21 January: Structuralism & Functionalism– social facts & social order

Key concepts in review

• Functionalism (9A), structuralism

• Social facts & social currents

• Durkheim’s research on suicide & types of suicide

• Illness as deviance

• Sick role (definition, rights & duties) (9A)

Micro and macro approaches to understanding society

More Macro:

• Durkheim and Parsons - Structural-Functionalism

• Marx & Engels, Starr - Conflict theories

More Micro:

• Goffman - Microsociology, Symbolic interactionism

Durkheim & social facts

• Durkheim was a student of August Comte, who called sociology the “queen of the sciences” (natural sciences was king) – Comte was a positivist, tried to generate a “physics of society”

• Durkheim’s approach also applied natural science universalist “law-like” thinking to society, but was a bit more flexible, embracing evolution & functionalism

• A major contribution was Durkheim’s concept of social facts – product of the collective & a structural force on individuals – “ways of acting, thinking and feeling, external to the individual, and endowed with a power of coercion, by which they control him” – Durkheim p. 3

“Physics of society”

• regular universal laws on how society works

Social Facts

• Durkheim concept

• product of the collective & a structural force on individuals – “ways of acting, thinking and feeling, external to the individual, and endowed with a power of coercion, by which they control him” – Durkheim p. 3

  • More than a “sum of the parts thing” in society that continues to regulate people against/or along their will

What are social facts?

• Collective representations, like religious beliefs & institutions, traditions, cultural ideas like legends, myths

• Collective habits, like public opinion or mass behavior

• Social morphologies, the “shape” of societies in terms of characteristics & forms of their institutions, including:

  • Religion

  • Language

  • Economy

  • Political system

• Patterned, but not universal... can vary across groups, time, etc.

Social facts are emergent phenomena arising from _______ of individuals

• Social facts are emergent phenomena arising from collectivity of individuals

  • Society is more than a collection of individuals & actions they take of their own free wills

  • A collection of individuals gives rise to something more than the individual themselves (“whole is more than the sum of its parts”)

    • People like to imitate each other

      • Durkheim → “no; powerful thing (social facts) exerts its force on people / influences them whether or not they like it”

  • Way of thinking counters “...zealous partisans of absolute individualism” – Durkheim p. 4 (counter to rational actor theory)

  • Durkheim argues that sociology is different from biology or psychology

Zealous partisans of absolute individualism (against Social Facts/ Durkheim’s theory)

• Idea that complete free will determines behaviors rather than free will constrained by social facts

• Durkheim argues that sociology is different from biology or psychology – how?

• Biology - body

• Psychology - what’s going on in a brain

• Sociologists (Durkheim) - society as an organism

• Social currents

• These are like social facts, but without so much history, institutionalization, crystallization...

• More mindless by comparison: “great movements of enthusiasm”

• According to Durkheim can make people act contrary to their nature – in ways that even horrify them after the fact – what you do as part of a group may differ from what you’d do on your own

  • Can compel you to do things 

  • What you do as part of a group can be different from what you would do when alone

    • Ex: people in protests acting violently (negative)

• Example: Collective effervescence - an emergent feeling of group euphoria

  • Ex: A non football fan may be influenced to be excited by a game when they’re in a stadium

Collective effervescence

• An emergent feeling of group euphoria

  • Ex: A non football fan may be influenced to be excited by a game when they’re in a stadium

Social facts – and social structures more generally – exist …

• Social facts – and social structures more generally – exist prior to your birth

• They have “power of external coercion” to sanction individual efforts that violate social norms (even if they aren’t “the law”)

  • Will push against you if you act against the norm, even if it’s’ not against the law

• Everyone is a product of their society, and is made so through socialization/education (more later in term)

• FYI for comparison with conflict theory next lecture: structuralism good at explaining patterns & regularity, but critiqued for not being very good at explaining social change (and ignoring individual difference, covered when we talk about status and inequality next week)

Social facts - “Will push against you if you act against the norm, even if it’s’ not against the law” example

• Ex: speaking your own invented language, would find trouble communicating with people ; run into problems that will push you to return to the norm (speak an actual language)