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introducing the sociology of everyday life

how to read academic works

  • what is the author’s research question?

  • what is the author’s argument?

  • what literature is the author in conversation with?

  • what are the limitations of the existing literature?

  • what is the author’s intervention?

  • if it’s an empirical study, what is the author’s methodology?

  • why is this method appropriate/ideal for answering the research question?

  • what evidence did the author leverage to make their argument?

  • how did the author analyse the evidence?

sociology background

  • 3 ways of understanding sociology:

by tracing the term’s etymology:

  • “socios”

    • Latin

    • ‘companion’

  • “ology”

    • Greek

    • ‘study of’

by look at what sociologists do:

  • sociological imagination: the ability to see the connections between our personal lives and the social world we live in

  • The Fundamental Question of Sociology: How is society possible?

  • social structure: patterns of social relationships and behaviours that work as a system to constrain individual choice

  • agency: the ability to influence the world around us

    • includes ability to modify social structure

by contrasting it with other social sciences:

  • economics: the study of the world from the standpoint of the economy

  • political science: the study of the world from the standpoint of the state

  • sociology: the study of the world from the standpoint of civil society

  • civil society: a set of organisations, associations, movements that exist outside both the state and the economy

    • under fascism/communism, sociology is often attacked, as it works to defend civil society

what is the sociology of everyday life?

  • Sociology of Everyday life does not equal Sociology in Everyday Life

  • Sociology of Everyday Life is a revolution within sociology that challenges the dominance of “macro sociology”

  • it “generates sociological concepts/insights from seemingly trivial settings”

major tenets

  • critique of macro sociology: overly deterministic; fail to capture the complexity of the everyday world; dualistic view of subject/object

  • contextuality: “naturally occurring interaction is the foundation of all understanding of society

  • model of the actor: derived from people’s everyday life attitudes and behaviour

  • social structure: emergent from but also in a reciprocal relationship with social interaction

brief history & thinkers

groundwork in 1920s-30s

George Herbert Mead

  • 1863-1931

  • Uni of Chicago

  • pragmatic social behaviourism: a theory of how our sense of self emerge from social interactions

  • “looking-glass self” » we are who we think other people think we are

    • generalised other: an internalised sense of expectations of others

Edmund Husserl

  • 1859-1938

  • Germany

  • phenomenology: the philosophical study of how we experience things from our own point of view

1950s-60s development

Herbert Blumer

  • 1900-1987

  • UChicago to UCBerkeley in 1952

  • symbolic interactionism: the study of face-to-face interactions with particular attention to the creation of meaning

    • 3 premises of symbolic interactionism:

      • we act toward things based on the meanings these things have for us

      • these meanings emerge from social interaction

      • these meanings are modified through an interpretive process which involves self-reflective individuals symbolically interacting with one another

Erving Goffman

  • published “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”

  • dramaturgy: everyday social life is like a theatrical performance in which we are all actors on a metaphorical “stage”

  • impression management: we act in such a way that others will form desired impressions of us and our current situation

    • about communication, not just ‘deception’

Alfred Schutz

  • 1899-1959

  • combined phenomenology with sociology

  • explored how our background knowledge and common sense help us interpret social situations

Harold Garfinkel

  • 1917-2011

  • studied with Talcott Parsons @Harvard & Alfred Schutz who was in New York

  • UCLA, 1954 » developed ethnomethodology

  • ethnomethodology: the study of the methods people use for producing recognisable social orders

    • sheds light on the most mundane aspect of our everyday life, often by adding “doing” in front of any social given to highlight its accomplished character

      • eg doing gender, doing friendship, doing ‘being ordinary’

    • breaking experiments: deliberately breaking social norms to reveal hidden rules

Harvey Sacks

  • studied with Goffman, worked with Garfinkel

  • developed Conversation Analysis (CA) - the study of how people take turns, repair misunderstandings and use talk to organise their interactions in everyday life

    • investigates the structural organisation of casual talk in everyday settings

    • “such structural analysis of talk served as a guideline for interpersonal interaction and its analysis”

relation to 70s’ women’s liberation

  • expansion of higher education brought more women into academia

  • “the personal is political” » slogan heightened the importance of the Sociology of Everyday Life

  • the Soc of EL provided an analytical lens to examine the routine oppression women experience daily

  • “many domains of life which a women might herself identify as ‘persona’ were not idiosyncratic but interactional in character’

  • ∴ not a coincidence that Feminist Sociology is deeply grounded in this interactionist tradition