Transcript Chapter 1
Fourth Edition
ANTHONY GIDDENS ● MITCHELL DUNEIER ● RICHARD P.APPELBAUM ● DEBORAH CARR
Chapter 1: Sociology: Theory and Method
Bullying as Social Phenomenon
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What Is Sociology?
• • • Sociology is the scientific study of human social life, groups, and societies.
Sociology shows us that aspects of life we consider natural or take for granted are influenced by social and historical forces.
Sociology is a discipline that insists on studying people within their social context. 3
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The Sociological Imagination
• C. Wright Mills (1959) coined this phrase, which explained the need to move from away from viewing problems as personal troubles and toward recognizing them as public issues.
• An important part of learning to think sociologically is to gain and utilize the sociological imagination.
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Social Structure
• • Goal of sociology: to understand the connections between what society makes of us and what we make of ourselves.
What we do both gives shape to and is shaped by society. That is, we structure society and at the same time are structured by society.
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Social Structure
• • Our lives are structured, or patterned, in particular, non-random, ways.
Social structures are dynamic. Societies are always in the process of
structuration,
which means they are constantly being affected by human actions.
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A Global Perspective
• • • As sociologists, we must now be global observers.
Globalization
affects all of us every day, both as individuals and as members of nation-states, economic markets, and more.
A global view offers insight into worldwide connections, as well as a point of comparison.
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Social Change
• Sociology was born during the upheaval that accompanied industrialization in Western Europe.
• Many early social thinkers dedicated their research to better understanding the massive social change they witnessed.
• The discipline developed with an eye toward understanding history and change.
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Social Change Today
• Social change continues: for most of human history, the vast majority of people lived in small, isolated groups. By 2050, nearly 70 percent of all people will live in urban settings.
• The development of technology and communications capabilities continue to alter the way humans live.
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Social Theory
• • • Social theories do not intend to explain what is happening but why it happens.
There are many theoretical approaches in sociology: sociologists do not all agree on any given topic, but theories must be based on facts.
Research and theory cannot, and should not, be separate enterprises.
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Early Theorists
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Auguste Comte
– French philosopher who is credited with giving the discipline its name.
– Believed in creating a science of the social world to be used for improving people’s lives.
– Saw sociology as the “last science” to be developed.
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Auguste Comte (1798–1857) © 2011 W. W. Norton Co., Inc.
Early Theorists
•
Émile Durkheim
– Drawing on Comte’s notion of sociology as a science, Durkheim set out to study
social facts.
These are those aspects of social life— for example, religion, the economy—that shape individual action.
– He saw society as a body that needed all its parts to function in harmony.
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Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) © 2011 W. W. Norton Co., Inc.
Early Theorists
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Émile Durkheim
– Was interested in what societies needed to function smoothly.
– Studied
social constraint
, social isolation, and
anomie
(normlessness) in relation to social change and human behaviors such as suicide.
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Early Theorists
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Karl Marx
– In seeking to explain social change Marx looked primarily to the economy.
– Developed what is called a
materialist conception of history,
whereby the economy, and not values, culture, or ideas, drives social change.
– Focused primarily on the ills of
capitalism
and its class system.
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Karl Marx (1818–1883) © 2011 W. W. Norton Co., Inc.
Early Theorists
•
Karl Marx
– Predicted that ultimately the class conflict built in to the capitalist system would lead to its demise and that a new, classless society would emerge.
– Marx’s ideas have had a great deal of influence, both within sociology and in world political history.
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Early Theorists
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Max Weber
– Though he, too, was interested in explaining social change, Weber saw power not only in the economy but also in ideas and values.
– In particular ,Weber argued that Christianity, in the form of the Protestant work ethic, played an important role in the development of capitalism.
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Max Weber (1864–1920) © 2011 W. W. Norton Co., Inc.
Early Theorists
•
Max Weber
– Was also interested in the increasing rationality of the social world and studied the structure of bureaucracies.
– Studied many other aspects of social life, including religion, law, and power, and was always attuned to the ways people make meaning out of life.
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Neglected Founders
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Harriet Martineau
was a scholar and activist who introduced sociology to England. Among other things, she insisted on the significance of studying domestic life to better understand a society.
