Sociology 468 Johnson PowerPoint 1,2&3

Contemporary phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists

Alfred schutz peter Berger and Thomas luckmann harold garfinkel

Positivist social science

- Human beings are self interested, pleasure-seeking/pain avoiding, rational mammals. • Mechanical Model of Man (behaviorist approach): A model of human nature used in positivist social science stating that observing people's external behaviors and documenting outside forces acting on them are sufficient to provide adequate explanations of human thought and action

Two main principals of structural 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 (equilibrium) of the unified whole. * Any dysfunction in a structure leads to social change, a new structure, and new equilibrium.

Examples of social constructs

- gender - deviance - crime - race

For whom is poverty functional ?

1. Poverty ensures that there will be low-wage laborers prepared to do society's dirty work. 2. Poverty creates a spectrum of jobs for people who help the poor (social workers), protect society, or profit from the poor. 3. Poverty provides a market for goods and services that would otherwise go unused like day old bread and old automobiles. 4. The poor also serve cultural functions. They provide scapegoats for society's problems

• Arlie Russell Hochschild was born and raised in a Maryland suburb. When she was twelve her parents joined the U.S. Foreign Service. • As her family hosted parties for foreign diplomats, she became aware of the subtleties of emotional displays and the importance of controlling , if not manipulating, them. • Hochschild complete her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of California Berkeley where she concluded that sociology was patently a male discipline. This inspired her to develop a branch of sociology that addressed not only the experiences of men, but also women; that to explore not only what people think but what people feel: the sociology of emotions.

Arlie Russell hochschild

Founding fathers of the functionalist perspective

August Comte Emile Durkheim

Who Inspired Many of the Ideas in Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology?

Edmund husserl max weber Robert e park

Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology: A social science approach that studies commonsense knowledge. • This approach was established and developed in the 1960's by sociologist at UCLA, Harold Garfinkel. • It involves the specialized highly detailed analysis of micro-situations (including conversation analysis) • Ethnomethodologists wish to reveal the unspoken rules that we follow but are not consciously aware of in daily life. • Unlike phenomenologists, ethnomethodologists are more interested in how actors assure each other that meaning is shared than the actual meaning structures themselves.

August Comte (1798-1857)

French social theorist credited with founding modern sociology. • He was primary concerned with two things: social statics (the way society is held together) and social dynamics (the laws that govern social change). • Comte took on a Positivist orientation to social research. In other words, based on facts alone which should be determined scientifically. • He argued that all societies go through three stages: • 1. Theological stage - key ways to understanding the world is framed by superstitions, imagination, and religion. • 2. Metaphysical stage - abstract speculation framed by the basic belief that society is framed by natural rather than supernatural forces. • 3. Scientific reasoning and "facts

Positivist social science

Functionalist argue that the function of sociology is to tell the world how society is designed and its functions, rather than try to change it • In other words, functionalist believe we should show the world as it is, not how we believe it should be. • Sociology should be apolitical without adding socio-political beliefs. • This is one of the reasons why strict positivists and functionalism has lost popularity over time

Positivist social science

Functionalist root their sociology in the positivist perspective arguing the following points: • Positivists adopt a realist ontology (also called essentialist, objectivist, or empirical realist). • Reality exists "out there" and is waiting to be discovered. • Social reality is not random, but it is patterned and has order. • Science occurs in a linear fashion - things are discovered about the social world and facts build upon one another. Ex. Positivists would say that if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, it still makes a sound.

Contemporary symbolic interactionism s and the school of dramaturgy

Herbert blubber Erving Goffman arlie russel hochschild

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

Husserl argues that humans know about the world only through experience; through mental consciousness. • Norms and values are always mediated by experience. Thus, the human experience in the world is a world of meaningful objectives and relations. • Husserl used the term lifeworld to refer to the world of existing assumptions as they are experienced and made meaningful in consciousness. In other words, humans operate in a taken-for-granted world that permeates their mental life and then assumes that others experience the same world. • To understand social events, consciousness must be comprehended .

Founding father of conflict theory

Karl Marx

Who inspired many of the ideas in symbolic interactionism and dramaturgy ?

Max Weber and George Herbert mead

Contemporary conflict theorists

Max horheimer theodor adorno herbert Marcuse

A curious mind

Sociologists ask the why about society

The functionalist Paradigm

Structural Functionalism: Seeks to explain social organization and change in terms of the roles performed by different social structures, phenomena, and institutions.

contemporary functionalist scholars

Talcott Parsons Robert K. Merton Kingsley Davis Wilbert Moore

Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons was the most dominant perspective and sociologist in American Sociology during the 1930's • After the 1970's, he became associated with conservative bias and academic elitism after backlash in the late 60's. • However, in the mid 1980's Parsonian sociology gains some popularity and momentum.

The functional perspective : crime

• Emile Durkheim is credited with developing the early foundations of fundamentalism and took particular interest in the function of crime. Durkheim reasoned that since deviance is universal, it must serve a social function. • So what is crime's function according to Durkheim? • To remind members of society what is considered normal or moral. It reaffirms people's beliefs in what is right and good

George Herbert Mead

• A philosopher born in Massachusetts, Mead argued that the self does not passively react to its environment but, rather, actively creates conditions to which it responds. • Individuals then shape their actions on the basis of the imagined responses they attribute to others. • Consider, for instance, the internal conversations you have before asking someone out for a date or determining how you will resolve an argument with a friend. In each case you take the attitude of the other, viewing yourself as you believe they see you.

