Sociology Essay Notes - Emile Durkheim PDF

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What is Durkheim's approach in sociological enquiry
and is his view of society justified?...

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What is Durkheim's approach in sociological enquiry and is his view of society justified? Social Structure - Wikipedia Social Structure = relatively stable patterned social arrangements in society, encompassing the relationship between different groups within society. They are affected and affect the actions of the individuals within the society. Society has a social structure where individuals are grouped, and given a specific set of roles, with specific functions, meanings of purposes within society. Social structure influences important social systems, including the economic, legal, political and cultural systems. Social structures include religion, law, economy and class. The social system is the blanket system that all the other systems exist in, interacting with each other. Social stratification = societies are separated into different levels (strata), based on the underlying structures within a social system. •

Macro scale - social structure - system of socioeconomic stratification (class structure), social institutions, and other patterned relations between large social groups. • Meso scale - structure of social network ties between individuals or organisations. • Micro scale - the way that social norms shape the behaviours of individuals within a social system. Majority-minority relations are extremely important when looking at stratification within a society. Those in the majority are seen as ‘normal’, whereas those in the minority are often viewed as ‘abnormal’. It is this distinction between normal and abnormal that creates hierarchical stratification within social structures, with a bias towards the majority. Alexis de Tocqueville was the first person to use the term ‘social structure’, however it has been used by others such as Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Karl Marx - he argued that the economic base of a society determines the superstructure of society in both a cultural and political sense. Lopez and Scott (2000) distinguish between institutional structure and relational structure, where in the former: “...social structure is seen as comprising those cultural or normative patterns that define the expectations of agents hold about each other's behaviour and that organize their enduring relations with each other. ” and the latter: “...social structure is seen as comprising the relationships themselves, understood as patterns of causal interconnection and interdependence among agents and their actions, as well as the positions that they occupy. ” Microstructure = pattern of relations that have no social structure of their own - relations between individuals in a group where individuals have no social structure. Pattern of relations between between social positions or roles within an organisation, where the positions or roles have no structure. Macrostructure = second level structure with pattern relations between things that have their own structure. Political social structure between political parties, as political parties have their own social structure. •

Normative structure - pattern of relations in a given organisation between norms and modes of operations of people in different social positions. • Ideal structure - pattern of relations be-

tween beliefs and views of people in different social positions. • •

Interest structure - pattern of relations between goals and desires of people in different social positions.

Interaction structure - communications of

people in different social positions. There is also debate over whether social structure is naturally developed or socially constructed. Suicide - Emile Durkheim In Suicide (1897), Durkheim explores the differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics, arguing that stronger social control among Catholics results in lower suicide rates. According to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration while Protestant society has low levels. Overall, Durkheim treated suicide as a social fact, explaining variations in its rate on a macro level, considering society-scale phenomena such as lack of connections between people and lack of regulations of behaviour, rather than individuals' feelings and motivations. In common terms, suicide is meant to describe the intentional act of killing oneself in a desperate act, when one does not want to live any longer. However, speaking more technically, suicide is a term used to describe any death that is the direct or indirect result of a positive or negative act undertaken by the victim themselves. A point to consider with this definition of suicide is that this encompasses all deaths by the victim, regardless of intention. Suicide should arguably only include intentional self-homicide, and this creates issues as it is hard to observe and quantify whether an action was intentional or not, especially when you take into account people that are not mentally stable. Intent is too difficult to comprehend for an outside perspective, and in some cases it is not possible to understand ones own actions. However, the definition including only intentional self-homicide brings its own issues, as there are many example of people purposefully losing their life, but not in the way we classify suicide in our society. A mother sacrificing herself for her child, or a solider dying in battle for their regiment are both apt examples of this, as there is the intention of self-destruction just without the negative aspect of the act. Durkheim concluded that the term ‘suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative ac of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result.’ An attempted suicide is therefore defined the same as above, but falling short of actual death. The interesting part about suicide is that it is an individual action that only involves and affects the individual. However, suicide cannot be explained exclusively by individual factors such as temperament and character. When comparing different societies suicide rates, it is useful to look that the relative proportions of voluntary deaths. ‘The rate of mortality through suicide, characteristic of the society under consideration’ is calculated using either a proportion to a million of a hundred thousand individuals. From year to year, suicide rates remain very stable, and this is because environmental changes in individuals lives remain unchanged in this short period of time, although there are exceptions. These exceptions are often a backlash of a crisis affecting the social state. From looking at the stability of suicide rates in European countries over a much longer period of time, it can be seen that the rates fluctuate in a distinct and sporadic fashion. These long term changes in suicide rates are accompanied by changes in the structural characteristics of society. The suicide rates permanence demonstrates that suicide is ‘a result of a group of distinct characteristics, solidary one with another, and simultaneously effective in spite of different attendant circumstances’. The suicide rates variability highlights the individual quality of these characteristics. According to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration while Protestant society has low levels. There are at least two problems with this interpretation. First, Durkheim took most of his data from earlier

