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Ideology
A set of beliefs, attitudes, and opinions that may or may not be based on scientific evidence. __________ are created by social groups.
Critical Thinking
The attempt to step outside our ideologies and make a reflective, logic-based judgement.
Dominant Discourse
The way most people think and speak about a particular issue OR the way that the people in power think and speak about a particular issue.
Individualism
_________ explains the world only in terms of what goes on inside individuals. _________ sees social problems as resulting from flaws in individual character.
Sociology’s Core View of Reality
We are always participating in something larger than ourselves, and if we want to understand social life and what happens to people, we have to understand what it is that we’re participating in and how we participate in it.
David Emile Durkheim
The study of the group (sociology) is more powerful in understanding human behavior than either biology or psychology.
Why would a person take sociology?
To better understand how they have been shaped by their group memberships.
To better understand how groups affect each other and shape our society.
To better understand individuals they will be working with professionally, based on the group memberships of those individuals.
Textbook definition of sociology
The study of human groups: their origin, development, structure, function, and significance for social life.
The historical perspective
Sociology began as a way of trying to apply natural science techniques to the study of society, the “physics” of society, laws describing cause and effect
Peter Berger definition of sociology
Sociology is a passionate curiosity - disciplined by scientific methodology - about the interactions of people
C. Wright Mills definition of sociology
The intersection of biography and history (troubles/issues) to provide insight into both, especially how those social structures over which people have no control influence their lives.
Terry McGinn’s definition of sociology
Sociology is a disciplined conversation about the power of groups, over their members, over each other, in society
Who created the concept of Ideal Types?
Max Weber
Ideal types
groups who members share characteristics and can be studied as a single unit
What is the risk with creating ideal types?
Stereotyping
Culture
the way we “construct” reality. within a social system, using ideas and symbols (especially language) to assign meaning, and its the way we habitual behave in relationship to the meaning we have constructed.
Beliefs
“The first purpose of any culture is to provide a way to know what to consider true and what to consider false…” what exists, and what doesn’t.
Truth and fiction are social constructs.
Values
Beliefs that designate what is good/bad, better/worse.
Guide choices.
Guide how we treat others (which can be a problem when it’s based on identity, not behavior).
Norms
Values that are reinforced with social consequences (rewards, punishments)
Society uses _______ to create “paths of least resistance”
_____ can be seen as “functional” (latency)
______ can be a criterion for “membership”/identity
______ can be a basis for privilege/stigmatization
The two key perspectives on norms
Functionalism - they help society work/succeed
Conflict - they create and preserve inequalities
Attitudes
Reactions - often with emotional content - based on beliefs, values, norms
Material Culture
The physical expression of our beliefs, values, norms, and attitudes
Can be used in problematic ways
High culture
Creative/artistic products of a group or society that reflect its beliefs, values, norms, and attitudes.
Typically requires specialized knowledge for full understanding and is therefore more likely to be consumed by individuals with upper socio-economic status
Examples: theatre, literature, art, composed music, etc.
Ethnocentrism
the tendency to view and judge other cultures based on the standards of one's own culture, often leading to the belief that one's own culture is superior
Cultural Relativity
the perspective that a culture should be understood and evaluated based on its own values, beliefs, and context, rather than judged by the standards of another culture
Social Structures
The organization of relationships at all levels of society.
The “distributions” that occur in social relationships (wealth, powers, people in various positions)
Status
The position one holds in a given social system
Can be permanent (father), or temporary (pedestrian)
Position does not equal the person
Behavior may be more a function on position than personality
Position both empowers and constrains
One’s position in a social system has a relationship with all the other social positions in a system
Social “job title”
____ is also the degree of honor/prestige that a position or group receives within a social system
Role
the collection of beliefs, values, attitudes, and norms that apply to a position holder (in relationship to other position holders)
_____ create paths of least resistance for position holder
This shapes/influences how we behave
Holding multiple positions in overlapping social systems can create _____ conflict
Social “job description”
Role Structure
“The relationships that link statuses - or entire systems to one another - are the main part of what we think of as social structure”
“Every system has a __________ that consists of a mix of statuses and role relationships
Merton’s Theory
We all have expectations from our culture, but there is are structural obstacles that don’t allow people to have the distributions the need, so people cope and react (deviants)
How does culture influence structure?
