The Sociological Imagination PDF

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The Sociological Imagination   

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Sociology is the study of human society. In the mid-twentieth century, sociologist C. Wright Mills coined the term " sociological imagination" and argued that one needs to use it to think critically about the social world. The sociological imagination is the ability to connect one’s personal experiences to society at large and greater historical forces. Using our sociological imagination allows us to "make the familiar strange" or to question habits or customs that seem "natural" to us. What are the true costs and returns of college? This is debatable, as individuals who finish college might earn more not because they obtained a degree, but because people who stay on are more likely to correspond to characteristics that predispose them to earn higher salaries.

What Is a Social Institution?   

A social institution is a group of social positions, connected by social relations, that perform a social role. Social institutions, such as the legal system, the labor market, or language itself, have a great influence on our behavior and are constantly changing. The ordinary interactions and meanings we ascribe to social institutions shape and change them. Social identity is how individuals define themselves in relationship to groups they are a part of (or in relationship to groups they choose not to be a part of). We all contribute to one another’s social identity, which can also be thought of as a grand narrative constructed of many individual stories.

The Sociology of Sociology      

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The ability to develop a "sociological lens," like technology, needed a specific set of circumstances to bloom The French scholar Auguste Comte, founder of what he called "social physics" or "positivism," felt that we could better understand society by determining the logic or scientific laws governing human behavior. Harriet Martineau, the first to translate Comte’s written works into English, was one of the earliest feminist social scientists and wrote on educational issues, among other things. Historical materialism, a theory developed by Karl Marx, one of the "classical sociologists," along with Weber and Durkheim, identifies class conflict as the primary cause of social change. Max Weber felt that culture and politics as well as economics were important influences on society, and his emphasis on subjectivity became a foundation of interpretive sociology. Émile Durkheim, who is considered the founding practitioner of positivist sociology, developed the theory that the division of labor in a given society helps to determine how social cohesion is maintained, or not maintained, in that society, and the concept of anomie, a sense of despair resulting from the chaos of everyday life. Georg Simmel established what is today referred to as formal sociology, or a sociology of pure numbers, leading to the development of urban sociology and cultural sociology, and the study of groups. The Chicago School focused on empirical research with the belief that people’s behaviors and personalities are shaped by their social and physical environments to become the "social self," a concept termed social ecology. Charles Cooley and George Herbert Mead made prominent contributions to the types of social selves. Double consciousness, a concept developed by W. E. B. DuBois, refers to individuals’ constant awareness of how others perceive them and how those perceptions alter their own behavior. Jane Addams was one of the pioneers of applied sociology, which, combined with the latent misogyny of the time, relegated her to a social worker as opposed to an academic. Along with Durkheim, Talcott Parsons was heavily responsible for championing functionalism: the strand of sociology that believes that social processes and institutions only exist to serve some important function to keep society running. Modern sociological theories include functionalism, conflict theory, feminist theory, symbolic interactionism, postmodernism, and midrange theory.

Sociology and Its Cousins 

Sociology focuses on making comparisons across cases to find patterns and create hypotheses about how societies work now or in the past. Sociology looks at how individuals interact with one another as well as at how groups, small and large, interact with one another.

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History and anthropology tend to focus more on particular circumstances, though in cultural anthropology in particular, there can be a lot of overlap with sociology. Psychology and biology examine things on more of a micro level than sociology does, and economics is an entirely quantitative discipline. Political science focuses on one aspect of social relations—power. These distinctions are important, but it is also important to keep in mind that a lot of overlap exists between the work done in different academic disciplines.

Divisions within Sociology    

Interpretive sociology focuses on the meanings people attach to social phenomena, prioritizing specific situations over a search for social facts that transcend time and place. Positivist sociology, also called the "normal science" model of sociology, attempts to reveal the social facts that affect social life by developing and testing hypotheses based on theories about how the social world works. Microsociology seeks to understand local interactional contexts, focusing on face-to-face encounters and gathering data through participant observations and in-depth interviews. Macrosociology generally looks at social dynamics across whole societies or large parts of them and often relies on statistical analysis to do so.

Introduction   

Sociologists follow the scientific method of gathering evidence, forming hypotheses and theories —a systematic schema—to explain it according to rules called research methods. Causality is a central part of the scientific method and is the idea that a change in one factor results in a corresponding change in another factor. Research methods are standard rules that social scientists follow when trying to establish a causal relationship between social elements. Quantitative methods seek to obtain information about the social world that is in, or can be converted to, numeric form. Qualitative methods attempt to collect information about the social world that cannot be readily converted to numeric form.

