You walk into a job interview. You smooth your hair, choose a tone of voice, decide how much of your last job to admit to. The interviewer has also prepared a face. Meanwhile the interviewer's firm has a type of person it recognises as "a good fit", and you may or may not have been trained since childhood to look like one. Behind both sits a legal and institutional machinery of CVs, references and tests that sorts everyone, which none of you chose, and a pile of categories (gender, race, class, nationality) that shape who sits on which side of the desk.
Each of those sentences belongs to a different school. This course covers six answers to "how does society work?" that came after Marx, Durkheim and Weber: Goffman on the stage, Bourdieu on capital and habitus, Foucault on power and knowledge, feminist theory on gender and its intersections, postcolonial and Southern theory (with Fei Xiaotong's ripples) on where theory itself comes from, and rational-choice sociology on choices that add up to structures. The aim is not to pick a winner but to learn which tool fits which problem.
Erving Goffman (1922–1982), a Canadian-born sociologist, built his first account of the idea during fieldwork on a hotel's staff on the island of Unst in the Shetlands in the late 1940s. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (an Edinburgh monograph in 1956; the American edition in 1959) treats ordinary encounters as performances. People manage the impression they give, in a front region (the restaurant floor, the consulting room, the video call with the camera on) and relax in a back region (the kitchen, the staff room, the mute button). Waiters, doctors and teenagers all keep a gap between the two. In Interaction Ritual (1967) he described face-work: the small repairs people make so that nobody is humiliated, such as pretending not to hear a stomach rumble. In Asylums (1961) he showed what happens when the back region is abolished: in a "total institution" such as a psychiatric hospital, prison or barracks, residents sleep, work and play in one place under one authority, and their sense of self is stripped. Stigma (1963) described the work done by people whose "spoiled identity" is visible or might be discovered. In his American Sociological Association presidential address, written in 1982 and published in 1983, he argued that face-to-face interaction is its own domain, the interaction order, with rules worth studying in themselves.
The critics are practical. Alvin Gouldner (1970) said Goffman's world is a bland middle-class one of impression management with the history, money and power left out. Others note that his evidence is observation and anecdote, not sample or experiment, so it suggests rather than proves. Defenders reply that he never claimed life is only theatre: his point was that the theatre has real rules, that breaking them has real costs, and that the people who pay most are those with the least room to perform.
Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) started as an ethnographer in Algeria, studying the Kabyle, and then turned the same eye on France. His idea is that advantage comes in several currencies. Economic capital is money and property. Cultural capital is knowledge, manner and credentials: the accent that sounds educated, ease in a museum, a degree. Social capital is the network you can call on. Symbolic capital is prestige, being recognised as worth listening to. They can be converted, with friction. The second concept is habitus: the dispositions you absorb from your upbringing, such as tastes, posture, what feels "for people like us". It lets people act without thinking in ways that fit their position. A field (art, law, academia, finance) is a structured arena in which people compete for the capital that counts there. In Distinction (1979, English 1984), built on French surveys of about 1,200 people in the 1960s, he argued that taste is not innocent: preferences for food, music and art sort people into positions, and the powerful turn their tastes into a mark of worth.
Bourdieu's picture of the social space has two axes: the total volume of capital you hold, and its composition, whether it is mostly economic or mostly cultural. The tool below places a position on those axes. The labels are schematic, in the spirit of his diagrams, not a data fit.
A schematic diagram: volume = (E + C) / 2, composition = E − C. The example occupations are the kind of position Bourdieu's French survey placed in each region, not a measurement of anyone.
Without JavaScript: high on both axes (large volume) places you among the dominant; mainly economic, among business owners; mainly cultural, among professors and artists; low on both, among those with little of either.
