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SOCIOLOGY 1000 A Tiffani Semach

SA8002 Hu ma ns o c i a l b e h a v i o u r , t h ep r o c e s s e sa n dp a t t e r n so f g r o u pi n t e r a c t i o na n dg r o u p i n fl u e n c eo ni n d i v i d u a l b e h a v i o u r . Ar e a so f s o c i o l o g i c a l c o n c e r ns u c ha ss o c i a l o r g a n i z a t i o n , s o c i a l s t r a t i fi c a t i o n , e t h n i cr e l a t i o n sa n df a mi l yi n t e r a c t i o ni n t r o d u c es o meo f t h ema j o rc o n c e p t s , t h e o r i e sa n dp r o c e d u r e so f s o c i o l o g i c a l i n q u i r y .

Sept, Myla 001200176

Myla Sept 001200176

SOCI-1000-A-Introduction to Sociology I ns t r uc t or : Ti f Se ma c h , MA Ema i l :t i ff a n i . s e ma c h @u l e t h . c a Offic e: A8 8 1( UHa l l ) Offic eHou r s : T u e s . / Th u r s . 1 0 : 4 5 a m–1 1 : 4 5 a m

Tuesday, January 6, 2020 Week 1 Introduction to Sociology Reading: Chapter 1.

The Sociological Imagination: This Is America Use these videos to develop your sociological imagination; try applying concepts we discussed this week, consider the different approaches one could use to examine this discourse, and reflect how this discourse may have been interpreted at different periods in history. https://moodle.uleth.ca/202001/mod/page/view.php?id=8887

Sociology can be defined as the social science that studies the development, structure, and functioning of human society

Myla Sept 001200176 Thursday, January 9, 2020 Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), an Arab scholar, was the first person to carry out a systematic study of sociological subjects. Sociology developed as a response to dramatic social changes such as industrialization in the 19th century. Max Weber is a founder of modern sociology, Germany in the 19th century. In Canada, the first sociology department was founded in 1922 by Carl Addington Dawson at McGill University. John Porter (1921-1979) examined the relationship between social class and ethnicity, he coined the term vertical mosaic to describe hierarchical stratification of racial, ethnic, and religious groups due to systematic discrimination. Annie Marie MacLean (1870-1934) First Canadian woman to obtain a PhD in sociology. Aileen Ross (1902-1995) First women hired as a sociologist at a Canadian Macrosociology focuses on the “big picture” of society and its institutions. Microsociology focuses on the plans, motivations, and actions of individuals and small groups. Structural Functionalism uses an organic or biological analogy for society, key representatives: Emile Durkheim, Robert K Merton, and Talcott Parsons. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) coined the term social fact, social facts are patterned ways of acting, thinking, and feeling that exist outside of any one individual but exert social control over people. Social facts have three essential characteristics: 1. It was developed from you as an individual prior to and separate. 2. It can be seen as a characteristic of a particular group. 3. It involves a constraining or coercing force that pushes individuals into acting Durkheim has a book suicide (1897) he found that certain groups were more likely to commit suicide: military officers, Protestants, and unmarried people. Robert K Merton (1910-2003) enhanced the functionalist perspective by noting that there are three different types of functions that any structure can produce:  Manifest Functions: intended and easily recognized  Latent Functions: unintended and unrecognized  Latent Dysfunction: unintended and produce socially negative consequences

