SOCIOLOGY OF HEALTH AND MEDICINE
education is now approaching parity, the overall proportion of school chil-
dren entering higher education has substantially increased since the 1950s,
and the number of entrants from working-class homes has also greatly
increased. On the odier hand, class differences in educational achievement
remain striking, and the role of educational systems in sustaining a class
society is equally apparent. See also BERNSTEIN, HIDDEN CURRICULUM,
INTELLIGENCE, MERITOCRACY, CONTEST AND SPONSORED MOBILITY.
sociology of health and medicine the application of sociological
approaches to the understanding of the experience, distribution, and treat
ment of illness. This subarea of the discipline has been a major growtii area
in terms of research and teaching, and in terms of membership it probably
represents the largest section of bodi the British and American national
sociological associations. The reasons for this expansion are perhaps
twofold. The first has been the relatively greater access of workers in this
area to research funds: bodi governments and medical sources have been
eager to promote research diat could improve health policy and patient
care. Secondly, it has become manifest diat the profile of morbidity and
mortality in the industrialized world is now dominated by so-called lifestyle
diseases (such as stroke, cancer, and heart disease). As the name implies,
the management of diese problems often involves an adjustment to ways of
living ratiier tfian subjection to a regime of drug dierapy. Medicine has no
magic bullets to destroy these diseases (as antibiotics could with many
infectious diseases), or immunization programs to give prophylactic protec
tion. Moreover, lifestyle diseases show a clear social class gradient, general
ly becoming less frequent as class position improves. There is also, tiien, a
socially structured pattern of opportunity for healdiy living. Sociology has
an obvious input to make in providing a fuller understanding of these
chances for life. '
The expansion of health and medicine as an area of sociological concern
can be dated from the seminal contribution made by PARSONS' analysis of
the SICK ROLE. Parsons' interest, in fact, was part of a much larger tiieoreti-
cal project (1951) on the development of a complex functional model of
society, but his contribution served to establish the area of medicine as an
institution whose sociological study could enhance the dieoretical develop-
ment of the discipline itself. Herein lies a long-established (if, in the end,
overdrawn) distinction between two sociologies of medicine: one, a sociol-
ogy in medicine, whose research agenda is set by governments, policy mak-
ers, and clinicians; the odier, a sociology of medicine, whose questions are
determined much more by sociologists and/or sociology.
Parsons' concept of the sick role was subjected to criticism and amend-
ment (see, for example, Morgan et al., 1985, for a recent overview of the
major contributions here). Other topics of particular importance in the
early expansion of the discipline were medical education and socialization
(MERTON et al., 1957, BECKER et al., 1961); the social organization of deadi
SOCIOLOGY OF HOUSING
(Glasser and Strauss, 1965,1968); mental illness (GOFFMAN, 1961a, Scheff,
1966); and the analysis of medicine as a profession (Freidson, 1970a,
1970b). FUNCTIONALISM and SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM were the major
dieoretical traditions diat informed much of diis early work.
As the sociology of health and medicine has grown both in terms of
maturity and in the number and dieoretical predilections of its practitioners,
research has been extended further. There can now be hardly any sub-
stantive area in the field in which work still remains to be initiated. Among
the topics diat have been, and continue to be, of interest to contemporary
researchers are the relationship between medicine and capitalism; medicine
as an instrument of social control (medicine and patriarchy and the
medicalization of life have been two prominent diemes here); gender and
health, with particular reference to the role of women as paid and unpaid
health workers; eating disorders; inequalities in health and health provision,
including diose of race and gender as well as class; the social construction
of medical knowledge; doctor-patient communication and interaction;
patterns of help-seeking and compliance among patients; the holistic healtii
movement and complementary therapies; and, most recently, the study of
sexual behavior, widi special reference to sexually transmitted diseases and
AIDS. sociology of housing a subject area in sociology that studies and
seeks explanations for different patterns of housing provision and housing
tenure, bodi historically and comparatively, as well as within societies. Its
subject matter is related to URBAN SOCIOLOGY and the sociology of welfare.
Widiin Britain, for example, housing tenure has changed gready since
World War I, when most dwellings were privately owned, rented accom-
modation. By the 1980s, owner occupation had increased to nearly 60 per
cent, widi public housing 30 per cent, and privately rented accommodation
making up the remainder.
In Britain, the right to a home has not generally been recognized for
those without children, widi many young workers, and especially the young
unemployed, unable to afford independent accommodation (see HOME-
LESSNESS).
Housing has never quite achieved the status of a social service within
Britain despite substantial council housing (public housing) provision and
attempts to control the behavior of private landlords. Sociologists have
attributed diis ideological ambiguity to the way in which housing is simul-
taneously consumption and capital.
