Why Sociology?*
by Lukas Szrot
I’ve never heard a child say, “I want to be a sociologist when I grow up” in the same sense that children want to be firefighters, doctors, professional athletes, or celebrities. And when I explain to family or old friends from my own blue-collar upbringing in Arlington, Texas that I study sociology, they’re often puzzled. “A degree in sociology? What are you going to do with that?” This is a brief response, a personal take on what sociologists do, and what sociology can offer.
Maybe children don’t dream of being sociologists when they grow up because we don’t have a good marketing campaign. I mean, no one makes blockbuster films featuring a heroic sociologist who saves the day. Sociology isn’t known for winning wars or making people rich. But I think it’s more than that: we already do sociology whenever we try to understand what other people mean by what they say and what they do. It might give us amusement or a self-serving sense of importance to imagine that people who think, believe, and behave differently from us are crazy or stupid or evil. But by and large they’re not. People usually have reasons for what they’re doing, reasons that are often every bit as thoughtful and complex as the reasons we do as we do, reasons we simply don’t understand.
Making a good-faith effort to understand those reasons can help to bridge the gulf between us as human beings. Learning why others do as they do can inspire compassion and build empathy. Sociology is the study of interaction—as soon as it involves a relationship between one person and another, it’s sociology. It is not hard to think of all the practical uses and advantages of studying how people interact with one another, and understanding why others do as they do. It could make you a better police officer, salesperson, teacher, politician, CEO—or spy.
But there is also something uplifting, if less immediately practical, about trying to understand why others do as they do: learning how, and why, others are different from us teaches us a lot about ourselves. Consider how you got here, right now, to become the person reading these words. Millions of interactions with people, groups, and institutions that have led you to this moment. These interactions are not certain, fixed, inevitable; they are the result of an ongoing dialogue between your social circumstances and the ways you have responded to them. Doing things even a little differently might have led to a dramatically different result, but the social world that shapes our options, opportunities, and limitations is largely not a social world of our choosing. It existed before us, and much of it will remain after we are gone. Societies endure. It follows that people who change the shape of social worlds often do so at great personal cost.
People who study sociology professionally tend to have certain character traits. They’re often “nonconformists”: people who didn’t find their place in the world until later in life, or people who found themselves experiencing the social world from the margins for reasons beyond their control. Being on the edges of the social world can make you see certain things more clearly. “Taking a big step back,” trying to see your own corner of the social world from afar or from a different perspective is rewarding, but can also be uncomfortable, even painful. For some, this discomfort is part of everyday reality. They are positioned to understand how patterns of interactions that most of us take for granted have real and enduring consequences.
As nonconformists who may find themselves at the fringes, many sociologists dream of changing the world, and some work actively to do so. When a person comes to see injustice and suffering, it often drives responses at once hopeless to constructive: what can I do? Learning why things are done in a certain way often means wondering aloud why things could not be done differently. Some sociologists have a specific area in which they work to affect positive change. Our studies often bleed through into real-world activism and participation in movements, civic organizations, political bodies, or other avenues of change. The effort to understand often inspires efforts to make a positive impact, to leave the world better than we found it. Many sociologists may keep personal politics at arm’s length in the classroom or their research, but they are rarely apolitical in their personal lives.
This leads to a tension within sociology. On the one hand, we’re trying to understand the reasons others do as they do. On the other, we often end up longing to change the world, both the actions others take and the reasons they take those actions. In my view, this tension, between describing what is and figuring out how to make it better, cannot be resolved, and should not be. It is a “creative tension” or “constructive tension” that requires us to stop imagining there is some bright line that separates knowing from doing, thinking from planning, or understanding from acting. You don’t resolve this tension; you embrace it, and learn to live in it. Sociologists call this process reflexivity, or ongoing self-reflection. We must reflect consistently and carefully about how our own backgrounds, experiences, and worldviews shape the way we learn about others, teach others, and study groups that we may or may not have a personal stake in.
Sociology is about interactions. Studying interactions leads in many different directions: practical knowledge about how and why others do as they do, greater personal insight, and motivation to make change. Few become professional sociologists; practicing sociologists in the U.S. number in the thousands. Out of a population of about 330 million, there are perhaps 2 sociologists per 100,000 people (many sociologists also use statistics to study large populations). Why sociology? Not only does sociology offer ways to make you a more effective whatever-you-ultimately-become, but it can add depth and richness to lives filled with interaction from our first to our last breath, and just might inspire you to leave a better world than you found.
*Note: this was written in the summer of 2020. It was originally shared at the American Sociological Association (ASA) Conference, 2020, during a Teaching and Learning Roundtable, and was offered as an introductory reading to Lukas Szrot’s Introduction to Sociology students in the Fall 2020 semester. What follows is a lightly edited entry based on these initial efforts.