The functional perspective : education

• According to Emile Durkheim, modern societies are complex. This complexity creates a problem for social solidarity. Modern society is no longer characterized by communities with high degrees of cultural, religious, or social similarities weakening social ties. • One function of mass education is to address this problem by socializing members of society into the norms and values necessary to produce and maintain social solidarity. • Durkheim referred to this as moral education, meaning that educational institutions not only provide the knowledge and training necessary for members to fulfill their economic roles in modern society but also function to socialize individuals, building solidarity in the group.

Parsons: the pattern variables, ( affectivity vs. affective-neutrality )

• Affectivity means that the emotions are considered legitimate in action. • Affective-neutrality means that emotions are closed out of action. • For instance, in contemporary societies it is normative to display affectivity in personal relationships but not in bureaucratic ones. You may kiss or hug someone close to you upon greeting them but you would not do this to the job clerk at the DMV.

Alfred Schultz

• Alfred Schutz was born in Vienna, Austria in 1899 to an upper- middle-class Jewish family. • Although he was not an academic by profession (he was a banker), he was intrigued by phenomenological sociology. • In 1932, he published Phenomenology of the Social World and finally gave up his banking career in 1956 and devoted himself full time to teaching and research.

The social conflict explanation : poverty

• Although more than a century has passed since Marx formulated his theory, a struggle between workers and owners, managers, and even stockholders still exists. • A study found that collective action lawsuits alleging hour violations have increased 400%. • Companies like Bank of America, Walmart, Starbucks, and Taco Bell have been sued most often for allegedly forcing employees to work overtime without pay. • In short, significant and persistent stratification exists because those in power use it to try to create economic, political, and social conditions that benefit them. • It is not functional, it is rather dysfunctional because the power is concentrated in the hands of the few

American style critical theory

• American-style Critical theory came from the feminist movement and civil rights movement. • C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) became a critic of the undemocratic character of America's allegedly democratic governance. • He argued that a small percentage of people control everybody. An interconnected group of political, economic, and military leaders dominate and centralize power in what he referred to as The Power Elite. • Mills believed that coercion is rarely needed in a monopolized democratic state because those who hold power exercise their power in ways that goes unnoticed by the powerless. In other words, the p

Parsons: The Pattern Variables, (Ascription vs. Achievement)

• Ascription means that evaluations or interactions are guided by given personal attributes (i.e., race, gender, age). • Achievement means that evaluation or interactions are based on the actor's performance with regard to established standards (i.e., college entrance examinations).

Parsons: The Pattern Variables, (Diffuseness vs. Specificity)

• Diffuseness means nothing is "closed out" in making a particular choice or undertaking a particular action. • Specificity means that action is based on a specific criterion. • For instance, modern societies, we are often expected to act within narrowly defined roles in order to maximize efficiency. For instance, standing in line is based solely on one criterion (who got their first), thereby favoring fairness over emotion or favoritism. By contrast, in slower-paced, traditional communities actions are diffuse. For example, a shopper may engage in a significant amount of small talk with a clerk before making a purchase.

Internalization and socialization

• Berger and Luckmann argue that the individual is not molded passively. Rather, they emphasize the active role that individuals take in maintaining the world that they experience as an objective reality. • Internalization is when we interpret an objective event as expressing meaning. • Externalization, objectification, reification and internalization often happen simultaneously. • The individual is thereby born into not only an objective social structure but also an objective social world. • There are two types of socialization: 1. Primary socialization • Refers to the first socialization an individual undergoes in childhood, through which he/she becomes a member of society. It is often predefined and taken for granted. 2. Secondary socialization • Refers to subsequent processes of socialization that induct an already socialized individual into new sectors of society. It is often acquired in a more conscious way.

Externalizations, objectivation and deification

• Berger and Luckmann use externalization, objectivation and reification to understand how the subjective (the internal) becomes the objective (the external). Externalization and objectivation enable the actor to confront the social world as something outside of herself. Reification is the process of making something abstract more real. It is viewing something that was created by humans as something that is non- human or possibly superhuman. • Take for instance Nazi guards that said they must act in a certain way because of their social role as a guard. This social role was created by • • humans but becomes so ingrained that it feels like it is beyond human • Karl Marx argued that reification can be seen in religion for example. • While Marx likened reification to a delusion that must be dispelled in order to create a fully human, liberated society, Berger and Luckmann view reification as inherent or natural to the human condition. • They are what enable social life to be both meaningful and continuous.

The social construction of reality

• Berger and Luckmann were greatly inspired by Schutz as well as Emile Durkheim. • They were quoted saying "society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product." • In other words, human beings have to create a world that ensures social stability. It is what allows us to perceive the reality of everyday life as "reality." In doing so, we create social institutions that become external and yet coercive of us.

The nature of symbolic interactionism

• Blumer emphasized interpretation. Interpretation entails constructing the meaning of another's actions as well as one's own. • Interpretation is a behavioral process that is carried out through the conversation of gestures and symbols. • Thus, self-consciousness is experienced indirectly through the interpretations of others. In other words, we define ourselves through the eyes of others. • The pattering of social life is continually constructed and reconstructed.

