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

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

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.