Socio 101

Sociological imagination

quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves

3 Questions

1. What is the structure of this particular society as a whole

2. Where does this society stand in human history

3. What varieties of men and women prevail in this society and this period

Trouble

individual, limited areas of social life

Issue

transcends local environment and range of inner life

Well being

Values + no threat

Values threatened

Crisis

Indifference, apathy

No values + no threat

Uneasiness

Unawareness of values + aware of threat

Society

denoting a large complex of human relationships

• system of interaction

Social

quality of interaction, interrelationship, mutuality

• people orient their actions towards one another

• Not a segregated field of human activity, but in with and under many different fields of such activity

Self-conception

Sociological thought would have best chance to develop in historical circumstances marked by severe jolts to the

Informal power structure

a configuration of men and their power that cannot be found in any statutes and probably cannot be read about in newspapers

Sociological problem

understanding of what goes on here in terms of social interaction

Weber

Who said about “unintended, unforeseen consequences of human actions in society”

Functionalism

Emile Durkheim; society is analyzed in terms of its own workings as a system

Manifest

conscious and deliberate functions of social processes

Latent

the unconscious and unintended ones

Ideology

views that serve to rationalize the vested interest of some group

• essential for the approach called sociology of knowledge

Thorstein Veblen

early sociologist in America

Alternation

an individual may alyernate back and forth between logically contradictory meaning systems

Sociological persoective

Broad, open, emancipated vista on human life