The critiques are well known. The first is determinism: habitus can seem to leave little room for change or surprise. Defenders say it is a theory of reproduction with its own room for conversion. The second is whether the French pattern travels. Richard Peterson and Roger Kern (1996) argued that in the US the high-status listener is increasingly an omnivore, who likes many genres, rather than a snob with one narrow highbrow taste. Michèle Lamont (1992), comparing the US and France, found upper-middle-class people drew their boundaries as often on moral qualities as on culture. Tony Bennett and colleagues (2009) found that British data supported much of Bourdieu's view of class and taste, with revisions, especially on gender and ethnicity.
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) saw power not as a thing held by rulers, but as a web of relations that runs through schools, hospitals, prisons and offices, and that produces as well as forbids. Discipline and Punish (1975; English 1977) opens with the torture and execution of Damiens in Paris in 1757, and then a prison timetable from the 1830s, as two eras' ways of governing bodies. He argues that modern societies shifted from spectacular punishment to discipline: timetables, exams, ranks and records that train people into docility by constant observation. His symbol is Jeremy Bentham's panopticon (1791), a prison with a central watchtower from which any cell can be seen, while the prisoners can never tell whether they are being watched. The effect, Foucault said, is that the prisoner "becomes the principle of his own subjection": he polices himself. He extended this to biopower (the management of populations through health, birth and death rates, in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 1976) and, in lectures in 1978–79, to governmentality, the arts of governing conduct. His other core claim is power/knowledge: knowledge of people (psychiatry, criminology, statistics) is both a result of power and a tool of it.
Here is the mechanism in its barest form. It is a rational-choice caricature of an idea Foucault would put in terms of norms people absorb, but it shows why uncertain observation is so cheap.
Invented numbers. “Hidden” means nobody can tell whom the guards are checking; they treat the chance of being checked as k / N. “Visible” means people can see who is being checked, so only those people comply. Real discipline, in Foucault’s account, also works through habit and self-image, which this toy does not model.
Without JavaScript: with 100 people, 10 checks, a penalty of 12 and a gain of 1, the chance of being checked is 10% and the expected penalty is 1.2, above the gain of 1: everyone complies when watching is hidden; if checks are visible, only the 10 people being watched comply.
The critics: Jürgen Habermas (1985) and Nancy Fraser (1981) said that if all power is bound up with knowledge, Foucault gives no basis for saying why any resistance is better than what it resists. Historians, such as Andrew Scull on psychiatry, challenged his accounts of the "great confinement" of the mad. The panopticon was rarely built as drawn; critics say modern surveillance is more often many cameras and databases than one tower, which others reply is exactly his point. Foucault himself described his books as tools to be used and revised, and sociologists have used them for studies of schools, medicine, policing and data.
Feminist sociology is not one school. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) supplied the founding line, "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman": gender is made, not given. Dorothy Smith (1974) argued that sociology had been written from the standpoint of men in the ruling professions, and began from women's everyday work, a standpoint approach that later writers such as Nancy Hartsock and Sandra Harding developed into a claim that people on the margins can see features of society the comfortable miss. Arlie Hochschild named emotional labour in The Managed Heart (1983), her study of flight attendants paid to produce a feeling in others, and the "second shift" of unpaid housework in 1989. Raewyn Connell's account of masculinities, and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990), which treats gender as performative, a pattern repeated until it looks natural, show how varied the field is.
Kimberlé Crenshaw coined intersectionality in a 1989 article from a legal case, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors (1976), in which Black women said the company's hiring and later layoffs hurt them as Black women. The court declined to treat them as a distinct group, observing that GM hired white women and hired Black men, so there was no sex or race discrimination. Crenshaw's point: if the law looks at one axis at a time, it misses harm at the crossing. Patricia Hill Collins (Black Feminist Thought, 1990) developed a wider account of overlapping systems. The tool uses invented callback rates to show the arithmetic.
Illustrative numbers, with the four groups equal in size: white men 30%, white women 26%, Black men 20%, and Black women set by the slider. They are not from any study. “Additive” means the race gap among men plus the gender gap among white people, applied to Black women.
