Sociology and the Real World 1

What Is Sociology?

  • Sociology: The systematic or scientific study of human society and social behavior, from large-scale institutions and mass culture to small groups and individual interactions.

  • The term sociology is derived from Latin (socius) and Greek (logos) roots, meaning "the study of society."

  • Society: A group of people who shape their lives in aggregated and patterned ways that distinguish their group from others.

  • Howard Becker defines sociology as the study of people "doing things together," emphasizing the interdependence of individuals and society.

  • Our survival depends on living in groups (e.g., families, neighborhoods).

  • Our sense of self comes from our membership in society.

Sociology as a Social Science

  • Sociology is a social science.

  • Social sciences: Disciplines that use the scientific method to examine the social world.

  • Social sciences include anthropology, psychology, economics, political science, history, geography, and communication studies.

  • Sociology overlaps with other social sciences but has its unique focus.

    • History: Both compare the past and present, but sociology focuses more on contemporary society.

    • Anthropology: Both study human culture, but sociology studies societies at all levels of development.

    • Economics & Political Science: Both examine social institutions, but sociology looks at a range of social institutions.

    • Geography: Both consider the relationship of people to places, but sociology is more concerned with the people themselves.

    • Communication Studies: Both examine human communication, but sociology studies both social and interpersonal levels.

    • Psychology: Both study the individual and their relationships, but sociology looks at the individual in relation to external social forces.

How to Think Like a Sociologist

  • Sociological perspective: A way of looking at the world through a sociological lens.

  • Distinguishing between practical knowledge and scientific knowledge is crucial.

  • Practical knowledge: Allows people to navigate everyday life.

  • Scientific knowledge: Systematic, comprehensive, coherent, clear, and consistent, resulting from constant questioning and investigation.

Beginner’s Mind (Bernard McGrane)

  • Beginner’s mind: Approaching the world without preconceptions to see things in a new way.

  • Clearing our minds of stereotypes, expectations, and opinions to be more receptive to experiences.

  • Our habitual ways of thinking can be obstacles to making new discoveries.

  • Discovery involves seeing things in a new way rather than seeing new things.

Culture Shock

  • Culture shock: A sense of disorientation that occurs when entering a radically new social or cultural environment.

  • Normal behaviors in one society may seem strange in another.

  • We often don’t think about how strange our own culture is when viewed from an outsider’s perspective.

The Sociological Imagination

  • Sociological imagination: A quality of mind that allows us to understand the relationship between our individual circumstances and larger social forces.

  • C. Wright Mills: understanding social life requires understanding “the intersection between biography and history.”

  • It searches for the link between micro and macro levels of analysis.

  • It allows us to see the connection between personal situations and broader social issues.

  • It provides access to a world beyond our own immediate sphere, where we can discover radically different ways of experiencing life and interpreting reality.

Levels of Analysis: Micro- and Macrosociology

  • Sociological perspectives have different levels of analysis.

  • Microsociology: Studies face-to-face and small-group interactions to understand how they affect larger patterns and structures of society.

  • Macrosociology: Studies large-scale social structures to determine how they affect the lives of groups and individuals.

Sociology's Family Tree

  • Theories: Abstract propositions that explain the social world and make predictions about the future.

  • Also referred to as approaches, schools of thought, perspectives, or paradigms.

  • Paradigm: A set of assumptions, theories, and perspectives that compose a way of understanding social reality.

  • Sociological theories typically address social processes at the microsociological and/or macrosociological level.

Sociology’s Roots

  • Auguste Comte

    • Developed positivism: society operates under specific laws that can be described objectively using the scientific method.

  • Harriet Martineau

    • Wrote about radical social changes and translated Comte’s work into English.

  • Herbert Spencer

    • Believed societies evolve through time by adapting to their changing environment.

    • Social Darwinism: Applying the theory of evolution to the study of society.

Macrosociological Theory

  • Structural Functionalism

    • Society is a unified whole that functions due to the contributions of its separate structures.

    • Émile Durkheim:

      • Central figure in functionalist theory.

      • Studied the social factors that bond people together.

    • Solidarity: The degree of integration or unity within a particular society.

      • Mechanical solidarity: Present in premodern, agrarian societies, with shared traditions and beliefs creating social cohesion.

      • Organic solidarity: Present in modern societies, based on difference, interdependence, and individual rights.

    • Anomie:

      • Lack of connection to the social world, resulting in alienation and loss of purpose from weaker social bonds.

    • Religion:

      • A powerful source of social solidarity, reinforcing collective bonds and shared moral values.

      • Sacred: The holy, divine, or supernatural.

      • Profane: The ordinary, mundane, or everyday.

    • Durkheim’s Contributions to Sociology:

      • Established sociology as an important, independent academic discipline.

      • Demonstrated the effectiveness of using scientific/empirical methods to study “social reality.”

      • Empirical: Based on scientific experimentation or observation.

    • Original Principles:

      • Society is a stable, ordered system made up of interrelated parts or structures.

      • Structure: A social institution that is relatively stable over time and that meets the needs of a society.

      • Each structure has a function that contributes to the stability of the whole.

      • Dysfunction: A disturbance to or undesirable consequence of some aspect of the social system; leads to change and a new equilibrium.

  • Talcott Parsons:

    • Applied functionalism to modern society, specifying functions of social structures.

  • Robert Merton:

    • Identified manifest and latent functions.

    • Manifest functions: Obvious, intended functions of a social structure.

    • Latent functions: Less obvious, unintended functions of a social structure.

    • Attempts to provide a universal social theory, explaining all institutions of society in one model.

    • Posits that only dysfunction can create social change, seeing society as static rather than dynamic.