Breaching experiments

• Breaching experiments are Garfinkel's method for identifying the building blocks of everyday interaction. These experiments disrupt normal procedures in order to expose them. • An effective breaching experiment: • Makes it impossible for the subject to interpret the situation as a game or experiment or deception. • Makes it necessary for the actor to reconstruct the "natural facts" of the encounter. • Deprives the actor of consensual support for an alternative definition of the situation. • Garfinkel sent his students to nearby stores. • He told them to "mistake" other customers for salesclerks How do you think the customers reacted after the students persisted in the misinterpretation? • Many bewildered customers accepted the new definition of the situation and awkwardly tried to fill the salesperson role • Other customers "blew up" and "lost their cool." Filmmakers use the effect of "breaching" social norms for comic effect. • For example they have people from different cultures who do not share the same tacit unspoken rules for proper behavior violate social norms.

Parsons: The Pattern Variables, (Collectivity-orientation vs. Self- orientation)

• Collectivity-orientation denotes the prioritization of the needs and goals of the collectivity or group as a whole. • Self-orientation means that the individual actor prioritizes the needs and goals of the "self." • For instance, in contemporary U.S. society marriage is often mostly (if not completely) based on personal interests and goals (self-orientation). Whereas in many traditional societies, marriage is based on collective concerns (i.e. economic and social benefits) that is often arranged by elders (collectivity-orientation).

The conflict perspective : education

• Conflict theorists reject the functionalist idea that the system channels individuals into the positions for which they are best suited. Instead, they believe, it reproduces social stratification and ensures that the discovery of talent will be limited. • The poor and working-class children have fewer opportunities to demonstrate their talents and abilities because they lack equal access to educational opportunities. • Conflict theorists pointed out three main arguments. 1. Schools prepare people to function well and without complaint in the hierarchical structure. 2. Parental economic status is passed on to children, at least in part, through unequal educational opportunity, though the advantages conferred on children of higher-social-status families are not limited to their educational preparation. 3. The modern school system is a reflection of the interests of raising profits for capitalism.

Conversation analysis

• Conversation analysis infuses the ethnomethodological interest in the details of everyday action and the production of order with a vigorous methodology and focus on the fundamental, taken-for- granted structures of conversation interaction. • Conversation analysis investigate not only words but hesitations, cut-offs, silences, laughter, etc.

Merton : Deviance

• Deviance refers to modes of action that do not conform to the dominant norms or values of a social group or society. • Merton argued in his Structural Strain Theory that deviance occurs when a gap exists between the culturally defined goals of a society and the means available in society to achieve those goals thus creating a dysfunction. • Merton argues that laws, social policies, norms, values, and religions can all produce latent (unintended) consequences and dysfunctions. • Merton argued that most people in a society share a common understanding of the goals they should pursue as well as the legitimate means for achieving these goals. • Success is not always attainable through conventional means, which may cause a strain which results in four different types of deviant behavior.

The presentation of self in everyday life

• Erving Goffman argued that the social self is the product of a social interaction. Thus, the individual engages in impression management to tailor his or her presentation of self in a way most favorable to the given situation. • Goffman argued that the individual (or a group) is concerned with defining the situation and ensuring a believable performance.

Erving Goffman

• Erving Goffman was born in Mannville, Alberta, Canada graduating from the University of Toronto. • He then continued his education at the University of Chicago. • Though often times labeled a symbolic interactionist, Goffman rejected the label as well as rejecting the label as a "theorist" altogether preferring the title of "empiricist" or a "social psychologist."

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

• French scholar that established the early subject manner of sociology, laid out rules for conducting research, and developed theories for social change. • Durkheim studied social facts or things that are external to individual members yet constrain their thinking and behavior. For example: laws, social duties, and religion. • Durkheim's principal concern was explaining the impact of modern society on social solidarity or the bonds that unite members of a social group. Mechanical solidarity: social bonds that are present in pre-modern agrarian societies where people share traditions and beliefs creates a sense of cohesion. Organic solidarity: social bonds present in modern societies based on interdependence and individual rights. What about the United States? Is it held together primarily by organic solidarity or does mechanical solidarity and the collective conscience (the common beliefs and values that bind a society together) present as well?

Criticisms and loss popularity

• Functionalism has been criticized as reaffirming the status quo. • In other words, its position that things exist because it serves a specific function does not address whether or not it might benefit one group at the detriment of others. It does not examine inequalities as well as the distribution of power.

Karl Marx

• German scholar and critic of early capitalism influencing the development of economics, political science, as well as sociology. • Marx argued almost all societies have been divided into economic classes, with one class prospering at the expense of others. In the time Marx was writing he referred to these two classes as the proletariat (working people) and the bourgeoisie (the capitalist or property- owning class). Also known as the haves and the have nots. • These two classes inevitably have class conflict under capitalism. Class conflict is the competition between social classes over the distribution of wealth, power, and other valued resources in society. • According to Marx, the means of production, the sites and technology that produce the goods we need and use, would come to be concentrated in the hands of the few, forcing people into the proletariat. • However, Marx believed Capitalism is a necessary evil that will inevitably transition into a utopia of equality he referred to as Communism. • Therefore, social change is not evolutionary but revolutionary with oppressed workers rising up

Max Weber

• German sociologist that was argued that an adequate explanation of the social world begins by first understanding the meaning of what people say and do. • He coined the method called Verstehen. Verstehen is the German word for interpretive understanding. In other words, in order to understand the social world we must understand and imagine how the person being studied perceived the situation.

