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.