Sociology posters
LearnPosters has 100 free printable sociology posters, grouped into 7 topics: Theory, Research methods, Stratification & inequality, Family & education, Crime & deviance. The theories and the evidence about how societies hold together. They are made for undergraduates, professionals and anyone revising the subject. No account and no watermark.
Classical and modern theory, research methods, and the substantive areas — class, gender, race, family, deviance and globalisation.
100 free printable posters · 7 topics · vector PDF
Theory
Marx, Weber, Durkheim and what came after.
The Sociological Imagination
Mills' move from private trouble to public issue, and why it frames the discipline.
Marx: Materialism
The base-superstructure model, class conflict, and what follows.
Weber: Social Action
The four ideal types of action, and why Weber starts from meaning.
Durkheim: Solidarity
Mechanical and organic solidarity, and what holds a divided society together.
Functionalism
How functionalists explain an institution by what it does for the wider system.
Conflict Theory
The family of approaches that read order as the outcome of unequal power.
Symbolic Interactionism
Blumer's three premises and the concepts that build society out of encounters.
Structure & Agency
The discipline's central argument, and the attempts to dissolve it.
Feminist Sociologies
The main strands, what each identifies as the source of gender inequality.
The Frankfurt School
Critical theory's turn from economics to culture, and Habermas after it.
Bourdieu: Forms of Capital
Four convertible resources, plus habitus and field, and how advantage is passed on.
Foucault: Power
Power as productive and dispersed rather than held, and what discipline does.
Postmodern Theory
The claim that the categories classical sociology relied on have come apart.
Rational Choice & Its Limits
The action model borrowed from economics, and where it breaks.
Three Lenses, One Fact
The same institution read functionally, critically and interactionally.
Stratification & inequality
Class, race, gender and mobility.
Measuring Inequality
The standard measures, what each is sensitive to, and why they disagree.
Class Schemes
How the main schemes cut the population, and what each is built to explain.
Social Mobility
Absolute and relative mobility, and why they can move in opposite directions.
Class, Status, Party
Weber's three dimensions of stratification, and why one does not reduce to another.
Cultural Capital at Work
The concrete ways cultural resources convert into institutional advantage.
The Gender Pay Gap
What the headline gap measures, and the mechanisms proposed for it.
Mechanisms of Racial Inequality
The distinct processes sociologists separate under one heading.
Intersectionality
Crenshaw's argument that categories combine rather than add.
Defining Poverty
Absolute against relative definitions, and what each implies for policy.
Wealth & Income
Two very different distributions that are routinely reported as one thing.
Occupational Segregation
Horizontal and vertical segregation, and how each is measured.
Audit & Correspondence Tests
The design that isolates discrimination from every other explanation.
Three Welfare Regimes
Esping-Andersen's typology and what each regime does to inequality.
The Meritocracy Debate
The case for merit-based allocation, and the sociological case against it.
The Social Gradient in Health
Why health tracks social position at every step, not just at the bottom.
Family & education
Institutions that reproduce society.
Family Forms
The forms households actually take, and what has changed in a century.
What Families Do
The functionalist account of family functions, and the critical replies.
Who Does the Housework
What time-use evidence shows about unpaid work, and what it does not settle.
Marriage & Divorce
The demographic changes, and the explanations offered for them.
Childhood as a Construct
Aries' claim that childhood is made by history, and the argument since.
Agents of Socialisation
Who teaches the norms, in what order, and how their messages conflict.
What Is School For
The competing answers, and what evidence would distinguish them.
The Hidden Curriculum
What is taught by the organisation of school rather than by its syllabus.
Cultural Reproduction
The step-by-step mechanism by which advantage passes through a fair-looking school.
Tracking & Setting
The case for grouping by attainment, and what the evidence on effects shows.
Attainment Gaps
The explanations offered for group differences, sorted by where they locate the cause.
Class & Child-Rearing
Lareau's contrast between two child-rearing logics, and how far it generalises.
Credentials & Screening
Whether a degree builds ability or merely signals it, and why the answer matters.
School Choice
What choice systems do to sorting, and who is best placed to use them.
Crime & deviance
Norms, labelling and social control.
Defining Deviance
Why deviance is a relation to a rule rather than a property of an act.
Durkheim on Crime
The counter-intuitive claim that crime is normal and even useful.
Strain Theory
Merton's five adaptations to a gap between goals and available means.
Labelling Theory
The sequence by which a label becomes an identity and then a career.
Social Control
The formal and informal mechanisms that hold conduct to a norm.
Subcultural Theories
The main subcultural accounts, and what each adds to strain theory.
Differential Association
Sutherland's claim that criminal conduct is learned like any other conduct.
Moral Panics
Cohen's sequence, and how to tell a panic from a genuine problem.
Broken Windows
The disorder hypothesis, and evidence much weaker than its influence.
The Dark Figure of Crime
The gap between offences committed and offences recorded, and how it is estimated.
Gender & Offending
The most consistent pattern in criminology, and the explanations offered for it.
Race & Criminal Justice
Where disproportionality appears, and what each stage can show.