Research 101: The Basics  

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Sociological research generally begins with a question that asks what causes a certain social phenomenon to occur. Using a deductive approach to research, we start with a theory, develop a hypothesis, make empirical observations, and then analyze the data collected through observation to confirm, reject, or modify the original theory. Using an inductive approach to research, we start with empirical observation and then work to form a theory. Correlation exists when we simply observe change in two things simultaneously; causality exists when we can prove that a change in one factor causes the change in the other factor. Sociologists conduct research to try to prove causation. In order to prove causation, researchers need to establish correlation and time order and rule out alternative explanations. A frequent issue is the problem of reverse causality, where the researcher believes that A results in a change in B, when in fact B is causing A, which is why a time order is necessary to establish which is causing which. A dependent variable is the outcome that a researcher is trying to explain; an independent variable is a measured factor that the researcher believes has a causal impact on the dependent variable. In social research, a hypothesis is a proposed relationship between two variables. For all hypotheses, both a null hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis exist. Operationalization is the process by which a researcher specifies the terms and methods he or she will use in a particular study and is an important aspect of hypothesis testing. Moderating variables are factors that affect the relationship between the independent and dependent variables; mediating variables are factors that are positioned between the independent and dependent variables but do not affect the relationship between them. Measures used to evaluate variables in a hypothesis must have validity and reliability, and the outcomes of a particular research study must have generalizability to a larger population.

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Researchers must be aware of the effects they have on the people, relationships, and processes they are studying; these are called experimenter effects, and a way to counter them is to employ reflexivity and take these effects into account. Feminist methodology treats women’s experiences as legitimate empirical and theoretical resources, promotes social science that may bring about policy change to help women, and is as conscious of the role of the researcher as that of the subjects being studied and the power dynamic between them. Participant observation, interviews, surveys, historical methods, case studies, comparative research, experimental methods, and content analysis are all types of data collection used in social research.

Ethics of Social Research   

Researchers must meet codified standards, which are often set by professional associations, academic institutions, or research centers, when conducting studies. Researchers must guard against causing physical, emotional, or psychological harm to their subjects. By adhering to informed consent and voluntary participation guidelines, researchers can make sure their subjects know they are participating in a study and have voluntarily chosen to participate. Public sociology refers to the practice of using sociological research, teaching, and service to reach a wider (not solely academic) audience and to influence society.

Definitions of Culture   

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The concept of culture has evolved and expanded throughout history. Perhaps one of the oldest understandings of culture focuses on the distinction between what is part of our natural environment and what is modified or created by humans. Culture can be loosely defined as a sum of beliefs, traditions, and practices that are separate from the natural environment. As Europeans came into contact with non-Westerners, they began to think of culture in terms of differences between peoples, which could be viewed positively or negatively. This trend gave rise to ethnocentrism, the belief that one’s own culture or group is superior to others. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a new dimension was added to the concept of culture—the idea that culture involved the pursuit of intellectual refinement.

Material versus Nonmaterial Culture 

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Material culture is everything that is a part of our constructed environment, such as books, fashion, and monuments. Nonmaterial culture encompasses values, beliefs, behaviors, and social norms. A cultural lag is the time gap between the appearance of a new technology and that of the words and practices that give it meaning. Culture includes language, the meanings we assign to words, and concepts such as class, inequality, and ownership. The confusion one feels when unfamiliar with them is called culture shock and leads people to code switch in order to transition seamlessly from and into multiple cultures. Nonmaterial culture can take the form of ideology, which is a system of concepts and relationships that includes an understanding of cause and effect. Cultural relativism, a term coined by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict in the 1930s, is the idea that we should recognize differences across cultures without passing judgment on them or assigning value to them. Cultural scripts are modes of behavior and understanding that are not universal or natural, but that may strongly shape beliefs or concepts held by a society. A subculture is a group united by sets of concepts, values, traits, and/or behavioral patterns that distinguish it from other groups within the same culture or society. Values are moral beliefs, and norms are how values tell us to act. Socialization is the process by which a person internalizes the values, beliefs, and norms of a given society and learns to function as a member of that society. Reflection theory states that culture is a projection of social structures and relationships into the public sphere. A Marxist version of reflection theory argues that cultural objects reflect the material labor and production relationships that went into making them.

Media

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Media are any formats or vehicles that carry, present, or communicate information. Examples of media include books, posters, social media, Web pages, clay tablets, and radio. "Mass media?"refers to any form of media that reaches the mass of the people. The concept of hegemony, which is different from domination, is important for understanding the impact of media on culture and for examining how people and societies shape culture, and are shaped by it.

