Sociology and the Real World Notes
Sociology and the Real World
Examples of reality television shows include Netflix's Queer Eye, Discovery's Naked and Afraid, and Netflix's Love Is Blind.
These shows present a range of scenarios, from makeovers to survival challenges to arranged engagements.
Millions of viewers tune in to watch these shows, drawn to the drama, competition, and personal transformations.
Curiosity about others and comparing their lives with our own drives interest in reality TV.
Some of the attractions of reality TV is that people want to win competitions, date an attractive person, find a high-profile job, feel pretty or handsome, be part of an exclusive group, or have a lovely home and family. People even want to be on a reality show themselves.
How to Read This Chapter
Sociology provides tools to analyze ourselves and the world from a sociological perspective.
Experiences and historical contexts shape our perspectives, as true for Karl Marx as it is for Kerry Ferris.
Highlighting text, taking notes, and discussing questions with instructors and peers are valuable study techniques.
Regular class attendance is essential for shared learning experiences.
What Is Sociology?
Sociology is the scientific study of human society and social behavior, examining everything from large-scale institutions to individual relationships.
Howard Becker defines sociology as the study of people "doing things together," highlighting the interconnectedness of society and individuals.
Survival depends on group membership, and our sense of self comes from societal integration.
Sociologists seek to understand how humans affect society and vice versa.
The subjects examined in sociology include anthropology, psychology, economics, political science, history, geography, and communication studies.
Sociology examines societies at various development levels, whereas anthropology focuses on traditional cultures.
Unlike economics or political science, sociology studies multiple social institutions.
Sociology considers the relationship between people and places, while geography focuses on the places themselves.
Sociology examines human communication at both social and interpersonal levels, while communication studies may focus on one or the other.
Sociology studies individuals within external social forces, while psychology specializes in internal states of mind.
Sociology takes a comprehensive approach to understanding human life.
How to Think Like a Sociologist
The sociological perspective involves looking at the world in a new light.
Practical vs. Scientific Knowledge
Everyday actors possess practical knowledge that enables them to function in daily life.
This knowledge is often not systematic or verified.
Social analysts question everything, taking a stranger's perspective to verify truths.
Practical knowledge is useful but may lack clarity, while analytical knowledge provides clarity but may miss implicit understandings.
Combining both approaches leads to a deeper comprehension of the social world.
Beginner’s Mind
Bernard McGrane suggests adopting a beginner's mind, which involves unlearning and approaching the world with openness and receptivity.
Being present in the moment—mindfulness—and stopping mental chatter can facilitate true learning.
This allows for a paradigm shift and a new understanding of self and society.
Data Workshop: Analyzing Everyday Life: Doing Nothing
Bernard McGrane suggests students "do" sociology through exercises that reveal the mundane aspects of society in new ways.
Stand in a public place for ten minutes and do nothing.
That means, just stand and be there being unoccupied.
Observe the reactions of others and your own thoughts and feelings.
Document the experience and its meanings, including others' reactions and your feelings.
This exercise helps turn the ordinary world into a strange place and makes you aware of your sense of self and how identity is constructed through interaction is also more aware of your own sense of self (or lack thereof) and how identity is constructed through interaction.
There are two options for completing this data workshop: Prep-pair-share and do-it-yourself.
Culture Shock
Peter Berger says, sociologists are intensely curious and daring in the pursuit of knowledge.
Attempt to create a sense of culture shock by viewing familiar surroundings as an outsider.
This enables a fresh perception of our own lives, revealing the exotic within the commonplace.
Anthropologists use the term to describe the experience of visiting an 'exotic' foreign culture.
The Sociological Imagination
C. Wright Mills describes the sociological imagination as understanding the intersection between biography and history.
It links the micro world of self with the macro world of social forces.
Individual problems are often influenced by cultural and historical contexts.
Sociological reasoning considers cultural norms and economic changes rather than solely focusing on individual psychology.
In Relationships
Women talk more than men is a commonly held belief.
Sociological studies show that men are slightly more talkative than women.
Men talk more with their wives and strangers, whereas women talk more with college classmates and children.
With close friends and family, men and women are equally talkative.
Men use assertive speech, while women use affiliative speech.
Men are more dominant in conversations, interrupting women more often in conversation, this is known as "Mansplaining".
Mansplaining is the tendency to explain things in a condescending way
Findings indicate that language and conversational differences are influenced more by social forces than biological forces.
