Introduction to Sociology Flashcards

Flashcards on Introduction to Sociology

Sociology (GIDDENS)

The study of social life, groups, and societies.

Sociology

The scientific knowledge of social phenomena.

Knowing a Reality

To be able to describe, highlight relationships, and explain that reality.

Sociological Knowledge

Involves description, highlighting relationships, and reasoning to explain social phenomena.

Sociology as a Science

A discipline studying verifiable facts and relations, using a specific approach to describe, link elements, and test hypotheses to develop theoretical models.

Bruno Latour on Scientific Fact

A statement that has successfully passed tests that tend to deny its existence.

Sociology as a Human Science

A discipline focused on understanding human behavior, both individual and collective, present and past, and related to disciplines such as psychology, history, and legal sciences

Sociology as a Social Science

A discipline that studies human beings in their interactions and relationships within groups and collectivities and related to disciplines like economics, political science, human geography, and anthropology.

Specificities of Disciplines in Human Sciences

Determined by the viewpoints adopted, the tools used (method), and the intentions in the approach to knowledge, emphasizing their complementarity despite potential conflicts.

Interdisciplinarity

Collaborative efforts between different disciplines to articulate their pieces of the puzzle and attempt to give a more complete vision of the realities studied.

Sociology's Distinct Characteristics

Include its specific viewpoint (social phenomena), tools (method), and intentions in the research process (foundations of sociology).

Social Phenomena

Encompass both social action and social fact, representing two poles that create tension within sociology, influenced by Max Weber and Emile Durkheim.

Social Action

A concrete manifestation in acts, undertaken by individuals or groups, that is meaningfully carried out in relation to others, taking others' existence into account when acting.

Max Weber's Sociology

Wanted to understand human behavior, to see that humans give meaning to their actions and act while taking others into account. Human behavior gains meaning when there are social relations

Social Relationships

Sets of reciprocal activities implying individuals are not isolated but give meaning to their actions by considering others.

Weber's 4 Types of Social Action

1. Rational action in finality, 2. Rational action in value, 3. Affective action, 4. Traditional action

Rational Action In Finality

An action based on expectations and the pursuit of objectives, considering others' reactions and behaviors, involving a rational calculation and strategic aim.

Rational Action In Value

Action based on belief in the intrinsic value of a behavior, regardless of outcome, involving reasoning related to values like probity, dignity, and honor.

Affective Action

Action based on current feelings, emotions, or passions, characterized as immediate, instinctive, and not well-thought-out.

Traditional Action

Action based on custom, performed because it has always been done that way, ingrained in habits and social customs, appearing natural without questioning its basis or utility.

Social Fact

According to Durkheim, it is a way of acting, thinking, and feeling, external to the individual, endowed with a power of coercion by virtue of which it controls them.

Durkheim's View of Society

Society is more than the sum of its individuals. It takes its own form and imposes an external force on individuals through social facts

Social Constraint

A framework which imposes itself externally on individuals, which characterizes phenomena that are believed to be strictly individual. It imposes through effect of number and duration.

Socialization Instances

Family, school, and media spreading social models (values, beliefs, customs, rites, and behavior forms) are initially external, then internalized

A Necessary Coordination of Social Action and Social Fact

Weber attempts to make sense of society through individual actions, where as Durkheim attempts to understand society through the frameworks that constrain them.

No Social Action without Social Fact

The framework renders the action feasible because it enables people to position, comprehend, and respond to their circumstances

No Social Fact without Social Action

That traditions would disappear if people ceased to make them new through action, and that democratic frameworks only persist through popular participation

Norbert Elias' Concept of Configuration

A concrete spatio-temporal situation of interdependence associating social and psychic structures

Sociology as a Science

Science that seeks to describe configurations, explaining their genesis, history, and reproducing what is durable, to reveal the underlying interdependencies and structural laws

Sociological Methods

Based on four essential rules: 1. Social facts should be considered as things; 2. The rule of totality; 3. The cause of a social fact must be the result of other social facts; 4. The rule of construction of the fact.

Considering Social Facts as Things

It does not remove from human beings humanity, nor concern itself with reducing facts of conscience, instead, it means to recognize social facts have their own reality, and are observable.

The Necessity to Produce Concepts

The production of concepts allows sociology to produce abstract thought to make an intangible idea, concept or problem more readily understandable. They are instruments of knowledge that can be revised.

Notion of Normality

Sociologists should endeavor to observe, without moral judgment. The normal will designate the statistical tendency of something.

Double Hermeneutic

Sociologists meet with thinking subjects and interpret their realities, then communicate their scientific findings back into the social field

Constructing Social Facts requires

Tension between theoretical elaboration and collection of data in material

Quantitative Methods

Make use of statistics and math laws. Take big numbers and see what is common.

Qualitative Methods

A collections of data that attempt to uncover nature, qualities, and meaning. It encompasses a set of tools such as observation

Sociological Reflexivity

The ability to take oneself as an object of analysis, to question the methods used and to keep in check any biases or effects one's own presence may induce on the social phenomenon being studied.

Emergence of Sociology

Occurred in the 19th century due to a revolution of ideas, political revolutions, and the Industrial Revolution (including the 'social question')

Evolution of Social and Political Philosophy

Included rationalism, the perception of man as a seat of rationality, and the diminishing of religion as social organization began to follow that of ideal principals

Developments in Science and Technology

Included the expansion of math and theoretical physics, the development of the concept of organisms as interdependent elements, and study of the evolution of species.

Political Revolutions and the Question of Stability

Political philosophy began to see itself manifested by revolutions throughout Europe. The question was, 'How to end political crisis through peace and stability?'

Industrial Revolution and Social Question

Industrial production deeply modified economic and labor organization. Led to the visibility of a proletariat in conditions of social distress that required a "social question."

