Who is Who in Sociology

The founder of sociology as a named discipline. His law of three stages argued every science passes through theological, metaphysical, and positive phases.

Can help you study: Positivism, the law of three stages, the founding of sociology, and Comte’s Religion of Humanity.

Translated Comte and wrote the first systematic sociological methodology. Increasingly recognised as the first sociologist.

Can help you study: Sociological methodology, morals and manners, and Martineau’s analysis of America.

The theorist of class and historical materialism, whose analysis of how economic structures generate social relations and ideology remains the most influential sociological theory.

Can help you study: Historical materialism, class conflict, alienation, Capital, and base-superstructure.

Coined “survival of the fittest” and applied evolutionary thinking to society.

Can help you study: Social Darwinism, the organic analogy, laissez-faire, and Spencer’s place in social thought.

His distinction between organic community and contractual society structured the debate about modernity.

Can help you study: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and the transition to modernity.

Founded academic sociology, introduced anomie, and used suicide data to show that individual acts have social causes.

Can help you study: Social facts, anomie, the sociology of suicide, religion, and the division of labour.

His formal method identified recurring social forms — the stranger, money, the city — beneath different contents.

Can help you study: Formal sociology, the stranger, metropolitan experience, and the sociology of money.

Argued Calvinist theology produced conditions for capitalism, introduced ideal types and verstehen, analysed bureaucracy and the disenchantment of the world.

Can help you study: The Protestant ethic, ideal types, bureaucracy, the iron cage, and verstehen sociology.

The first urban fieldwork sociologist in America and originator of double consciousness. The founding figure of Black sociology.

Can help you study: Double consciousness, the Philadelphia Negro, The Souls of Black Folk, and the sociology of race.

French sociologist and nephew of Durkheim who demonstrated in The Gift (1925) that exchange is never purely economic — every gift creates an obligation to receive and to reciprocate. He coined the concept of the total social fact: a phenomenon simultaneously economic, legal, moral, religious, and aesthetic.

Can help you study: The gift, total social fact, techniques of the body, exchange and reciprocity, and the anthropological foundations of sociology.

French sociologist who demonstrated that taste is not innocent. His concepts of habitus (embodied dispositions), field (structured social spaces), and capital (economic, cultural, social, symbolic) revealed how social inequality reproduces itself through culture. Distinction (1979) showed that aesthetic preferences are class markers disguised as personal choice.

Can help you study: Habitus, field, capital, symbolic violence, distinction, cultural reproduction, reflexive sociology, and the relationship between culture and class.

French philosopher and historian who argued that power is not held but exercised — it circulates, produces knowledge, constitutes subjects, and creates truth itself. His archaeological and genealogical methods revealed how institutions (the clinic, the prison, the asylum) produce the very categories they claim merely to describe.

Can help you study: Power/knowledge, archaeology of knowledge, genealogy, discipline and punishment, biopolitics, the history of sexuality, and the analysis of how institutions produce the subjects they govern.

Foundation of symbolic interactionism: the self arises through taking the attitude of others.

Can help you study: Symbolic interactionism, the self and the generalised other.

Psychiatrist and social psychologist at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Cross-posted from the Institut.

Can help you study: Social psychology and the sociology of sexuality.

The dominant American sociologist of mid-century, whose AGIL schema treated society as a system meeting functional requirements.

Can help you study: Structural functionalism, the AGIL schema, and the critique of Parsons.

Coined “unintended consequences,” “role models,” and the self-fulfilling prophecy; proposed middle-range theory.

Can help you study: Middle-range theory, manifest and latent functions, strain theory, and Merton’s concepts.

Founded ethnomethodology. His breaching experiments revealed invisible rules sustaining normal interaction.

Can help you study: Ethnomethodology, breaching experiments, and practical reasoning in everyday life.

Analysed social life as theatrical performance — impression management, face-work — and studied stigma and total institutions.

Can help you study: Dramaturgical sociology, stigma, total institutions, and the micro-analysis of interaction.

Outsiders founded labelling theory: deviance is the label applied by others, not a quality of the act.

Can help you study: Labelling theory, moral entrepreneurship, the sociology of art worlds.

His Essay (1767) argued social progress involves conflict, and that the division of labour produces proto-alienation.

Can help you study: Civil society, social conflict as progress, proto-Marxian alienation, and Scottish social theory.

Wrote the first systematic account of how gender hierarchy and class are produced by social conditions.

Can help you study: The social origins of rank and gender, Millar’s critique of slavery, and comparative sociology.

Co-authored the Dialectic of Enlightenment, arguing Enlightenment reason had become domination, and introduced critical theory.

Can help you study: Critical theory, the critique of Enlightenment, instrumental reason.

One-Dimensional Man argued advanced capitalism integrates opposition. The philosopher of the New Left.

Can help you study: One-Dimensional Man, the Great Refusal, Eros and Civilisation, and the sociology of consumer capitalism.

Co-originator of the culture industry critique. Negative Dialectics refused all affirmative philosophy.

Can help you study: The culture industry, negative dialectics, Minima Moralia, and Frankfurt School cultural critique.

Together they charted the modern English family’s shift from segregated conjugal roles toward the symmetrical home, a pattern they argued spread downward through society by stratified diffusion.

Can help you study: Family diversity, changing conjugal roles, the symmetrical family, and the functionalist view of family change — the families content of GCSE Sociology.

The Marxist case that schooling mirrors the workplace — rewarding the obedience capitalism needs and reproducing class position beneath the surface of the curriculum.

Can help you study: The Marxist theory of education, the correspondence principle, the hidden curriculum, and social reproduction — the education content of GCSE Sociology.

The feminist analysis of gender in schooling — treating gender not as something fixed but constructed daily in the classroom, and questioning the simple story of “boys’ underachievement.”

Can help you study: The feminist theory of education, gender and achievement, subject choice, and patriarchy in schools — the education content of GCSE Sociology.

The study of how working-class “lads” reject school — and how, in rejecting it, they prepare themselves for the very factory floor that awaits them. The deepest irony of cultural reproduction.

Can help you study: Anti-school subcultures, counter-school culture, cultural reproduction, and factors affecting achievement — the education content of GCSE Sociology.

The functionalist defence of inequality: that stratification is an unconsciously evolved device ensuring the most important roles are filled by the most able, drawn forward by the promise of reward.

Can help you study: The functionalist theory of stratification, role allocation, meritocracy, and the consensus view of inequality — the stratification content of GCSE Sociology.

The argument that patriarchy is not one thing but six interacting structures — paid work, housework, the state, violence, sexuality, and culture — shifting over time from private to public forms.

Can help you study: Feminist theory, patriarchy, gender inequality, and the factors influencing life chances — the stratification content of GCSE Sociology.

The subcultural theorist who explained non-utilitarian delinquency through status frustration: working-class boys, failing by middle-class standards, invert those standards in a subculture of their own.

Can help you study: Subcultural theory, status frustration, delinquent subcultures, and explanations of crime and deviance — the crime content of GCSE Sociology.