Doing sociology requires suspending preconceptions and questioning taken-for-granted beliefs.
The sociological imagination links micro and macro levels of analysis through larger social forces.
Mills emphasizes the bidirectional process where social forces influence individual lives, and individual lives affect society.
Accessing a world beyond our sphere helps appreciate alternative viewpoints and understand the origins of our values.
A sociological perspective challenges assumptions and acknowledges the diversity of individual experiences.
Levels of Analysis: Micro- and Macrosociology
Sociological perspectives are like lenses, providing different ways of looking at a common subject.
Microsociology (zoom lens) concentrates on interactions between individuals.
Macrosociology (wide-angle lens) examines large-scale social structures.
Microsociology examines the smallest building blocks of society.
Example of Microsociology
Victoria Leto DeFrancisco's study, men use silence to suppress women's talk.
By men withholding supportive responses, women must work harder to continue a conversation.
DeFrancisco's micro-level analysis shows how gender and power are manifested in everyday interactions.
In The Future
C. Wright Mills introduced “sociological imagination” and states it is an enduring cornerstone of the discipline.
Mills was convinced that sociology had something to offer everyone, not just academics.
Mills highlighted the distinction between "personal troubles" and "public issues."
Unemployment, war, marriage, and housing are all experienced as personal troubles, but to be fully understood, they must also be seen as manifestations of long-standing institutions and larger social structures.
The term can be understood only when they are viewed as a public issue.
People are shaped by the connections between “the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history."
Anorexia and Bulimia are examples of cultural factors that shapes individual psychologies. Macrosociology examines large-scale social structures and their effects on individuals and groups.
Examples of Macrosociology
US Labour market is still sex segregated.
For instance, certain jobs are predominantly held by one gender, reflecting broader societal norms and expectations.
"glass ceiling" effect on women.
This refers to the invisible barrier preventing women and minorities from rising to senior leadership positions, regardless of their qualifications or achievements.
Christine Williams calls The unusually rapid rates of upward mobility "glass escalator".
This term describes how men in female-dominated professions often experience quicker promotions and preferential treatment.
Pattern and occupational are large-scale features of social structure create that influence individuals and groups.
Micro perspective assumes society’s large structures are shaped through individual interactions, while macro perspective assumes society’s larger structures shape those individual interactions.
Sociology’s Family Tree
Great thinkers were trying to understand the world and our place in it at the beginning of time.
Theories are abstract propositions about how things are, as well as how they should be.
Social theories are guiding principles or abstract models that attempt to explain and predict the social world.
Sociology has a family tree of real people who lived in a particular time and place, related throughout time.
Earliest western social theorists focused on establishing society as an appropriate object of scientific scrutiny, which was itself a revolutionary concept.
Early theorists laid the groundwork not only for the discipline as a whole but also for the different schools of thought that are still shaping society today.
Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte (1798–1857) was the first to provide a program for the scientific study of society, labeled “social physics”.
Comte developed a theory of the progress of human thinking from its early theological and metaphysical stages toward a final “positive,” or scientific, stage.
Positivism seeks to identify laws that describe the behavior of a particular reality, in which people gain knowledge of the world directly through their senses.
Comte felt that society needed positivist guidance toward both social progress and social order.
Comte distinguished methods and topics that provided the kernel of discipline.
Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) believed that the American experiment was, in her eyes, flawed and hypocritical.
She pointed out the contradictions between the nation's espoused values and the realities of slavery and gender inequality.
She was the precursor to these naturalistic sociologists who would establish the discipline in America, as well as translated Comte’s Introduction to Positive Philosophy into english to make his ideas accessible in England and America.
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was primarily responsible for the establishment of sociology in Britain and America.
Spencer proposed that societies, like biological organisms, evolve through time by adapting to changing conditions, with less successful adaptations falling by the wayside.
He coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” and his social philosophy is sometimes known as social Darwinism.
Macrosociological Theory
Theorists in late-nineteenth-century Europe were living during extraordinary times.
They were attempting to explain social order, social change, and social inequality while the world around them changed as a result of the Industrial Revolution.
Frequently referred to as classical sociology, the theories that arose during this period reflect the broad subject matter of a sweeping era.
Structural Functionalism
Structural functionalism, or functionalist theory, was the dominant theoretical perspective within sociology well into the mid-twentieth century.
New (or neo-) functionalists continue to apply their own vision of the theory to study a wide variety of social phenomena today.
Founder and Key Contributions
Émile Durkheim is the central figure in functionalist theory.
