Sociology Ch 1

Society

A group of people who live in a defined geographic area, who interact with one another, and who share a common culture is what sociologists

Functionalism

Also called structural-functional theory, sees society as a structure with interrelated parts designed to meet the biological and social needs of the individuals in that society.

Reification

An error of treating an abstract concept as though it has a real, material existence

Grand theories

Attempt to explain large-scale relationships and answer fundamental questions such as why societies form and why they change.

Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Karl Marx were all advocates of

Conflict Theory

Capitalism

Economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of goods and the means to produce them, grew in many nations.

Harriet Martineau (1802-1876)

First Woman Sociologist. Harriet Martineau was a writer who addressed a wide range of social science issues. She was an early observer of social practices, including economics, social class, religion, suicide, government, and women's rights. Martineau was the first to translate Comte's writing from French to English and thereby introduced sociology to Englishspeaking scholars (Hill 1991). Martineau found the workings of capitalism at odds with the professed moral principles of people in the United States; she pointed out the faults with the free enterprise system in which workers were exploited and impoverished while business owners became wealthy. She further noted that the belief in all being created equal was inconsistent with the lack of women's rights. Much like Mary Wollstonecraft, Martineau was often discounted in her own time by the male domination of academic sociology.

Georg Simmel (1858-1918)

German art critic who wrote widely on social and political issues. Simmel took an antipositivism stance and addressed topics such as social conflict, the function of money, individual identity in city life, and the European fear of outsiders (Stapley 2010). Much of his work focused on the micro-level theories, and it analyzed the dynamics of two-person and three-person groups. His work also emphasized individual culture as the creative capacities of individuals. Simmel's contributions to sociology are not often included in academic histories of the discipline, perhaps overshadowed by his contemporaries Durkheim, Mead, and Weber (Ritzer and Goodman 2004).

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

German philosopher and economist. Marx rejected Comte's positivism. He believed that societies grew and changed as a result of the struggles of different social classes over the means of production. At the time he was developing his theories, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism led to great disparities in wealth between the owners of the factories and workers.

Émile Durkheim (1858-1917)

Laid out his theory on how societies transformed from a primitive state into a capitalist, industrial society. According to Durkheim, people rise to their proper levels in society based on merit. Durkheim believed that sociologists could study objective "social facts" (Poggi 2000). He also believed that through such studies it would be possible to determine if a society was "healthy" or "pathological." He saw healthy societies as stable, while pathological societies experienced a breakdown in social norms between individuals and society.

Symbolic Interactionism

One-to-one interactions and communications

Social institutions

Patterns of beliefs and behaviors focused on meeting social needs, such as government, education, family, healthcare, religion, and the economy.

Paradigms

Philosophical and theoretical frameworks used within a discipline to formulate theories, generalizations, and the experiments performed in support of them.

Sociological imagination

Pioneer sociologist C. Wright Mills described as an awareness of the relationship between a person's behavior and experience and the wider culture that shaped the person's choices and perceptions.

Positivism

Scientific study of social patterns

Qualitative sociology

Seeks to understand human behavior by learning about it through in-depth interviews, focus groups, and analysis of content sources (like books, magazines, journals, and popular media).

Auguste Comte (1798-1857)

Term sociology reinvented by Comte. Comte named the scientific study of social patterns positivism. scientific methods to reveal the laws by which societies and individuals interact would usher in a new "positivist" age of history. While the field and its terminology have grown, sociologists still believe in the positive impact of their work.

Social facts

The laws, morals, values, religious beliefs, customs, fashions, rituals, and all of the cultural rules that govern social life, that may contribute to these changes in the family.

Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès (1748-1836)

The term sociology was first coined in 1780 by the French essayist

Structural Functionalism

The way each part of society functions together to contribute to the whole.

Conflict Theory

The way inequalities contribute to social differences and perpetuate differences in power.

Quantitative sociology

Uses statistical methods such as surveys with large numbers of participants. Researchers analyze data using statistical techniques to see if they can uncover patterns of human behavior.

Functionalism

____ theory views society as a structure with interrelated parts designed to meet the biological and social needs of individuals who make up that society;

macro-level

a wide-scale view of the role of social structures within a society

Communism

economic system under which there is no private or corporate ownership: everything is owned communally and distributed as needed.

Conflict theory

looks at society as a competition for limited resources.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

published The Study of Sociology, the first book with the term "sociology" in the title. Spencer rejected much of Comte's philosophy as well as Marx's theory of class struggle and his support of communism. Instead, he favored a form of government that allowed market forces to control capitalism. His work influenced many early sociologists including Émile Durkheim (1858-1917).

Sociology

the study of groups and group interactions, societies and social interactions, from small and personal groups to very large groups.

Micro-level

the study of specific relationships between individuals or small groups