You May Ask Yourself Chapter 1 PDF

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Sociological Imagination: the ability to connect the most basic, intimate aspects of an individual’s life to seemingly impersonal and remote historical forces. (C. Wright Mills) ● Ability to see the connections between our personal experience and the larger forces of history. ● Makes the familiar strange Social Institution: A complex group of interdependent positions that, together, perform a social role and reproduce themselves over time; also defined in a narrow sense as any institution in a society that works to shape the behavior of the groups of people within it. ● Legal system, labor market, language. ● Tendency to reinforce existing social structures and the inequalities therein. ● Social identity. The sociology of sociology Auguste Comte (1798-1857): social physics / positivism ● Arose out of a need to make moral sense of the social order in a time of declining religious authority. ● Purpose is to develop a secular morality. ● Three epistemological stages: 1) Theological stage: society result of divine will / God’s plan. 2) Metaphysical stage: behavior governed by natural, biological instincts. 3) Scientific stage: development of social physics to identify scientific laws that govern behavior. Equations / underlying logic. Harriet Martineau (1802-1876): translated Comte’s works. Karl Marx (1818-1883) ● Marxism ● Historical materialism: conflicts between classes drove social change throughout history. ● Political struggle + escalating crises within economic system = social change through communist revolution. ● Focus on material world. Max Weber (1864-1920) ● Economy and Society: theories of authority, rationality, the state, and status. ● Verstehen (German for understanding): A concept that is the basis of interpretive sociology in which researchers imagine themselves experiencing the life positions of the social actors they want to understand rather than treating those people as objects to be examined. ● Study of social meaning.

Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) ● Division of labor: degree to which jobs are specialized. ○ Division of labor in a given society helps to determine its form of social solidarity the way social cohesion among individuals is maintained. ●

Suicide is conditioned by social forces. ○ The degree to which we are integrated into group life and the degree to which our lives follows routines. ○ One of the main forces is the sense of normlessness resulting from drastic changes in living conditions or arrangements. ○ Theory of A  nomie: a sense of aimlessness or despair that arises when we can no longer reasonably expect life to be predictable; too little social regulation; normlessness. ○ Positivist sociology: strain within sociology that believes the social world can be described and predicted by certain observable relationships (akin to social physics).

Georg Simmel (1858-1918): formal sociology (pure numbers) ● Influential in the development of urban sociology, cultural sociology, and microinteractions. American Sociology (Chicago School) ● Social ecology: humans’ behaviors and personalities are shaped by their social and physical environments. ● Community-based approach to research. ● Concerned with how race and ethnic divisions played out in cities: ○ How Polish peasants and African American sharecroppers adapted to life in a new, industrialized world. ○ How the anonymity of the city contributed to creativity and freedom / breakdown of traditional communities and higher rates of social problems. ● Social Self Theory (Cooley & Mead) ○ Cooley: ‘Looking-glass self’: the self emerges from an interactive social process. ○ Mead: The self itself develops over the course of childhood as the individual learns to take the point of view of specific others into specific contexts and eventually internalizes the ‘’generalized other” - our view of the views of society as a whole that transcends individuals or particular situations. ○ Meaning emerges through social interaction. ● WWII as an enormous boost to empirical sociology, to motivate soldiers we must study them

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963): ethnography in African American community. ● Double consciousness: a concept which describes the two behavioral scripts, one for moving through the world and the other incorporating the external opinions of prejudiced onlookers, which are constantly maintained by African Americans. ● Criminology: crime rate among African Americans. ○ Theory of anomie: breakdown of norms resulting from sudden and new found freedom of former slaves caused high crime rates among blacks. Jane Addams (1860-1935) ● Hull House ● Marginal member of Chicago school. Modern Sociological Theories Functionalism (Durkheim and Parsons) ● Theory that various social institutions and processes in society exist to serve some important (or necessary) function to keep society running. ○ Extension of nineteenth century theory called organicism, the notion that society is like a living organism, each part serves an important role in keeping society together. ○ Social inequality: device by which societies ensure that the most important positions are filled by most qualified persons. ● Criticism: reinforces status quo and the dominant economic system with its class structures and inequalities instead of challenging how much systems evolved and offering alternatives. Conflict Theory (Ralph Dahrendorf, Lewis Coser) ● The idea that conflict between competing interests is the basic, animating force of social change and society in general. ○ Social inequality exists as a result of political struggles among different groups in a society. Feminist Theory ● Concerned with how power relationships are defined, shaped, and reproduced on the basis of gender differences. ● Gender inequalities. Symbolic Interactionism (Herbert Blumer, Erving Goffman ● A micro-level theory in which shared meanings, orientations, and assumptions form the basic motivations behind people’s actions.

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Focuses on how face to face interactions create the social world.

Postmodernism ● A condition characterized by a questioning of the notion of progress and history, the replacement of narrative within pastiche, and multiple, perhaps even conflicting, identities resulting from disjointed affiliations. ● Shared meanings have eroded, no longer one version of history that is correct as everything is interpretable. ● Red light may have multiple meanings to different groups of individuals in society. 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 rules or informal norms of behavior associated with that entity. Midrange Theory (Robert Merton) ● A theory that attempts to predict how certain social institutions tend to function. ● Generates falsifiable hypotheses - predictions that can be tested by analyzing the real world. Sociology and its cousins Microsociology: A branch of sociology that seeks to understand local interactional contexts; its methods of choice are ethnographic, generally including participant observation and in-depth interviews. Macrosociology: A branch of sociology generally concerned with social dynamics at a higher level of analysis - thatis, across the breadth of a society....