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Macionis & Plummer - Sociology, 4th editionLecture 1- in the ch below
Part 1: Introducing Sociology - Chapter 1: The
Sociological Imagination
Sociology = systematic study of human society, a way of thinking and seeing the social = science of society
- Psychology looks at individual level of problems, soc at societal level (also for explanations - psyche vs social explanation)
- Sociology can give an alternative and complementary perspective - socially embedded
- Human patterns of thinking, feeling and social action - anything that happens in society can raise questions for sociologists
- Interaction between people - looking for general elements in social behaviour
- Categories of people - similarities and differences
- Open door? Trivial knowledge?
- Improve society and social interaction - belief in malleable society
Sociological perspective = seeing the general in the particular; how general categories in which people fit shape their behaviour;
how society impacts the actions, thoughts and feelings of people
Durkheim: analysis of suicide records (suicide = most individual act imaginable)
- Some categories of people are more likely than others to commit suicide - corresponding to degree of social integration
(low strength of social ties is bad)
- Shows that even a particularly individualistic decision like suicide can be influenced by society → sociology has a point (of
fucking course it does)
- People are often under the illusion of individualism and authenticity
- Man is both an individual and a social being; man transcends himself to be part of society
Suicide in China: lots of suicides per capita, and more often women in rural areas (as opposed to west) - why?
Sociology and Social Marginality
- More marginalised - more likely to embrace sociological perspective
Sociology and Social Crisis
- C. Mills: people facing adversity (for ex the great depression) are more likely to take the sociological perspective
- Personal problems are not personal - they are also societal
- ⇒ sociological imagination focused on biography, history and structure
- Sociological thinking → social change
- Social problems solved via sociological imagination
- Sociological problems - logical objective
- Social problems - issues of valuation (it is bad that people do this) or issues of action (something should be done about …)
- Sociology vs common sense
- Responsible speech - rules of responsible arguments
- Size of the field - transcending your own social world
- Making sense - explaining and interpreting human behaviour by looking at different figurations and institutions
which people are embedded in
- Defamiliarize - ability to discuss/question the familiar and the obvious
- Sociology is formulated in human language (not maths like in hard sciences)
- 3 levels + interactions between them
- Micro = family, friends
- Meso = office, university
- Macro = government, country
Benefits of Sociological Perspective
- Can critically assess truth of commonly held assumptions - debunking social myths
- Ca assess opportunities and constraints that characterise our lives - better understand
- Can be active participants in society - not just accept status quo - empowering and recognition of reality
, - Can confront human differences and suffering toward positive change
Problems of the sociological perspective
- Changing world - we are studying a moving object, so statistics often become outdated quickly
- Sociologists are part of what they study → ethnocentrism
- Sociological knowledge becomes part of society - and this knowledge can change society in unprecedented ways, and
sociology becomes part of the public debate
Social change and the origins of sociology = Genesis of Sociology
- Changes in structure of society
- Hunter & collector → nomadic → agrarian → industrial → post industrial societies ⇒ classification based on
technology
- But, technology is neutral - people determine how it is used
- 5 societies, but no successive stages or progress
- Technology is not a solution to everything, produces new problems, and its progress sets limits for
environment
- Sociology = product of enlightenment, coined by Auguste Comte (lived right after French Revolution and during the
Industrial revolution - so he noticed society changing and decided to make a science out of it)
- Reason, empiricism (facts understood through senses), science (experiments!!), universalism (search for laws of nature),
progress (improving the human condition), individualism (where knowledge starts), toleration, freedom, uniformity of
human nature, secularism (suck it church)
Science and Sociology
- Before sociology, thinkers focused on what a perfect society may be like, not on what the society is → Comte: we need a
scientific approach to society; he sorted human understanding of the world in 3 stages:
- Theological - mediaeval thinking centred on God
