Social Theory Midterm

Social Fact

Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method"

Manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him" (52). Two marks: externality and constraint. Study them "as things.”

What makes a fact social, according to the slides?

A collective cause

Not that everyone does it, but that it can be attributed to collective causes, a "common propulsive force." Patterns are a clue; explanations matter.

Three kinds of social fact

Roles, norms, currents

Formal roles/duties ("brother, husband, or citizen"), norms and beliefs (repulsive foods, trash talk), and social currents (Swifties, jean styles, trad wives).

Why does Durkheim compare social forces to gravity?

A problem of measurement

We can't see the force directly, only its effects, just as falling objects show gravity. Social forces are strongest when least evident, and we notice them when we violate norms and get sanctioned (Garfinkel's breaching experiments).

Aggregate patterns (social statistics)

Durkheim, Rules

Rates of births, suicides, crime, bankruptcies reveal social forces, because individual factors "cancel each other out" (55).

"Dissociation" between rules and enactment

Durkheim, Rules

A social fact is distinct from its individual manifestations and isn't reinvented each time. Lecture comparison: langue vs. parole.

The "social rate" of suicide

Durkheim, Suicide

What Durkheim explains: a society's aggregate tendency to suicide, not individual cases. Explained by the extent of integration, the content of norms, and temporal variations in regulation.

Waves vs. ocean currents

Psychological vs. social causes of suicide

Psychological factors may be proximate (waves), but the original cause is social (currents). Victims may not know what is causing their suicide.

Durkheim's method in Suicide

Compare and control

Compare groups with different attributes, controlling for some factors to isolate others. Example: Bavarian and Swiss data separate religion from nationality and ethnicity.

Religion and suicide rates

Protestants high, Catholics lower, Jews lowest

Holds whether Protestants are a minority or majority. England is the lowest Protestant country because its church is organized like Catholicism. Reason: Protestant individualism and free inquiry vs. Catholic and Jewish rituals and mechanical solidarity.

Durkheim's "reversal of the causal arrow"

Society erodes first, then ideas follow

Free inquiry doesn't erode religion; religion's disorganization opens space for free inquiry. "Knowledge is not sought... to destroy accepted opinions but because their destruction has commenced" (169).

Marriage, children, and suicide

Children protect most

Compare married vs. unmarried people of the same age. Marriage protects (more for men); widowers fall between. Men with kids < married men without kids < unmarried men. Having kids matters more than marriage.

Politics and suicide

Upheavals lower suicide

Wars and political crises reduce suicide, not because of army discipline but because collective conflict arouses collective sentiment. Suicide is lower where groups give greater integration.

Egoistic suicide

Too little integration

Excessive individualism; the group exerts little influence. Lecture examples: Protestantism, atheism, unmarried people.

Altruistic suicide

Too much integration

The group exerts excessive influence; the self counts for little. Lecture examples: Inuit, jihadists.

Anomic suicide

Too little regulation

Anomie = a-nomos, "without law." Rises in sudden crashes and sudden booms: desires are unleashed, a "thirst for novelties." Trade is chronically anomic. Lecture example: Wall Street.

Fatalistic suicide

Too much regulation

Oppressive discipline that blocks the future. Lecture example: prison.

Mechanical vs. organic solidarity

Durkheim, Division of Labor

Mechanical: likeness, strong collective conscience, repressive (punishing) law, traditional societies.

Organic: difference and interdependence, restitutive law (contracts), modern societies.

Anomic and forced division of labor

Durkheim's abnormal forms

Anomic: no rules coordinating functions (crises, class conflict).

Forced: people assigned roles that don't fit their abilities.

Labor-power

Marx, Wage Labor and Capital

The worker's capacity to work, which is what the wage actually buys. The worker sells it as a commodity "in order to live."

How is the wage calculated?

Cost of keeping and reproducing the worker

Subsistence plus reproduction of the next generation. Lecture formula: (365A + 52B + 4C + D + ...) / 365.

Two strands of Marxian analysis that follow from the wage

Alienation and exploitation

(a) Labor becomes a commodity, not a source of meaning, so it is alienated.

(b) Exploitation is necessary to make a profit.

Commodification

Marx

Capitalism turns goods into commodities exchangeable by price; qualitative differences become quantitative. The capitalist cares only about profit. Lecture example: mergers and acquisitions.

Surplus value

Marx's term for profit

The workday splits into socially necessary labor time (value equal to the wage) and surplus labor time (value the capitalist keeps).

Absolute vs. relative surplus value

Marx

Absolute: lengthen the workday.

Relative: shorten necessary labor time through productivity, such as Smith's division of labor, so more of the day is surplus.

