Sociology Exam 2

Adam Smith’s Work

• Theory of Moral Sentiments

• An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nation

• Lectures on Jurisprudence

Adam Smith

• enlightenment thinker

  • humanism

  • property rights

  • individualism

  • liberty

  • rationalism

  • inequalities

• Scottish historical school

• developed political economy

Theory of Moral Sentiments

all about morality and how people make judgements based on right and wrong

• sympathy

• morality

• impartial spectator

• social relationships

• self interest and self love

• amour-propre —> desire for approval, recognition, and respect from other people

Adam Smith and Sociological Imagination

• he examined how individual actions and economic activities relate to overall social structure

  • broader thinking

Adam Smith

• Embeddedness

  • human behavior is embedded in social relationships, cultural expectations, and institutions

  • Smith recognized that people’s behavior is influenced by their relationships with others and desire for approval and acceptance

• Unintended Consequences of Actions

  • the result of someone’s actions can differ from what they intended

  • smith argued that individual’s pursuing their own interests can sometimes contribute to benefits for society, even if it was not their goal

• Division of Labor

  • when production is broken into separate tasks, with people specializing in different tasks

  • increases productivity, allows workers to specialize, saves time. producing goods more efficiently

  • Durkheim —> social solidarity

  • Marx —> capitalism

Adam Smith’s Metaphor

The Invisible Hand

• individuals pursuing their own interests unintentionally contribute to broader social benefits through economic activity

  • used in History of Astronomy, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and Wealth of Nations

  • no complete consensus

  • only under certain circumstances does the invisible hand work

Emilie Durkheim

• The Division of Labor and Society

• The Rules of Sociological Method

• Suicide

• The Elementary Forms of Religion

Solidarity

Mechanic —> type of social cohesion that corresponds to less complex forms of social organizations

• people are connected because they share the same beliefs, values, and lifestyles

• order depends on punishment and rules

Organic —> more complex

• higher levels of interdependency

• people are connected because they have different jobs and depend on one another

Anomie

meaning without law

• norms and rules become weak or unclear leaving people without clear guidance for behavior

• drastic changes

• society helps regulate people’s desires and expectations

• when social rules lose their influence, people may experience uncertainty

Social Facts

• states of the collective mind

• currents of opinions

• social ways of being

  • exist outside of individuals, but still influence how they think, feel, and behave

Suicide

• can be studied through broader social patterns

• effected by social regulation (how strongly society’s norms and values influence behaviors) and social integration (how connected people are to communities and groups)

  • egoistic - too little social integration

  • altruistic - too much social integration

Max Weber

• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

• Economy and Society

Bureaucracy

A type of hierarchal organization which is designed to achieve specific goals and rationally coordinate the work of many in order to achieve these goals

• authority

• power

• written rules of conduct

• impersonality

• efficiency

• connected to division of labor

• reproduce, reinforce, or challenge norms

Iron Cage (first translation)

Modern systems and institutions force people to constantly have to follow rules and fit in

• constrains liberty

Shell as Hard as Steel (second translation)

• a shell molds more strictly

• people are not just trapped by the cage, but they are molded by it, and become a part of it

Max Weber on Power

Power as domination and control

• coercion - forcing people to comply

• interests - controlling resources that others need

• legitimacy - the perception that authority is justified

Types of Authority

• Traditional Authority —> based on permanency, customs, and long-standing tradition

• Charismatic Authority —> belief in a leader’s personality and qualities (survive beyond the lifespan because they have great impact)

• Rational-legal Authority —> based on formal rules, laws, and positions

Meritocracy

System in which people advance based on their abilities, qualifications, and achievements rather than connections or their family

Foucault

Power over —> emphasis on who exercises power over others

• higher analytical level than Weber

Foucault’s Works

• Discipline and Punish

• Security, Territory, Population

Tradition and Disciplinary Power

• freedom is the condition for the exercise of power in modern societies and its precondition

  • freedom must exist in order for power to be exerted

• role of agency and free agents in the constitutions of relations of powers

• type of power that is deployed through socialization and psychological mechanisms and habits that lead to internalized mechanisms of control

  • based on surveillance and being monitored

• follow society’s expectations

The Panopticon

An institutional building and a system of control

• it was designed as a solution to watch all the inmates of a prison without the inmates being able to tell if they were being watched

  • compelled the prisoners to act as if they were always under surveillance

  • illustrate the increasing role of surveillance as a mechanism of domination in modern society

  • objects of information

  • police themselves for fear of punishment

Power/Knowledge Matrix

Allocation of money for research: which are the topics that prevail? Why is priority given to certain lines of research and funding allocated to them and not others? Who determines what?