The stigmatized self

• Goffman defines a stigma as an undesired differentness. Goffman names three types of stigmas: 1. Abominations of the body (physical deformities), 2. Perceived blemishes of individual character (personality traits that are looked down upon, suicide attempts, alcoholism, homosexuality, unemployment, etc.), 3. Tribal stigmas (race, nation, religion, etc.) • Those that do not deport negatively from the expectations he calls the "normals • Some people that are stigmatized do not internalize it. So he/she feels full-ledged human and looks at normals as not quite human. So they bear their stigma and are not repentant about doing so. • However, other stigmatized people tend to hold the same belief about identity that normals do. In their deepest feelings they may have a sense of being a normal person yet he or she might perceive that whatever others profess, they do not really accept him or her. • Shame becomes a possibility here "The stigmatized person is asked to imply neither that his burden is heavy nor that bearing it has made him different from us. He is advised to reciprocate an acceptance of himself and us, an acceptance of him that we have not extended to him in the first place. The self is defined as normal in our society so the stigmatized person has to be extremely thorough as to perform this self in a faultless manner to an edgy audience that is half watching him in terms of another show."

Dramaturgy : a synthesis

• Goffman used what he termed the dramaturgical approach to explain this idea further. • Dramaturgy can be understood as the study of interactions as if it were governed by the practices of theatrical performances. • As people interact, they monitor themselves and each other, looking for clues that reveal the impressions they are making on others. "Actors" refit their "roles" using dress, objects, voice, and gestures. • Goffman presented the notion of the front or the front stage which he labeled as the expressive equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unwillingly employed by the individual during his performance. • For example, a professor, a couple on first date, and a job applicant in an interview are governed by social norms, so the professor will not arrive in her nightgown, nor will the prospective employee greet his interviewer with a high-five. • Just as actors in a play must stick to their scripts, so too, do we as social actors risk consequences if we diverge from the normative script. • The front is contrasted with the backstage, the region of the performance normally unobserved by, and restricted from, members of the audience. • In the backstage, actors let their masks down and relax or even practice their front stage. • Take for instance a family dinner. Before guests arrive the parents are fighting, one sibling refuses to speak to the other, and another is perusing Instagram wishing she was at the latest concert instead of with her party. The door bell rings and guests arrive, like magic, the home becomes the front stage with parents smiling and children engaged in setting the table. When the party ends, the home reverts back to the back stage.

Habitual inaction and institutionalization

• Habitualization is the process by which the flexibility of human actions is limited. All activity as repeated inevitably become routinized. • Habitualization carries with it the psychological advantage that choices are narrowed. • In other words, we can direct our minds and bodies to constructive action only because we take most actions for granted. • Habitualization sets the stage for institutionalization. • When habitualized actions are shared and/or available to all members of the particular social group that institutions are born. • Institutions control human conduct by setting up predefined patterns of conduct. This becomes also taken for granted or deemed as natural and therefore limiting for the individuals who are subject to them. • For example: driving on the right side of the road, reading from left to right, even gender roles.

Harold Garfinkel

• Harold Garfinkel was born in 1917 in Newark, New Jersey. • Garfinkel began taking business courses from the University of Newark in an effort to properly inherit his father's small furniture business. • After her graduated in 1939, Garfinkel decided not to join the family's business. Instead, he continued to graduate school to study intraracial and interracial homicide • He continued on to Harvard to study Talcott Parsons which resulted in an extended debate with Parsons about the relative importance of empirical detail versus conceptual categories and generalizations.

Herbert Blumer

• Herbert Blumer was born in St. Louis, Missouri. After graduating from the nearby University of Missouri, Blumer played professional football, playing for the Chicago Cardinals (now the Arizona Cardinals). • While in Chicago, Blumer received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. • There he contributed to what famously became called the "Chicago School" of sociology that explored how individuals understand their everyday life.

Herbert Marcuse

• Herbert Marcuse was born in Berlin to a well-to-do German family. • His mother was the daughter of a factory owner, while his father had worked his way up to become part owner of a textile factory and a real estate entrepreneur. • As he witnessed the outbreak of strikes, riots, and general social unrest in Berlin during the war years, his views became increasingly politicalized and joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD), a socialist political party that represented working-class interests. • Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse met through their association with the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany earning the nickname of The Frankfurt School. • Due to Nazi occupation, all three members moved to Pacific Palisades in 1941.

Robert E. Park

• In 1916 he created a research program for the social investigation of the city of Chicago. • He urged researchers to leave the libraries and "get their hands dirty" by making direct observations and listening to conversations on street corners, in barrooms, and in luxury hotel lobbies.