Means of keeping wages down

Marx

Cheaper goods lower subsistence costs; simplified tasks make workers replaceable; machinery replaces workers; child labor ("start the kids early").

"Expand or die!"

Marx: the compulsion of capital

Competition forces capitalists into constant growth, more division of labor and machinery. "Capital can only increase by exchanging itself for labor-power, by calling wage labor to life" (210).

Conflict is endemic and ubiquitous

Marx

Competition between capitalists (underselling) drives conflict between capitalists and workers (value extraction) and competition among workers for scarce jobs.

Long-run results of capitalism

Marx

More inequality, a simpler two-class structure, precarity, child labor, concentration and globalization of capital, crises of overproduction, and class consciousness: from class-in-itself to class-for-itself.

Four types of alienation

Marx, 1844 Manuscripts

From (1) the product, (2) the activity of labor, (3) species-being, and (4) other people.

Base and superstructure

Marx, 1859 Preface

The relations of production form the economic base; law, politics, religion, and philosophy rise on it as the superstructure. When productive forces outgrow the relations, those become "fetters" and revolution begins.

Verstehen

Weber

Interpretive understanding: explain social action through the subjective meanings actors give it. Contrast Durkheim's external social facts.

Ideal type

Weber

A pure model used as a benchmark against messier real cases. Not the average. Lecture examples: typical stockbroker vs. Wolf of Wall Street; B student vs. A+ student; typical churchgoer vs. saint.

Rationalization

Weber

Growing organization by rational rules across science, music, medicine, administration, and the economy. Peaks in bureaucracy (rational-legal domination). Develops unevenly; Weber is ambivalent.

Disenchantment

Weber

Rationalization drains the world of magic and richer meaning. Religious revivals are a pushback.

Weber's argument in a nutshell

Protestant Ethic

The systematic pursuit of profit as a duty emerged from the systematic pursuit of salvation through diligent work in a calling: a translation of ideas from the religious to the economic domain.

Form vs. spirit of capitalism

Weber

Form: institutions and structures.

Spirit: an inner drive for money-making as a duty. Exemplar: Ben Franklin, "Time is money."

Predestination

Calvinism (Weber)

Your eternal fate is already decided and nothing can change it. Produced "unimaginable inner loneliness" (59), so believers sought signs of their election. Contrast Pascal's Wager.

The calling

Weber (from Luther)

One's worldly work as a God-given task. Success in a calling becomes a sign of grace.

This-worldly asceticism

Weber

Self-denial practiced in everyday working life: work hard, accumulate, but don't enjoy wealth. Profits get reinvested. Lecture comparison: step-by-step 12-step programs.

Ad maiorem gloriam dei

Weber, Calvinist ideas

"For the greater glory of God." Work is done for God's glory, not one's own. Also: "God loveth adverbs."

Iron cage (steel-hard casing)

Weber

The long-run outcome: an obsessive but meaningless pursuit of wealth, or money-making as mere sport ("Greed is good"). Money becomes a measure of worth.

Power (Weber's definition)

Weber, Economy and Society

"The probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance" (53). Includes coercion, bribery, persuasion.

Domination

Weber

Commands obeyed "as if the ruled had made the content of the command the maxim of their conduct for its very own sake" (946). A stable, institutionalized hierarchy. Subordinates don't agree; they obey.

Four types of social action

Weber

Value-rational (Wertrationalität), traditional, affectual, instrumentally rational (Zweckrationalität). Mapping: value-rational to legal-rational, traditional to traditional, affectual to charismatic; instrumental infuses all.

Legal-rational authority

Weber: bureaucracy

Obedience to impersonal rules; person separate from office; hierarchy and jurisdictions; sine ira et studio; merit hiring; salary; written records. Synergy with capitalism.

Traditional authority

Weber

Based on unbreakable traditions and taboos; leader has wide discretion; staff of personal retainers and kin; decisions by precedent; protest in moral-economy language. Not compatible with capitalism.

Charismatic authority

Weber

Followers' duty to recognize the leader's gift; proofs must be repeated; no careers; foreign to rules and economics. "It is written, but I say unto you..."

Routinization of charisma

Weber

Charisma must be institutionalized to last: the problem of succession, regular celebrations of the group's mission.

Administrative staff

Weber

All domination runs through staff between ruler and followers: the White House, managers, disciples, henchmen, prison guards.

Class, status, and party

Weber

Class: economic order, shared life chances in the market.

Status: social order, status honor and style of life.

Party: "the house of power."

Reproduction of inequality

Bourdieu

Power is inscribed in bodies and made durable in ongoing structures (schools, workplaces), which tend toward reproduction without being functional for society.