    • Explanations of social inequality are unsatisfying, seeing poverty, racism, and sexism as serving social functions.

    • The mere persistence of an institution should not be seen as an adequate explanation for its existence.

  • Conflict Theory

    • Sees social conflict as the basis of society and social change.

    • Emphasizes a materialist view of society, a critical view of the status quo, and a dynamic model of historical change.

    • Social inequality is the basic characteristic of society.

      • Social inequality: The unequal distribution of wealth, power, or prestige among members of a society.

    • Karl Marx

      • Believed that problems of poverty, crime, and disease were a result of capitalism.

      • Proposed a radical alternative to the inequalities of this system.

    • Tensions between the wealthy (bourgeoisie) and the poor (proletariat) would lead to class struggle.

      • Means of production: Anything that can create wealth: money, property, factories, and other types of businesses and the infrastructure necessary to run them

      • Proletariat: Workers; those who have no means of production of their own and so are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.

      • Bourgeoisie: Owners; the class of modern capitalists who own the means of production and employ wage laborers.

    • Workers suffer from alienation because they cannot directly benefit from their labor.

      • Alienation: The sense of dissatisfaction the modern worker feels as a result of producing goods that are owned and controlled by someone else.

    • Takes a materialist view of society, focused on labor practices and economic reality, extended to other social inequalities.

    • False consciousness: A denial of the truth on the part of the oppressed when they fail to recognize that the interests of the ruling class are embedded in the dominant ideology

    • Class consciousness: The recognition of social inequality on the part of the oppressed, leading to revolutionary action.

    • Critical theory: contemporary form of conflict theory that criticizes many different systems and ideologies of domination and oppression.

      • Critical theorists recognized mass communications and popular culture as powerful ideological tools in capitalist societies.

    • Critical race theory: the study of the relationship among race, racism, and power. Argues that racism is deeply embedded in American institutions, including our laws.

    • Feminist theory: theoretical approach that looks at gender inequities in society and the way that gender structures the social world. Argues that gender and power are inextricably intertwined in society through other social hierarchies, such as race and ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation.

    • Queer theory: social theory about gender and sexual identity; emphasizes the importance of difference and rejects ideas of innate identities or restrictive categories. Asserts that no sexual category is fundamentally deviant or normal; we create such definitions, so we can change them as well.

    • Praxis:

      • The application of theory to practical action to improve aspects of society.

  • Weberian Theory

    • Interested in the shift from traditional to modern industrial society.

    • Drew on ideas of other macrosociologists.

    • Rationalization:

      • The application of economic logic to human activity.

      • The use of formal rules and regulations to maximize efficiency without consideration of subjective concerns.

    • Iron cage:

      • Weber’s pessimistic description of modern life, where bureaucratic structures control our lives through rigid rules and rationalization.

    • Bureaucracy:

      • A type of secondary group designed to perform tasks efficiently, characterized by specialization, technical competence, hierarchy, written rules, impersonality, and formal written communication.

    • Verstehen:

      • “Empathic understanding”; Weber’s term to describe good social research, which tries to understand the meanings that individuals attach to various aspects of social reality

    • Eurocentric:

      • The tendency to favor European or Western histories, cultures, and values over those of non-Western societies

Microsociological Theory

  • Symbolic Interactionism

    • Sees interaction and meaning as central to society.

    • Meanings are not inherent but are created through interaction.

    • Explains individual personalities and the ways we are linked together.

    • Developed primarily in the United States in the 20th century.

    • Chicago School: practiced at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s that centered on urban settings and field research methods.

    • Inspired by Weber’s concept of verstehen, they focused on the micro level of everyday interactions as the building blocks of larger social phenomena

    • Pragmatism: perspective that assumes organisms (including humans) make practical adaptations to their environments; humans do this through cognition, interpretation, and interaction.

    • George Herbert Mead:

      • Proposed that human development and the meanings we assign to objects and events are social processes.

      • Language is key to development of self and society.

    • Herbert Blumer:

      • Appealed for researchers to get “down and dirty” with the dynamics of social life.

    • W.E.B. Du Bois:

      • Did groundbreaking research on the history of the slave trade, post–Civil War Reconstruction, the problems of urban ghetto life, and the nature of Black American society.

    • Jane Addams:

      • One of the first proponents of applied sociology—addressing the most pressing problems of her day through hands- on work with the people and places that were the subject of her research.

    • **Original Principles:
      ** *We act toward things on the basis of their meanings.

      • Meanings are not inherent; rather, they are negotiated through interaction with others.

      • Meanings can change or be modified through interaction.

    • Erving Goffman:

      • Studied how the self is developed through interactions with others.

      • Used the theatrical metaphor of dramaturgy to describe the ways in which we engage in a strategic presentation of ourselves to others.

    • Ethnomethodology:

      • The study of “folk methods” and background knowledge that sustain a shared sense of reality in everyday interactions.

    • Conversation analysis:

      • A sociological approach that looks at how we create meaning in naturally occurring conversation, often by taping conversations and examining their transcripts

New Theoretical Approaches

  • Postmodernism

    • Suggests that social reality is diverse, pluralistic, and constantly in flux.

    • Developed in response to modernism.

    • Modernism:

      • A paradigm that places trust in the power of science and technology to create progress, solve problems, and improve life.

    • There are no absolutes: no claims to truth, reason, right, order, or stability.

    • Everything is relative: fragmented, temporary, and contingent.

    • “Factual” accounts of history are no more accurate than those in fiction.

  • Midrange Theory

    • Integrates empiricism and grand theory.

    • Strikes a balance between micro and macro perspectives in sociology.

    • Aims to build knowledge cumulatively, making sociology more effective as a science.