His first major study, The Division of Labor in Society (1893), Durkheim stated that solidarity, or unity, was present in all types of societies but that different types of societies created different types of social bonds.
He suggested that people in a simple agricultural society were bound together by mechanical solidarity.
This refers to a state of social integration that arises out of the uniformity of values and lifestyles.
In industrial societies, organic solidarity prevailed.
Which occurs when people are united through differences and interdependence, like specialized roles in a workforce.
He believed that even the most individualistic actions have sociological explanations and set out to establish a scientific methodology for studying these actions.
He chose for his case study the most individualistic of actions—suicide—and used statistical data to show that suicides were related to social factors such as religious affiliation, marital status, and employment.
According to Durkheim in his now-classic study Suicide (1897), even the darkest depression has its roots in an individual’s connections to the social world, or rather his lack of connection.
Durkheim theorized that suicide is one result of anomie, a sense of disconnection brought about by the changing conditions of modern life.
In his final major study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim suggested that religion was a powerful source of social solidarity because it reinforced collective bonds and shared moral values.
Durkheim's study of the indigenous peoples of Australia led him to a universal definition of religion:
The two main principles of functionalism:
Society is conceived as a stable, ordered system made up of interrelated parts, or structures.
Each structure has a function that contributes to the continued stability or equilibrium of the unified whole.
Structures are identified as social institutions such as the family, the educational system, politics, the economy, and religion.
They meet society’s needs by performing different functions, and every function is necessary to maintain social order and stability.
Offshoots
Structural functionalism was the dominant theoretical perspective in Europe for much of the early twentieth century.
Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) elaborated on the theory and applied it to modern society, specifying some of the functions that social structures might fulfill in contemporary life. A healthy society must provide a means for people to adapt to their environment; for example, families, schools, and religious institutions work together to socialize children.
He emphasized the importance of social systems and their interdependence.
Robert Merton (1910–2003), delineated the theory even further, identifying manifest and latent functions for different social structures.
Manifest functions are the obvious, intended functions of a social structure, while latent functions are the less obvious, perhaps unintended functions.
Advantages and Critiques
One of the great advantages of functionalism is its inclusion of all social institutions.
A critique of functionalism is that it generally preoccupied with stability. Functionalism takes the position that only dysfunction can create social change. This conservative bias is part of a larger problem with the theory: Functionalism provides little insight into social processes because its model of society is static rather than dynamic.
Conflict Theory
Conflict theory is the second major school of thought in sociology.
Like structural functionalism, it’s a macro-level approach to understanding social life that dates to mid-nineteenth-century Europe.
Conflict theory posits that social inequality is the basic characteristic of society.
By focusing on inequality, conflict theory helped address some of the critiques of structural functionalism.
Founder and Key Contributions
Karl Marx (1818–1883) has been better known to the world as the basis for communism.
He focused on class struggles in society's history.
Marx's theory continues to provide a powerful tool for understanding social phenomena.
Marx felt that this would inevitably lead to class struggle between those who owned the means of production which is money, property, factories, other types of businesses, and those who worked for them.
Global Perspective Eurocentrism and Sociological Theory
Social world and social theory are often Eurocentric.
One influential non-Western thinker was Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), an Arab Muslim philosopher and politician.
He examined power dynamics and social cohesion in societies.
The coining of the term as sabiyah, or “social cohesion,” precedes Durkheim’s work on the same subject by more than 500 years, and his argument that larger social and historical forces shape individual lives predates Mills’s insight about sociology as “the intersection of biography and history” by almost 600 years!
Original Principles
Conflict theory proposes that conflict and tension are basic facts of social life and suggests that people have disagreements over goals and values and are involved in struggles over both resources and power. The theory thus focuses on the processes of dominance, competition, upheaval, and social change.
Conflict theory takes a materialist view of society (focused on labor practices and economic reality) and extends it to other social inequalities.
Most people readily accept the prevailing ideology, despite its failure to represent the reality of their lives. Marx referred to this acceptance as false consciousness, a denial of the truth that allows for the perpetuation of the inequalities inherent in the class structure.
Conflict theory sees the transformation of society over time as inevitable.
To change the status quo is for the masses to attain class consciousness, or revolutionary consciousness, and challenge those in power.
Offshoots
Despite Marx’s single-minded focus on economic exploitation and transformation, his ideas have helped inspire theorists interested in all forms of power and inequality.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, modern Marxism is called critical theory.
