaths a year on U.S. roads
(cited in Kolbert, 2013).
We tend to believe that “lying unconscious for eight hours straight [belongs] to a natural order” (Barron, 2016, p. 27). But the “8 hours of sleep
a night” ideal has not always characterized people’s lives. Up until the mid-19th century, it was common for people to sleep in segments
throughout the day. They may have gone to bed in the later afternoon or early evening, slept for several hours, woken up and engaged in a few
hours of activity—what the French referred to as dorveille, or “wakesleep”—then gone to bed for a “second sleep.” In some societies, periods
of daytime sleep are a common part of the culture. The siesta in some Mediterranean countries and the midday rest in some Asian societies are
held as acceptable, even valued, practices.
However, such a pattern was not (and today is not) conducive to a complex, global world that hinges on employment and profit. For years, the
taken-for-granted 9 to 5 workday and Monday through Friday workweek have had a significant impact on how we divide and define time.
Most of us can easily make distinctions between workdays and non-workdays (holidays and weekends); between work hours and rest hours.
And it’s pretty clear in which of these times sleep is considered appropriate.
Yet the boundary between work (wakefulness) and home (sleep) is not always so clear. In certain occupations that involve the operation of
heavy machinery—like long-distance truckers, train conductors, and airplane pilots—tired workers pose obvious safety hazards. Hence they
have mandatory downtime policies and work hour limitations. But as the pace of life has sped up, even office-based, non-manual occupations
are facing the problem of worker fatigue due to lack of sleep. It’s estimated that drowsiness costs the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of
dollars each year in higher stress and lost productivity (Baxter & Kroll-Smith, 2005). One third of respondents in one poll indicated that they’d
fallen asleep at work in the previous month (National Sleep Foundation, 2008).
Some sociologists have argued that recent changes in the workplace—flexible schedules, telecommuting, home-based work—have begun to
blur the time-honored boundaries between public and private, work and home, and given rise to shifting conceptions of sleep. In particular,
they cite the greater acceptability of the workplace nap as evidence of changing attitudes toward sleep and wakefulness: “Once a taboo act
engaged in by those who knew they were violating company rules, workplace napping is emerging, albeit unevenly, in American work culture
as a tolerated, if not prescribed, behavior” (Baxter & Kroll-Smith, 2005, p. 34). More and more companies have come to the conclusion that
restorative naps are a relatively cheap solution to the problem of excessive drowsiness. Many now provide nap rooms (or serenity rooms) for
their employees, where they can find comfortable sofas, soothing lighting, and enforced bans on tablet and smartphone usage.
I don’t think we’re yet to the point where all American employees will have opportunities to take periodic power naps at work. We’re not in
danger of becoming a siesta culture anytime soon. However, I hope you can now see that “the very places, spaces [and] schedules . . . of sleep
are themselves deeply social, cultural, historical, and political matters—and potentially subject to contestation and change” (S. Williams,
2011, p. 31). Even in something so natural as sleep, society interacts with the individual to shape the experience.
Then there’s the matter of personal style—your choices in hairstyle, dress, music, videos, and the like. Large-scale marketing
strategies can actually create a demand for particular products or images. Your tastes, and therefore your choices as a
consumer, are often influenced by decisions made in far-off corporate boardrooms. Would Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran,
Taylor Swift, or Zayn have become so popular without a tightly managed and slickly packaged publicity program designed
to appeal to adolescents and preadolescents? One California company, called Jukin Media, is the leader in a new industry
that determines whether or not your web video will go viral. Once its researchers determine that a video of, say, a baby
tasting lemons for the first time or dogs and parakeets becoming friends is good enough, the company contacts the clip’s
owner and purchases the licensing rights. Then it’s just a matter of time before the video is splashed all over the Internet,
becoming what millions of us think is the month’s hot new meme (Kelles, 2017).
National and international economic trends also affect your everyday life. You may lose your job or, like André, face a tight
job market as a result of economic fluctuations brought about by increased global competition or a severe recession. Or,
because of the rapid development of certain types of technology, the college degree that may be your ticket to a rewarding
career today may not qualify you even for a low-paying, entry-level position 10 years from now. In one poll, 75% of young
adults who dropped out of college cited the financial need to work full time as the principal reason why it would be hard for
them to go back to school (Lewin, 2009). And if you finish your degree but don’t get a good job right out of college, you
may have to move back home—like one third of people in their 20s and 30s these days (Fry, 2016a)—and live there for years
after you graduate, not because you can’t face the idea of living apart from your beloved parents but because you can’t earn
enough money to support yourself. In fact, by 2014, for the first time in 130 years, more adults in this age group were living
with their parents than were living with a spouse or partner in their own household. If you think this is troubling, consider
what it’s like in Slovakia where 74% of 18- to 34-year-olds live with their parents, regardless of employment or marital
status (Lyman, 2015).