REX and Moore (1967) have suggested diat differences in housing can be
analyzed profitably using the concept of "housing classes," although the
generation of such typologies would appear potentially endless. Others
have argued diat tenure, the basis of Rex and Moore's housing classes, is
not the cause of social status but rather its effect. In a further develop-
ment, critics of the CHICAGO SCHOOL have argued diat cities and areas or
475
SOCIOLOGY OF ART
Aristotle or, closer to modern times, Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such
as SMITH or FERGUSON. There is a viewpoint in sociology that sociology's
concern as a discipline is with the distinctive problems of modern INDUS-
TRIAL SOCIETIES (GIDDENS, 1981). However, though this draws attention to an
undoubted central emphasis widiin modern sociology, seen not least in the
classical works of the giants of the discipline, such as MARX, WEBER, and
DURKHEIM, it understates the range of the subject, which is a concern
widi all aspects and all types of society.
sociology of art an area of sociological analysis that includes within its
compass a concern widi exploring the visual arts and sometimes also music,
dieater, film, and literature. As such, the potential range of concepts and
theories is diverse. Influential theoretical approaches have included
Marxist and neo-Marxist, including STRUCTURALISM, as well as more con-
ventionally sociological perspectives.
In the United States, mainstream sociologists such as Coser (1978) and
BECKER (1982) have focused on organizational and institutional analysis of
the agencies involved in artistic and cultural production and tiieir relations
widi audiences.
Whereas at one time Marxist approaches sought to analyze artistic prod-
ucts reductionistically, in terms of the metaphor of base and superstruc-
ture, Marxists are today at the forefront of an emphasis on the importance
of analysis of internal features of the artistic object or the text (see also
HERMENEUTICS). Structuralist approaches, including SEMIOTIC analysis,
exploring the complex codes involved in artistic products, have also been
widely employed in recent years. Ultimately, however, it is a combination
of an understanding of artistic production in its own terms and an account
of its wider socioeconomic location and implications that continues to
demarcate the sociology of art from more conventional nonsociological
approaches to its analysis, such as literary criticism or art history. This said,
it must also be recognized diat much seminal work in the sociology of art
has been interdisciplinary radier tiian narrowly sociological. See also AES-
THETICS, SOCIOLOGY OF MASS COMMUNICATIONS, LEISURE, CULTURAL STUDIES, BENJAMIN.
sociology of crime and deviance see CRIMINOLOGY, DEVIANCE.
sociology of development that branch of sociology concerned witli the
examination of social change from agrarian to industrial societies and par-
ticularly applied to study of the Third World. More narrowly, the term is
sometimes used to refer to those dieories of social change associated widi
MODERNIZATION theory and neo-evolutionary approaches (see NEO-EVOLU-
TIONISM). This latter use is now less common than in the 1970s, when the
sociology of development was contrasted with underdevelopment or
DEPENDENCY THEORY.
sociology of education the application of sociological theories, perspec-
tives, and research metods to analysis of educational processes and prac-
SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION
tices. It is characteristic of industrial societies diat, compared widi previous
societies, education is provided by specialized institutions. It is the perfor-
mance of tiiese institutions diat is the central object of study in the
sociology of education.
Aldiough the emergence of the sociology of education as a distinct field
of inquiry is of fairly recent origin, it has its roots in the early development
of sociology, especially the FUNCTIONALISM of DURKHEIM. For Durkheim
(1922), the process of education was to be understood in terms of its con-
tribution to the promotion and maintenance of the social order. A related
viewpoint (for example, MANNHEIM) was to regard education as a means of
solving problems and removing social antagonisms.
Until the 1950s, the sociology of education remained strongly influenced
by such perspectives, although development of the discipline owed much
to the role of sociology in teacher training, especially in the Unites States,
as well as to the tradition of "political aridimetic" in Britain. The latter tra-
dition led to a range of surveys and statistical studies exploring the social
influences on educational attainment, and on educational and occupational
selection and SOCIAL MOBILITY (for example, Floud, HALSEY, and Martin, 1957).
Although these studies revealed the persistence of class and gender
inequalities in educational opportunity, the assumption remained diat edu-
cation could become a means of social transformation in the long run
During the 1960s, a breakdown of the functionalist hegemony in sociology
and an increasing pessimism about reformist policies in education,
especially in the United States, led to the emergence of a sociology of edu-
cation markedly different in tenor. Sources of inequality lying outside the
school were seen as intractable, and fundamental questions were raised
about the traditional sociology of education and the assumed relationship
between education and social reform. One aspect of tiiis new phase in the
sociology of education was to direct attention to features of schooling such as
classroom interaction and curriculum organization, work that derived from
the application of standard interactionist approaches. Other work was more
radical (for example, Young's work on the curriculum, and Bowles and
Gintis's Schooling in Capitalist America, 1976), suggesting that schools
function above all as agencies that necessarily reproduce the social relations
of capitalist production. Part of the inspiration behind analysis of tiiis type
was Marxist (for example, drawing on the conceptions of GRAMSCI and
ALTHUSSER). Odier sociologists, however, combined the dunking of Marx,
Durkheim, and Weber to achieve much the same outcome, for example,
BOURDIEU'S arguments about the dependence of education on CULTURAL
CAPITAL.
It would be wrong to imagine that later perspectives in the sociology of
education have entirely replaced earlier ones. Nor should it be assumed
that all attempts to expand educational opportunity have been to no avail.
For example, in Britain the percentage of men and women entering higher
473