Myla Sept 001200176 Conflict Theory: based on the four C’s 1. Conflict: exists in all large societies 2. Class: has existed in every society 3. Contestation: Functions can be contested by asking “who does this function best serve?” 4. Change: society either will or should be changed Karl Marx (1818-1883) society is a hierarchy and each group’s position in the hierarchy is determined by the group’s role in production. Egalitarian society. Symbolic Interactionism approach looks at the meaning behind what we do and how that impacts are daily interactions. Focuses on individuals and small groups and their everyday George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) looks at the development of self Herbert Blumer (1900-1987) coined the term symbolic interaction and was looking at how individuals made groups and how those groups made social systems. Erving Goffman (1922-1982) Canadian sociologist, coined the term total institution, prisons, etc. which seeks to regulate, control, and manipulate its residence. Feminist theory, rooted in conflict theory, rooted in discrimination of women, First Wave: campaign for civil and political rights, Second Wave: focuses on public and private rights, Third Wave: inclusion of LGBTQ and racialized individuals. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) one of the first feminist analysts Dorothy Smith, developed standpoint theory which challenges objective analysis Postmodern theory seeks to include a diversity of voices, especially those that are often drowned out by powerful voices of dominant groups. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) Discourses are ways of speaking about some element of reality Totalitarian discourse: refers to a universal claim about how knowledge is achieved Archeology of knowledge refers to the process of examining how individual discourses developed All knowledge is constructed and thus we must ask: How do we know what we know?

Myla Sept 001200176 Week 2 Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Research methodology: the system of methods a researcher uses to gather data on a particular research question. Methodology differs depending on what a sociologist is examining, as well as the audience. https://moodle.uleth.ca/202001/mod/url/view.php?id=8891 French philosopher August Comte (1798–1857) coined the term sociology and Comte’s sociology was rooted in positivism. Positivism assumes that researchers are objective. Comte thus viewed the outsider (the researcher) as the expert whose perspective is privileged over the (biased) insider perspectives of the research subjects.  The researcher will have impact on the data and the field, the people you are interacting with, there is a bias with an insider perspective. Critical sociologists like Dorothy Smith and Michel Foucault challenged the notion of the objective outsider and stressed the unique role of the insider perspective. Standpoint theory, for example, states that the social location of social scientists creates bias. The insider voice of the subject being studied provides information that comes from their subjective experience. Objective outsider experts use their privilege to decide over the authenticity of the insider perspective All human subjects research must be based on informed consent through which participants indicate their understanding and acceptance of research conditions Qualitative research is the close examination of characteristics that cannot be counted or measured E.g.:  Ethnography: a research method in which people and their culture are studied through fieldwork. Participant observation: observing people and actively participating in their activities to obtain an insider’s perspective. Semi-structured interviews: informal, faceto-face interviews. Informants: insiders who help the researcher in becoming accepted by the community and assist with the interpretation of information  Institutional ethnography: developed by Dorothy Smith, recognizes that every institution has two sides, each supported by separated data: Ruling interests are the interests of the organization, particularly its administration, or the interests of those who hold power in society. Written rules and practices (texts) provide the data. Ruling relations are activated when workers follow rules and practices. Experiential data come from informants: anyone who works for the organization, outside of management  Case study approach: Case studies take as its subject a single case or a few selected examples of a social entity. The case study approach is often used to identify and describe best practices—strategies with a proven history of achieving desired results.  Narratives: the stories people tell about themselves, their situations, and others around them. Voice is the expression of a unique viewpoint from a particular social location.

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Narratives can give voice to people who do not usually get to speak directly in research. Purest form of the insider view. Triangulation links at least three narratives to examine the same phenomenon, needs at least three narratives. Agency is your ability to enact power within any social situation. Giving someone a narrative is agency. Content analysis: involves studying a set of cultural artifacts, (e.g., newspaper articles, ads, or books) or events by systematically counting them and then interpreting the themes they reflect. Data are pre-existing and non-interactive. For example, feminist approaches seek to reveal the gendered aspects of culture, such as patriarchy and misogyny Discourse analysis: an approach to analyzing a conversation, a speech, or written texts. A discourse is a conceptual framework with its own internal logic and underlying assumptions that are generally recognizable. A field comprises all known discourses on a particular cultural concept, such as masculinity Genealogy: seeks to trace the origins and histories of modern discourses. E.g., Edward Said’s Orientalism, which is the Western fascination with or romanticization of “exotic” Middle and Far Eastern cultures.

