Introduction to Sociology: Notes

Introduction

• A busy commuter train station might seem like a very individualized place where strangers with a singular purpose move to get where they need to go.
• Even with large numbers of people, strangers can synchronize their schedules, use the same doors, and travel together. Experienced commuters can often sense where others are going and adjust their behavior accordingly.
• Customs develop within these transit hubs, like which side to walk on, how fast to go, where to stand, and how much space to leave on the escalator.
• Sociologists study these people to understand how they feel about their trip and how the length of commute relates to job satisfaction or family relationships.
• Understanding gained from sociological studies can influence government policy and spending decisions, employer interventions, and healthcare practices.

1.1 What Is Sociology?

• Sociology is the scientific and systematic study of groups and group interactions, societies and social interactions, from small and personal groups to very large groups.
• A society refers to a group of people who live in a defined geographic area, interact with one another, and share a common culture.
• Sociologists study all aspects and levels of society through micro-level and macro-level analyses.
  • Micro-level study: Focuses on small groups and individual interactions (e.g., rules of conversation among teenagers).
  • Macro-level analysis: Examines trends among and between large groups and societies (e.g., how language use has changed over time or in social media).
• Culture refers to the group’s shared practices, values, and beliefs, encompassing their way of life and all social rules.
• Sociologists use the sociological imagination, understanding the relationship between a person’s behavior and experience and the wider culture that shaped their choices and perceptions.
• Sociologists avoid reification, which is treating an abstract concept as though it has a real, material existence.

Studying Patterns: How Sociologists View Society

• Sociologists are interested in individual experiences and how they are shaped by interactions with social groups and society.
• Cultural patterns, social forces, and influences put pressure on people to select one choice over another.
• Sociologists identify general patterns by examining the behavior of large groups of people living in the same society and experiencing the same societal pressures.
• Social facts (the laws, morals, values, religious beliefs, customs, fashions, rituals, and cultural rules that govern social life) contribute to changes in the family.

Studying Part and Whole: How Sociologists View Social Structures

• The individual and society are inseparable; one cannot be studied without the other.
• Norbert Elias called analyzing the behavior of individuals and the society that shapes that behavior figuration.
• Religion exists in a larger social context as a social institution.

Individual-Society Connections

• Negative social forces can result in a positive response from individuals to bring about social change.

1.2 The History of Sociology

• People have been fascinated by the relationships between individuals and societies for millennia.
• Many topics studied by ancient philosophers are still studied in modern sociology, including theories of social conflict, economics, social cohesion, and power.
• From 4th century through the 19th century, the Catholic Church was the seat of power safeguarding its traditions from the influence of people practicing other religions.
• In the 13th century, Ma Tuan-Lin, a Chinese historian, recorded the social dynamics underlying and generating historical development in his encyclopedia.
• In the 14th century, Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) set the foundation for both modern sociology and economics by proposing a theory of social conflict and providing a comparison of nomadic and sedentary life.
• From 1347 to 1522, the bubonic plague ravaged Europe, killing up to $35 \%$ of the population.
• Events once held to be the product of the divine hand could be analyzed by human reason and observation and could be explained by scientific, testable, and retestable hypotheses.
• In the 18th century, Enlightenment philosophers developed general principles to explain social life.
• Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) wrote about women’s conditions in society and is considered the first feminist thinker of consequence.
• The Industrial Revolution, increased mobility, new kinds of employment, increased trade, travel, and globalization exposed many people to societies and cultures other than their own.