- Metaphysical - Renaissance - society is a natural phenomenon that you philosophise about from your armchair
- Scientific - Galileo, Copernicus, Newton → use science to study society ⇒ Comte supported Positivism (we
understand the world based on science)
- But human behaviour is hard to scientifically quantify
- Societal changes in the last 2 centuries
- Sociology was born out of the changes of the last 2 centuries : French Revolution + Industrial Revolution were key
- Scientific discoveries → technology (factory based industrial economy) → growth of cities (urbanisation)
→ new ideas about equality and politics → stable communities that existed before dissolved
1. Economic: growth of capitalism and industrial revolution (1750 onward)
a. Manufacturing (middle ages) → large and anonymous industrial workforce → poverty and suffering → weakened
families, degenerated societies, eroded traditions, breakdown of social order
2. Growth of cities
a. Land owners turned farms into large scale pastures for wool (textile industry) → enclosure movement forced
farmers into cities to find work → housing market overwhelmed → poverty, crime, disease, homelessness ( →
sociological perspective
3. Political change: french revolution (1789) - freedom, equality, solidarity
a. From middle ages royalty ruling ‘out of god’s will’ to Hobbes, Locke and Adam Smith → people take control of
their lives with moral obligations → individual liberty and individual rights → American declaration of
Independence
b. Sociology flourished where this change was greatest
4. The eclipse of community
a. Modern world = loss of community → rampant individualism
b. Technological advancements widened the scope of one’s communication and world → people essentially separated
in cities in spite of uniting factors → lack of trust in other people as everyone works toward their own personal
interest
- + Developments in religion
-
- Discovery of society (18th-19th century)
- Start of modern science - empirical observation
, - Discovery of society - nature to culture
- Sociology as study of society = trying to grasp large societal changes of the 18th and 19th centuries
- Herbert Spencer = survival of the fittest → rise of social-darwinist thinking (every change should be for the better of
society - society has to adapt to be fitter for survival, better)
- Civilization labour - middle and higher class raise standard of living for working class
- Discipline - empowering
- Education of the masses
- Trust in science
- The Social Question
- Misery of urbanisation and industrialisation - Marx and Engels
- Rise of labour movement (socialism)
- Reaction liberals (conservatives) confessionals → well understood self interest (de Swaan) → sanitisation
of neighbourhoods for the good of everyone
Key questions of sociology
1. Social inequality
2. Social cohesion
3. Rationalisation (or culture) - to what extent is a society rationalised?
Academics and do-gooders
- Rise of the people
- Social workers
- Anti-alcohol movement
-
Paradigmata - sociology presents different views on reality
- Kuhn: scientific revolutions:
- Normal science - existing theories explain reality well enough
- Model drift - realising that that^ is not the case
- In hard sciences one paradigm gives way to a new one, in social sciences multiple paradigms can coexist
- Paradigm = view on society that steers scientific thinking and research - theoretical stance and methodology point of view
- 4 paradigms in sociology:
- Structural- functionalist paradigm
- Conflict paradigm
, - Interactionist paradigm:
- Symbolic interactionist paradigm
- Rational choice paradigm
- Theory = coherent system of statement about how and why specific facts are related
- Within a paradigm, you have multiple theories and theory types working together
- Problems with paradigms
- Sociology is not detached from the researcher
- This determines paradigm → a complete view doesn't exist - always ‘partial perspectives’
- Sociological approaches
- Positivistic - following physical principles, laws, empirical facts, objectivity and replicability, deductive (derive
hypotheses from theories to test)
- Humanistic - meaning of behaviour and symbols; subjective interpretaiton, inductive
- Critical - on positivism - reification of the social world, science is not neutral; focused on enabling social change
and improving society
Ch 2 book (Lec 1): Thinking Sociologically,
Thinking Globally
How to think about society
● A theory is a statement of how and why specific facts are related
● A theoretical perspective can be seen as a basic image that guides thinking and research.
● Over the past hundred years, sociologists have developed three major theoretical ways of thinking: classical perspectives
o Functionalism, conflict and action theory
● Next to the classical perspectives: emerging perspectives
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