ABSTRACT
THE CHAIR OF THE SOCIOLOGY department was talking with another member of the faculty about what he said when people asked him what sociologists study: “Whatever they want!” he said. As an independent-minded 21-year-old at the time, that response helped me decide to go into the field of sociology. However, his statement is not entirely true. You do have the freedom to focus on a great many different subjects in sociology, but there are boundaries. You can’t study chemistry or physics, for example. What you do study is groups of people-people in friendship groups, families, organizations, and societies. But wait, you might say. Lots of people study people in groups. Novelists and writers do. Journalists do. Historians do. Ordinary people do in everyday life. Does this mean that everyone is a sociologist? The famous economist Joseph Schumpeter once joked that this was the case. He said that he was planning to write a “sociological novel” in his old age, and that he had even once done fieldwork for the book: He rode the subway back to work! “This, he reported, had been a very interesting experience, and what was more, when he came to writing his sociological novel he was going to do it again” (Samuelson, 1951, p. 98).
