Intro to Sociology 1Z03: chapter 1 notes

Sociology - The systematic study of human groups and their interactions
sociological perspective - A view of society based on the dynamic relationships between individuals and the larger social network in which we all live
C.W. Mills was an influential American sociologist who suggested that people who do not understand how individual challenges are impacted by larger social forces diminishes a person’s capability to understand and resolve them
Mills highlighted the difference between what he called personal troubles, which result from individual challenges, and social issues, which are caused by larger social factors

E.g. only one student failing an exam is a personal troubles, while the majority of the class failing an exam is a social issue
Here, what appears to be a personal trouble, (i.e., a test score) can be understood only if the student takes into account the larger social environment as well (i.e., how other students did, pressure to achieve high grades, etc.).

Quality of mind - Mills’s term for the ability to view personal circumstance within a social context (ie. seeing failure on an exam as a partial result of social forces)
*Doesn’t psychology’s theory of attribution theory kind of contradict Mills’ statement that most people don’t have quality of mind/don’t see the social forces playing a part (wanting to attribute negative things that occur to us to outside forces, but positive things to ourselves - e.g. test mark)
sociological imagination - C. W. Mills’s term for the ability to perceive how dynamic social forces influence individual lives
Cheerful robots - People who are unwilling or unable to see the social world as it truly exists (do not use sociological imagination)
According to Peter Berger, seeing the general in the particular is the ability to look at seemingly unique events or circumstances and then recognize the larger (or general) features involved.

E.g. seeing a homeless person asking for money and realising that this is a bigger problem in the country and that even though you only saw one, there are many others
This is an aspect of the sociological perspective

According to Berger, sociologists also need to tune their sociological perspective by thinking about what is familiar and seeing it as strange

E.g. looking at exams and grading in schools and wondering if they actually test intelligence or just how well someone memorises content (something familiar to us that we are now questioning and finding strange)

Agency - The assumption that individuals have the ability to alter their socially constructed lives
Structure - The network of relatively stable opportunities and constraints influencing individual decisions and behaviours

Includes large social parameters like occupation, minority status, or education level and also small interactions between individuals

There is a agency-structure debate which revolves around whether individuals behave autonomously or are the expressive agents of the social structure
Factors that affect our perceptions of ourselves and others: minority status, gender, socioeconomic status, family structure, urban rural differences
Ascribed status - Attributes (advantages and disadvantages) assigned at birth (e.g., income level).
Achieved status - Attributes developed throughout life as a result of effort and skill (e.g., course grades).

Comte and his 3 stage theory

Comte named the discipline as sociology, and as a result is called the father of sociology
Comte considered himself a scientist and thought that the techniques applied to the social world should be applied to the social world too
He is known for his Law of Three Stages, which defines how advances of the mind created three different types of societies
The first stage was called the theological stage

This stage is characterised by a religious outlook that explains the world and human society as an expression of God’s will and views science as a means to discover God’s intentions
The longest period of human thinking

The theological stage concluded with the emergence of the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment, when science, not religion, was used to explain the world

Comte called this next stage of intellectual development the meta-physical stage
The metaphysical stage (metaphysics, or “beyond physics,” is a field of philosophy dedicated to an understanding of truth and the relationship between mind and matter) was a period during which people began to question everything and to challenge the power and teachings of the Church.
It was characterised by the assumption that people could understand and explain their universe through their own insight and reflection.

Comte referred to the final stage as the positive stage

During this period, he believed that the world would be interpreted through a scientific lens—that society would be guided by the rules of observation, experimentation, and logic.