This theory critically assesses social structures and power dynamics.
Beginning with the pioneering work of W.E.B. Du Bois, sociology started to focus on inequalities of race and ethnicity, inspiring important studies about the causes and consequences of prejudice and discrimination.
Critical race theory, which emerged out of legal scholarship in the 1970s and ’80s, is concerned with the relationship among race, racism, and power. This controversial theory argues that racism is deeply embedded in American institutions, including our laws.
By applying assumptions about gender inequality irt the family, education, the economy, or the media, feminist theory. This allows for a new way of understanding those institutions and the changing role of gender in contemporary society.
Queer theory proposes that categories of sexuality—homo, hetero, bi, trans—should be viewed as “social constructs”.
Advantages and Critiques
One of Karl Marx’s great contributions to the social sciences is the principle of praxis, or practical action.
intellectual should act on what they believe.
Conflict theory is useful in understanding not only macro-level social issues but micro-level personal interactions.
theory argues that a social arrangement's existence does not mean that it's beneficial.
conflict theory can often ignore those parts of society that are truly orderly, stable, and enduring, in focusing on tension and conflict.
Weberian Theory
Max Weber (1864–1920) was another important European macrosociological theorist during the Industrial Revolution.
Weber's most overriding concern was with the process of rationalization, or the application of economic logic to all spheres of human activity.
Economy and Society (1921 Weber proposed that modern industrialized societies were characterized by efficient, goal-oriented, rule-governed bureaucracies.
His classic sociological discussion of the origins of the capitalist system, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905), concluded with the image of people trapped by their industrious way of life in what he called an iron cage of bureaucratic rules.
Ritzer has applied Weber’s theories of bureaucracy and rationalization to the fast-food industry and has warned about “McDonaldization”
Weber was also influential in improving research methods by suggesting that researchers avoid imposing their own opinions on their scientific analysis.
invoked the German term verstehen (“empathic understanding”) to describe how a social scientist should study human action: that is, with a kind of scientific empathy for actors’ experiences, intentions, and actions.
Microsociological Theory
In the twentieth century, and increasingly in the United States, the discipline of sociology continued to develop and the ideas of its third major school of thought began to coalesce.
Symbolic Interactionism
Sociology’s third grand theory, symbolic interactionism proved its greatest influence through much of the 1900s.
Symbolic interactionism helps us explain both our individual personalities and the ways in which we are all linked together. It allows us to understand the processes by which social order and social change are constructed.
Founder and Key Contributions
A handful of academics has influenced symbolic interactionism.
Their studies were inspired by Max Weber’s concept of verstehen as the proper attitude to adopt in the field.
American social theorists was influenced by a philosophical perspective called pragmatism, developed largely by William James and John Dewey
Living in the world involved making practical adaptations to whatever we encountered; if those adaptations made our lives run more smoothly, then the ideas behind them must be both useful and true.
Mead proposed that both human development and the meanings we assign to everyday objects and events are fundamentally social processes; they require the interaction of multiple individuals and crucial to the development of self and society is a language.
According to Mead, the most important human behaviors consist of linguistic “gestures,” such as words and facial expressions.
Mead argued that we use language to "name ourselves, think about ourselves, talk to ourselves, and feel proud or ashamed of ourselves" and that "we can act toward ourselves in all the ways we can act toward others. For Mead, then, society and self are created through communicative acts such as speech and gestures; the individual personality is shaped by society, and vice versa.
Blumer appealed for researchers to get “down and dirty” with the dynamics of social life.
Despite its geographical location in a city full of real-world inequality (or perhaps because of it), the Chicago School of sociology had very few women or people of color among its membership.
This imbalance in representation influenced the perspectives and priorities within the school.
Addams is often considered the founder of what is now a separate field outside the discipline: social work. On the Job Famous Sociology Majors
Michelle Robinson Obama (b. 1964)
Kalpen Modi (b. 1977) who served as an associate director with the White House Office of Public Engagement (OPE) in 2009.
Amanda Gorman (b. 1998), who rose to fame with her breakout performance at President Biden’s inauguration.
Original Principles
We act toward things on the basis of their meanings.
meanings are negotiated through interaction with others.
meanings can change or be modified through interaction. For symbolic interactionists, social facts exist only because we create and re-create them through our interactions; this gives the theory wide explanatory power and a versatility that allows it to address any sociological issue.Although symbolic interactionism is focused on how self and society develop through interaction with others, it is useful in explaining and analyzing a wide variety of specific social issues, from inequalities of race and gender to the group dynamics of families or co-workers.