Creating a Discipline: European Theorists

• Auguste Comte (1798 – 1857)
  • The term sociology was first coined in 1780 by the French essayist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836).
  • In 1838, the term was reintroduced by Auguste Comte (1798–1857).
  • Comte believed that social scientists could study society using the same scientific methods utilized in natural sciences and work toward the betterment of society.
  • Comte named the scientific study of social patterns positivism.
• Harriet Martineau (1802 – 1876)
  • Harriet Martineau introduced sociology to English-speaking scholars through her translation of Comte’s writing from French to English.
  • She was an early analyst of social practices, including economics, social class, religion, suicide, government, and women’s rights
  • Martineau found the workings of capitalism at odds with the professed moral principles of people in the United States.
• Karl Marx (1818-1883)
  • Karl Marx was a German philosopher and economist and coauthored the Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels (1820–1895).
  • Marx rejected Comte’s positivism and believed that societies grew and changed due to the struggles of different social classes over the means of production.
  • Marx predicted that inequalities of capitalism would become so extreme that workers would eventually revolt, leading to the collapse of capitalism and its replacement by communism.
• Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)
  • In 1873, the English philosopher Herbert Spencer published The Study of Sociology.
  • Spencer rejected much of Comte’s philosophy and Marx’s theory of class struggle and his support of communism.
  • Using Charles Darwin’s work as a comparison said, “This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called ‘natural selection,’ or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.” (Spencer, 1864)
• Georg Simmel (1858–1918)
  • Georg Simmel was a German art critic who wrote widely on social and political issues.
  • Simmel took an anti-positivism stance and addressed topics such as social conflict, the function of money, individual identity in city life, and the European fear of outsiders.
• Émile Durkheim (1858–1917)
  • Émile Durkheim helped establish sociology as a formal academic discipline by establishing the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895 and by publishing his Rules of the Sociological Method in 1895.
  • Durkheim believed that sociologists could study objective social facts and determine if a society was “healthy” or “pathological.”
• Max Weber (1864–1920)
  • Prominent sociologist Max Weber established a sociology department in Germany at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich in 1919.
  • Weber believed that it was difficult to use standard scientific methods to accurately predict the behavior of groups.
  • Weber and Wilhelm Dilthey introduced the concept of verstehen, a German word that means to understand in a deep way.
  • Weber described sociology as striving to “… interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which action proceeds and the effects it produces.”

Should We Raise the Minimum Wage?

• Sociologists may consider the minimum wage issue from differing perspectives.
• These could all be examples of public sociology, a branch of sociology that strives to bring sociological dialogue to public forums.

Applying the Discipline: American Theorists and Practitioners

• In the early 1900s, sociology reached universities in the United States.
• Early American sociologists tested and applied the theories of the Europeans and became leaders in social research.
• W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963)
  • William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois pioneered the use of rigorous empirical methodology into sociology.
  • Du Bois’ 1899 publication provided empirical evidence to challenge pseudoscientific ideas of biological racism
  • Du Bois became a leader in what would later be known as the Niagara Movement.
• Thorstein Veblen (1857 – 1929)
  • Thorstein Veblen began to study the economy through a social lens, writing about the leisure class, the business class, and other areas that touched on the idea of ‘working’ itself.
• Jane Addams (1860-1935)
  • Jane Addams founded Hull House, a center that served needy immigrants through social and educational programs while providing extensive opportunities for sociological research.
• Charles Herbert Cooley (1864-1929)
  • Charles Herbert Cooley posited that individuals compare themselves to others in order to check themselves against social standards and remain part of the group.
• George Herbert Mead (1863–1931)
  • George Herbert Mead was a philosopher and sociologist whose work focused on the ways in which the mind and the self were developed as a result of social processes.
• Robert E. Park (1864-1944)
  • Robert E. Park is best known as the founder of social ecology.
  • Park focused on how individuals lived within their environment.

1.3 Theoretical Perspectives in Sociology

• Sociologists study social events, interactions, and patterns, and they develop theories to explain why things work as they do.
• A theory is a way to explain different aspects of social interactions and to create a testable proposition, called a hypothesis, about society.
• Macro-level theories relate to large-scale issues and large groups of people, while micro-level theories look at very specific relationships between individuals or small groups.
• Grand theories attempt to explain large-scale relationships and answer fundamental questions such as why societies form and why they change.
• Classic sociological theories are still considered important and current, but new sociological theories build upon the work of their predecessors and add to them .
• Paradigms are philosophical and theoretical frameworks used within a discipline to formulate theories, generalizations, and the experiments performed in support of them.

