Intro to Sociology and Sociological Imagination
Making the familiar strange
- Finding ways to improve on old practices
- Identify flaws and keep what works/has to stay
Sociological Competence
- Is formed from early interactions with people around
- The “norm” and social behavior
Study of human society
- “Going beyond getting by”
- Study of external forces that determine human behavior
Lack of sociologists in pop culture
- Absence of books/movie characters
- People don’t recognize how important/impactful
- However, addresses important societal problems
- Racism
- Vaccine Resistance
- Education System
- Wealth Inequality
Uses scientific method
- Has limits, since social behavior cannot be quantified as well as other sciences can
Has overlap with other disciplines
- History and anthropology
- Particular events/cultures
- Sociology is more general
- Psychology and Biology
- On a micro level and examines internal forces
- Sociology is more the examination of a larger picture and the effects of external forces
- Economics
- Quantitative
- Sociology can’t always be quantified
- Political science
- Focuses on only one aspect of social behavior/dynamic, i.e power
- Sociology discusses power and how it comes to be but also examines other behavior
Why is Sociology unique?
- Focuses on making comparisons across cases and finding patterns
- Used to create hypotheses about how society works/has worked
- Examines how people interact with one another and large groups
Parsons:
- Professor at Harvard
- Universal theory of Actions
- Thought human behavior can be reduced to a formula
- Foundational sociology was written by a conservative man
Emile Durkheim:
- French sociologist
- Society is sui generis: objective reality that is irreducible to the individuals that compose it
- Society is greater than the sum of its parts
- Focus on group and not the individual
- Text called “suicide”
- How we can measure the rates of events happening around the world to predict occurrences beyond individual trauma.
- Shouldn’t care why a person committed suicide or why their life came to an end
- Rather care about why we see more suicides in a certain group than other
- However the patterns he suggested (Protestants more likely to commit suicide than Catholics) still hold true
- Protestant: individual relationship w/ god, Catholic: community relationship w/ god; community relationship keeps people more tethered to their lives
- Used numbers and data to provide empirical evidence that supports his hypotheses about why the world works the way it works
C. Wright Mills
- Our individual lives are strongly shaped by where, when and to whom we were born
- Our opportunities and potentials are always influenced by the inequalities and injustice that we encounter (i.e opportunities impacted by factors outside of our control)
- Different from psychology since it takes into account things you cannot change (i.e circumstances around ones birth)
- Availability of essential resources (sucha s good nutrition and clean water) early in life can heavily impact future development
- Coined the term “sociological imagination”
- Term that connects personal experiences to society at large and to greater historical forces
- Makes the familiar strange
- Facilitates a more active and effective participation in the world around us
Sociological imagination in practice
- Why go to college
- If you can teach yourself, why pay your professors to do it?
- Because it provides you access to a variety of resources that you wouldn't have access to otherwise
- Get a piece of paper which certifies you as an expert
- Social benefit
- Challenges basic impulses to see aspects of life as inevitable/natural
- Provides insight into stereotyping and active discrimination
- Discrimination
- Behavior, practice or policy that harms, excludes or disadvantages individuals on the basis of their group membership
- Cleveland Clinic banning smokers
- Discrimination vs Legal discrimination
- Legal: based on race, religion, sex, gender identitity, sexuality,
- Although they don’t “condone” smoking because it does not match the institutions value, they contribute to a system that supports an unhealthy lifestyle that doesn’t prioritize the well-being of its workers
- Smoking high among people live in low poverty situations
- More smoke shops
- Less education about healthy coping strategies
- Know its bad, but gives instant gratification and is very difficult to quit
- Peer influence
- Smoking isn’t random
- Follows patterns that coincides with socio-econominc status, race and gender
- So is the Cleveland Clinic’s policy well intentioned or a de facto (not through legislation) discrimination policy
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Facilitates more active and effective participation in the world around us
False Consciousness
- Lack of Sociological Imagination and tendency for people to be able to see things/fight situations in which they have less power
- especially exploitation and oppression
- Stereotyping vs Discrimination
- Stereotyping: emotions
- Discrimination: actions
- Karl Marx:
- Why do oppressed people [who have the ability to understand their situation] fail to understand?