Quantitative research is the close examination of social elements that can be counted or measured, and are therefore used to generate statistics E.g., surveys, polls. Statistics is a science that, in sociology, involves the use of numbers to map social behavior and beliefs. However, many of the topics that sociologists research, (e.g., poverty, abuse, social class) are theoretical in nature and thus difficult to define. A poll is a quantitative survey designed to measure respondents’ attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Closed-ended questionnaires are used to capture respondents’ answers to a set of questions with set answer options. Questionnaires are administered to a sample, selected from a larger population Median represents the number, score, or result that separates the higher half from the lower half of a given data set. Middle number Mean (average) can be found by adding up all the scores and dividing the total by the number of scores you have

Operational definitions transform abstract or theoretical concepts like “poverty” or “middle class” into concrete, observable, measurable, and countable variables. A variable is a concept with measurable traits or characteristics that can vary or change from one person, group, culture, or time to another. For example, defining poverty o Absolute poverty: anything below the minimum income level needed to secure basic necessities  Measure: Market Basket Measure (MBM) o Relative poverty: defines poverty relative to median or mean household incomes  Measure: low income cut-off (LICO) • Different poverty definitions lead to different poverty measures and thus different poverty statistics

Myla Sept 001200176 Independent variable: has an effect on another variable (the cause) Dependent variable: is affected by the independent variable (the effect)

Correlation describes the relationship between two variables •

This relationship can take on two forms: o Direct (or positive) correlation occurs when the independent and the dependent variables increase or decrease together o Inverse (or negative) correlation occurs when the two variables change in opposing directions

Correlation: describes the relationship between two variables Causation: The attributing of effects to causes Spurious reasoning: occurs when someone sees correlation and falsely assumes causation o Spurious variable: a third outside factor that influences both correlating variables The dead grandma during exams reading Thursday, January 16, 2020 Living amongst her participants Alice Goffman has a subjective view instead of an objective view, little separation. Textbook page 60 on Alice Goffman. Alice Goffman – On the Run: Fugitive Live in an American City

Myla Sept 001200176 Week 3 Tuesday, January 21, 2020………………Chapter 3 (Culture)

Culture is a system of behaviors, beliefs, knowledge, practices, values, and material artifacts such as buildings, tools, and sacred items • Cultures are dynamic and change over time - Culture and its elements are contested: there is little agreement as to who and what belongs to a culture, even by those who belong to a cultural group - One of the points of contestation is authenticity or what is true to a particular culture Dominant Culture vs. Subculture and Counterculture - Dominant culture is the culture that, through its political and economic power, is able to impose its values, language, and ways of behaving and interpreting behavior on a given society - Subcultures and countercultures are minority cultures that fall outside the cultural mainstream. Subculture is the culture of a group of people who share a distinctive set of beliefs and practices that differ in some significant way from the dominant culture without directly opposing it - Countercultures are groups that reject elements of the dominant culture (e.g., clothing styles or sexual norms) High culture vs. popular and mass culture -

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High culture: The culture of the elite (e.g., arts such as opera, ballet, and classical music) High culture requires what Pierre Bourdieu called cultural capital: a set of skills and knowledge needed to acquire the sophisticated tastes that mark someone as a person of high culture Popular culture: The culture of the majority, especially those who do not have power. Popular culture reflects the people who take an active role in the culture they consume Mass culture: Refers to people who have little or no agency in the culture they consume (e.g., big companies dictate what people watch, buy, value or believe) Created by those in power for the masses.

The main distinction between popular and mass culture is the role of a consumer’s agency: the ability of the people to be creative or productive with what a dominant culture, colonial power or mass media has given them. Pop culture has agency, whereas mass culture we don’t Agency; the ability to act for or against certain subjects