Symbolic power / symbolic violence

Bourdieu

What is arbitrary is taken for granted as natural. Classifications are political terrain. Lecture examples: "housewife," "victim" vs. "survivor," "illegals." Compare Gramsci.

Objectivism vs. subjectivism

Bourdieu

Objective "social physics" treats people as puppets; subjectivism (Weber, rational choice) overstates agency. Bourdieu's synthesis: map structures first, then lived experience; structures take priority.

Homology

Bourdieu

A correspondence between social structures and mental structures, through their mutual reinforcement.

Habitus

Bourdieu

"Systems of durable, transposable dispositions"; a "generative principle of regulated improvisations" producing a practical sense. Internalized external structures (socialization); schemas of perception, thought, action.

Field

Bourdieu

A set of relations between positions with unequal power, like a magnetic field or battlefield. It refracts outside power like a prism. Examples: universities, high school cliques.

The college example

Bourdieu: objective chances become attitudes

Some students lack knowledge of the rules and feel they don't belong; others turn objective unlikelihood into "college isn't for the likes of me."

Mastery vs. necessity

Bourdieu

High art values form over function; popular taste subordinates form to function ("can I dance to it?"). The disadvantaged make a virtue of necessity.

Capital (Bourdieu)

Bourdieu

An accumulation of resources with the capacity to make more. The structure of the social world is the distribution of the types of capital.

Three forms of cultural capital

Bourdieu

Embodied (dispositions, cultivation)

objectified (books, pictures, music)

institutionalized (credentials).

Transmitted at home, it looks like innate talent.

Social capital

Bourdieu

Resources from "a durable network" of mutual acquaintance and recognition; built by endless investment (gifts, dinners). Being "known to more people than they know."

Conversions of capital

Bourdieu

Economic to cultural (buying art, sending kids to Harvard); economic to social (parties, philanthropy, donations); cultural to economic (turning fashion knowledge into a job). Always some effort and cost.

The color-line

Du Bois

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." A structural barrier to authentic "sympathy" across races, even among the well-intentioned.

The veil

Du Bois

Central metaphor: segregation, denial of the race problem, psychological separation ("two solitudes"), stereotyping the other as a "problem," and the critical second-sight of those who look through it.

Double consciousness

Du Bois

Seeing oneself through others' eyes produces a distorted self-image. Contrast Cooley's looking-glass self and Mead's generalized other.

Stigma and "marked difference"

Du Bois (lecture)

"How does it feel to be a problem?" is renewed in interaction. Blackness is a marked identity; whites need not see themselves as white. Compare Beauvoir.

"Double aims"

Du Bois

Assimilating to the white world alienates you from Black peers; helping fellow Black people pulls you away from white society. Fanon raises a similar dilemma.

Du Bois and pragmatism

Du Bois (lecture)

Souls (1903) is an evocative essay on culture, identity, and subjectivities. Evocative description can build shared understanding and consensus, as with Dewey, Cooley, Mead.

The Philadelphia Negro (1899)

Du Bois

A pioneering ethnography using demographic data, foundational for later urban ethnography (Chicago School, Whyte, Anderson).

Color-blind racism

Bonilla-Silva

Using liberal ideals (meritocracy, choice, individualism) to protect illiberal goals and white privilege (7). "It's racist to attend to race." Example: calling affirmative action racist.

Institutional racism

Bonilla-Silva (lecture)

Discrimination built into institutions. Race-neutral policies are racist if discriminatory in their effects, especially if implementers know. Examples: redlining, policing, redistricting, poll taxes.

Racial structure

Bonilla-Silva

"The totality of the social relations and practices that reinforce white privilege." It persists because it benefits whites.

Racial ideology

Bonilla-Silva

"The racially based frameworks used by actors to explain and justify (dominant race) or challenge (subordinate race or races) the racial status quo." Made of frames, style, and racial stories.

The "prejudice problematic"

Bonilla-Silva's critique

Most theories treat racism as individual psychology and hostility. He uses a materialist view: racial views reflect people's position in the racial structure.

Hegemony

Gramsci

Rule by consent as well as coercion: the ruling class "not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules."

Common sense vs. good sense

Gramsci

Common sense: the incoherent, uncritical beliefs absorbed from one's environment.

Good sense: its healthy practical core, which can be made coherent.

War of movement vs. war of position

Gramsci

In Russia, a frontal assault on the state worked. In the West, civil society is like trench systems that hold even when the state is shaken, so change needs a long war of position for hegemony.

Weapons of the weak

Scott

Everyday resistance: foot dragging, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, sabotage, desertion. Little coordination, self-help, avoids open confrontation.