Culture shapes the roles associated with various statuses or positions in a social structure
How does structure shape culture?
Unequal distributions within social structures can shape culture: our beliefs, values, norms, attitudes, and material culture.
William James
An individual’s self is the sum total of all they can call theirs
Social Self
George Herbert Mead
Reflexivity, generalized other - seeing myself reflected through the eyes of others, which then shapes behavior and perception of self
Action is based on social meaning
Reflexivity
The ability to get outside of ourselves and see ourselves as other do
Generalized Other
People present but not directly known still hold an impact; ex. people in a church, don’t know them all
Charles Horton Cooley
Primary Groups
What is the social basis of the self’s formation?
Robert Park
Social Roles
The root word for person means mask: “Everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role.”
The self is constituted by the individual’s conception of his roles on the social scene and the status accorded to those roles.
Social Gestures
Actions in response to others’ actions, after considering the socially determined symbolic meaning of their actions and ours.
Erving Goffman
Gives definition to the social thoughts of Cooley, the interpersonal gestures of Mead, and the roles of Park.
Goffman: Dramaturgy
“The person is a kind of construct, built up from moral rules that are impressed on him from without.”
Self is the product of dramatic interaction between actor and audience. We are all actor and audience to each other.
Johnson: Jazz
A metaphor for society.
Individual players have freedom to improvise, but they play within existing musical forms. And the music happens among the players as well as within each player.
Social Inequality
_________ is composed of patterns of behavior that contribute to privileging some groups over others.
These behaviors generally represent socially created “paths of least resistance”
“I Love You”
The words are “performative” and can alter reality. The fact that we treat certain words as actions is socially constructed - people created it and sustain it.
The meaning of “I love you” varies with the role of those who are saying it. These meanings are socially constructed, too.
Voting
The system will determine (ia paths of least resistance) whether or not it is rational to vote.
Paths of least resistance that encourage NOT voting in the US
The challenges in registering
Winner-take-all results
The two-party system
Gerrymandering
Poverty
Captialism potrays welath/poverty as the result of individual action. BUT, ________ is a structural feature of capitalism
Distribution issues (taxes)
Competition/efficiency: minimize labor force
Solutions proposed to date have either attempted to get individual to perform better or have tried to compensate individuals
A systemic problem requires systemic solutions
“Make the pie bigger” - but the extra pie always goes to the rich first and most.
Men’s Violence
The privileged in society can minimize the public’s perception of their flaws and maximize perception of their good qualities.
They can set the agenda about what we focus on and what we ignore.
Men can do this with violence, we support them because we don’t want something as fundamental as gender to be categorically associated with violence.
In patriarchy, the ideals defined for manhood become the ideals defined for society as an entity.
Manhood = domination, which may include violence.
America needs to be dominant, violence is permissible.
White Privilege
The English constructed their beliefs about race in relating to the Irish. (“We are superior, other groups are inferior/sub-human.”)
Those beliefs about race were exported to America and used to justify the creation of a permanent African American slave class, thus meeting the capitalist need for cheap labor.
These beliefs were also used to pacify poor European-Americans: “You may be poor, but at least you’re white.”
Johnson shows that his family’s prosperity began with land taken from native Americans and was increased through policies that blatantly favored white Americans.
We did not create the systems whose “paths of least resistance” supported white privilege…but we can change those systems by stepping off the established paths.
Greensboro Sit-Ins
The _____________ challenged and changed a racist system, rather than trying to change the racists individually.