Without JavaScript: with callback rates of 30, 26, 20 and 12 for white men, white women, Black men and Black women, women average 19 and men 25 and the white group 28 and the Black group 16, but the additive prediction for Black women is 16, so their actual 12 shows a further 4-point gap that neither single-axis average shows.
Criticism comes from inside and outside. Inside: Elizabeth Spelman (1988) asked who "women" means when the category is built from some women's experience, and Leslie McCall (2005) set out three ways researchers handle categories, from rejecting them to comparing across them. Butler's view and standpoint theory pull in different directions. Outside: critics doubt that a standpoint gives privileged knowledge, which they say makes claims hard to test, and some argue intersectionality becomes hard to measure or reduces people to identity categories. Supporters answer that quantitative researchers can test it with interaction terms, as the toy does, and that it began as a precise legal point.
Who gets to be the theorist, and whose experience counts as "society in general"? Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) analysed colonialism as a system that shaped minds as well as economies. Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) argued that European scholarship and literature built a flattering, static picture of "the Orient" that helped justify rule. Gayatri Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) asked whether those at the bottom of a colonial order can be heard in the language of those above. In Latin America, Raúl Prebisch (1950) and the Economic Commission for Latin America argued that countries exporting raw materials and importing manufactures faced a long-run decline in their terms of trade, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto (Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina, written in the late 1960s; English 1979) argued that development there was shaped by the position of local elites within a global system, allowing some "associated-dependent" growth. Raewyn Connell's Southern Theory (2007) says the sociological canon rests on the experience of a few European and North American societies, offered as universal, and looks at social thought produced in the colonised world, such as Paulin Hountondji's work in West Africa and Ali Shariati's in Iran.
A toy of the Prebisch–Singer hypothesis: if a country’s export prices fall by g per cent a year against its imports, buying the same machine takes (1 − g)−t times the exports after t years. The start (100 sacks of coffee for a tractor) is invented. Studies of real commodity prices find declines that depend on the period and the commodity; one often-cited estimate is about 0.6% a year for 1900–1986.
Without JavaScript: a yearly fall of 0.6% over 50 years means about 135 sacks of coffee for a tractor that cost 100, a 35% rise.
Dependency theory's record is argued. Its critics point to South Korea and Taiwan, which climbed through manufactured exports and state guidance, and to commodity cycles that have also raised prices for periods. Defenders note that those cases also relied on special conditions, and that Cardoso himself never said development was impossible. Said's critics, such as Aijaz Ahmad (1992) and Bernard Lewis, argued that Orientalism lumps together very different scholars and itself treats "the West" as one block. Connell's critics ask whether "the South" is itself too broad a label.
The same worry about borrowed categories sits behind Fei Xiaotong (1910–2005), who studied under Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics and wrote Peasant Life in China (1939), his thesis on a Jiangsu village. His From the Soil (Xiangtu Zhongguo, 1947–48; English edition 1992) drew a contrast. Western social life, he said, is often like bundles of firewood: people belong to clear groups, with equal standing inside and rules at the edge. Chinese rural society is closer to ripples from a stone dropped in water, the "differential mode of association" (chaxu geju): each person is the centre of their own circles of kin and friends, and obligations weaken with distance. Two people's circles overlap but are never the same, and the same stranger can be close to one person and far from another.
The picture is a schematic of Fei's contrast. He drew it as an ideal-type comparison, not a claim that all Chinese or all Western life fits.
Critics note that Fei wrote from a few villages in southern Jiangsu and that the contrast with "the West" is stylised, since Western life is full of ripples (networks, favours) and Chinese life of bundles (work units, lineages, companies). Fei himself kept studying change. After being attacked in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 and returning to research later, he turned to small towns and rural industry. His idea has fed research on guanxi, personal connections, and on how obligations work when institutions are weak.