Hochschild emotional management model

• In her theory of emotions, Hochschild draws from two distinct approaches: 1. The organismic model: an individual's biological or psychological makeup. 2. The interaction model: the role of social processes in shaping self-consciousness. • Eventually, Hochschild will develop her own approach referred to as the "emotion management perspective" or the "emotion management model • Hochschild defines emotions as a biologically given sense, much like hearing, sight, and smell, that communicates information about the social world around us. • Unlike our other senses, however, emotions are directly tied to behavior; they are experienced as the body physiologically readies itself to engage in action • Yet, Hochschild argues that emotions are not immune to social and cultural factors. • Emotions are managed, produced, and created in the context of interactions • This can be seen in her concept emotion work. Emotion work refers to efforts to alter or manage the intensity or types of feelings one is experiencing. • Emotion work can involve conscious attempts to either evoke or shape particular feelings as well as attempts to suppress them. This may manifest in two ways: 1. Surface acting • The outward verbal and nonverbal cues people communicate to one another. 2. Deep acting • Producing within themselves emotional displays that were sincere and genuine. In other words, our inner efforts to produce not the appearance of feeling but, rather, a real feeling that has been self- induced. • Since the increase in service labor in the United States, so has the increase of utilizing emotions as a commodity, or something that can be bought and sold. This is referred to as emotional labor. • In other words, inner feelings are managed in order to produce an outward display as part of one's job. • Jobs that require emotional labor have three characteristics: 1. Face-to-face or voice-to-voice interaction with the public. 2. Employees are directed to produce specified emotional states in clients 3. Through training and supervision, employers are able to exercise control over the emotional activities of workers. • Example: • Hochschild studied the emotional labor of female flight attendants on Delta Airlines. She demonstrated that the airline consistently hired people who it perceived could be controlled emotionally. • For example, Delta focused on employing young, attractive, single women that corresponded with their ideal of the perfect service employee. • Flight attendants were trained in deep acting. • Flight attendants had to exert emotional effort into deep acting to counteract discrepancies between their true feelings and those necessary to be successful at work. Thus, even internal emotions are commodified and managed as a source of labor power. - Hochschild argues that deep acting and emotional labor is ultimately damaging to the employees well-being. • She identified two negative consequences from long-term emotional labor: 1. The fusing together of the employees' private sense of selfhood with their public self was liable to lead to emotional and psychological burnout. 2. A sense of self-estrangement often occurred: trying to manage the very real disparity between their personal feelings and the emotional states they strive to evoke, typically led to them beginning to resent themselves emotionally and/or develop resentment for the job. • In female dominated sectors of the labor market, emotional commodification is prevalent due to the stereotype that women are more emotional than men. • Therefore, female workers are reduced to performative acts of gendered stereotypes where commodification of feelings takes place or the commercial reshaping of emotions. • Thus, women are more emotionally prone to burnout and feelings of alienation. • Feeling rules is another idea first presented by Hochschild. Feeling rules are shared, social conventions that: 1. Determine what we should feel in a given situation. 2. How intensely we should feel. 3. How long we should feel. • For example, during a court trial a defendant may be found guilty of a crime in part because he expressed the "wrong amount' of grief, thus providing a clue to his guilt.

Davis and Moore : poverty

• Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore argued that in all societies, most important positions in society require skill and talent making them difficult to fill. Therefore, social inequality is a device by which societies ensure that the most important positions are filled with the most qualified persons. • Functionalist argue that society is a meritocracy, a society in which personal success is based on talent and ind

Max Horkheimer

• Max Horkheimer was born in Stuttgart, Germany. • His father was a owner of several textile factories which he was set to inherit. However, due to his political ideologies and sympathies for the working class, he was deemed ill-equipped for the role of a capitalist. • Horkheimer married Rose Rieker, the personal secretary of his father. His father disapproved of the relationship due to Rose's humble family background confirming his compassion for the working class and his distaste for domineering businessmen like his father.

Manifest and latent functions

• Merton proposed the concepts of manifest and latent functions • Manifest functions are intended functions. Latent functions are unintended functions. • Example in education: • The manifest functions include the transmission of general knowledge and specific skills needed in society and the economy, such as literacy and numeracy. • The latent functions include propagation of societal norms and values. For example, in kindergarten, along with learning shapes and colors, students learn how to be a student. In other words, how to sit at a desk, to follow rules, and show respect for authorit

Accounting practices

• One of the central methods that actors use to order and make sense of their everyday world is accounting practices. • Accounting practices allows people to respond to unexpected behavior by constructing and attributing motives that look to past experiences to explain the present. They are trying to make accountable the behavior observed.

Indexicality

• One of the most important features of accounting practices is indexicality. • The term indexical refers to the fact that just as words have different meanings in different contexts, so, too, all expressions and practical actions are interpreted in particular context. • Consider, for instance, the following conversation: A. I spend my weekends playing the piano. B. Well, that's all right. A. I also have three cats. B. Oh, I'm sorry

Parsons : action systems and social systems

• Parsons argued that actions should be viewed less in isolation and more so as a "process in time," or a system. • Actions are composed of four basic elements that impact an individual (what Parsons calls a unit act). 1. It is oriented toward attainment of ends or goals. 2. It takes place in situations, consisting of the physical and social objects to which the actor relates. 3. It is normatively regulated (i.e. regulated by social norms). 4. It involves expenditure of effort or energy. • Parsons argued that actions take place in three modes or realms. 1. Social Systems 2. Personality Systems 3. Cultural Systems • Social systems refers to the level of integrated interaction between two or more actors. In other words, it is the complex arrangement of interconnected social roles. • For example: in an everyday situation such as buying groceries, you enter the store, you walk around, and pick out what you want. You then go to the cashier and pay for it. Order and balance ensues because you, as well as the other "actors" (other shoppers and store employees) know how to play your respective roles. • Personality systems refers to a system of action organized by need-dispositions both organic and emotional. • For example: at the grocery store, though there is order and predictability, not everyone shops for food in the exact same way. Some people follow an exact list, others shop more spontaneously, buying more on impulse. Either way, the way you shop reflects to some extent your emotional as well as organic need- dispositions at the level of personality. • Cultural systems is made up of the values, norms, and symbols which guide the choices made by "actors" and which limit the type of interaction that may occur among "actors." • For example: whether you help yourself to fruit or ask a clerk for assistance is not solely a choice at the level of personality, nor of mere availability at the social system level. Rater, it is set by custom—as anyone who has helped themselves at a store they are not supposed to will learn. Even what you purchase disguised as personal likes and dislikes are also a function of one's cultural environment

Parsons : sex roles

• Parsons argued that traditional family roles and gender socialization were functional to contribute to the stability of the family. • He argued, women make their contribution in a modern capitalistic society by raising children and maintaining the family unit; men do so by earning the family income through outside labor. • Parsons argued that this was not due to biological factors, but socialization factors. • Women are socialized to acquire traits needed in the home (i.e. sympathy and emotionality). • Men are socialized to acquire instrumental qualities (i.e. rationality and competitiveness) that is needed for a capitalist workplace.