researchers, notably Adolph Wagner and Henry Morselli, who were much more careful in generalizing from their own data. Second, later researchers found that the Protestant-Catholic differences in suicide seemed to be limited to German-speaking Europe and thus may always have been the spurious reflection of other factors. Durkheim concluded that: • Suicide rates are higher in men than women (although married women who remained childless for a number of years ended up with a high suicide rate). • Suicide rates are higher for those who are single than those who are in a sexual relationship. • Suicide rates are higher for people without children than people with children. • Suicide rates are higher among Protestants than Catholics and Jews. • Suicide rates are higher among soldiers than civilians. • Suicide rates are higher in times of peace than in times of war (For example, the suicide rate in France fell after the coup d'etat of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. War also reduced the suicide rate: after war broke out in 1866 between Austria and Italy, the suicide rate fell by 14% in both countries.). • Suicide rates are higher in Scandinavian countries. • The higher the education level, the more likely it was that an individual would choose suicide. However, Durkheim established that there is more correlation between an individual's religion and suicide rate than an individual's education level. Jewish people were generally highly educated but had a low suicide rate. In his view, suicide comes in four kinds. These four types of suicide are based on the degrees of imbalance of two social forces: social integration and moral regulation. Durkheim noted the effects of various crises on social aggregates — war, for example, leading to an increase in altruism, economic boom or disaster contributing to anomie. •

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Egoistic suicide reflects a prolonged sense of not belonging, of not being integrated in a community. It results from the suicide's sense that he has no tether. This absence can give rise to meaninglessness, apathy, melancholy, and depression. Durkheim calls such detachment "excessive individuation". Those individuals who were not sufficiently bound to social groups (and therefore well-defined values, traditions, norms, and goals) were left with little social support or guidance, and were therefore more likely to commit suicide. Durkheim found that suicide occurred more often among unmarried people, especially unmarried men, whom he found had less to bind and connect them to stable social norms and goals. Altruistic suicide is characterized by a sense of being overwhelmed by a group's goals and beliefs. It occurs in societies with high integration, where individual needs are seen as less important than the society's needs as a whole. They thus occur on the opposite integration scale as egoistic suicide. As individual interest would not be considered important, Durkheim stated that in an altruistic society there would be little reason for people to commit suicide. He described one exception: when the individual is expected to kill himself on behalf of society, for example in military service. Anomic suicide reflects an individual's moral confusion and lack of social direction, which is related to dramatic social and economic upheaval. It is the product of moral deregulation and a lack of definition of legitimate aspirations through a restraining social ethic, which could impose meaning and order on the individual conscience. This is symptomatic of a failure of economic development and division of labour to produce Durkheim's organic solidarity. People do not know where they fit in within their societies. Durkheim explains that this is a state of moral disorder where man does not know the limits on his desires, and is constantly in a state of disappointment. This can occur when man goes through extreme changes in wealth; while this includes economic ruin, it can also include windfall gains – in both cases, previous expectations from life are brushed aside and new expectations are needed before he can judge his new situation in relation to the new limits. Fatalistic suicide occurs when a person is excessively regulated, when their futures are pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive discipline. It is the opposite of Anomic suicide, and occurs in societies so oppressive their inhabitants would rather die than live on. For example, some prisoners might prefer to die than live in a prison with constant abuse and excessive regulation.