Government and politics affect our personal lives, too. A political decision made at the local, regional, national, or even
international level may result in the closing of a government agency you depend on, make the goods and services to which
you have grown accustomed either more expensive or less available, or reduce the size of your paycheck after taxes are taken
out. Workplace family-leave policies or health insurance regulations established by the government may affect your decision
whether and when to have a baby or to undergo the elective surgery you’ve been putting off. If you are gay, lesbian,
bisexual, or transgender, the federal and state governments can determine whether or not you can be fired from your job
simply because of your sexual orientation. In the United States, decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court can increase or
limit your ability to control your fertility, sue an employer for discrimination, use your property however you please, carry a
concealed weapon in public, legally marry, or keep the details of your life a private matter.
People’s personal lives can also be touched by events that occur in distant countries:
In 2011, a massive earthquake and deadly tsunami crippled many Japanese companies that manufacture car parts,
resulting in a drop in automobile production in U.S. plants. That same year, violent protests in Arab countries like
Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen sparked fears of reduced oil imports and drove U.S. gasoline prices up over $4.00 a
gallon.
In the fall of 2014, an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in several West African countries grabbed the world’s
attention. There were over 20,000 documented cases in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone and about 8,000 deaths. In
the United States, there have been 4 cases and 1 death (Centers for Disease Control, 2015b). But even though the risk
of contracting this disease in the United States is exceedingly low, one fifth of Americans worry about getting it
(Gallup, 2014). Immediately following the outbreak in West Africa, the Department of Homeland Security
implemented travel restrictions to these countries and imposed elevated screening for passengers arriving from them.
Anxieties grew. A train station in Dallas was shut down when a passenger was reported to have vomited on the
platform. A cruise ship was blocked from docking in Mexico because a passenger worked in the Texas hospital where
an Ebola patient died. Schools were shut down when it was suspected that an employee might have been on the same
plane as an Ebola patient. Experts feared that the entire international business travel industry could suffer huge
financial losses (Sharkey, 2014).
Similarly, in 2016, fear of the Zika outbreak—a virus that has been linked in several Latin American countries to
babies born with microcephaly (a severe reduction in the size of a child’s head)—affected some U.S. women’s
decisions to become pregnant. Some people in Florida, where there had been some reports of Zika cases, were simply
too afraid to leave their homes.
Between 2015 and 2017, ISIS attacks killed several hundred people in Paris, Brussels, Istanbul, London, and other
places across Europe. Following each attack, many cities in the United States heightened police security in popular
public venues. In fact, terrorist attacks in foreign countries routinely result in travel restrictions and increased safety
measures here.
In June 2016, voters in the United Kingdom voted to withdraw from the European Union. Even though the actual
withdrawal (known as “Brexit”) will take years, the fallout of the decision was being assessed around the world within
hours of the vote. Stock markets worldwide suffered as fear of global economic calamity spread.
These are only some of the ways in which events in the larger world can affect individual lives. Can you think of others?
The Insights of Sociology
Sociologists do not deny that individuals make choices or that they must take personal responsibility for those choices. But
they are quick to point out that we cannot fully understand the things happening in our lives, private and personal though
they may be, without examining the influence of the people, events, and societal features that surround us. By showing how
social processes can shape us, and how individual action can in turn affect those processes, sociology provides unique insight
into the taken-for-granted personal events and the large-scale cultural and global processes that make up our everyday
existence.
Other disciplines study human life, too. Biologists study how the body works. Neurologists examine what goes on inside the
brain. Psychologists study what goes on inside the mind to create human behavior. These disciplines focus almost
exclusively on structures and processes that reside within the individual. In contrast, sociologists study what goes on among
people as individuals, groups, or societies. How do social forces affect the way people interact with one another? How do
individuals make sense of their private lives and the social worlds they occupy? How does everyday social interaction create
“society”?
