Introducing Sociology

Icon Books (UK), Totem Books (USA). Republished 1999 (ISBN 1-84046-067-9)

Written by Richard Osborne, Illustrated / designed by Borin Van Loon
What is sociology? Simply, it is the study of how science functions, or in some cases, does not function. Various competeing schools of sociology have attempted to fit observations of social phenomena into different conceptual systems.

Introducing Sociology traces the origins of these systems from Enlightenment thought and the pioneering work of Auguste Comte to subsequent developments in Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. The rapid expansion of sociology in twentieth century America and Britain, the post World War II dominanace of Talcott parsons, the Chicago School and the rise of structuralism are oulined in a clear graphic form. The book also examines the array of concepts and methiods of research that have been applied to the study of society by the key analysts.

This was my first 'pure collage' documentary comic book and it involved about double the amount of visual research usually devoted to an 'Introducing' title. I have drawn on every strand of reference that lateral thinking could lead me. At this point I believed that, given the generic nature of sociology and the fact that it's all about people, I wouldn't be able to pull this approach with any other topic. That was, until Introducing Mathematics. It must be noted that this was 'pre-internet', so I was still reliant on the author, public libraries and my own resources for reference material.

The author Richard Osborne has his own website, see Links.

Reviews

Introducing Sociology

From Book
Introducing Sociology by Richard Osborne and Borin Van Loon
Scans of pages 1-17 of the book. I'll check the site and insert the web address! Interesting to see such a slab of our book on another site, though.

_Introducing Sociology_ by Richard Osborne and heavily-illustrated surrealistic-comic-book-style by Borin Van Loon gives a beginner's outline to the science, study, discipline or whatever you want to call it, of sociology. Sociology attempts to figure out how society, especially how the ever-increasingly complex, modern Western societies are constructed, structured, operate, interact, and what the role of class, race, gender and above all, economics, plays in them. This book goes through all the major theories and thinkers, but is overly-confused by smoke from the crack-pipes of Marxism and radical feminism. A central point is noted toward the end of the book: that of the transformation of the West in the 19th and 20th centuries from an agricultural, Christian and aristocratic base to industrialism, secularism, pleasure-seeking hedonism and sensualism. This is the root of the predicament that Western society is in today, but you won't hear a whole lot about it in the PC New Left and neoconservative academia. The author also dismisses in an offensively condescending manner sociobiology and the evoloutionary Darwinist perspective--that the determining factors of how different cultural groups, races and genders in society act are rooted in heredity rather than in social conditioning. This of course will lead to "racism and the holocaust." _Introducing Sociology_ is a rather quirky yet serious overview of sociology, and the author at the end admits that he cannot come to any decisive conclusion about the study of society in our ever-morphing postmodern world, where individuals live in "hyperreality"; learning more from mass-media and its contrived, false images than from the real world itself. I wish I knew the reasoning behind the cover illustration, a half-human, half-robot woman in a bikini with a human embryo attached to her hip in a huge test-tube, reading a book upside down.
It's easy to get lost in the spew of "-isms" and sub-disciplines that pervades the social sciences and humanities these days. This illustrated intro to sociology illustrates fairly clearly how we got there from a few simple questions (E.g., what is the nature of society?) The book provides a broad, historically structured overview that accounts for most of the major thinkers, from Comte and Spencer to Adorno and Baudrillard.I've read most of the books in this series, and this is one of the best. It is concise, not condescending. And although it offers a wide range of theories and thinkers, it takes pains to distinguish between all of the information presented, even offering some comparisons between different sociological perspectives. This covers methodology, Marxism, Functionalism, Symbolic Interactionism, Chicago School, Frankfurt School, Feminism, Media Studies, Culture, and almost everything else. Of course, you only get a few paragraphs on each, but then that it what this book is designed to do...give a short introduction to each of the sub-areas as well as a general overview. The illustrations are of a fairly good quality, and while they don't really enhance a reader's understanding of the material, they help sustain interest in it. Rating: 5 (http://traveltocaribbeanislands.com/1874166390.html)

Darwin...
Genetics...
Buddha...
Eastern Philosophy...
Cultural Studies...
Mathematics...
Media Studies...
Critical Theory...
Science...
Psychotherapy
Hinduism