Sociologists do not grant much credibility to this three stage theory because:

The idea of only having 3 stages suggests that human thinking is as good as it is going to get
It is potentially self-serving since the third stage was emerging during Comte’s lifetime

Positivism and Anti-positivism

Positivism is an approach that is based in science
A positivist approaches the world through 3 main assumptions:

There exists an objective and knowable reality

physical and social worlds can be understood through observation, experimentation, and logic

Since all sciences explore the same, singular reality, over time all sciences will become more alike
There is no room in science for value judgments (no good or bad science)

In contrast, anti-positivism is a theoretical approach that considers knowledge and understanding to be the result of human subjectivity
It directly refutes each positivist assumption with one of its own:

While hard science may be useful for exploring the physical world, the social world cannot be understood solely through numbers and formulas

Numbers only have relative importance (ie. being happy you got an 89 on your exam, then hearing the class average was 96 and your feelings changing)

All sciences will not merge over time, and no single methodological approach (i.e., science) can reach a complete understanding of our world.

anti-positivists suggest that to truly understand the human condition we need to appreciate and vali-date emotions, values, and human subjectivity.

Science cannot be separated from our values

anti-positivists suggest that what we choose to study is also a social expression.
Values - Cultural beliefs about ideal goals and behaviours that serve as standards for social life and that identify something as right, desirable, and moral
Quantitative sociology - The study of behaviours that can be measured (e.g., income levels)
Qualitative sociology - The study of nonmeasurable, subjective behaviours (e.g., the effects of divorce)
Machiavelli’s famous work The Prince (1513) suggests that human behaviour is motivated by self-interest and an insatiable desire for material gain
René Descartes is most famous for his commitment to the idea that we are think-ing beings
Thomas Hobbes believed that people were driven by two primary passions: fear of death and the desire for power
According to Hobbes, the true nature of humankind is therefore self-preservation, and he argued that long-term stability can be achieved only when citizens join together and agree to forgo their individual power to the gains achieved within a collective
John Locke is perhaps most famous for his assertion that ideas are not innate and that all knowledge is the result of experience
Jean-Jacques Rousseau suggested that, prior to organized society, human beings existed in a natural state whereby an individual’s desire was solitary and self-centred. (In this sense, his approach is consistent with the earlier writings of Thomas Hobbes.)
As society developed, these early beings began to see the benefits they could achieve when they agreed to work together (i.e., the social contract).
The social contract is basically that although individuals lose some independence by working together, overall the benefits outweigh the costs
During the industrial revolution, many social changes occurred (family structures, how people made a living, and even people’s thoughts, dreams, and aspirations)
Sociology emerged from the need to understand the striking social changes that occurred in Europe in the form of three revolutions: scientific, industrial, and political.
Macrosociology - The study of society as a whole (looking at the big picture)
Microsociology - The study of individual or small-group dynamics within a larger society
Macrotheorists are more interested in looking at system-wide phenomena (e.g., class structure, education system) than they are in exploring how individuals relate to the larger social system
In sociology, the most influential historical macrotheorists were Marx, Durkheim, and Weber
Marx believed that people were forced into competition with others because of the material changes brought about by the accumulation of wealth in early agricultural societies and this wealth creates conflict as there is inevitably someone who has more wealth than the other person
According to Marx, all human relationships in capitalist economies have power imbalances (e.g. teacher and students)
to understand Marx is to understand how power permeates the ways people interact, not only as individuals but also as entire classes
Emile Durkheim believed that people want to work together for the collective benefit
He argued that low levels of social integration and regulation were a source of various social problems, including rising deviance and suicide rates
Weber analysed how the social world is becoming increasingly rationalized over time, by which he meant that people are becoming more focused on selecting the most efficient means to accomplish any particular end (e.g. most students today are not motivated to read extra academic resources if it does not have any correlation to them getting a higher grade
However, while rationalisation may make society more productive and efficient, it may also result in people who act like machines and do not appreciate the larger social world in which they exist
George Herbert Mead, Charles Horton Cooley, and Herbert Blumer promoted a microsociological point of view in early sociology
microsociologists look at individual lived realities and then generalise about their social relevance.
Mead viewed the individual mind and self as rising out of the social process of communication—in effect, we become ourselves through social interaction
Mead’s approach became known as symbolic interactionism
Symbolic interactionism - A perspective asserting that people and societies are defined and created through the interactions of individuals
Cooley theorised that by considering how others view us, we actually become the kind of person we believe others see us to be
Herbert Blumer named Mead’s theory, and continued his work
He also analysed meaning, language, and thought that these core principles formed the foundation of how people create their sense of self within the larger social world