Sociology as a Perspective

A way to address political stability and social quesitons. With a growing secularization and rationalization, social philosophers turned to science as a way to rationalize political organization.

Auguste Comte

Coined the term 'sociology' in 1839. He was inspired by the natural sciences when attempting to understand social phenomena, stating that in order to approach truth, observation needed to be scientific

The Law of Three Stages

The mind progresses through the 1. Theological State, 2. Metaphysical State, and 3. Positive State. These states all encompass a progression of individual history, as well as that of civilizations

Comte's Classification of Sciences

Sciences are ranked from least to most complex. 1. math, 2. physics, 3. chemistry, 4. biology. Crises created a new area of science that built upon biological science, sociology.

Sociology, a New Religion?

Convinced the sense of history pushes society to ascend to the Positive Age, Comte predicted sociologists would raise minds and the souls.

Herbert Spencer

Used the analogy of the social organism and the living organism. Applied the laws of evolution to social history, saying that social units progress to get more complex from homogeneous to heterogeneous.

Spencer's Political Dimension

A radical liberal view that human laws and state intervention has the impact of parasitizing the laws of natural self- regulation and of social evolution.

Emile Durkheim

Says that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, where the social fact is not reducible to many individuals but is imposed from the outside on them.

Collective Consciousness

Shared beliefs and sentiments common among members of a society, which form a determined system that has its own life.

Durkheim on Elementary Forms of Religious Life

Through collective living, humans access the intuition of a sacred world that overlooks the profane. Collective rituals cause individual feelings of self detachment, leading to intuitive understanding.

The Forms of Solidarity

Durkheim says society can only exist with a form of solidarity that links its individuals together. However, that solidarity is subject to forms of transformation

Mechanical Solidarity

A form of solidarity through simile. Individuals don't think in term of 'I', but in terms of 'We'. Individuals share one mind.

Organic Solidarity

Results in social differentiation and comes from differences between individuals complementary to each other. Replaces competition with cooperation.

Durkheim's Suicide Types

Egoistic, Altruistic, Anomic, Fatalistic

Anomic Suicide

Results from too low of a social regulation, as a result of boom or bust

Normal and Pathological

Though suicide is normal in a society, its modern increase corresponds with a reduction in common codes of conscious.

Karl Marx

Adapts Hegelian philosophies to the economic, hystorical, and socialoogical analysis of the industrial and capitalist society

Marxist Materialism

The material world predominates. Ideas and feelings are important, but secondary to material realities that subsist outside of individual consciousnesses.

The Goal of the Communist Revolution

An end to all societal superstructures that exploit the lower classes in favor of the elite by ending any possibility that social conflict could occur.

Max Weber

Against Durkheim and Marx, he views man as contingent on societal restraints. States that science can still be value neutral even if it is subjective

Weber's Sociology

Believed the proper focus was on interpretation of social action, and that this required ideal types to be developed to permit analysis of the complexities of human activity.

Weber's Value Neutrality

Regardless of personal values or opinions, to conduct research that can be validated according to scientific criteria.

The Ideal Type

An exploration of reality that requires a reference point to describe and make sense of reality, like the character of the Miser from Moliere's 'The Miser'.

Weber Study of Ethic in Protestant Ideology and Spirit of Capitalism

Weber suggests that not only is religion not opposed to modernity, it is actually one of its foundations.

Rationalization and Disenchantment

In polytheistic traditions, contradictions are represented by feuding gods. Monotheistic faiths had to address that and resulted in a more personal rationality as individuals weighed the needs of their souls with the rules of their community.

The Ideal of Ascetic Work

Is the self-sacrifice of investment within rigorous work without increasing personal wealth, but for a higher ideal.

Affinity between Ethic and Economic Structure

There is resonance between these areas through a process of rationalization

Forms of Domination

How the people in positions of power can impose their will. 1. Force. 2. Authority

Different Approaches to Group Reliance

It becomes less about knowing human freedom, and more about the system and how it enforces itself.

The Cage of Steel

The loss of sense and meaning when a system so efficiently runs on its own.

Points of Sociological Inquiry

Addresses human relationships, social groups, and the concept of human ties

Dupréel view on Social Coherence

Social order comes from social relations based in sentiment, or it is maintained from formal relations with organizations

Social Relationships (DUPREEL)

Evokes connections of individuals between individuals and groups, and between social groups. The connections can be permanent, sporadic, codified, formalized, or more informal

Social Groups (DUPREEL)

Formed when an aggregate is combined with harmonious social and complimentary reports.

Tönnies Ideas on Community vs Society

States that it is not a question of choosing structure, but of seeing society leaning into one or the other.

What is Maffesoli Viewpoint?

There are different types of social relationships, where there are more important groups now for cultural connection

What does Vranken say about Social Hierarchization?

When is difference enriching? When is it a societal ill. We are in general, a point of intersection between several social phenomenon

Dupreel's Take

Morality stems from social agreement. There is both objective and accepted experience.

Social Stratification

An act of putting the strata on top of each other, based mostly on the distinction of economy. This implies that you are high up, this is where you are coming from, such thing as power. So we should try to study how we can go up, not just with economic studies now.

Social Roles

The behavior expected of an individual in a given social situation

Normal Behavior in a Social View

The attempt to confer reality on things that are social, but aren't physical.

Gilles Lipovetsky View

The new generations know of an individual who puts stock in an act of expression that doesn't correspond with some kind of normal code of behavior, not that the codes do not have interest, it will now just require individual action to try and establish themselves, such as becoming more visible or vocal.

Mançur Olson Idea

Each individual does not take place in the shared action. But as the individuals are not equal, at some time, all those groups take influence on everyone.