What is sociology to me?

One of the reasons that sociology is an attractive discipline is that it allows us to ask and answer questions about the nature of society and people’s social experiences. It illuminates commonalities and differences between social groups. It is sociology that helps us to understand social inequalities of various kinds, the social processes by which they occur and, therefore, how inequalities can be addressed. For me, it is the study of the interplay of social divisions and structures that makes sociology a vital and central social science discipline.

My awakening to the importance of a sociological framing of issues came from a perhaps unusual source. In 1976, when I was an undergraduate studying psychology at the University of St Andrews, Jack Tizard, Peter Moss and Jane Perry at the then fairly new Thomas Coram Research Unit, published All our children: Pre-school services in a changing society. This was not a sociological text. However, it contextualised pre-school services by tracing the history of pre-school provision and by examining inequalities in the provision of early child education and care. Tizard and his colleagues recognised that the ways in which society makes provision for young children is driven (at least partly) by the ways in which children and families are conceptualised. Furthermore, the resulting structures have an impact on the everyday practices and lives of parents and children, offering clear evidence that social structures and processes are central to personal lives. It was not that this book, by itself, changed my mindset, but it helped to crystallise my understanding that my interests in the processes that produce racialised, gendered and social class differences were not ‘just’ personal, political and of interest to those who considered themselves directly affected. They were also of academic interest.

Not long after this, I encountered Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s (1966) book, The social construction of reality. The title encapsulated their thesis that the social order is an ongoing human production rather than naturally occurring. The idea that reality is socially constructed is now familiar to many social researchers, but it was much less evident at the time that I encountered this book, more than ten years after its first publication. The idea had an impact on my work on women who became mothers before they were 20 years old, which was published in 1991 as Young mothers?