Functionalism

• Functionalism, also called structural-functional theory, sees society as a structure with interrelated parts designed to meet the biological and social needs of the individuals in that society.
• Émile Durkheim applied Spencer’s theory to explain how societies change and survive over time.
• Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) defined the function of any recurrent activity as the part it played in social life as a whole, and therefore the contribution it makes to social stability and continuity
• Manifest functions are the consequences of a social process that are sought or anticipated, while latent functions are the unsought consequences of a social process.
• Social processes that have undesirable consequences for the operation of society are called dysfunctions.

A Global Culture?

• Sociologists around the world look closely for signs of what would be an unprecedented event: the emergence of a global culture.
• Sociologists research many different aspects of this potential global culture.
  • Some explore the dynamics involved in the social interactions of global online communities, such as when members feel a closer kinship to other group members than to people residing in their own countries.
  • Other sociologists study the impact this growing international culture has on smaller, less-powerful local cultures.
  • Yet other researchers explore how international markets and the outsourcing of labor impact social inequalities.

Conflict Theory

• Conflict theory looks at society as a competition for limited resources.
• Several theorists suggested variations on this basic theme like Polish-Austrian sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838–1909) who expanded on Marx’s ideas by arguing that war and conquest are the bases of civilizations.
• In the 1930s and 1940s, German philosophers, known as the Frankfurt School, developed critical theory as an elaboration on Marxist principles.
• More recently, inequality based on gender or race has been explained in a similar manner and has identified institutionalized power structures that help to maintain inequality between groups.

Farming and Locavores: How Sociological Perspectives Might View Food Consumption

• A structural-functional approach to the topic of food consumption might analyze the role of the agriculture industry within the nation’s economy and how this has changed from the early days of manual-labor farming to modern mechanized production.
• A conflict theorist might be interested in the power differentials present in the regulation of food, by exploring where people’s right to information intersects with corporations’ drive for profit and how the government mediates those interests.
• A sociologist viewing food consumption through a symbolic interactionist lens would be more interested in microlevel topics, such as the symbolic use of food in religious rituals, or the role it plays in the social interaction of a family dinner.

Symbolic Interactionist Theory

• Symbolic interactionism is a micro-level theory that focuses on the relationships among individuals within a society.
• Communication—the exchange of meaning through language and symbols—is believed to be the way in which people make sense of their social worlds.
• George Herbert Mead is considered a founder of symbolic interactionism though he never published his work on it .
• Social scientists who apply symbolic-interactionist thinking look for patterns of interaction between individuals. Their studies often involve observation of one-on-one interactions.
• The focus on the importance of symbols in building a society led sociologists like Erving Goffman (1922-1982) to develop a technique called dramaturgical analysis.
• We develop social constructs based on interactions with others, and those constructs that last over time are those that have meanings which are widely agreed-upon or generally accepted by most within the society.

Sociological Theory Today

• These three approaches still provide the main foundation of modern sociological theory though they have evolved.
• Postmodern social theory developed in the 1980s to look at society through an entirely new lens by rejecting previous macro-level attempts to explain social phenomena.

1.4 Why Study Sociology?

• Besides desegregation, sociology has played a crucial role in many important social reforms, such as equal opportunity for women in the workplace, improved treatment for individuals with mental handicaps or learning disabilities, increased accessibility and accommodation for people with physical handicaps, the right of native populations to preserve their land and culture, and prison system reforms.
• Sociology can be exciting because it teaches people ways to recognize how they fit into the world and how others perceive them.
• Sociology teaches people not to accept easy explanations. It teaches them a way to organize their thinking so that they can ask better questions and formulate better answers.

Sociology in the Workplace

Sociology prepares people for a wide variety of careers, including:

• An understanding of social systems and large bureaucracies
• The ability to devise and carry out research projects to assess whether a program or policy is working
• The ability to collect, read, and analyze statistical information from polls or surveys
• The ability to recognize important differences in people’s social, cultural, and economic backgrounds
• Skills in preparing reports and communicating complex ideas, and
• The capacity for critical thinking about social issues and problems that confront modern society

Social Networking Consequences

• Sociologists may consider all of those assumptions, and may seek answers or information through research to uncover the impacts, risks, tendencies, and outcomes on the different groups involved.