3. What is Sociology?
My favorite definitions: (these mean basically the same thing)
1. The scientific study of inter-actions and
relations among human beings
2. The study of how people influence one
another and the (intended and unintended)
consequences of these influences.
4. What explains the rise of Nazism?
"Resistance would have been another form of suicide.”
5. What causes violence and
competition? Cooperation?
• Why did the British and Germans stop shooting at each other
during WWI? More importantly, why would they start fighting
in the first place?!
• The Christmas Truce of 1914 was a series of widespread
unofficial ceasefires that took place along the Western Front
around Christmas 1914, during the First World War.
• British and German mingled, held meetings, joint burial
ceremonies, sang carols, and even played games of soccer.
6. What is Sociology?
• Sociology is interested in the PATTERNS that people
generate as they interact, influence, and relate to
one another.
• In short:
THINK PATTERNS, NOT PEOPLE!
(at least not individual people)
8. Individual and Society
• How do sociologists view the relationship between the
individual and society?
• We are always influencing and being influenced by others…
‘Society’, or
Individual Other Individuals
9. Individual and Society
• Individualist bias: the focus on individuality
also explains our tendency to think that our
own situations and circumstances are
entirely a result of our own behavior.
10. Individual and Society
• In this class, we will emphasize that SOCIETY
AND THE INDIVIDUAL ARE INSEPARABLE, like
two sides of the same coin.
11. “Men make their own history,
but they do not make it as they
please; they do not make it
under self-selected
circumstances, but under
circumstances existing already,
given and transmitted from the
past. The tradition of all dead
generations weighs like a
nightmare on the brains of the
(1818-1883)
living.”
Karl Marx
12. The Sociological Imagination
“Neither the life of an individual
nor the history of a society can
be understood without
understanding both.”
C. Wright Mills
(1916-1962)
13. The Sociological Imagination
• To understand one side, you have to understand the
other.
Man/Woman Society
Biography History
Self World
Personal “Troubles of Public “Issues of
milieu” social structure”
• The ability to understand history and its relation to
biography is called the sociological imagination by C.
Wright Mills.
15. Influence and Responsibility
• We tend to think that because individuals have free will,
whatever happens to an individual is exclusively the
responsibility of that individual. In our culture we focus on
what an individual does as opposed to what is done to an
individual.
• We think individuals (at least adult humans) are self-
determined. This is our common-sense notion of ‘personal
responsibility.’ People are responsible for their own
actions and decisions in life.
16. Influence and Responsibility
• Basically, we tend to believe that you get what
you earn.
• Sociologists do NOT deny this perspective,
but find it limited for our purposes.
• We aren’t in the business of giving advice
(even if its very good advice).
17. The influence of social context
• Individuals are often
influenced by
circumstances over which
s/he has little control
• Examples: your native
language, your religious
and political beliefs, your
parent’s income, etc.
Starvation in East Africa, 2011
18. The influence of social context
• Sometimes, interacting
individuals create
collective circumstances
that everyone is Traffic jam
subjected to, but no one
intends!
• Example: traffic jams Unintended
Consequences
Intended
actions
of Actions
19. The influence of social context
• Some attributes are valued more highly
in some contexts or societies than in
others. Individuals can adapt to these
realities, but cannot control them.
• Example: standards of beauty.
20. Social context and
decision-making
• Most human behaviors are not ‘decisions’; rather
we have varying degrees of susceptibility to
influence from others.
• People are responsible for their own actions and
decisions in life, but sociologists will still examine
those factors that make some decisions and
actions more likely than others.
• Example: Smoking Crack
21. Social context and
decision-making
Example: Standing Ovations.
• We are socialized to pay attention to how
others respond to situations.
• Our decision to stand is often not based on
how we personally feel, but what other
people are doing.
22. The Influence of Language
• “Languages differ essentially in what they
must convey and not in what they may
convey.”- Roman Jakobson (linguist)
– It’s possible to express any idea in any language,
but different languages oblige or force us to pay
more attention to some things than others.
23. The Influence of Language
Examples:
1. English requires me to
specify when I met my
neighbor in the past, present
or future. But Chinese does
not oblige its speakers to
specify the exact time, or to
distinguish between past or
present or future actions!
24. The Influence of Language
Examples:
2. The Matses in the Amazon have
the most elaborate grammar of all
known languages:
• It has 3 separate past tenses,
distinguishing between the Matsés people
recent past (up to a month),
distant past (a month to 50
years), and remote past (over 50
years).
25. The Influence of Language
• It also has strict rules for
determining “evidentiality”- There
are separate verbal forms
depending on whether you are
reporting Direct experience,
Something inferred, Conjecture, or
Hearsay. Matsés people
• If you ask a Matses man how is wife
is doing, he might respond daed
ikosh “two there. Were [directly
experienced recently]” !!
27. I. Functionalist Theory
1. Consensus about values and norms
makes society possible
2. Society is a whole made of
integrated parts that work (i.e.
function) together.
– A change to one part of society will
affect all others.
– All parts are interdependent.
– Society is ‘more than the sum of its
parts.’
