Textbooks and Sociology: A Franco—British Comparison

Abstract

This comparison of British and French textbooks published between 1950 and 2003 sets out to identify differences and similarities in form and content that may be indicative of the ways in which sociology is conceived of and practised in the two countries. Various aspects of the texts are examined such as their definitions of sociology, their construction of the sociological tradition and their use of examples and illustrations. Both common features and differences are found suggesting the existence of distinct national traditions that refer to more universal characteristics inherent in sociology as a discipline.

A Comprehensive Framework for Comparing Textbooks: Insights from the Literature and Experts

“…Concerning structure, our findings highlighted several sub-indicators, including page count, word count, illustration count, and chapter/unit organization. Studies in the reviewed literature primarily focused on analyzing the first three sub-indicators [23,34,65]. However, no study has focused on analyzing chapter/unit organization when comparing textbooks.…”

“…Due to the aforementioned reasons, comparing textbooks has gained vast research attention [15,[31][32][33]. However, to the best of our knowledge, most of the extant research has evaluated and compared textbooks in terms of limited indicators of structure [34], content [23,32,35], learning expectations, and/or language analysis [20,36]. For example, to compare the presentation of fractions in textbooks of fifth and sixth grades, Yang et al [31] mainly examined problems and exercises.…”

Toward a Historical Sociology of Canonization: Comparing the Development of Sociological Theory in the English-, German-, and French-Language Contexts since the 1950s

“…Other efforts have yielded insights but have been limited by the size of their corpus. Alway [1995] looked at the neglect of women thinkers and feminist theories more broadly, rooting her arguments and critiques in an analysis of 17 textbooks; Schrecker [2008] examined “national and universal factors in sociological discourse and practice by testing for what some have called a sociological ‘core’” through multiple editions of eight textbooks in France and Britain; whereas Barlösius [2004] examined nine textbooks, albeit French, English, and German ones, to investigate which works are recognized as sociological classics and how these are presented. Surveys have similarly been very small, ranging from one study based on a single instructor’s classroom [Parker 1997] to one that collected data from roughly 30 colleagues [Gerhards 2014].…”

Les Deux Angleterres et le Continent. Anglophone sociology as the guardian of Old European semantics

“…This "lamentably low visibility of Niklas Luhmann's work in the Anglophone world" (Bergthaller and Schinko, 2011: 5) is also reflected by the fact that his writings have neither been ranked in the 'ISA top 10 books' (ISA, 1998) 4 nor in the 'Contemporary Sociology Top 10 Books' (CS, 1996), thus far. Theorists in social systems and their concepts hardly play any role in the contemporary sociological student textbooks (Keith and Ender, 2004;Macionis, 1988;Schrecker, 2008;Wagenaar, 2004). Also in his study on 'Canon Formation in Late 20 th -Century British Sociology', W. Outhwaite (2009Outhwaite ( : 1030 lists Z. Baumann, U. Beck, P. Bourdieu and A. Giddens as representatives of the British canon while excluding N. Luhmann, but not without admitting that the in-group is only "proving a loose framework for analysis, rather than laying down formal categories in the manner of Parsons, Luhmann or Richard Münch.…”

“…However, as of the 1920s, the constitutive idea of being the 'Practical Sociology of the Metropole' still has a certain relevance in US-American sociology (Persell et al, 2007: 313). A strong focus on the applied, practical and actorbased concepts can also be noted with regard to the British Islands, both in the context of a comparison between French and British student textbooks 6 (Connell, 1997(Connell, : 1535 and with regard to the British sociological canon formation (Schrecker, 2008). Thus, a common feature of both traditions is to flaunt a theory-skeptical attitude (Outhwaite, 2009), which, in return, makes these sociologies more open to and, therefore, more dependent on what they perceive to be the everyday languages and the common senses already existent in the subjects and objects of their research.…”