What to read next

Levels: START readable with no background; CORE standard texts, some effort required; DEEP demanding or specialist. Dates are of first publication in the original language.

Shelf 1If you read only five

• C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959). STARTShort, angry and still the best introduction to what sociology is for. Read the first chapter at least.
• Peter L. Berger, Invitation to Sociology (1963). STARTA graceful, witty case for seeing through the façades of social life. Pairs well with Mills.
• Matthew Desmond, Evicted (2016). STARTWhat contemporary sociology can do at its best: a gripping human story backed by original data.
• Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality (2018). STARTThe most concrete book on what happens when the state hands decisions about poor people to software.
• Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, The Ordinal Society (2024). COREThe most ambitious recent attempt to say what kind of society digital scoring and ranking has created.

Shelf 2The classics

• Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah (1377). Abridged translation by Franz Rosenthal, ed. N. J. Dawood. COREThe abridged edition is the way in. Read the chapters on asabiyya and dynastic cycles.
• Harriet Martineau, How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838). STARTA methods manual that still reads as sensible advice.
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848). STARTThe first section's portrait of capitalism's restlessness is extraordinary whatever your politics.
• Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1867). DEEPRead chapter 1 last, not first. The chapters on the working day and on machinery are the most relevant here.
• Émile Durkheim, Suicide (1897). COREBook Two, on the social causes and types, is the essential part.
• Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). CORERead the final pages, with the “iron cage”, even if nothing else.
• Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation” (1917–19). CORETwo lectures on facts, values and responsibility that every researcher and politician should read.
• Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903). STARTTwenty pages that anticipate the attention economy.
• W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). STARTBeautifully written; the opening chapter introduces double consciousness.
• W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (1899). COREFor a sense of what rigorous empirical sociology looked like at the start.

Shelf 3Twentieth-century theory

• Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956). STARTYou will never see a restaurant, a meeting or a profile page the same way again.
• Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (1966). COREThe source of a phrase everyone uses and few have read.
• Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944). COREThe best book for thinking about how societies respond to market and technological upheaval.
• Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/47). DEEPStart with the chapter on the culture industry.
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975). COREThe chapter on panopticism is famous; the chapter on “the means of correct training” is more useful.
• Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (1979). DEEPLong and dense. The introduction and conclusion carry the argument.
• Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart (1983). STARTClear and humane; essential for thinking about care and AI.
• Ulrich Beck, Risk Society (1986). COREExplains why AI regulation is written in the language of risk.
• Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). COREA disturbing book about bureaucracy and moral distance with direct lessons for automated systems.
• Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (1990). COREStandpoint and the matrix of domination.
• Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (1996). DEEPThe prologue and conclusion are the place to start.

Shelf 4From the South

• José Rizal, “On the Indolence of the Filipino” (1890). STARTA colonial subject turning the coloniser's stereotype into an analysis of colonial conditions.
• Fei Xiaotong, From the Soil (1947). Translated by Gary Hamilton and Wang Zheng. STARTShort lectures on Chinese rural society; a model of building concepts from local experience.
• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961). CORERead with Sartre's preface and against it.
• Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native (1977). COREHow colonial ideology was built, with extended discussion of the Philippines, Malaya and Java.
• Raewyn Connell, Southern Theory (2007). COREThe systematic case that sociology's canon is a regional one, with an anthology of alternatives.
• Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias, The Costs of Connection (2019). COREThe book that launched “data colonialism”.
• Jonathan Corpus Ong and Jason Vincent Cabañes, Architects of Networked Disinformation (2018). STARTFree report; an inside look at the Philippine disinformation industry that avoids easy villains.

Shelf 5Technology, data and AI

• Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976). STARTThe creator of the first chatbot explains why some things should not be delegated to computers.
• Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine (1988). CORELess famous than her later book and in some ways better: an ethnography of computerisation at work.
• Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction (2016). STARTAn accessible introduction to how models encode harm, written by a mathematician.
• Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (2018). STARTSearch engines, race and gender.
• Matthew Salganik, Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age (2018). COREThe standard guide to digital methods and their ethics. Free online.
• Mary Gray and Siddharth Suri, Ghost Work (2019). STARTThe humans behind the automation.
• Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen (2019). STARTContent moderators, including in Manila.
• Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology (2019). STARTThe New Jim Code; short and sharp.
• Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019). CORELong and polemical; its account of the business model is its strongest part.
• Sarah Brayne, Predict and Surveil (2020). COREInside the LAPD's data-driven policing; the best ethnography of algorithms in a state institution.
• Angèle Christin, Metrics at Work (2020). COREHow web analytics changed newsrooms differently in Paris and New York.
• Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI (2021). STARTAI as an extractive industry, from lithium mines to labour.
• Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas (2017). STARTThe best account of how digital tools changed protest. Free online.
• Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major and Margaret Mitchell, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” (2021). COREA short paper that became a flashpoint; read it to understand the debate.
• Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, The Ordinal Society (2024). CORESee Shelf 1.

Shelf 6Data, archives and tools

Sociology is an empirical discipline. These are public sources you can actually analyse.

• General Social Survey (GSS), NORC, University of Chicago. US attitudes and behaviour since 1972. Free, with an online data explorer.
• World Values Survey and European Values Study. Values and beliefs in nearly a hundred countries, including the Philippines, since 1981.
• International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). Cross-national modules on work, inequality, religion, the role of government and more.
• Pew Research Center. Frequent, well-documented surveys on technology, AI attitudes, religion and politics, in the US and internationally.
• Opportunity Insights and the Social Capital Atlas. The data behind the mobility and economic connectedness studies.
• Eviction Lab, Princeton. National US eviction data.
• Social Weather Stations and Pulse Asia. Long-running Philippine public opinion series, including trust, poverty self-ratings and hunger.
• Philippine Statistics Authority. Census, labour force survey and family income and expenditure survey.
• AI Incident Database. A public collection of documented harms and failures involving AI systems.
• OECD.AI Policy Observatory. Tracks national AI policies and strategies.

Shelf 7Journals and associations

• Journals: American Journal of Sociology (1895); American Sociological Review (1936); The British Journal of Sociology; Social Forces; Sociological Science (open access); Big Data & Society (open access, central for AI and society); Information, Communication & Society; Current Sociology (ISA); Philippine Sociological Review.
• Associations: International Sociological Association (founded 1949), whose research committees include one on the sociology of science and technology; American Sociological Association (1905); British Sociological Association (1951); Philippine Sociological Society (1952).