Lifelong learning

Many different groups of people find varied reasons for looking to sociology. Social workers have always found basic knowledge about how society works relevant, but professionals like doctors and architects also find this has a place in their training. Companies may need to find out more about their employees or about the consumers of their products. Their profits may depend on this.

In the 1980s in Britain when Margaret Thatcher dominated the political scene she and her friends often dismissed sociology as a waste of time. Many threats were made and some were carried through to restrict the possibilities of teaching and studying the subject. Many sociologists feared for their jobs. In fact the subject survived, in some ways even became stronger, as it responded to the threat. The attractions it had for students never diminished.

The blurred boundaries between sociology as an academic discipline, as professional practice and in employment, mean that the question of a curriculum for sociology is always equally open. There is no set of public requirements which insists that every sociologist knows how to do a t-test, conduct a competent interview, or design a research project.

But probably today, as has been the case from the beginning when sociology was first taught in higher education, the main motive for studying the subject has been the individual’s sense that society is difficult to understand and even troubling at a personal level. Some people will study it mainly to clear their minds about their own place in society, others more with a mission to do something about it, to repair its failures or promote its successes.

The main contribution sociology has made in the last century is to public consciousness world-wide. You can find sociology anywhere. In 1986 I found a sociology text on the bookshelf of the local policeman, in Bangladesh, in the only brick built house for a hundred miles in a country as poor as any in the world.

Sociology is a much bigger subject than just what sociologists happen to be saying and doing today. It has behind it a century-long tradition of teaching, research and professional activity. So it has informed the thinking of hundreds of millions of people who have studied it in schools, colleges and universities throughout the world.

We can all become sociologists, just as we all can clean our rooms, bake our bread, fish or write poetry. At the end, however, there will be some who want to go further down the road of studying sociology intensively, or even think of it as a possible career choice.

If you do a first degree in sociology in Britain you may avoid technical training, and the common core of your studies is more likely to be regarded as the thought of Karl Marx, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim than any direct experience of social research. This is not widely different in the rest of the world. In the United States there is more emphasis on training in methods of research; in Italy less even than in Britain.

This is not going to change very much. Even if there were a concerted attempt to produce a highly professional sociology curriculum, with common global requirements, it would not affect the basic openness of sociology. It would create an artificial boundary for a certain kind of sociology around which alternatives would soon proliferate. The reader should recognise this as a controversial statement. Sociology is bigger than what sociologists say it is at any one moment. The discipline is produced out of the requirements of contemporary life and its logic develops in response to the nature of society today, not according to some model of what a discipline or professional practice ought to be.

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