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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