Personal issues like love, sexuality, poverty, aging, and prejudice are better understood within the appropriate societal
context. For instance, U.S. adults tend to believe that they marry purely for love, when in fact society pressures people to
marry from the same social class, religion, and race (P. L. Berger, 1963). Sociology, unlike other disciplines, forces us to
look outside the tight confines of individual anatomy and personality to understand the phenomena that shape us. Consider,
for example, the following situations:
A 14-year-old girl, fearing she is overweight, begins systematically starving herself in the hope of becoming more
attractive.
A 55-year-old stockbroker, unable to find work since his firm laid him off, sinks into a depression after losing his
family and his home. He now lives on the streets.
A 46-year-old professor kills herself after learning that her position at the university will be terminated the following
year due to budget cuts.
The student body president and valedictorian of the local high school cannot begin or end her day without several shots
of whiskey.
What do these people have in common? Your first response might be that they all have terrible personal problems that have
made their lives suck. If you saw them only for what they’ve become—the “anorexic,” the “homeless person,” the “suicide
victim,” or the “alcoholic”—you might think they have some kind of personality defect, genetic flaw, or mental problem that
renders them incapable of coping with the demands of contemporary life. Maybe they simply lack the willpower to pick
themselves up and move on. In short, your immediate tendency may be to focus on the unique, perhaps “abnormal,”
characteristics of these people to explain their problems.
But we cannot downplay the importance of their social worlds. There is no denying that we live in a society that exalts lean
bodies, values individual achievement and economic success, and encourages drinking to excess. Some people suffer under
these conditions when they don’t measure up. This is not to say that all people exposed to the same social messages
inevitably fall victim to the same problems. Some overcome their wretched childhoods, others withstand the tragedy of
economic failure and begin anew, and some are immune to narrowly defined cultural images of beauty. But to understand
fully the nature of human life or of particular social problems, we must acknowledge the broader social context in which
these things occur.
The Sociological Imagination
Unfortunately, we often don’t see the connections between the personal events in our everyday lives and the larger society in
which we live. People in a country such as the United States, which places such a high premium on individual achievement,
have difficulty looking beyond their immediate situation. Someone who loses a job, gets divorced, or flunks out of school in
such a society has trouble imagining that these experiences are somehow related to massive cultural or historical processes.
The ability to see the impact of these forces on our private lives is what the famous sociologist C. Wright Mills (1959) called
the sociological imagination. The sociological imagination enables us to understand the larger historical picture and its
meaning in our own lives. Mills argued that no matter how personal we think our experiences are, many of them can be seen
as products of society-wide forces. The task of sociology is to help us view our lives as the intersection between personal
biography and societal history and thereby to provide a means for us to interpret our lives and social circumstances.
Getting fired, for example, is a terrible, even traumatic, private experience. Like our friend André at the beginning of this
chapter, feelings of personal failure are inevitable when one loses a job. But would your feelings of failure differ if you lived
in Fargo, North Dakota—where the unemployment rate is less than 2%—versus El Centro, California—where the rate is
22% (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016d)? If yes, then we must see unemployment not as a personal malfunction but as a
social problem that has its roots in the economic and political structures of society. Listen to how one columnist described his
job loss:
Five years ago, when the magazine dismissed me, fewer Americans were unemployed than are now, and I felt like a
solitary reject in a nation of comfortable successes. . . . If I were to get the same news now, in an era of mass
layoffs and major bankruptcies, I wonder if I would suffer as I did then. . . . Maybe I would just shrug instead and
head outside for a relaxing bike ride. (Kirn, 2009, p. 13)
Such an easygoing response to being fired is probably uncommon. Nevertheless, his point is important sociologically: Being
unemployed is not a character flaw or personal failure if a significant number of people in one’s community are also
unemployed. We can’t explain a spike in the unemployment rate as a sudden increase in the number of incompetent or
unprepared individual workers in the labor force. As long as the economy is arranged so that employees are easily replaced
or slumps inevitably occur, the social problem of unemployment cannot be solved at the personal level.
The same can be said for divorce, which people usually experience as an intimate tragedy. But in the United States, it’s
estimated that 4 out of every 10 marriages that begin this year will eventually end in divorce. And divorce rates are
increasing dramatically in many countries around the world. We must therefore view divorce in the context of broader
historical changes occurring throughout societies: in family, law, religion, economics, and the culture as a whole. It is
impossible to explain significant changes in divorce rates over time by focusing exclusively on the personal characteristics
and behaviors of divorcing individuals. Divorce rates don’t rise simply because individual spouses have more difficulty
getting along with one another than they used to, and they don’t fall because more husbands and wives are suddenly being
nicer to each other.