Emile Durkheim - The Rules of Sociological Method Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purely holistic. He argued that sociology should study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the specific actions of individuals. Durkheim rejected biologistic or psychologist explanations for human social problems, arguing that it is the social structure of society that creates and shapes these problems. Durkheim believed that social facts and moral rules become so engrained in out societies that they become internalised in the consciousness of individuals. Constraint becomes a moral obligation to obey a certain rule rather than an outward control on an individual. Society is “something beyond us and something in ourselves”. Durkheim sought the establishment of sociology as an independent, recognized academic discipline that was also a distinct and autonomous science. In order to do this, Durkheim produced a book named ‘The Rules of Sociological Method’ in which he tired to establish a method in which to study social phenomena that was objective in nature. According to Durkheim, observation must be as impartial and impersonal as possible, even though a "perfectly objective observation" in this sense may never be attained. A social fact must always be studied according to its relation with other social facts, never according to the individual who studies it. Durkheim wanted to explain social phenomena, and the existence of different parts of a society through their function within society, and how they helped to maintain the running of society. Instead of focusing on looking at individual actions to explain observations of society, Durkheim looked at the study of social facts. ‘A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.’ — Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method Put more simply, social facts are things that originate in the institutions or culture of a society which affect the behaviour or attitudes of an individual member of that society. Durkheim argued that social facts are sui generis, which is something that has been externalized, then internalized in the overall public, becoming a part of society that simply exists in its construct. It is not something that is not thought to have been created because it is imbedded in everyone's way of thinking and being.Like the idea of love, or going to school, or clothing belonging to a specific gender. These examples are sui generis because they simply exist in society and in all of us without thought of where they come from or how they were created. Social facts are needed to explain social phenomena, rather than the actions of the individuals that make up that specific society.Because social facts are exterior to the individual, they are able to have coercive power on individuals, and this is seen through formal laws, informal rules, religious rules and family norms in society. Social facts can be material to immaterial. An example of a physical object that is a social fact is a flag, and this flag has many immaterial social facts associated with it, such as the political meaning of the flag. Immaterial social facts include love, freedom and suicide. Although these phenomena seem to be individualistic, Durkheim argues that these are still objective social facts. When looking at suicide, Durkheim postulated that individuals composing society do not directly cause suicide: suicide, as a social fact, exists independently in society, and is caused by other social facts (such as rules governing behavior and group attachment). Suicide, like other immaterial social facts, exists independently of the will of an individual, cannot be eliminated, and is as influential – coercive – as physical laws such as gravity.

One of the most important ideas of Durkheim surrounding social enquiry is the belief a whole society cannot be explained by the sum of its individual parts. Once all the components of a society have been put together, it acts in a different way, with different properties to the components. Because of this, social phenomena cannot be explained by individual action, rejecting biological and psychological explanations for social phenomena due to their focus on the individual. Durkheim believed that a group feels, thinks and acts in a different way from the individuals that make up the group, and so looking at the individual to explain the group is wrong and will produce false explanations. In every society, there is a certain type of phenomena that can be differentiated from those studied in other natural sciences. Within society, we have obligations to fulfil our roles within the family, such as a wife or husband, and these roles are defined externally to the individual. We may feel like these role are in line with our own beliefs anyway, and so feel the roles reality as subjective, their reality is actually still objective. This is because the individual did not create the roles themselves, rather was taught and inherited them through eduction. ‘The determining cause of a social fact should be sought among the social fact preceding it and not among the states of the individual consequences. The function of a social fat ought always to be sought in its relation to some social end.’ Psychological and biological factors are not ignored, but they are not seen as adequate explanations. They can facilitate the explanation. Social facts are produced by action on psychological factors. Biological factors such as sensations, reflexes and instincts shape the action of the individual. Function of punishment - social reaction of punishment is due to the intensity of collective sentiments which the crime offends. But it also has a useful function in maintaining these sentiments at the same degree of intensity, because they would soon diminish is offences against them were not punished. This is its function in the establishment of social order. Influence the course of social phenomena: • • namic density • participate in if effectively

number of social units - size of society degree of concentration of group - dysocial life is only affected by those who

The obligatory, coercive nature of social facts, he argued, is repeatedly manifested in individuals because it is imposed upon them, particularly through education; the parts are thus derived from the whole rather than the whole from the parts. Durkheim insisted that social facts were not simply limited to ways of functioning (e.g., acting, thinking, feeling, etc.), but also extended to ways of being (e.g., the number, nature, and relation of the parts of a society, the size and geographical distribution of its population, the nature and extent of its communication networks, etc.)Durkheim insisted that social facts were not simply limited to ways of functioning (e.g., acting, thinking, feeling, etc.), but also extended to ways of being (e.g., the number, nature, and relation of the parts of a society, the size and geographical distribution of its population, the nature and extent of its communication networks, etc.) The most basic rule of all sociological method, Durkheim thus concluded, is to treat social facts as things. All societies are born of other societies, Durkheim concluded, and "in the whole course of social evolution there has not been a single time when individuals have really had to consult together to decide whether they would enter into collective life together, and into one sort of collective life rather than another.” The determining cause of a social fact must he sought among the antecedent social facts and not among the states of the individual consciousness. Unhealthy Societies : The Afflictions of Inequality

Life expectancy in different countries is significantly improved where income difference are smaller and societies are more socially cohesive. Social link between health and inequality. The factors that makes come societies healthier than others are different to those factors that make individuals within a society healthier tha...