Parsons : AGIL

• Parsons maintains that there are four basic problems that a society, group, or individual must confront in order to survive. 1. Adaptation 2. Goal attainment 3. Integration 4. Latent pattern maintenance • Adaptation refers to responses to the physical environment. This is often seen in the economic system (i.e. resources, supply and demand). • Goal attainment refers to collective goal attainment. This is often seen in the political system and maintaining political power. • Integration refers to the coordination of a system's parts. Integration involves solidarity, norms, and interaction that develops in a social group. • Latent pattern maintenance refers to the maintenance of institutionalized culture (i.e. shared meanings and values). This is sometimes seen in the realm of religion.

Parsons: The Pattern Variables, (Particularism vs. Universalism)

• Particularism refers to actions that are guided by the uniqueness of that particular relationship. • Universalism means that an action is based on impersonal, universal standards or general rules. • For instance, if you stand by your sister even though she acted badly or illegally, you are prioritizing that particular relationship. If you turn your sister in to the police because what she did was illegal, you would be applying a universal standard.

Peter Berger

• Peter Berger was born in Vienna, Austria in 1929. He studied in London for a short time before emigrating to the United States, receiving his bachelors degree at Wagner College on Staten Island, New York. • He received his Masters and doctorate degrees from The New School for Social Research studying under Alfred Schutz

What is phenomenology and Ethnomethodology ?

• Phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists study phenomena of everyday life. • In other words, they analyze the taken-for-granted everyday world that is the basis for human conduct. • For example: • Speaking to an acquaintance on the phone, attempting to get off the phone but they just continue to speak. Why is this irritating? • Or saying goodbye to a friend and you both end up walking in the same direction. Why is this awkward?

Phenomenology

• Phenomenology is a philosophy, method, and approach that has deeply psychology and psychiatry as well as sociology. • Phenomenologists seek to explain how people actively produce and sustain meaning.

Robert k. Merton

• Robert K. Merton was born Meyer R. Schkolnick in South Philadelphia to working class Jewism Immigrants. • Merton was one of the most important students of Talcott Parsons and by the time he was forty was one of the most influential social scientists in the United States. • Merton became the first sociologist to be awarded a National Medal of Science in 1994.

Intersubjectivity

• Schutz was inspired by Husserl in his conceptualization of intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity refers to the idea that we as a society share the same consciousness allowing human beings from diverse backgrounds to function and interact. • The lifeworld is an intersubjective world, known and experienced by others. • In other words, people have shared understandings of their world that allows them to interact with one another. All humans carry in their mind appropriate conduct that allows them to behave in the social world.

The social conflict paradigm

• Social conflict paradigm (also known as conflict theory) seeks to explain social organization and change in terms of the conflict that is built into social relationships. • Conflict theory is rooted in Marxist questions about the roots of conflict. • As the functionalist did not account for who benefits from what, conflict theorists are completely immersed in asking "Who benefits from the way social institutions and relationships are structured and who loses?" • Group interests drive relationships, and various groups in society (social classes, ethnic and racial groups, women and men) will act in their own interests. • Recall Durkheim's view on crime.

social constructionism

• Social constructionism questions what is defined by humans and society to be reality. • Subjective-cultural beliefs influence how we experience reality. • Our personal biography and cultural world view are always organizing our experiences . • Social reality is fluid and fragile, and people construct it as they interact with others in ongoing processes of communication and negotiation.

Sociological Theories

• Sociological theories are logical, rigorous frameworks for the interpretation of social life that make particular assumptions and ask particular questions about the social world. • A way to think of it is like a pair of glasses or lens as to how one views social phenomenon. Each pair of glasses changes the way you see an image. • Three dominant theoretical perspectives in sociology are: 1. Structural functionalism 2. Social conflict theory 3. Symbolic interactionism

The symbolic interactionist perspective : Race

• Sociologist Louis Wirth has noted that minority groups share particular traits: 1. Membership in a minority group is essentially involuntary and is not, in most cases, free to opt out. 2. Minorities are not a question of size but a measured by control of valuable resources. 3. Minorities do not share the full privileges of mobility or opportunity enjoyed by the dominant group. 4. Membership in a minority group conditions the treatment of group members by others in society.

Stocks of knowledge, recipes and typification

• Stocks of knowledge provide actors with rules for interpreting interactions, social relationships, organizations, institutions, and the physical world. • It consists of what has already been experienced and is thus taken for granted. • Think of it like files on your computer. Lets say you have a zip file called "stocks of knowledge." As you experience a new item consciously, it is filed away in your stocks of knowledge zip file. • For instance, when you enter kindergarten, you learn and experience proper behavior and symbols of a student. Every time you see a backpack, you are not shocked because it has already been stored away in your stock of knowledge. However, if you have never experienced a backpack (by watching others or wearing one yourself) Schutz argues that it is not possible for it to be in your stock of knowledge. • Schutz uses the analogy of a cookbook. • Just as a cookbook has recipes and lists of ingredients for making something to eat, so, too, we all have a "cookbook" of recipes, or implicit instruction, for accomplishing everyday life. • Schutz sometimes refers to a recipe as a typification and vice versa. • Typification is the process of constructing personal "ideal-types" based on the typical function of people or things rather than their unique features. They are very similar to stereotypes. However, while stereotypes tend to be fixed, typifications are isolated for the particular context of an action.