Offshoots
interactionist conceptions of the self.
Erving Goffman (1922–1982) furthered symbolic interactionist conceptions of the self in a seemingly radical way.
indicated that the self is essentially “on loan” to us from society; it is created through interaction with others and hence ever changing within various social contexts.
used the theatrical metaphor of dramaturgy to describe the ways in which we engage in a strategic presentation of ourselves to others.
Conversation Analysis, pioneered by sociologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, is also related to symbolic interactionism.
conversation analysts are convinced that the best place to look for the social processes of meaning production is in naturally occurring conversation and that the best way to get at the meanings an everyday actor gives to the things others say and do is to look closely at how the actor responds.
Advantages and Critiques
As society changes, so must the discipline that studies it, and symbolic interactionism has invigorated sociology in ways that are linked to the past and looking toward the future.
New way of looking at the world interactionism is “the only perspective that assumes an active, expressive model of the human actor and that treats the individual and the social at the same level of analysis”.
Data Workshop Analyzing Media and Pop Culture
For this Data Workshop we'd like you to immerse yourself in the celebrity gossip site of your choice. Pick three stories to work with scrutinize the pictures read the headlines and text carefully and review the reader comments. Then consider how you might answer the following questions according to each of Sociology's three major schools of thought.
Structural Functionalism-What is the function or functions of celebrity gossip for society? What purpose does it serve, and how does it help society maintain stability and order? and and are there any dysfunctions in it? Discuss how notions of the sacred and profane are characterized are there manifest and latent functions of celebrity gossip.
Conflict theory is what forms of inequality or reveal and celebrity gossip? In particular what does it have to say about class race gender sexuality body size or other inequalities? And who's his interests are being served and who gets exploited and who suffers and who from celebrity gossip?
Symbolic interaction, but what celebrity gossip mean to society as a whole? What does it mean to individual members of society and can also happen it could have different meanings for different individuals or groups of individuals on how do those meanings gets constructed in interaction and how does celebrity gossip shape and influence our everyday lives?
Postmodernism is a theory that encompasses a wide range of areas, from art and architecture, to music and film, to communications and technology addresses these and other questions.The postmodern perspective developed primarily out of the French intellectual scene in the second half of the twentieth century and is still associated with three of its most important proponents. In order to understand postmodernism, we first need to juxtapose it with modernism, the movement against which it reacted. Modernism is both a historical period and an ideological stance that began with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, or Age of Reason.
New Theoretical Approaches
New perspectives occur since the major schools of thought and and the other shoots have weaknesses as well as strength and because society itself is also changing
Postmodern Theory
addresses the question of what is truth and who have the right to claim it is their perspective developed primarily out of the French intellectual scene in the 2nd half of the 20th century.
Postmodern theory Modernism is a historical period and ideological stance that began at the 18th century enlightenment.
there are no such thing as universal human truths from which we can interpret the meaning of existence.
They are interesting in destruction taking apart and examining these stories and theories.
Table 1.1 Theory in Everyday Life Perspective Approach to Society Case Study College Admissions in the United States Perspective Approach to Society Case Study College Admissions in the United States structural functionalism assumes that society is unified whole that functions because of the contributions of its separate structures those who are admitted worthy and well qualified while those do not are others a conflict theory sees social conflict as the bases emphasis materialist view.
They are rejecting to made means that you're not dumb so don't fall for any trap because they are all contingents are there are people challenging because of their knowledge.
Midrange Theory
Share this view with postmodernism they show with postmodernism in for small scale the classical social theories they seek to develop large scale.
Theory Glossary
SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM: a paradigm that sees interaction and meaning as central to society and assumes that meanings are not inherent but are created through interaction
CHICAGO SCHOOL a type of sociology practiced at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s that centered on urban settings and field research methods
PRAGMATISM a perspective that assumes organisms (including humans) make practical adaptations to their environments; humans do this through cognition, interpretation, and interaction
DRAMATURGY an approach pioneered by Erving Goffman in which social life is analyzed in terms of its similarities to theatrical performance
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
POSTMODERNISM a paradigm that suggests that social reality is diverse, pluralistic, and constantly in flux
MODERNISM a paradigm that places trust in the power of science and technology to create progress, solve problems, and improve life
MIDRANGE THEORY an approach that integrates empiricism and grand theory
Closing Comments
Sociology can