Myla Sept 001200176 Norms are the rules or standards of behavior that are expected of a group, society, or culture Simulacra are a feature of mass culture - Stereotypical cultural images that are (re)produced like material goods or commodities by the media (e.g., representing Inuit through igloos or inukshuk [Inuit way finder]) - Simulacra are “hyperreal”, thus likely to be considered more real than what actually exists Sanctions are rewards and punishment in response to a particular behavior - Positive sanctions are rewards (e.g., smiles, bonuses, trophies) - Negative sanctions are reactions designed to tell someone they have violated a norm (e.g., a dirty look, a parking ticket, a library fine) Folkways e.g. table manners: Canada = elbows off table, utensils stay on plate, eat quietly, tip waiter; East & South Asia = slurp noodles, chopsticks on holder NOT bowl, leave a little on the plate, no tip for waiter Mores e.g. stealing, murder: Canada: stealing = fine, community service, and/or jail time, murder = prison sentence; Sharia-controlled region: stealing = right hand cut off, murder = death penalty or family receives “blood money” Taboos e.g. incest: laws and sanctions for marriage among families differs across time and region Symbols are cultural items that take on tremendous meaning within a culture or subculture of a society - Symbols can be tangible (material), such as the Canadian flag, or the niqab Values are the standards used by a culture to describe abstract qualities such as goodness, beauty, and justice. Shape how we create norms - Values also guide our behavior and our assessment of the behaviors of others Ethnocentrism occurs when someone holds up one culture—usually their own—as being the standard by which all cultures are to be judged - Ethnocentrism is often the product of a lack of knowledge or ignorance Eurocentrism is a particular form of ethnocentrism - It involves addressing others from a broadly defined European position to address others and assuming the audience is or would like to be part of that position Reverse ethnocentrism involves assuming that a particular culture that is not one’s own is better than one’s own in some way - E.g., beauty standards in Taiwan

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Thursday, January 23, 2020 Cultural globalization is the intensification and expansion of cultural flows across the globe - The “Americanization” of the world or the danger of a one-directional flow of culture could be problematic Cultural relativism is an approach to studying and understanding an aspect of another culture within its proper social, historical, and environmental context Sociolinguistics is the study of language as part of culture Dialect: a variety of a language that differs from others in terms of pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. An example of a dialect difference can be seen in Newfoundland when compared to Manitoba Sapir–Whorf hypothesis describes the relationship between language and culture - Language, words, and the meanings they generate are culture-specific, therefore language outside of its cultural context does not make sense - Linguistic determinism suggests that the way each of us views and understands the world is shaped by the language we speak o E.g., gendered pronouns reflect and shape how we think about gender Postville Questions 1. What elements of dominant culture are being contested? - Religion, dominant is Christian vs Jewish - Racial differences - Language 2. What are some examples of key Postville norms? How are sanctions expressed? (negative/positive, strong/weak) - Civic bonds - They didn’t take care of the lawn (negative, weak) - Saying hello all the time (positive, weak) - Overpriced homes (negative, strong) 3. Identify some key Postville symbols - The Kosher plant - Christian churches 4. What type of language us used to discuss the “other”? - Foreigners - “a bear” - Strange - “these people”

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Week 4 Tuesday, January 28, 2020……………Chapter 4 (Socialization)

Socialization is a lifelong learning process that involves development or changes in the individual’s sense of self o Primary socialization – childhood o Secondary socialization – from age 5/6 until death When it comes to socialization, we must ask: o Does socialization shape us entirely or do we have agency? o Are we shaped mainly by biological factors or social ones (nature versus nurture debate)? Determinism refers to: o Biological determinism (nature) versus o Social or cultural determinism (nurture) Biological determinism states that the greater part of who we are is determined by our roughly 26,000 genes o Textbook page 99-100, XYY male study Behaviorism is a school of thought in psychology that takes a strong cultural-determinist position Sigmund Freud argued that both biological and social factors shape human personality • Freud believed the mind had three interconnected parts: 1. Id (instinctive drives) root drives 2. Superego (cultural/social, positive/negative sanctions) 3. Ego (ego moves up and down between the two) Canadian sociologist Dennis Wrong argued that behaviorists work with an over socialized representation of human beings Agents of socialization are groups that have a significant impact on one’s socialization • The impact of different socializing agents is contested George Herbert Mead, a symbolic interactionist, argued children are socialized by others and internalize norms and values

Myla Sept 001200176 Two categories of agents of socialization • Significant others: individuals, primarily family and friends, whom young children imitate and model t...