Mills did not mean to imply that the sociological imagination should debilitate us—that is, force us to powerlessly perceive
our lives as wholly beyond our control. In fact, the opposite is true. An awareness of the impact of social forces or world
history on our personal lives is a prerequisite to any efforts we make to change our social circumstances.
Indeed, the sociological imagination allows us to recognize that the solutions to many of our most serious social problems lie
not in changing the personal situations and characteristics of individual people but in changing the social institutions and
roles available to them (C. W. Mills, 1959). Drug addiction, homelessness, sexual violence, hate crimes, eating disorders,
suicide, and other unfortunate situations will not go away simply by treating or punishing a person who is suffering from or
engaging in the behavior.
Several years ago, as I was working on an earlier edition of this book, a tragic event occurred at the university where I teach.
On a pleasant May night at the beginning of final exam week, a first-year student killed himself. The incident sent shock
waves through this small, close-knit campus.
As you would expect in such a situation, the question on everyone’s mind was, “Why did he do it?” Although no definitive
answer could ever be obtained, most people simply concluded that it was a “typical” suicide. They assumed that he must
have been despondent, hopeless, unhappy, and unable to cope with the demands of college life. Some students said they
heard he was failing some of his courses. Others said they heard he didn’t get into the fraternity he wanted or that he was a
bit of a loner. In other words, something was wrong with him.
As tragic as this incident was, it was far from unique. Between 1950 and 2010, the U.S. suicide rate more than doubled for
people between the ages of 15 and 24 (National Center for Health Statistics, 2014). In fact, the suicide rate for 10- to 14-
year-olds has tripled since 2000 (S. C. Curtin, Warner, & Hedegaard, 2016). Suicide is the third leading cause of death among
10- to 14-year-olds—following accidents and homicides—and second leading cause of death among 15- to 34-year-olds. In
2015, 17% of U.S. high school students reported that they had seriously considered attempting suicide during the previous
year, and about 8% had actually attempted suicide one or more times during the same period (Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, 2015e).
Focusing on individual feelings such as depression, hopelessness, and frustration doesn’t tell us why so many people in this
age group commit suicide, nor does it tell us why rates of youth suicide increase—or for that matter decrease—from decade
to decade. So, to understand why the student at my university made such a choice, we must look beyond his private mental
state and examine the social and historical factors that may have affected him.
Clearly, life in contemporary developed societies is focused on individual achievement—being well dressed, popular, and
successful—more strongly than ever before. Young people face almost constant pressure to “measure up” and define their
identities, and therefore their self-worth, according to standards set by others (Mannon, 1997). Although most adjust pretty
well, others can’t. In addition, as competition for scarce financial resources becomes more acute, young people are likely to
experience heightened levels of stress and confusion about their own futures. To some, expectations regarding educational
success have spun out of control, resulting in a national school-related stress epidemic. As one teacher put it, “We are sitting
on a ticking time bomb” (quoted in Abeles, 2016, p. 2). When the quest for success begins earlier and earlier, the costs of not
succeeding increase. For instance, the suicide rate among high school students in one affluent school district in Silicon
Valley—where performance pressures are particularly acute—is between four and five times the national average (Rosin,
2015).
Growing educational expectations may explain why suicides among young African American men (ages 15–24), once quite
rare and still relatively less frequent than suicides among other ethnic groups, tripled from 4.1 deaths per 100,000 people in
1960 to 12.0 deaths in 2015 (see Exhibit 1.1). Some experts have blamed these trends on a growing sense of hopelessness
and a long-standing cultural taboo against discussing mental health matters. Others, however, have cited broader social
factors, brought about, ironically, by the growing economy of the late 20th century and the more recent recovery from the
2008 recession. As more and more black families move into the middle class, they feel increasing pressure to compete in
traditionally white-dominated professions and social environments.
You’ll also notice in Exhibit 1.1 that the suicide rates of both black and white young women has consistently been lower than
those of young men. Can you think of a sociological reason to account for this fact? Is it less stressful being a teenage girl
than a teenage boy?
Exhibit 1.1 What Effect Do Race and Gender Have on Young People’s Desire to Commit Suicide?
Source: National Center for Health Statistics, 2015a, Table 30.
