Topic 1: Socialization

Looking-glass self: a term coined by Charles Horton Cooley to refer to the process by which our self develops through internalizing others’ reaction to us.

Self: the unique human capacity of being able to see ourselves “from the outside”; the views we internalize of how we think others see us.

How We Develop a Self

Mead and Role Taking: By playing we learn to take the role of others, which ultimately helps us understand how someone else feels and thinks and anticipate how that person will act.

The Stages of Role Taking are..

• Imitation

  • age < 3

  • mimic others gestures and words

• Play

  • 3 to 6 years old

  • role play; pretending to be firefighter, a wrestler, nurse, etc..

• Team Games

  • Enter school

  • To play game you must be willing to take on multiple roles

Socialization into Gender

• Parents

• Toys and Play

• Mass Media

• Advertising

Agents of Socialization

People or groups that affect our self concept, attitudes, behaviors, or other orientations toward life.

• The Family

  • establish initial motivation, values,and beliefs

  • Social class influences the way parents social their children

The Neighborhood

• Children from poorer neighborhoods are more likely to get in trouble with the law, become pregnant, or drop out of school.

• Parenting is easier in a wealthier neighborhood

Religion

Religious ideas so pervade U.S. society that they provide the foundation of morality for both the religious and the non religious.

• Participation in religious services allows one to learn doctrines, values, and morality.

  • can influence clothing, speech, and manners

Day Care

• More time spent in a daycare earlier in a child’s development results in a weaker maternal bond.

  • less cooperative with others, get into fights, “mean”

• Score higher in language testt

• Effects do not go away with age

The School

• Learn a broader perspective which allows children to form their own beliefs besides from their parent’s.

• Children learn’s universality.

• Hidden curriculum

  • democracy, justice,and honesty

• corridor curriculum- what students teach one another outside of the classroom

  • racism, sexism,coolness, superiority

Peer Groups

Topic 2: Societies to Social Networks

Industrial Societies

• Industrial Rev (Great Britain in 1765)

• goods are produced by machines

• Brought an abundance of goods and unions

• growing equality over time

Post Industrial Societies

• selling information over manufactures

Primary groups: a small group characterized by cooperative, intimate, long term, face to face relationships.

• gives you a self, an identity, a feeling of who you are.

Secondary Groups:

Topic 3: Deviance and Social Control

Deviance:Violation of Norms

Stigma: “blemishes” that discredit a person’s claim to a “normal” identity

Social Order: a group’s usual and customary social arrangements, on which it’s members depend and on which they base their lives

Social Control: a group’s formal and informal means of enforcing it’s norms

Negative Sanction: an expression of disapproval for breaking a norm, ranging from a mild, informal reaction such as a frown to a formal reaction such as a fine or a prison sentence.

Positive Sanction: an expression of approval for a following a norm, such ex. is a smile or a good grade in a class

Topic 4: Global Stratification

Social Stratification: the division of large numbers of people into layers according to their relative property, power, and prestige; applies to both nations and to people within the nation.

Slavery: a form of social stratification in which someone people own other people

Causes of Slavery

• Debt

  • creditors would enslave people who could not pay their debt

• Crime

  • Instead of being killed a murderer would instead be enslaved by the victim’s family

• War

  • When one group conquers another often times the conquered is enslaved.

Caste: a form of stratification in which birth determines people’s statuses, which are lifelong

• ex: someone born into a low status group will always have low status

• practice endogamy to maintain caste system

Endogamy: the practice of marrying within one’s own group

Mr. Poppas Notice

Social Science: the intellectual and academic disciplines designed to understand the social world objectively by means of controlled and repeated observations

Anthropology: focuses on tribal people. Goal is to understand culture and forms of communication

Origin of Sociology:

• Sociology emerged in the 19th century in response to social changes brought by the Industrial Revolution.

• Auguste Comte, a French philosopher, coined the term "sociology" and is considered the father of sociology.

• Early sociologists like Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber laid the foundation for the discipline by studying social structures, institutions, and interactions.

Weber and Verstehn

Weber stressed that to understand human behavior, we should use Verstehen

• Verstehen: a German word used by Weber meaning “to understand” or “to grasp by insight”

According to Weber the best interpreter of human behavior is someone who “has been there”, someone who can understand the feeling and motivation of the people being studied.

Durkheim and Social Facts

Social Facts: Durkheim’s term for a group’s recurring patterns of behavior

• Ex: June being the most popular month for weddings and suicide rates being high among the elderly and more births occur on Tuesdays

According to Durkheim each pattern reflects some condition of society

How Social Facts and Verstehen Fit Together

Future mothers prefer to give birth in hospitals»Doctor schedules mother on a day that’s most convenient which happens to be Tuesdays.

Culture

Material Culture: objects that distinguish a group of people such as their art, buildings, weapons, and utensils , machines, hairstyles and etc

Nonmaterial Culture: a groups ways go thinking and doing; also called symbolic culture.

Culture Shock: the disorientation that people experience when they come in contact with a fundamentally different culture and can no longer depend on their taken for granted assumptions about life

Ethnocentrism: using your own groups way of thinking to judge others

• nationalis pride

  • usually leads to discrimination

Cultural Relativism: trying to understand a culture on it’s own terms, taking time to understand how elements of culture “fit” together

Language: each word is symbol

Counter Cultures are groups who’s values and norms place it in opposition to mainstream culture

• a sub culture could be seen as a radical movement or a bunch of people bonding over something weird.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: Edwards Sapir and Benjamin Whorf’s hypothesis that language creates ways of thinking and perceiving.

Basic, Applied, and Public Sociology:

• Basic Sociology: Focuses on theoretical understanding and knowledge for its own sake.

• Applied Sociology: Utilizes sociological theories to address practical issues in society.

• Public Sociology: Involves engaging with the public to address social problems and promote social change.