If you think about it too much, there’s something almost embarrassing about it. Sociology textbooks are thick, pricey books that arrive in classrooms with about the shelf life of a phone contract, and universities spend millions commissioning, editing, and packaging them. However, since 2000, a 21-card deck created by David Gauntlett at theory.org.uk has reportedly been outselling conventional sociology textbooks, tucked away in a corner of academic culture. Not exactly to replace them. simply winning in silence.
It’s difficult to ignore what that says about the publishing situation in sociology.
The cards are not particularly difficult. The first thing that is important to comprehend is that. They are based on important social theorists, whose theories have influenced our perceptions of culture, power, identity, and day-to-day existence. Each card condenses the main ideas of a theorist into something that students can actually grasp, flip over, read twice, and retain. There is no 500-page apparatus surrounding it. No summaries of chapters that pose as insights. Sitting there, just the thought.
Conversely, sociology textbooks have been moving in the opposite direction. In a 2012 article for Social Science Space, Daniel Nehring identified an issue that is still relevant today: there are far too many textbooks at what he referred to as the discipline’s periphery, recycling information into formats that are better suited for memorization than for critical thought. He was correct. Nehring used the memorable phrase “it looks more like an issue of Cosmopolitan than an academic text,” and anyone who has observed undergraduates navigating a syllabus built around a textbook will understand exactly what he meant. Maybe stylish. Significant, but much less so.
Textbooks have a great deal of influence over a discipline, which creates an odd tension. They frequently represent students’ first significant exposure to sociological thought. If you fill that encounter with multiple-choice-ready passages and superficial summaries, you may have done more harm than no textbook at all. The intriguing aspect of sociology—its insistence on posing difficult questions about how the real world functions—has been removed from the version of the subject that you have presented to your students.
Contrary to popular belief, a card deck does not have that issue. It is impossible for twenty-one cards to pretend to cover everything. They can’t pretend to be rigorous while stretching themselves out over twenty chapters. They are able to point. They point a student in the direction of a theorist, a tradition, or a way of thinking, and then give them the freedom to follow it. That restriction has a subtle intellectual honesty.
There may be a more profound lesson here that publishers haven’t fully realized. There is a connection between those 21 cards and the classic sociology textbooks, such as Peter Berger’s An Invitation to Sociology and Zygmunt Bauman’s Thinking Sociologically. They don’t make an effort to limit sociology. They attempt to open it. Creating yearly revised editions with new stock photos and rearranged chapter orders is a very different editorial instinct.
There is something instructive about seeing this little card deck continue to exist and seem to flourish while the textbook industry continues to produce ever-more-expensive, ever-thinner alternatives to genuine intellectual engagement. Perhaps even something somewhat optimistic. The point was always the ideas. In less than twenty-two cards, someone just remembered to say that.