In other societies, different types of social changes may account for fluctuations in suicide rates. For instance, Japan has one
of the highest suicide rates in the world (23.1 per 100,000 people; World Health Organization, 2016b), 60% greater than that
of the United States. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Japan saw its unemployment and bankruptcy rates rise to record
levels as companies grappled with a severe economic recession. According to Japan’s National Police Agency, more than
25% of suicides were caused by financial problems such as difficulty paying bills, finding a job, and keeping a business
going (cited in J. S. Curtin, 2004). In fact, suicide became such a problem that the East Japan Railway Company installed
blue lights above train platforms in its stations in hopes that they would have a soothing effect, thereby reducing the number
of people who jump in front of trains to kill themselves (“Japanese Railways,” 2009). Although the majority of suicides
occur among people in their 60s, rates have increased especially dramatically among elementary school, middle school, and
college students. Suicide is now the leading cause of death among Japanese youth (Nippon.com, 2014).
The stress of change due to rapid development has been linked to increased suicide rates in China, too, particularly among
rural women, who are most likely to be displaced from their villages (E. Rosenthal, 2002). And in Ireland, which at one point
had the fastest-growing rate of suicide in the world, one in four suicides occurs among those ages 15 to 24 (Clarity, 1999).
Experts there attribute much of this increase to the weakening of religious prohibition of suicide and the alteration of gender
roles, which has left many young men unsure of their place in Irish society.
Émile Durkheim: All Suicides are not Created Equal
Sociologists’ interest in linking suicide to certain processes going on in society is not new. In one of the classic pieces of social research, the
famous sociologist Émile Durkheim (1897/1951) argued that suicide is more likely to occur under particular social circumstances and in
particular communities. He was the first to see suicide as a manifestation of changes in society rather than of psychological shortcomings.
How does one go about determining whether rates of suicide are influenced by the structure of society? Durkheim decided to test his theory by
comparing existing official statistics and historical records across groups, a research strategy sometimes referred to as the comparative
method. Many sociologists continue to follow this methodology, analyzing statistics compiled by governmental agencies such as the U.S.
Bureau of the Census, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Center for Health Statistics to draw comparisons of suicide rates
among groups.
For about 7 years, Durkheim carefully examined the available data on suicide rates among various social groups in Europe—from different
regions of countries, certain religious or ethnic groups, and so on—looking for important social patterns. If suicides were purely acts of
individual desperation, he reasoned, one would not expect to find any noticeable changes in the rates from year to year or from society to
society. That is, the distribution of desperate, unstable, unhappy individuals should be roughly equal across time and culture. If, however,
certain groups or societies had a consistently higher rate of suicide than others, something more than individual disposition would seem to be
at work.
After compiling his figures, Durkheim concluded that there are actually several different types of suicide. Sometimes, he found, people take
their own lives when they see no possible way to improve their oppressive circumstances. They come to the conclusion that suicide is
preferable to a harsh life that will never improve. Think of prisoners serving life sentences or slaves who take their own lives to escape their
miserable confinement and lack of freedom. Durkheim called this type of suicide fatalistic suicide.
Other suicides, what he called anomic suicide, occur when people’s lives are suddenly disrupted by major social events, such as economic
depressions, wars, and famines. At these times, he argued, the conditions around which people have organized their lives are dramatically
altered, leaving them with a sense of hopelessness and despair as they come to realize they can no longer live the life to which they were
accustomed. A study of suicide trends over the past 80 years found that overall rates tend to rise during economic recessions and fall during
economic expansions (Luo, Florence, Quispe-Agnoli, Ouyang, & Crosby, 2011). Many experts attribute the 28% increase in suicides among
U.S. adults between 35 and 64 in the early 2010s to the economic recession of 2008 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2013).
Similarly, the financial crisis that gripped Europe recently led to a spike in suicide rates in the hardest-hit countries such as Greece, Ireland,
and Italy. The problem became so pronounced that European psychiatrists started calling it “suicide by economic crisis” (Reeves, McKee, &
Stuckler, 2014).
Conversely, Durkheim argued that people who live in poor countries are, in a sense, “immune” to this type of suicide. He said, “[P]overty
protects against anomic suicide because it is a restraint in itself” (Durkheim, 1897/1951, p. 254). Indeed, there is some evidence that people
who live in poor countries have a significantly lower risk of depression than those who live in industrialized countries (cited in A. Weil, 2011).
What Durkheim couldn’t have predicted, however, was the role that communication technology plays in instantly exposing people to the
lifestyles of others half a world away. In Durkheim’s time, poor people in isolated rural areas had little, if any, knowledge of how wealthier
people lived. So they had no way of comparing their lot in life to others who were better off. Today the Internet is available in some of the
remotest regions of the world, providing people with instant information about (and instant comparisons to) the comforts and privileges of the
more affluent. So do you think that poverty protects people from committing suicide?
