Sociology Introduction (CH. 1-2)

Emergence of American Sociology

characterized by the latter, applied perspective, and was embodied by what came to be referred to as the Chicago School

Verstehen

-"understanding" in German -Weber is suggesting that sociologists approach social behavior from the perspective of those engaging in it -to truly understand why people act the way that they do, a sociologist must understand the meanings of people attach to their actions -Weber's emphasis on subjectivity is the foundation of interpretive socially, the study of social meaning

Sociological Imagination

-C. Wright Mills -the ability to see the connections between our personal experience and the larger forces of history -Mills says, "the first fruit of this imagination, and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it, is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways it is a magnificent one." -Mills also says, "it enables us to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions." -it allows us to see veneer of social life for what it is -Mills says, " the sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst."

Social Self

-Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929) -George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) -how the social environment shapes the individual -Cooley's "looking self-glass": the self emerges from an interactive social process; we envision how others perceive us, then we gauge the response of other individuals to our presentation of self -by refining our vision of how others perceive us, we develop a self-concept that is in constant interaction with the surrounding social world (group dynamics play an important role)

Three Theoretical Paradigms

-Functionalism -Conflict -Symbolic Interaction

Founding Fathers of Sociological Discipline

-Karl Marx -Max Weber -Emile Durkheim -Georg Simmel (maybe)

Midrange Theory

-Robert Merton -a theory that attempts to predict how certain social institutions tend to function -it generates falsifiable hypotheses, predictions that can be tested by analyzing the real world

A Sociological Analysis of Sports

-What is its function? -create cohesion among groups, uniting people in common support of a team -builds community on game day (people's homes, bars, restaurants, tailgating) -Fans: they come from everywhere and all support one thing together -Globally: Olympics -Players: paid for their talent and skill -Economy: stimulates consumption of sports memorabilia and fuels advertising revenue

A Conflict Theorist Analysis of Sports

-Who benefits from this phenomenon? -how inequality is created and perpetuated in society -very few players achieve celebrity status and multi-millions dollar deals -players who are not in the light are paid modestly for their work -team owners receive great benefits for the work of the players (does not have to risk physical health or well-being to reap grand benefits) -race and social class -team owners: generally white and upper class -players: generally from a middle working class and from some ethnic background (depends on sports as a route for upward mobility) -demographics: if you live in a low income inner city area, you have basketball and football; if you live in a well-funded area in the suburban area, you have golf, track, cross country, lacrosse, as well as football and basketball gender: women sports are limited to their support and investments

Research Methods

-approaches that social scientists use for investigating the answers to questions -tools we use to describe, explore and explain various social phenomena in an ethical fashion

Positivism

-arose out of a need to make moral sense of the social order in a time of declining religious authority -a secular mortality did exist: we could determine right and wrong without reference to higher powers or other religious concepts

Macrosociology

-big theories of society -generally concerned with social dynamics at a higher level of analysis; that is, across the breadth of society -statistical analysis -use qualitative methods such as historical comparison and in-depth interviews -may result to large scale experimentation

History

-concerned with the idiographic, meaning that historians, at least traditionally, have been concerned with explaining unique cases (Adolf Hitler, Haitian slave revolt, railroads) -historians use the notion of the counterfactual (would this have happened if this didn't happen?) -history runes the gamut from "great man" theories, to people's histories, to historiography -sociology is more concerned with the commonalities that can be abstracted across cases (nomothetic approach) -pg. 34

Functionalism

-drew on the ideas of Durkheim and best embodied the work of Talcott Parsons -derived its name from the notion that the best way to analyze society was to identify the roles that different aspects or phenomena play -functions may be manifest (explicit) or latent (hidden) -an extension of organicism -pg. 29

Economics and Political Science

-economics traditionally has focused on market exchange relations -more recently though economics has expanded to include social realm such as culture, religion, and the family; the traditional stomping ground of sociologists -what distinguishes economics from sociology in these contexts is the underlying view of human behavior -economics assumes that people are rational utility maximizers: they are out to get the best deal for themselves -sociology on the other hand has a more open view of human motivation that include selfishness, altruism, and simple irrationality -economics is a fundamentally quantitative discipline, meaning it is mainly based on numerical data -political science mainly focuses on power (state relations, legal structure, and the nature of civic life) -political science has adopted the rational actor model implicit in economics in an attempt to explain everything from how lobbyists influence legislators to the recruitment of suicide bombers by terrorist groups -disciplinary boundaries are in a constant state of flux -Franco Moretti -Steven Levitt -Zvi Ben-Dor Benite

