Introducing Sociology: A Critical Perspective (review)

This rather short paperbound introductory textbook is predominantly Marxist in orientation. In addition to the critical perspective, Knuttila devotes quite a lot of space to biological considerations and a fair proportion to structural functionalists, but may disappoint instructors who emphasize culture, symbolic interactionism, or social construction.

Given the book's Marxist orientation, it devotes a surprisingly large amount of attention — over one-third of the pages — to the individual level of analysis, especially the nature/nurture controversy. Insofar as culture is discussed, it is mostly based on the early fieldwork of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. However, there are two substantial chapters on socialization, which cover feral children, Piaget, Freud, and twin studies, addressing the question of genetic versus cultural determinism.

The second, theoretical section of the book consists of three chapters, dealing respectively with the historical development of sociology; contemporary approaches (within the conventional tri-partite classification); and sex and gender. (This third chapter supposedly compensates for classical sociology's lack of feminist analyses.)

The third, "applied," section of the book provides six substantive chapters plus a postscript. The strongest chapter, on social inequality, brings us up through the work of Warner, the Lynds, Parsons, Davis, and Moore, to an excellent section on Marxist theories of class, including neo-Marxist writers such as C. H. Anderson, Nicos Poulantzas, Erik Olin Wright, plus John Porter, Wallace Clement, and Dennis Forcese, though the final few pages fall short of the earlier passages. Also, there is no discussion of Weber in this chapter and very little elsewhere.

The chapter on "the polity and political power" develops and goes beyond neo-Marxist views of the state (Miliband, Poulantzas, and contemporary approaches such as regulation theory) then inserts a section on classical elite theory (Pareto and Michels) without relating it to any contemporary discourse. There is a box on Robert Dahl's theories of democracy and polyarchy (in which the distinction between the two remains ambiguous), and a section on feminism. In this chapter, again, the strong sections are the Marxist ones; other passages are vague, imprecise, and substantively disappointing.

The chapter on race and ethnicity is apparently new in this edition. There are long discussions of the history of race as a concept, and the genetic interpretation of race (including the work of Rushton, Herrnstein, and Murray and current work on the human genome), but little emphasis on the social creation of ethnic identity, apart from a curiously misplaced passage on structural functionalism's focus on norms and values. Instead of the topics most commonly stressed in race-and-ethnicity courses, we find a discussion of Canada as a colonial society and a history of Quebec. There is little mention of aboriginal rights, and the only discussion of multiculturalism pivots around John Porter's work.

The chapter on deviance and control again offers a substantial discussion of biological explanations, before turning to Durkheim, Parsons, Merton, and then Neo-Marxist theories of power and conflict, where again Knuttila seems to be in his element, if somewhat too abstract to appeal to the numerous students who are especially attracted to the study of aberrant behavior. Symbolic interactionism and labeling theory are addressed under one heading, followed by a section on feminism, despite an acknowledgment that "no distinctive feminist theory on the etiology of crime has yet been formulated."

The chapter on the family was placed late in the book instead of near the chapters on socialization or gender. This makes sense, however, since the content is again heavily Marxist, dealing with such topics as commodity consumption and the reproduction of labor power — notions linked to the just-preceding chapters and drawing upon feminist analyses of capitalism and patriarchy. Some of the boxes are well-written — notably Mandell and Duffy's discussion of girls' dreams of romance.

There is a new chapter on globalization — a topic that conflates so many disparate processes that considerable attention needs to be paid to the proper introduction of terminology. This was not done. I would expect most introductory students to...