Symbolic Interactionism

• Symbolic interactionism argues that both the individual self and society as a whole are the products of social interactions based on language and other symbols. In other words, people acquire their sense of who they are only through interaction with others. • Symbols are representations of things that are not immediately present to our senses. For example: words, gestures, emoticons, tattoos, etc. • Now lets use our new glasses to interpret crime. Symbolic interactionist may be interested in studying the ways in which people label others as deviant and how that label may affect the way you see yourself and the way others see you. Symbolic Interactionism roots itself in interpretive social science • The goal of social research is to develop an understanding of social life and discover how people construct meaning in natural settings. • The researcher wants to learn what is meaningful or relevant to the people he/she is studying and how they experience everyday life. • To do this the researcher gets to know people in a particular social setting in great depth and works to see the setting from the viewpoint of the people in it. Meaning Social Action: Social action in social settings to which people subjectively attach significance. Interpretative social science treats it as being the most important aspect of social reality (meaning making). 2. What is the fundamental nature of social reality? • Interpretive social scientists adopt a more nominalist ontology. Social reality is largely what people perceive it to be. • Social reality is fluid and fragile, and people construct it as they interact with others in ongoing processes of communication and negotiation. Constructionist Orientation: An orientation toward social reality that assumes the beliefs and meaning that people create and use fundamentally shape what reality is for them. Example: If socially constructed reality tells me that the person moving into the apartment next to mine has committed violent crimes and carries a gun, I will behave accordingly whether or not my constructed belief fits actual physical reality. Example: People take the social world around them for granted and behave as if it is "natural," objective, and a fixed reality. People accept that a week has 7 days. Few people realize that some cultures have 3, 5, and 10 day weeks. - Interpretive social scientists would say that if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, it does not make a sound

The symbolic interactionist perspective : education

• Symbolic interactionists study what occurs in the classroom, in which schools affect students' interactions and self-images. • In a study by Rosenthal and Jacobson, elementary school teachers were told that certain students had scored unusually high. However, it was a lie. The students were chosen at random by the researchers and there was no difference in their level of intelligence and their peers. Teachers favored the students labeled exceptional and behaved differently towards those students. • How could this labeling be negative? • A study found that both Black and nonblack teachers had lower expectations for Black students when it came to college, especially Black male students. Teachers' expectations and students' college-going outcomes had a strong relationship. Teachers' expectations were more predictive of college success than many other factors. • Black students are four times more likely to be suspended than White students and two times more likely to be expelled

The revolution that wasn't : the Frankfurt school

• The critical theorists developed a framework that both extends and departs from central Marxist ideas. • They agreed with Marx that modern societies were oppressive and dehumanizing. They also agreed that theory should not just explain things (as we see in the positivist domain) but enlighten and empower the oppressed. • However, the critical theorists offered a picture of the sources of domination and struggle To overcome them that was very different from that posited by Marx. - Critical theorists ask if this design is true by Marx, how can the working class develop a revolutionary consciousness when a society's prevailing or dominant ideas serve to legitimate the very system that they are allegedly destined to overthrow? • Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse began to look elsewhere for the sources of emancipation and no longer cast the working class in the role of the savior of humanity. • The answer, according to The Frankfurt School was in Hegelian Idealism. Hegelian Idealism (first proposed by Georg Hegel) argues that economic arrangements are not primarily responsible for the barbarism of humanity, but ideas and irrationality of reason.. - "Who" or "what" will lead to emancipation was left unanswered by The Frankfurt School and has been characterized as a more pessimistic (if not realistic) picture of society's future.

The functional perspective : race

• The fundamentals of functionalism argues that things exist in society because it serves a function to a community and society, contributing to order and harmony. • Durkheim argued that social groups held together by mechanical solidarity based on homogeneity (sameness) in language and culture are more culturally durable than those held together by organic solidarity, or interdependence. • This may explain why people gravitate towards those that are similar to them.

Parsons : the pattern variables (Chart)

• The pattern variables are a set of "choices" that apply not only to the individual level but to the collective level as well. • Pattern variables are an extension of a dichotomy first formulated by Ferdinand Tonnies between Gemeinschaft (community/traditional) and Gesellschaft (purposive association/modern). -Traditional (gemeinschaft) Affectivity Collectivity- orientation Particularism Ascription Diffuseness -Modern (gesellschaft) Affective-neutrality Self-orientation Universalism Achievement Specificity

Conflict Theory

• The primary purpose of research is not simply to study the social world, but to change it. • Critical social science researchers conduct research to critique and transform social relations (particularly for less powerful people). • To expose hypocrisy and stimulate grassroots action that empowers people. • They argue that learning gives us the ability to reduce our illusions and ignorance and can help free us from domination by dogma, undisputed authority, and falsehoods. Conflict theorists do not deny the existence of social facts, however, they argue that agency and free will also exists. Bounded Autonomy: An approach to human agency used in critical social science that assumes human actions are based on subjective choices and reasons but limited by larger structures. • Social research is a moral-political activity that requires the researcher to commit to a value position. • All social research begins with a point of view. Therefore being "objective" is not being value free. To deny that a researcher has a point of view is itself a point of view. • Knowledge is power, it can be used to control people, it can be hidden in ivory towers for intellectuals to play games with, or it can be given to people to help them change and improve their lives.