3. Society seeks stability and tends to
avoid conflict
28. II. Conflict Theory
1. In every society, there are disagreements and
differences (i.e. lack of consensus) about values and
norms
2. Society is made up of subgroups (aka ‘classes’) that
are in ruthless competition for scarce resources
3. Society is not harmonious: conflict is normal in a
society.
– The conflict can be latent (i.e. conflict of interests) or
manifest (i.e. real conflict such as violence).
29. III. Symbolic Interactionism
• Focuses on how people
interpret and ascribe meaning
to other peoples behavior and
the larger world.
• Emphasizes people’s
perceptions of reality.
• Micro-sociology: Focuses on
small encounters
30. What is Social REALITY?
• Thomas theorem: "If people define
situations as real, they are real in their
consequences“
• To understand human inter-actions and
relations, sociologists have to
understand both reality, and perceived
reality.
W. I. Thomas
1863 - 1947
31. Which theory is correct?
• Society is like this cube: we
can see it from multiple
perspectives!
• The paradigms are just lenses
through which we view society.
Hinweis der Redaktion
Here are some definitions found in textbooks on sociology [You do not need to remember these!]:“Scientific study of ‘Society’” [But what is ‘society’?]“systematic study of human groups.”“scientific study of human groups”“scientific study of human behavior, social groups, and society”“systematic study of society and human behavior.”
In his book Defying Hitler, the German writer Sebastian Haffner recalls how he, an enemy of the Nazis, had been coerced into taking part in their activities. In the mid-1930s, when the Nazi army of intimidation, the brownshirts, marched through the streets, they beat anyone who failed to salute. Defiant in his own small way, Haffner often ducked into doorways. But when he and other students of law were ordered into an indoctrination camp, he found himself wearing a brown shirt and joining the very same marches."Resistance would have been another form of suicide," Haffner wrote, and the oppressed, unwittingly, became oppressor: When we came through villages, the people on either side of the road raised their arms to greet the flag, or disappeared quickly in some house entrance. They did this because they had learned that if they did not, we, that is I, would beat them up. It made not the slightest difference that I—and, no doubt others among us—ourselves fled into entryways to avoid these flags, when we were not marching behind them. Now we were the ones embodying an implicit threat of violence against all bystanders. They greeted the flag or disappeared.Source:Buchanan, Mark (2008-12-05). The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You (p. 2). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Christmas truce was a series of widespread unofficial ceasefires that took place along the Western Front around Christmas 1914, during the First World War. Through the week leading up to Christmas, parties of German and British soldiers began to exchange seasonal greetings and songs between their trenches; on occasion, the tension was reduced to the point that individuals would walk across to talk to their opposite numbers bearing gifts. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, many soldiers from both sides – as well as, to a lesser degree, from French units – independently ventured into "no man's land", where they mingled, exchanging food and souvenirs. As well as joint burial ceremonies, several meetings ended in carol-singing. Troops from both sides were also friendly enough to play games of football with one another.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truceSee also Buchanan’s The Social Atom, and Jeremy Rifkin’s Empathic Civilization.
Here I am using these words interchangeably: ‘Interactions’ = ‘Influences’ = ‘relationships’ What do I mean by pattern? Basically its ordinary, everyday meaning, but to be more precise, a pattern is anything we observe more than once, i.e. which repeats; it is any observation that can be generalized to more than one example. To be able to see a pattern you have to use ‘abstraction’ (which from its Latin root means to ‘cut out’)- you have to select out the important aspects of some person, situation, relation (or whatever) and filter out what isn’t important. Basically, to see a pattern you have to be able to see commonalities among different things. There are all sorts of patterns, across space, across time, across individuals, across nations, across groups, etc. By ‘pattern’, I am also implying that in sociology we are by definition interested numbers larger than one.
There are many different ways of categorizing and thinking about human influence. Here are just a few categories we might use: Direct vs indirect (or ‘mediated’), Conscious vs unconscious, Intended vs Unintended, Reciprocated vs non-reciprocated (symmetrical or asymmetrical), Individual to group; group to individual, Familial vs non-familial, (or friendly vs indifferent or hostile), Micro (small groups) vs macro (larger) patterns and influences, Past, present, future… Can you think of any more?
Emile Durkheim said that individualism is (ironically) a social value. He described this focus on individualism as the ‘cult of the individual’.
In a standing ovation, people are more likely to stand when they see others stand. Once everyone is standing, it is an act of social defiance or resistance to stay seated. One ‘feels’ like one should stand. Our behavior is influenced and partly determined by watching the behavior of others.
As the name suggests, symbolic interactionists are primarily interested in human interaction at the micro-level (i.e. pertaining to a few individuals in small groups). Humans interact differently from other animals in that humans interact with one another through the use of symbolic language.
There are two levels here to evaluate: what is going on, and what people think is going on; the facts, and perceived facts; the world of physical, material objects and the world of meanings ascribed to these objects. The relation between these two levels is often complicated. For example, a sufficient sociological explanation would not only explain to people that what they believe to be true is in fact only partially true or false, but also, to explain what about the real world leads to their being deluded about it in the first place!