The power/knowledge matrix operates through direct imposition but through techniques of power that may include co-optation, socialization through different institutions and organizations

Biopower and Biopolitics

• In modern societies the state and other institutions have an unprecedented interest in gathering data, analyses and all sorts of information related to human life and the population. The human body is subject to intense research, debates, and policy

• Part of power debate

Du Bois

• The Souls of Black Folk

• Black Reconstruction in America

• Pan Africanist and founder of NAACP

Double Consciousness

This sensation of always looking at ourselves through the eyes of others

• two souls, two thoughts

Urban Sociology/Philadelphia Negro

• study established sociology as an evidence-based field

• how people live, interact, and experience social issues in societies

  • poverty

  • housing

  • segregation

  • crime

Karl Marx

• Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts

• Communist Manifesto

• Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

• The German Ideology

• A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Karl Marx

• Contrary to other scientists, he studied the history of societies as the history of transformation of one mode of production to a new one

  • society changes when it switches from one economic system to another

    • primitive community

    • feudalism

    • slavery

    • communism

• mode of production in which capital, private ownership of means of production, and labor as a commodity played a critical role in the sphere of production

• labor exploitation is at the core of capital accumulation because labor produces a surplus value which is appropriated by the capitalist

Surplus Value

The value that the worker incorporates into the final product for which he/she is not paid by the capitalist

Alienation

The process of becoming foreign to the world the individual lives in or a condition that shows the individual’s submission to the forces of his/her own creation

Other Things Marx Discussed

• The cyclical nature of economic crisis in capitalism

• Monopolistic trends of capitalism

• Mutual reinforcement of the economic and political elites in detriment of the less powerful members of society

Sociology in the U.S

The studies on cities played a key foundational role for the development of sociology

• the use of space forms and settlements

• the causes of the concentration of people in cities and economic, political, cultural, and physiological applications

• Agglomeration —> a group of people, businesses, or things clustered together in one area

Jane Addams

• Hull House Maps and Papers

• Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions

  • inspired by a movement led by English reformers, who were highly educated yet resided in lower-class slums

  • she founded a Social Settlement House —> Hull House and Addams House

    • in Chicago

Settlement House

• based on transatlantic pro-ethics movement

• individuals of better socioeconomic status move other lower-class areas

• helped local families receive healthcare, enroll in educational programs, join clubs, and enjoy a range of social services

Jane Addams Other Works

• A Belated Industry

  • emphasis on housekeeping, caregiving, and cooking

  • isolation and working conditions and expectations compared to the dynamics of social exchanges and expectations in other types of work

• Trade Unions and Public Duty

• Etc

The Chicago School of Sociology

• First sociology course

• First independent department of sociology in the U.S

• the study of the city became a major research line in the department of sociology

• the ecological theory of the city

• was called “ecological” because it applied biological and botanical plant-

  and-animal ecology concepts to the study of cities. They discussed the city as

  a living organism with human communities as adapting to physical geography

  and competing for scarce land and resources

Alexis De Tocqueville

• Democracy in America

• On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France

De Tocqueville’s Observations

• Associations are always being formed

• Slavery was contradictory of democracy

Impact

• Democracy in America had a very large impact on Political Science and Political Sociology

  • sociological imagination of a practitioner

  • free association

Hannah Ardent

• forced to leave. Germany due to her being Jewish

• immigrated to the U.S

Hannah Ardent’s Works

• The Origins of Totalitarianism

• The Human Condition

• The Life of the Mind

Hannah Ardent

• she dissected the complexities and brutalities that characterized social life under totalitarian domination

• she shows how nazism and stalinism shared important characteristics

What is totalitarianism?

A sociopolitical system based on:

• total control of the individual and society by a political class that holds an idea of absolute domination

• imposition of terror for the complete control of all aspects of life of people who live under this kind of rule

• annihilation of individuality based on a totalitarian end

  • state project comes before individualism

• manipulation of the masses

• widespread racism

• personality cult toward a leader who typically exhibits severe personality disorders

• violent fragmentation of nation-state

• may or may not annihilate institutions associated with the functioning of markets and private ownership

  • fascination is a social phenomenon