The self

• The self in reality is an image, a managed impression, that is fabricated in concert with others during an encounter. • The self is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it. In other words, the scene produces your behavior, your behavior does not produce the scene. • Therefore, individuals do not have an underlying personality or identity that is carried from situation to situation as most symbolic interactionists believe. • Truth, in reality, is fiction.

Theodor Adorno

• Theodor Adorno was born in Frankfurt, Germany. • Adorno also came from a wealthy household. His mother was a successful singer and descendent of nobility. His father was the owner of a wholesale wine business. • Between 1921 and 1932 Adorno published nearly a hundred articles.

Thomas luckmann

• Thomas Luckmann was born in 1927 in Slovenia. • He was educated both in Europe and in the United States, studying in Vienna and the New School for Social Research. • Together with Berger, he published his groundbreaking work The Social Construction of Reality in 1966.

The conflict perspective : race

• Though asking "How is this functional for some groups?" seems to be rooted in the functionalist perspective, it ultimately leads us to asking "Who benefits from the phenomenon or institution—and who loses?" • Consider that racism or the idea that one racial or ethnic group is inherently superior to another, offers a justification for racial inequality and associated forms of stratification such as socioeconomic inequality

Max Weber

• Weber envisioned sociology as the science of human behavior and its consequences, and he sought a method that would prevent the intrusion of political and moral ideologies. • However, this does not mean he was a positivist but instead believe in verstehen or interpretive understating. • Thus, social action is behavior to which a subjective meaning is attached.

The Revolution That Wasn't: The Irrationality of Rationality

• What does it mean to be rational? • Critical theory must describe historical forces that dominate human freedom and expose ideological justifications of these forces. Humans subjective side is restricted by the spread of rationalization. • Reason is not accessible to everyone; rather, it is manipulated, controlled, and bounded by the upper class in their class interest. • Reason itself has been corrupted, leaving individuals unable to develop a critique. In other words, if you do not know you are being dominated how do you fight against it? • Max Weber was a classical German sociologist that argued that the development of Capitalism was predicated on an increasingly impersonal and bureaucratic society. • This has transformed into the disenchanted "iron cage" from which the modern individual is left to live. • Capitalism calls for purely rational decisions based off of efficiency and a cost-benefit analysis. • As societies become hyper-capitalistic, they also become hyper-bureaucratic. This bureaucracy is seen in every sector of life making its growth and power unstoppable. • Members of modern society become trapped in the "iron cage" of rationalization and rigid rules, not allowing for freedom to question, oppose, or think of society in any other way. • The Frankfurt school thus expands Marxist thoughts with Weberian influence and inspiration. • For instance, Horkheimer proposed that there were two types of reason: 1. Subjective reason • Subjective reason is concerned with means and ends and attaches little importance to the question whether the purposes as such are reasonable. In other words, the priority lies in functional procedural rules and is blind to the ethical basis of them. 2. Objective reason • Objective reason speaks to the relative value of the ends of action and provides a basis for determining what is ethical, right, and just. Horkheimer argues that this should be the measuring rod for individual thoughts and actions. - Marcuse also added that there are two types of rationality: 1. Individualistic rationality allows for negating (critiquing) all that is established in order to critically understand one's world, develop personal objectives, and achieve them through rational means. However, the individual's ability to question the status-quo has been diminished by corporate capitalism which leads to the second type of rationality. 2. Technological rationality is marked by the scientific approach to all human affairs. Social relations are now understood as "problems" to be efficiently solved. And with solutions come control, production, and consumption. The status-quo becomes so rationalized that individual protest and liberation appear not only as hopeless but as utterly irrational leading to unquestioned conformity. Thus becoming the dominant ideology. Conforming to ideas sold by the elite not only shapes social life but also taken-for-granted knowledge that views systems as less oppressive and rather, natural. - illustrate this, Marcuse points to two types of needs 1. True needs 2. False needs - Marcuse describes the government as a apparatus that imposes its economic and political requirements on its people by influencing their working and leisure time. It does so by creating in people a set of "false needs." Essentially, they convince people that they have certain needs, and then making it look as though there is a route to satisfying these needs (even if there isn't). However, these needs are artificially created, yet these needs feel internally driven because we are bombarded by media messages that promise happiness. We begin to believe that false needs are real ones. - The primary way false needs are disseminated is through the culture industry as described by Adorno. - The culture industry encompasses all those sectors involved in the creation and distribution of mass-culture products (i.e. tv, radio, film, music, magazines, and advertisements) geared towards entertaining and pacifying the masses. - Manufactured movie and television stars act as its leading spokespersons, promoting a conformist version of happiness. - Advertisements offer the illusion of choice. Deodorants, hit songs, movie plots, cars, and soft drinks are made to closely resemble their competitors in order to conform to the consumer's pregiven expectations, but offers just the slightest difference in order to capture their attention. - The media disguises itself as an escape from reality but it really offers an escape from the last thought of resisting that reality. - Nothing I have told you is probably a shock to you, however the true power of the culture industry is that we are unable to envision an alternative.