Introducing Sociology Using the Stuff of Everyday Life

The introductory sociology market is vast, and dominated by traditional textbooks. These textbooks generally take a fairly similar approach, dividing the field up into chapters based on disciplinary subfields like culture, family, deviance, race/ethnicity, and so forth. While these approaches are certainly thorough, what they possess in breadth they often lack in sociological imagination – the kind of spark that ignites a cognitive connection between one’s private troubles and public, or structural issues. The sociological imagination was defined by C. Wright Mills as "the vivid awareness of the relationship between experience and the wider society." Similarly, Peter Berger talks about a sociological "perspective", which allowed one to "see the general in the particular". Indeed, our hope as teachers is that our students won’t necessarily memorize everything there is to know about sociology as a discipline, but that they develop a sociological imagination, or perspective, that allows them to think broadly about the problems and issues in their individual lives, and move beyond the limitations of myopic individualism. By starting with consumer culture, and the "stuff" it so voluminously produces, this book will encourage students to unpack the back-story behind the stuff they love (and the stuff they hate). Through this process, they will see that the seemingly individual act of shopping – whether that be selecting a tube of toothpaste, or ordering a pair of shoes online – is never a solo experience. Instead, it is a profoundly collective phenomenon that joins the cultural and the material world, individual agents with broader structures, and local realities with global trends.

Josee Johnston is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She is co-author of Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape 2e (Routledge 2014) and Food and Femininity (Bloomsbury Academic 2015).

Kate Cairns is Assistant Professor in the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University. She is co-author of Food and Femininity (Bloomsbury Academic 2015).

Shyon Baumann is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He is co-author of Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape 2e (Routledge 2014).

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