Psychology

-focus on the individual while sociologists focus on the ultra-individual (above the individual) -try to explain the phenomenon under consideration, examining how urges, drives, instincts, and the mind can account for human behavior -sociologists examine group-level dynamics and social structures

Microsociology

-how face-to-face interactions create the social world -seeks to understand local interactional contexts; its methods of choice are ethnographic, generally including participant observation and in-depth interviews

Biology

-increasingly attempts to explain phenomena that once would have seemed the exclusive dominion of social scientists -medical science has claimed to identify genes that explain some aspects of social behavior, such as aggressiveness, shyness, and even thrill seeking -social differences have been diagnosed, such as ADHD and autism -the distinction between these areas of biology and the social sciences lies not so much in the topic of study but rather in the underlying variation or casual mechanisms with which the disciplines are concerned -deals with the intra-individual-level factors (those within the individual), such as biochemistry, genetic makeup, and cellular activity

Qualitative Methods

-methods that attempt to collect info about the social world that cannot be readily converted to numeric form -the info gathered with this approach is often used to document the meanings that actions engender in social participants or to describe the mechanisms by which social processes occur -data collected in a host of ways, from spending time with people and recording what they say and do (participant observation) to interviewing them in an open-ended manner to reviewing archives

Symbolic Interaction

-micro level paradigm -the focus is at the level of interaction between individuals and groups, rather than broad patterns and institutions -interested in the symbols of social life and meanings behind peoples' actions -George H. Mead -Erving Goffman

A Symbolic Interactionist Analysis of Sports

-people attach to sports -What does sport symbolize to individuals and to the culture? -simplistic way to view sports: sports only provide entertainment -can represent leisure and relaxation -can represent competition -can represent an act of patriotism (pre-game rituals such as the star spangled banner) -this paradigm argues that people from different social groups view the same experience differently -ex: soccer is much more important to other nations than ours (Brazil)

Quantitative Methods

-seek to obtain information about the social world that is already in or can be converted to numeric form -uses statistical analysis to describe the social world that those data represent -some of this analysis uses the placebo affect to determine how changes in one factor affect another social outcome, while factoring out every other simultaneous event -surveys (Venkatesh)

Cultural Anthropology vs Sociology

-sociology as a whole has a wider array of methods to answer questions, such as experimentation and stat data analysis -sociology tends to be more toward comparative case study -anthropology is more like history in its focus on particular circumstances -sociology can lead to irreconcilable differences within the field

Anthropology

-split between physical anthropologists (who resemble biologists more than sociologists) and cultural anthropologists (study human relations similarly to the way sociologists do) -sociologists studied "us" (western society and culture) while anthropologists studied "them" (other societies and cultures) -pg. 36 -Caitlin Zaloom, Natascha Schull, Stephen Morgan, Doug Guthrie

Normal Science

-stands in contrast to interpretive sociology, which is much more concerned with the meaning of social phenomena to individuals -the interpretive sociologist will seek to understand the experience of solidarity among minority groups in various contexts -an interpretive sociologist might object to the notion that we can make worthwhile predictions about human behavior; or more precisely, might just questions whether it is worth the time and effort

Terrible Part of the Sociological Imagination

-to make our own lives ordinary -to see our intensely personal, private experience of life as typical of the period and place in which we live

2 General Categories of Methods for Gathering Sociological Data

1. Quantitative methods 2. Qualitative methods

3 Historical/Epistemological Stages Human Society has been through

1. Theological Stage 2. Metaphysical Stage 3. Scientific Stage

3 Factors to establish Causality

1. correlation 2. time order 3. ruling out alternative explanations

Standard Practice of Sociology

1. form a theory about how the social world works (that members of minorities have a high degree of social solidarity) 2. generate a hypothesis that derives from this theory, perhaps that minority groups should demonstrate a lower level of intragroup violence than majority groups 3. make predictions based on our hypothesis (both the hypothesis and the predictions have to be falsifiable by an empirical or experimental test); in this case, it might involve examining homicide rates among different groups in a given society or multiple societies 4. the acceptance or rejection of the hypothesis and the revision (or extension) of the theory (in the face of contradictory or confirming evidence)

Major Divisions in Sociology

1. those who deal in numbers (statistical or quantitative researchers) 2. those who deal in words (qualitative sociologists)

Auguste Comte

1798-1857 -social physics -positivism

Harriet Martineau

1802-1876 -english social theorist -first to translate Comte into English -wrote "Theory of Practice in Society in America" (1837): describes our nation's physical and social aspects; education, government -wrote "How to Observe Morals and Manners" (1838): institution of marriage~ claiming that it was based on an assumption of the inferiority of women