De facto vs. de jure gains

Scott

Everyday resistance seeks immediate, practical (de facto) gains, not formal (de jure) change. It works best behind outward conformity.

Panopticon

Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Bentham's design: inmates always visible, guard unseen. Power is visible but unverifiable, so inmates watch themselves. A model for schools, hospitals, factories.

Capillary power

Foucault, Power/Knowledge

Study power at its local extremities, not just the state. Power circulates through a net-like organization; analysis should be ascending.

Epidermalization

Fanon

The internalization of inferiority, which is "primarily, economic" and "subsequently" inscribed on the skin and self.

Lactification

Fanon, ch. 2

The wish to whiten: "whiten the race, save the race." Illustrated by Mayotte Capécia's wish to marry a white man.

Personal troubles vs. public issues

Mills

Troubles: within a person's character and milieu.

Issues: concern a society's institutions. One person unemployed is a trouble; 15 million of 50 million is an issue.

The pin factory

Smith

Ten workers splitting about 18 operations make about 48,000 pins a day. Productivity rises through dexterity, saved time, and machinery.

Summarize Mills, The Sociological Imagination

People feel trapped because they experience private troubles without seeing the history and social structure that shape them. The sociological imagination grasps the intersection of biography and history. Troubles are personal and local; issues are public and institutional (unemployment, war, divorce).

Summarize Hooks, "Theory as Liberatory Practice"

Hooks "came to theory because I was hurting," finding it a "location for healing." Theory is not inherently liberatory; it becomes so when rooted in lived experience and aimed at practice. She criticizes jargon-heavy academic feminism and anti-intellectualism alike.

Summarize Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Wealth comes from the division of labor (pin factory), which arises from a "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange" and runs on self-interest (butcher, brewer, baker). Limited by the extent of the market. Masters combine more easily than workers; wages are highest in growing economies.

Summarize Marx, "Estranged Labor" (1844)

Under capitalism the worker is alienated from the product, the activity of labor, species-being, and other people. "The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces." Private property results from alienated labor; political economy wrongly assumes it.

Summarize Marx and Engels, The German Ideology

Start from real individuals and material production. "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life." History moves through forms of ownership; division of labor and private property are the same thing. "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas."

Summarize Marx, Wage Labor and Capital

Workers sell labor-power as a commodity "in order to live." The wage covers subsistence; the rest of their value is surplus value. Capital is accumulated labor dominating living labor. Competition drives machinery and deskilling; even when wages rise, profits rise faster: "golden chains."

Summarize Marx, 1859 Preface

People enter relations of production "independent of their will"; these form the base under a legal-political superstructure. "Social being... determines their consciousness." When productive forces outgrow relations, those become fetters and revolution begins. Bourgeois society ends humanity's "prehistory."

Summarize Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method

Social facts are ways of acting, thinking, and feeling external to individuals and coercive over them; study them as things. They include roles, norms, beliefs, and currents. A fact is social because of its collective cause. We see social forces indirectly, like gravity, especially when norms are violated.

Summarize Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society

The division of labor's main function is moral: solidarity. Mechanical solidarity (likeness, strong collective conscience, repressive law) gives way to organic solidarity (interdependence, restitutive law). Abnormal forms: anomic and forced division of labor.

Summarize Durkheim, Suicide

Suicide rates are social facts. Protestants > Catholics > Jews; unmarried > married > parents; wars lower rates. Too little or too much integration (egoistic, altruistic) or regulation (anomic, fatalistic) raises suicide. "The individual is dominated by a moral reality greater than himself."

Summarize Weber, The Protestant Ethic

Capitalism's spirit (money-making as duty; Franklin) came from Calvinism. Predestination caused anxiety; believers sought signs of election through methodical work in a calling and ascetic self-denial, so capital accumulated. Religion faded: "The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so": the iron cage.

Summarize Weber, Prefatory Remarks (Sociology of Religion)

Why did rationalized science, music, law, the state, and capitalism develop only in the West? Greed is universal; rational capitalism (free labor, separate household and business, bookkeeping) is Western. Explaining it requires both economic conditions and religiously shaped ways of life.

Summarize Weber, "Class, Status, Party"

Inequality has three dimensions.

Classes: economic order, shared market life chances; property and lack of property.

Status groups: social order, status honor, style of life, consumption.

Parties: "the house of power." A poor aristocrat can outrank a rich newcomer.

Summarize Weber, "The Types of Legitimate Domination"

Stable rule needs belief in legitimacy. Three pure types: legal-rational (enacted rules, bureaucracy), traditional (sanctity of tradition), charismatic (devotion to an extraordinary leader). Charisma is unstable and must be routinized; modernity grows more bureaucratic.