The Media Life Cycle 

Media studies open paths of investigation, including textual analysis and audience studies, that allow us to see how people create media and the biases involved in that creation, how media reflect the culture in which they exist, and how individuals and groups use the media to change culture.

Media Effects 

Media effects can be placed into four categories according to their duration and intention: short term and deliberate, long term and deliberate, short term and unintentional, and long term and unintentional.

Mommy, Where Do Stereotypes Come From? 

Intentionally or unintentionally and subtly or overtly, the media can create or reinforce ethnic, racial, gender, religious, and other stereotypes, as seen in the movie industry’s Production Code from 1930, and sometimes in the process they distract people’s attention from foundational issues or tensions that need to be addressed.

Political Economy of the Media  

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Media ownership in the United States is concentrated in the hands of six companies, and those companies in turn can affect the information and messages communicated to the public. The media, especially advertising, play a large role in the maintenance of consumerism and consumer culture, which is the belief that happiness and fulfillment can be achieved through the acquisition of material possessions. This increasingly involves advertising to children in order to encourage a self-sustaining consumer culture among them. Culture jamming is one example of subverting the power of media. With the global reach of media today, American culture can be found in the farthest corners of the world. This soft power—the effects of culture, values, and ideas on others’ behavior—has experienced a backlash recently, in part due to negative reactions to certain American foreign policy measures.

Social Groups  

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Social groups form the building blocks for society and for most social interaction. The sociologist Georg Simmel argued that the key element in determining the form of social relations in a group is the size of the group, and he emphasized the differences between social relations in a dyad (group of two) and a triad (group of three). The dyad is the most intimate form of social life because the two members are mutually dependent on each other. If one member leaves the group, the group ceases to exist. According to Simmel, when a third person joins a dyad, that person can fill the role of mediator, tertius gaudens ("the third that rejoices"), or divide et impera ("divide and conquer"). As group size increases, the number of possible relationships increase exponentially: In a group of three, three possible relationships exist, but in a group of four, six possible relationships exist. There are several different ways that groups larger than a dyad or triad can be characterized. Georg Simmel came up with three categories: small groups, parties, and large groups. The sociologist C. H. Cooley identified two main types of groups— primary groups and secondary groups. Other "group types" include in-groups, out-groups, and reference groups. The Asch Test is an experiment developed in the 1940s that shows group conformity, or how much people are influenced by the actions or norms of a group.

From Groups to Networks

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A social network is a set of relations—essentially, a set of dyads—held together by ties between individuals. A tie is a set of stories that explains our relationship to the other members of our network, while a narrative is the sum of the stories contained in a series of ties. Embeddedness refers to the degree to which ties are reinforced through indirect paths within a social network. The more embedded a tie is, the stronger it is. Sociologist Mark Granovetter developed the concept of the strength of weak ties to explain that relatively weak ties can actually be quite valuable because they are more likely to provide new opportunities than a strongly embedded tie. A structural hole is a gap between network clusters, or even between two people, who would benefit from having that gap closed. The six degree theory proposes that each one of us is connected to every other person by social chains of no more than six people and is based on Stanley Milgram’s experiments in the 1960s. Duncan Watts modified Milgram’s theory to one that posits that while not everyone is connected to each other, at least half the people in the world are connected to each other through six steps. Social capital is the information, knowledge of people or ideas, and connections that help individuals enter preexisting networks or gain power in them. The existence of high levels of social capital in a community generally means that the community is tightly knit and can come together to face challenges and make improvements. Many opinions exist about changes in social capital in the United States during the past 50 or so years. Some perceive a decline in civic engagement. Some argue that we have less time to devote to traditional community activities while others say that the advent of the Internet has created new ways of bringing people together, like crowdfunding.

Network Analysis in Practice 

Researchers use basic concepts about groups and social networks—concepts like embeddedness, the differences between dyads and triads, and group conformity—to investigate how group life shapes individual behavior. This type of investigation is referred to as network analysis.

Organizations   

An organization is any social network that is defined by a common purpose and has a boundary between its membership and the rest of the social world. Formal organizations have a set of governing structures and rules for their internal setup, while informal organizations do not. Organizational culture can be defined as the shared beliefs and behaviors within a social group; organizational structure refers to ways in which power and authority are distributed within an organization. Sociologists Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell are part of a school of thought which tries to develop a sociological view of institutions. They coined the phrase "institutional isomorphism." Isomorphism is a constraining process that forces one organization to resemble others that face the same set of environmental conditions....