Policy Press

Case studies - how to use this section

We will use this part of the website to introduce you to significant works of sociology and the sociologists behind these works.

On the one hand, we do so through descriptions and summaries of our own. On the other hand, we would also like to enable you to read further and to discover sociology on your own. In this regard, we would like to begin with a few general suggestions.

If you would like to read beyond the introductory summaries on this website, there are two useful ways to do so systematically. First, you could conduct a literature search on the subject matter in which you are interested. You might do so through the online catalogue of your university library. There are also online tools that are generally accessible and will point you in the right direction.  

Perhaps the most important of these is Google Scholar. This works just like the Google search engine, but the results it returns consist only of academic publications. If, for example, I would like to know more about the German sociologist Max Weber, I could use the key words ‘Max Weber’ and ‘introduction’ in Google Scholar. As of August 2019, this search returns approximately 2,130,000 results, sorted by relevance. These can be further organised by date of publication and a number of other criteria. Google Scholar searches provide titles and short abstracts, as well as, in some cases, links to the full publication.  

A second way to read further is to find introductory texts on a given subject, either through your library catalogue, Google Scholar or by other means. These usually describe key works, provide suggestions for further reading and contain long bibliographies of relevant sources. To begin with, we would like to suggest two books of this kind that make for useful further reading after you have finished Imagining Society.  

  1. The first of these books is Anthony Elliott and Bryan S. Turner’s On Society (2012, Polity). A fairly short and highly readable book, On Society is dedicated to the question how society might be understood from a sociological perspective. Answering this question, the book surveys a range of both classical and contemporary sociological theories. In doing so, it engages in considerable detail with a question that has been central to our argument throughout Imagining Society (see, for example, Chapters 2 and 3).
  2. A second, equally central, question that underpins our argument in Imagining Society (see, for instance, Chapters 2 and 9) concerns the ways in which the individual and society are related. In this regard, Athanasia Chalari’s recent The Sociology of the Individual (2017, SAGE) surveys the diverse answers that sociologists have given to this question. The book was written for students, and it offers an interesting and lively account to those who are interested in social identities and the interconnectedness of self and society.

Taken together, these two books go far in addressing two of the central questions in which Imaging Society is grounded, and they therefore make for important further reading. 

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