Defining features of Canadian sociology

Canadian sociology is influenced by four factors that differentiate it from the American tradition the country’s geography and regionalism, its focus on political economy, the Canadianization movement, and its more radical nature
They suggest that one defining feature of Canadian sociology is its ability to survive over time, and they propose a core theme of the development and maintenance of a community in the face of hostile elements (e.g., cold winters) and outside forces (e.g., political and intel-lectual pressure from the United States).
Another internal force that helps define Canadian sociology is the role of regional-ism in our country’s development (e.g., west versus east) and, in particular, the role of Quebec, which offers a unique linguistic and cultural influence on Canadian society generally and on Canadian sociology specifically
Wallace Clement, a leading figure in Canadian sociology, believes that a key defining element of Canadian sociology is its interest in the political economy
Political economy - The interactions of politics, government and governing, and the social and cultural constitution of markets, institutions, and actors
Canadian sociology is more radical than the American tradition because of its greater focus on macrosociology as well as greater support for feminist ideas and social change

Early Canadian Sociologists

Annie Marion Maclean was the first Canadian woman to receive a PhD in sociology
She was a forerunner on the subject of working women and her study entitled Wage-Earning Women (1910) was one of the first large-scale applications of survey research in Canada.
Sir Herbert Brown Ames is best known for his book The City below the Hill: A Sociological Study of a Portion of the City of Montreal, Canada (1897), one of the first Canadian examples of sociology that relied on various statistical analyses to document the slum conditions people experienced living just south of downtown Montreal
Carl Dawson was the first sociologist to be hired at McGill University (in 1922) and served as chair of its department of sociology until 1952
He and colleague W. Gettys wrote an introductory sociology textbook that would become one of the most popular and widely used in North America and contributed greatly to the discipline
Harold Adams Innis is remembered for two primary contributions: his analysis of Canada’s political economy through his staples thesis and his studies of media theory
His primary contribution to the field of communications was his division of different media biases and how they influenced society
Aileen D Ross has strong ties to gender roles and includes Control and Leadership in Women’s Groups (1958), Becoming a Nurse (1961), and Businesswomen and Business Cliques in Three Cities: Delhi, Sydney, Montreal (1979)
S. D. Clark was instrumental to the development of sociology in Canada
Clark became the first chair of the department of sociology at the University of Toronto in 1963 and wrote many books about the political and economic landscape of Canada
Helen Abell is regarded as the founder of rural sociology in Canada
She focused her work on farm families and the effects of mod-ernization, contributions by farm women, and the decline of family farming and this recognition of the efforts of farm wives was an invaluable contribution to both public consciousness and policymakers
Kathleen Herman was chair of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association’s Canadianization movement and was an active supporter of women’s rights through the Royal Commission on the Status of Women
John Porter’s most important work is The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (1965) which is an investigation into equality in Canada and the use of power by Canada’s bureau-cratic, economic, and political elites
Porter challenged the impression that Canada was a classless society with no barriers to opportunity and was the first full-time sociologist to be hired at Carleton University
Ruth Rittenhouse Morris’s work focused on the attempt to abolish the penal system in favour of an alternative justice system.
She founded several organisations, including Rittenhouse, Toronto Justice Council, St. Stephen’s Conflict Resolution Service, and the Toronto Bail Program and received many awards for her work
Globalisation - A worldwide process involving the production, distribution, and consumption of technological, political, economic, and sociocultural goods and services.
As a sociologist you need to realise that Canadians have been taught to assume that capitalism is by default the only economic system possible. While it is hard to argue that another economic strategy can rival the dominance of capitalism, using your sociological imagination and seeing the strange in the familiar means asking whether capitalism is the right or only option. Capitalism has enabled a great deal of wealth to be produced around the world; however, for many the concern is where that wealth has ended up.
In today’s interconnected world, it is vital to consider the dynamic forces of globalisation and the inequities that result from the primacy of capitalism in the global economy.