Restorative Justice
A justice model built on repair rather than punishment, and what trials show.
White-Collar Crime
The category Sutherland invented, and why it is under-counted.
Globalisation
Flows of people, capital and culture.
What Globalisation Means
The four flows the term covers, and why they do not move together.
Three Positions
Hyperglobalist, sceptic and transformationalist readings of the same evidence.
Commodity Chains
How value is distributed along a production chain that crosses many borders.
Why People Move
Beyond push and pull: the mechanisms that shape migration flows.
Transnational Lives
Migration as an ongoing tie to two places, not a single move.
World-Systems Theory
Wallerstein's division of the world economy into three positions.
Culture: Flat or Plural
Homogenisation against hybridity, and what the evidence supports.
McDonaldization
Ritzer's four principles, and the irrationality he says they produce.
Global Cities
Why command functions concentrate in a few cities as production disperses.
Glocalisation
How a global form is reworked by every local setting it lands in.
Global Inequality
Three different questions the phrase covers, with three different answers.
The Digital Divide
Three levels of the divide, and why access alone does not close it.
Does the State Still Matter
The case that states are being hollowed out, and the case that they are not.
Risk Society
Beck: modern risks are manufactured, global and unevenly borne.
Urban sociology
Cities, community and space.
The Chicago School
The first systematic urban sociology, its model, and where the model fails.
Community Lost or Saved
Three answers to whether cities destroy community, and the evidence.
Gentrification
The standard sequence, and the two rival explanations of what drives it.
Residential Segregation
How segregation is produced and measured: choice or constraint.
Suburbanisation
What moved people outward, and what the pattern did to the city they left.
The Right to the City
Lefebvre: urban space is produced, and can therefore be claimed.
Informal Settlements
How informal settlement works, and what upgrading policy assumes.
Neighbourhood Effects
Whether a place itself changes outcomes, and why that is so hard to establish.
Public Space
What makes a space public in practice, and how access is narrowed.
Tenure & Housing
The main tenures, and what each does to security, wealth and mobility.
Renewal & Displacement
How a redevelopment scheme moves people, and the forms displacement takes.
The Growth Machine
Logan and Molotch on the coalition that treats a city as a growth engine.
Megacities
Where urban growth is actually happening, and what that pattern implies.
The Smart City
What sensor-led urban governance promises, and what sociologists ask of it.
Questions about the Sociology posters
- What is the Sociology section of LearnPosters?
- The theories and the evidence about how societies hold together. Classical and modern theory, research methods, and the substantive areas — class, gender, race, family, deviance and globalisation.
- What topics do the Sociology posters cover?
- 100 posters across 7 topics. Theory — Marx, Weber, Durkheim and what came after. Research methods — Designing studies of people, ethically. Stratification & inequality — Class, race, gender and mobility. Family & education — Institutions that reproduce society. Crime & deviance — Norms, labelling and social control. Globalisation — Flows of people, capital and culture. Urban sociology — Cities, community and space.
- Who are the Sociology posters for?
- The sociology charts are pitched at undergraduates and professionals — the frameworks and equations a course keeps returning to. Nothing here is tied to a school year, so a curious beginner and someone revising the same material for an exam are looking at the same sociology chart.
- Which Sociology poster should I print first?
- The Sociological Imagination, Marx: Materialism and Weber: Social Action are the ones people reach for first — they are the references the rest of the sociology set assumes you already have on the wall.The Sociological ImaginationMarx: MaterialismWeber: Social Action
- Are the Sociology posters free to print?
- Yes — all 100 of them. Each sociology poster is a free vector PDF that needs no account, prints on US Letter or A4, and enlarges to A1 without softening. Home, classroom, library and tutoring use are all covered by the licence.Read the licence
Where the sociology charts come from
These posters summarise. When you need the full account — or the normative text a chart is compressing — start here.
- American Sociological Association — ASA. The discipline's professional body, including its code of ethics.
- Sociological theory — Wikipedia. Attribution and critique for each theorist named on a chart.
Research methods
Designing studies of people, ethically.
Designing a Study
The order of decisions that turns a curiosity into a study you can defend.
Positivism & Interpretivism
Two research traditions, and what each treats as good evidence.
Sampling People
The main strategies, what each supports, and where each quietly fails.
Wording a Question
Rules for questions that measure the respondent, not the researcher.
Interview Formats
Structured to unstructured, and what you trade at each step.
Ethnography
What sustained fieldwork can show that no survey reaches.
Participant Observation
Overt against covert observation, and what each costs the researcher.
Ethics in Fieldwork
The obligations that outlast the study, and where they conflict with each other.
Coding Qualitative Data
How transcripts become an argument you can show your working for.
Operationalisation
The move from concept to indicator, and the two ways it goes wrong.
Reading Official Statistics
What administrative data is actually a record of, and how to use it anyway.
Triangulation
Combining methods, sources or researchers, and what agreement really shows.
Reflexivity
Accounting for the researcher as part of the instrument, without making it the subject.
Claiming a Cause
What a correlation needs before it is allowed to become a causal claim.