Karl Marx

1818-1883 -Marxism: an idealogical alternative to capitalism -his writing provided at the theoretical basis for Communism -historical materialism -believed that it was primarily the conflict between classes that drove social change throughout history -saw history as an account of man's struggle to gain control and later dominate his natural environment -in his version of history, each economic system, whether small scale farming or factory capitalism, had its own fault lines of conflict -the fault line divided society into a small number of capitalists and a large number of workers (the proletariat) whose interests were opposed -pg. 24

Emile Durkheim

1858-1917 -he wished to understand how society holds together and the ways that modern capitalism and industrialization have transformed how people relate to one another -wrote "The Division of Labor in Society" (1893/1997) -the division of labor refers to the degree to which jobs are specialized (hunter-gatherers or small-scale farmers is low division of labor) -today the USA has a high DOL with mainly highly specialized occupations -he argued, and substantiated through legal evidence, that the DOL didn't just affect work and productivity but had social and moral consequences as well -the DOL of a given society helps determine its form of social solidarity (the way social cohesion among individuals is maintained -wrote "Suicide" (1897/1951): shows how this individual act is conditioned by social forces (the degree by which we are integrated into group life, or not, and the degree to which our lives follow routines -one of the main social forces leading to suicide is the sense of normlessness resulting from drastic changes in living conditions or arrangements (anomie) -wrote "The Elementary Forms of Religious Life" (1917/1995) -considered the founder of positivist sociology

Georg Simmel

1858-1918 -established formal sociology -his work was influential in the development of urban and cultural sociology -his work with small-group interactions served as an intellectual precedent for later sociologists who came to study microinterations -provided formal definitions for small and large groups, a party, a stranger, and the poor

Jane Addams

1860-1935 -considered a marginal member of the Chicago School -founded the first american settlement house (Hull House) -prolific author on both the substance and the methodology of community studies -regarded as a social worker

George Herbert Mead

1863-1931 -wrote "Mind, Self, and Society" (1934): described how the "self" itself develops over the course of childhood as the individual learns to take the point of view of specific others in specific contexts (such as games) and eventually internalizes the "generalized other"

Max Weber

1864-1920 -said to have brought ideas back into history -Weber criticized Marx for his exclusive focus on the economy and social class -wrote "Economy and Society" (1920): provided the theories of authority, rationality, the state (government), and status and a host of other concepts that sociologists still use today -wrote "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" (1904/2003) -argued that the religious transformation that occurred during the Protestant reformation in the 16th and 17th centuries laid the groundwork for modern capitalism by upending the medieval ethic of virtuous poverty and replacing it with an ideology that saw riches as a sign of divine providence -Verstehen

W.E.B. Dubois

1868-1963 -the most important black sociologist -the first african american to receive a PhD from Harvard -the first sociologist to undertake ethnography in the african american community -double consciousness -interested in criminology (used anomie) -theorized that the breakdown of norms resulting from the sudden and newfound freedom of former slaves caused high crime rates among blacks (at least in the south) -AA would be led by "the talented tenth" -worked to advance a civil rights agenda in the USA -co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909

Philosophers Credited with Founding Sociological Thought

Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber

Metaphysical Stage

Enlightenment thinkers (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hobbs) saw humankind's behavior as governed by natural, biological instincts -to understand the nature of society (why things were the way they were), we needed to strip away the layers of society to better comprehend how our basic drives and natural instincts governed and established the foundation for the surrounding world

Social Institution

a complex group of interdependent positions that, together, perform a social role and reproduce themselves over time -social relations are a network of ties -the social role is a grand narrative that unifies these stories within the network -social institutions may be just a name; it is not a collection of buildings or people (the name may change as well)

Changing a Social Identity (people and college)

pg. 14-15

Chicago School

pg. 26

Feminist Theory

pg. 30

Generalized Other

our view of the views of society as a whole that transcends individuals or particular situations

What is Needed to Study Society

a curious mind and a certain willingness, but also the specific frame of reference (the lens) of the sociological imagination

Double Consciousness

a mechanism by which african americans constantly maintain two behavioral scripts 1. the script that any american would have for moving through the world 2. the script that takes the external opinions of an often racially prejudiced onlooker into consideration -a "sense of always looking at one self through the eyes of others, and measuring one's soul by the tape of the world that looks on in amused contempt and pity" -with a double consciousness, an AA may be aware that when they are moving through a grocery store, they are being watched closely by store security and makes an effort to get in and out quickly -those operating with a double consciousness risk conforming so closely to others' perceptions that they are fully constrained to the behaviors predicted of them