- People who are most oppressed, are the ones who have the least amount of time to think about the fact that they are being oppressed
- Hence can’t fight against because they know that someone else would be willing to take their spot if they left
- The ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas
American Dream
- Example of Social Mobility
- Unattainable for most americans (even those who fit the racial and heteronormative standards)
- Agency v. Structure
- Agency: the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices
- Can choose one’s own path
- Allows one to navigate the structure
- Structure: the recurrent patterned arrangements which influence or limit the choices and opportunities available.
- The path that a person must navigate
- May not be equal for everyone (marble staircase v broken ladder)
- The structure of the American Dream and american society makes it prohibitive to certain groups of people
- American Dream works (or is thought to work) on the foundation of a meritocracy → people who work harder must be on top
- People working different jobs work different levels of “hard”
- I.e they have a different structure, and their respective structure may define the “hard work” and the extent of that hard work differently
Pierre Bourdieu
- How are structures reproduced from generation to generation and how is social stability preserved?
- Habitus refers to the deeply ingrained habits, skills and dispositions we possess due to our life experiences
- Acquire a sense of one’s place in the world (not create)
- A “point of view” from which one is able to interpret one’s own actions as well as the actions of others
- Cultural capital refers to nonmaterial goods such as educational credentials, types of knowledge and expertise, verbal skills, and aesthetic preferences that can be converted into economic capital
- Our taste
- Our knowledge of how to handle certain situations
- How is habitus dangerous?
Tree Vs. Forest
- Individual First
- Composed of individuals who choose to act instead of experiencing chaos
- Bad rules >> no rules
- Micro-model
- Society First
- Larger institutions teach individuals the rules and this influences what they do
- Socialization: process by which people learn the “rules” of a functioning society
- Alienation (Marx): the dehumanizing sense that one's society is opposed to individual human interest. The separation of a person from what they create.
- Structure separates us from society by dehumanizing us a s functioning parts
- Anomie (Durkheim): Lack of moral regulation or common social rules leading to social isolation and anxiety
- Lack of ability to assimilate with rules of world/ or cope w/ anxiety that comes from unfamiliar rules can be very disturbing for individuals
- Pat Sharkey’s Research
- Violence in neighborhood → lower test scores in children who didn’t know about the violence
- Environmental changes can have impact on the individual
- Way people interact with the environment and each other changes, hence causing behavioral changes
- Agency within Structure
- Habitual practices are simultaneously a result of social rules and of individual flourishes
- We normally comply to rules
- But, we always have the potential to resist
- The impact of our actions is dependent on the structure around us
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- Wealthy white woman born in 1860 in the northeast
- Feminist sociologist
- Suffered from baby blues or post-partum depression after giving birth
- Treatment was to lock the her in the room
- Realized that all her life’s decisions were being made by the men in her life
- Wondered if things would be better if women were allowed to have input about their own care
- Was also controversial
- Racist and Anti-semitic writings
- Support of eugenics movement
- Gave rise to feminism but it was only exclusive to rich, white women
- Could not see the worries of women unlike herself
- Had a limited sociological imagination
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WEB Dubois
- Wanted to go to Harvard
- First black valedictorian in an all balck school
- Mother has a stroke
- Cope and still excels, only to be told he is not Harvard material
- “I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses, --the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls…”
- By this, Du Bois intends to introduce his readers (WHITE READERS) to the experience of living within the dominant white culture for blacks.
- He suggests that white people would like to ask him “How does it feel to be a problem?” but usually, he, and other blacks tend to keep this experience to themselves.
- Double Consciousness
- The sense that you always need to look at yourself through the eyes of another—measuring your worth by the “contempt and pity” that others within the world view you with
- Freedom has not really occurred yet for Black men
- “the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,--a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.
Conley’s Definition of culture:
- A set of beliefs, traditions and practices
- Culture is everything except nature
- Not biological, but rather things that are passed down
- Learned through families and other institutions in society
- “Being cultured”
- Accounts for only a few cultures
- Creates a hierarchy that places certain cultures “better” or “more powerful” than others
- Giving power to a certain culture
Ethnocentrism
- the sense of taken-for-granted superiority in the context of cultural practices and attitudes
- the belief that our own culture or group is superior to others
- the tendency to view all other cultures from the perspective of our own.
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