What is Political Sociology? (What is Sociology?)

With an entire discipline devoted to political science, what is distinctive about political sociology?This concise book explains what a sociological perspective brings to our understanding of the emergence, reproduction, and transformation of different forms of political order.Crucially, political sociology expands the field of view to the politics that happen in other social settings - in the family, at work, in civic associations - as well as the ways in which social attributes such as class, religion, age, race, and gender shape patterns of political participation and the distribution of political power. Political sociology grapples with these issues across an enormous range of historical and geographic settings, from intimate to geo-political scales.It requires an analytic toolkit that includes concepts of power, identities and inequalities, social closure, civil society, and modes of political action.Using these central concepts, this updated edition of What is Political Sociology