Durkheim also discovered that suicide rates in all the countries he examined tended to be consistently higher among widowed, single, and
divorced people than among married people; higher among people without children than among parents; and higher among Protestants than
among Catholics. Did this mean that unmarried people, childless people, and Protestants were more unhappy, depressed, or psychologically
dysfunctional than other people? Durkheim didn’t think so. Instead, he felt that something about the nature of social life among people in these
groups increased the likelihood of what he called egoistic suicide.
Durkheim reasoned that when group, family, or community ties are weak or de-emphasized, people feel disconnected and alone. He pointed
out, for instance, that the Catholic Church emphasizes salvation through community and binds its members to the church through elaborate
doctrine and ritual; Protestantism, in contrast, emphasizes individual salvation and responsibility. This religious individualism, he believed,
explained the differences he noticed in suicide rates between Catholics and Protestants. Self-reliance and independence may glorify one in
God’s eyes, but they become liabilities if one is in the throes of personal tragedy.
Durkheim feared that life in modern society tends to be individualistic and dangerously alienating. Over a century later, contemporary
sociologists have found evidence supporting Durkheim’s insight (e.g., Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985; Riesman, 1950).
Many people in the United States today don’t know and have no desire to know their neighbors. Strangers are treated with suspicion. In the
pursuit of economic opportunities, we have become more willing to relocate, sometimes to regions far from family and existing friends and
colleagues—the very people who could and would offer support in times of need.
The structure of our communities discourages the formation of bonds with others, and, not surprisingly, the likelihood of suicide increases at
the same time. In the United States today, the highest suicide rates can be found in sparsely populated states like Alaska, New Mexico,
Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2015a). Exhibits 1.2a and 1.2b show this pattern. These states
tend to have a larger proportion of new residents who are not part of an established community. People tend to be more isolated, less likely to
seek help or comfort from others in times of trouble, and therefore more susceptible to suicide than people who live in more populous states.
It’s worth noting that sparsely populated rural areas also have higher rates of gun ownership than other areas of the United States. More than
half of the rural youths who kill themselves do so with a firearm. Indeed, gun suicides in general are three times more common in rural areas
than in urban areas (Beck, 2015b).
Durkheim also felt, however, that another type of suicide (what he called altruistic suicide) is more likely when the ties to one’s community
are too strong instead of too weak. He suggested that in certain societies, individuality is completely overshadowed by one’s group
membership; the individual literally lives for the group, and personality is merely a reflection of the collective identity of the community. In
some cases, commitment to a particular political cause can be powerful enough to lead some people to take their own lives. In India, the
number of politically motivated suicides doubled between 2006 and 2008. For example, a few years ago 200 people took their own lives in
support of efforts to establish a separate state, Telangana, in southern India (Polgreen, 2010). Spiritual loyalty can also lead to altruistic
suicide. Some religious sects require their members to reject their ties to outside people and groups and to live by the values and customs of
their new community. When members feel that they can no longer contribute to the group and sustain their value within it, they may take their
own lives out of loyalty to cultural expectations.
A terrible example of the deadly effects of overly strong ties occurred in 1989, when four young Korean sisters, ranging in age from 6 to 13,
attempted to kill themselves by ingesting rat poison. The three older sisters survived; the youngest died. The eldest provided startling
sociological insight into this seemingly senseless act: Their family was poor; the father supported everyone on a salary of about $362 a month.
The girl told the authorities that the sisters had made a suicide pact to ease their parents’ financial burden and leave enough money for the
education of their 3-year-old brother. Within the traditional Korean culture, female children are much less important to the family than male
children. These sisters attempted to take their lives not because they were depressed or unable to cope but because they felt obligated to
sacrifice their personal well-being for the success of their family’s male heir (“Korean Girls,” 1989).
Just as the suicide pact of these young girls was tied to the social system of which they were a part, so, too, was the suicide of the young
college student at my university. His choices and life circumstances were also a function of the values and conditions of his particular society.
No doubt he had serious emotional problems, but these problems may have been part and parcel of his social circumstances. Had he lived in a
society that didn’t place as much pressure on young people or glorify individual achievement, he might not have chosen suicide. That’s what
the sociological imagination helps us understand.
Exhibit 1.2A The More Crowded the …