Deductive Approach

a research approach that starts with a theory, forms a hypothesis, makes empirical observations, and then analyzes the data to confirm, reject, or modify the original theory

Inductive Approach

a research approach that starts with empirical observation then works to form a theory

The Research Cycle

pg. 46, image 2.1

Reverse Causality

a situation in which the researcher believes that A results in a change in B, but B, in fact, is causing A -the problem of reverse causality is why its so important to establish time order -people may alter their current behavior based on future expectations

Formal Sociology

a sociology of pure numbers -the fundamental differences between a group of 2 and a group of 3+ (independent of the reasons for the group and who belongs to it)

Positivist Sociology

a strain within sociology that believes the social world can be described and predicted by certain describable relationships -born from the mission of Comte -mission was to reveal the "social facts" that affect, if not govern, social life

The Talented Tenth

an elite group of highly educated professionals

Social Construction

an entity that exists because people behave as if it exists and whose existence is perpetuated as people and social institutions act in accordance with the widely agreed-upon formal rule or informal norms of behavior associated with that entity

Hull House

an institution that attempted to link the ideas of the university to the poor through a full-service community center, staffed by students and professionals, which offered educational services and aid and promoted spots and the arts

Functionalism (as a framework)

analyzes social life as a system of interrelated parts all working together harmoniously -general trend is to see society as a smoothly running system where difference actually contributes to cohesion -Emile Durkheim -Talcott Parsons

Sui Generis

appearing to be self-constituting rather than flimsy constructed by ourselves or others

Chicago School's Basic Premise

humans' behaviors and personalities are shaped by their social and physical environments (social ecology)

Why go to College?

pg. 8

What does it mean to think like a sociologist?

making the familiar strange

Symbolic Interactionism

micro-level throes in which shared meanings, orientations, and assumptions form the basic motivations behind people's actions -macrosociology -microsociology -Herbert Blumer (student of Mead): this paradigm operates on the basic premise of a cycle of meaning, namely, the idea that people act in response to the meaning that signs and social signs hold for them -sui generis -pg. 32

Social Identity

nothing more than a sum of individual stories told between pairs of individuals -relationships: always two different sides to the story about your relationship with someone (mom, dad, aunt, etc.)

Anomie

one of the main social forces leading to suicide is the sense of normlessness resulting from drastic changes in living conditions or arrangements

Conflict

sees conflict and competition as characterizing most of social life -Karl Marx -Wright Mills -there is a conflict between key groups (not individuals) for the scarce resources in society -inequality and power differentials are the driving force in social relations

Correlation (Association)

simultaneous variation in two variables -to say the 2 things are correlated is different from saying that one causes the other -health example pg. 46

Theological Stage

society seemed to be the result of divine will -if you wanted to know why something happened, the answer was that it was God's plan -to better understand this, scholars in the theological period would reference the Bible or ecclesiastical texts

Different Types of Sociology

sports, religion, music, medicine, sociologists

Conflict Theory (Marxist Theory)

the idea that the conflict between competing interests is the basic, animating force of social change and society in general -competition drives social change ; and such social change only occurs through revolution and war, not evolution or baby steps -inequality exists as a result of political struggles among different groups in a particular society

Causality

the notion that a change in one factor results in a corresponding change in another

Key to both Cooley's and Mead's Work

the notion that it is through social interaction that meaning emerges

Organicism

the notion that society is like a living organism, each part of which serves an important role in keeping society together -state/government was the brain -industry was the muscular systems -media/mass communications were the nervous system

Post Modernism

the notion that these shared meanings have eroded -there is no longer one version of history that is correct -everything is interpretable within this framework; even "facts" are up for debate -postmodernists may choose not to act on these shared meanings as seemingly objective, because they are in fact, objective -the term itself derives from the idea that the grand narratives of history are over

Sociology

the study of human society

Grand Narrative

the sum total of the individual stories about someone makes them who they are

Thinking Sociologically about Social Institutions

think of them not as monolithic, uniform, stable entities, things that just "are", but as institutions constructed within a dense network of other social institutions and meanings

Job of a Sociologist (Comte's time)

to develop a secular mortality

Scientific Stage

we would develop a social physics of sorts in order to identify the scientific laws that govern human behavior -not theology/biology, but physics -Comte was convinced that we could understand how social institutions worked, how we relate to one another (individual or group), and the overall structure of societies if we merely ascertained their "equations" or underlying logic