Rational-choice sociology starts from individuals with preferences and constraints, and asks what structures follow from their choices. James Coleman (1926–1995) gave it its best-known sociological statement, Foundations of Social Theory (1990), and a diagram, the macro-micro-macro "boat": a social condition shapes individuals' situations, individuals choose, and their choices add up to a new social outcome. Weber's Protestant ethic is his example: a religious doctrine (macro) changes individuals' values (micro), who act in new ways in markets, producing capitalism (macro). Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1992, applied the approach to marriage, crime and education. Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action (1965) showed why large groups with shared interests often fail to act (see Social Movements & Collective Action, 35/82). Coleman's study of trust is a neat case: to trust someone is to take a bet with a gain if they are honest and a loss if they are not.
Invented numbers. The decision rule is Coleman’s: trust if p × gain exceeds (1 − p) × loss. The presets for p are illustrative guesses, not measurements.
Without JavaScript: with a gain of 10 and a loss of 20, trust pays only if the chance of honesty is above 20 / (10 + 20), which is about 67%.
The model makes a point clear: the key variable is the chance, and it is not set by the individual. It is set by the social structure around them: reputation, kin ties, repeated dealings, a third party who vouches (Coleman's social capital). That is how rational choice and network sociology meet. The critics are strong. Donald Green and Ian Shapiro (1994) argued that rational-choice work in political science often fits stories after the fact and is rarely tested against alternatives. Psychologists and behavioural economists, following Herbert Simon and Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, show that people satisfice, use shortcuts and care about fairness: in the ultimatum game, many reject unfair offers at a cost to themselves. Others, such as Pierre Bourdieu, hold that "choice" hides the way tastes and options are made by position. Defenders reply that the approach is meant to be a clear baseline, that preferences can include fairness and duty, and that its virtue is that its assumptions are on the table where they can be criticised.
Contemporary theory offers six tools: Goffman for the stage of everyday life, Bourdieu for the currencies of advantage, Foucault for power that works through knowledge and being watched, feminist theory for gender and the crossing of categories, postcolonial and Southern theory (with Fei's ripples) for whose experience counts, and rational choice for the way choices add up. Each explains some things well, and each has critics worth taking seriously.
Try this: take one workplace or school situation you know and describe it with three of the six tools, in one sentence each. See which tool makes you notice something the others did not.
Sources. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956/1959), Asylums (1961), Stigma (1963), Interaction Ritual (1967), "The Interaction Order," American Sociological Review 1983; Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970). Bourdieu, Distinction (1979; English 1984), "The Forms of Capital" (1986); Peterson and Kern, American Sociological Review 1996; Lamont, Money, Morals, and Manners (1992); Bennett et al., Culture, Class, Distinction (2009). Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975), The History of Sexuality vol. 1 (1976), the 1978–79 Collège de France lectures; Bentham's panopticon letters (1791); Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985); Fraser, "Foucault on Modern Power," Praxis International 1981. de Beauvoir 1949; Smith 1974; Hochschild 1983, 1989; Butler 1990; Crenshaw, University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989; DeGraffenreid v. General Motors Assembly Division, 413 F. Supp. 142 (E.D. Mo. 1976); Collins 1990; Spelman 1988; McCall, Signs 2005. Fanon 1961; Said 1978; Spivak 1988; Prebisch 1950; Cardoso and Faletto 1969/1979; Connell 2007; Ahmad, In Theory (1992); the “about 0.6% a year” estimate of Grilli and Yang, World Bank Economic Review 1988, as commonly cited. Fei, Peasant Life in China (1939) and From the Soil (1947–48; trans. Gary Hamilton and Wang Zheng, 1992); dates of his life and the 1957 campaign per Wikipedia, "Fei Xiaotong". Coleman 1990; Becker (Nobel 1992); Olson 1965; Green and Shapiro 1994. The model arithmetic on this page was run in node. This describes schools of thought and is not advice.