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Neglected Founders
•
W. E. B. Du Bois
was the first significant African American sociologist. – Key conceptual contributions:
double consciousness
and
the color line
– Du Bois was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
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Contemporary Theory
•
Symbolic Interactionism
– All social interaction involves an exchange of information via symbols.
– This exchange may be through language, but may also be nonverbal or may be conveyed by setting.
– We learn about ourselves and the world through this meaningful interaction.
– Key figure: George Herbert Mead
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Contemporary Theory
•
Functionalism
– This perspective is derived from Comte and Durkheim and emphasizes large-scale social institutions and processes.
– Functionalist approaches focus on understanding the role or contribution of some event, activity, or institution to the workings of society as a whole.
– Modern figures: Talcott Parsons, Robert K. Merton
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Contemporary Theory
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Marxism
– Those working under this approach derive their approach from Marx, most significantly as regards concerns about power, conflict, and ideology.
– This perspective is most commonly applied to capitalism and economic systems.
– Marxist thinkers tend to take on an activist stance in addition to a scholarly one.
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Contemporary Theory
•
Feminist theory
begins from the perspective that women’s lives and experiences have largely been ignored and must be brought to the forefront of sociological thinking.
•
Postmodern theory
takes the position that social life is not based on any kind of linear history, but is rather always in flux. The media is often seen as a key player in how people understand their lives.
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Levels of Analysis – Microsociology
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Microsociology
is the study of everyday, face-to-face interaction. Symbolic interactionists study primarily at this level of analysis.
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Levels of Analysis – Macrosociology
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Macrosociology
is the analysis of large social systems and institutions. Functionalists and Marxists fall largely under this heading.
• In practice, these two levels of analysis work best when applied in concert.
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Research Methods: Questions
• • Sociology, as a social science, must take an empirical approach to answering questions about the world.
Sociologists ask four primary types of questions: factual, comparative, developmental, and theoretical.
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Activity: Writing Sociological Questions
Table 1.2 A Sociologist’s Line of Questioning © 2011 W. W. Norton Co., Inc.
Research Methods: Seven Steps
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2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Define the research problem.
Review the evidence—do a literature review.
Make the problem precise—specify your hypothesis.
Work out a research design.
Carry out the research—collect your data.
Interpret the results—analyze your data.
Report the findings—publish or present them.
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Research Methods
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Ethnography
, or participant observation, is a method frequently used to study people in their own settings in a deep, thorough fashion.
Surveys
are a more structured research method where specific, carefully constructed questions are asked to specific, carefully selected individuals.
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Research Methods
• • Sociologists occasionally use
experimental designs
when highly controlled conditions are necessary to determine causation.
Comparative
and
historical sociology
are approaches that allow researchers to understand variations in social phenomena across both time and space.
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Research Methods: Ethics
• • • Because sociologists are dealing with real people in their everyday lives, we must be very cautious in our work.
All research that directly involves human subjects must first be approved by an
Institutional Review Board (IRB).
Study participants must give
informed consent
prior to agreeing to participate and must be
debriefed
afterward.
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How Sociology Affects our Lives
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Enhances our awareness of cultural differences and of social structures Improves our ability to assess the success/failure of public initiatives and policies Offers us knowledge and enlightenment we can use to direct our choices Teaches us analytical skills that are important in many future careers
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Clicker Questions
1. What is sociology?
• • • • a. Sociology is the study of individuals.
b. Sociology is the study of personality, cognition, emotion, and motivation.
c. Sociology is the study of human social life, groups, and societies. d. Sociology is the study of the Social Reform movement. 38
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Clicker Questions
2. What is the sociological imagination?
a. It is the ability to “think ourselves away” from the familiar routines of our daily lives in order to look at them anew.
b. It is the study of the way private troubles aggregate into public issues.
c. It is the worldview of Karl Marx.
d. It is the application of Liberal and Socialist political values to social scientific inquiry.
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Clicker Questions
3. The social contexts of our lives consist of more than just random assortments of actions or events; there are regularities in the ways we behave and in the relationships we have with one another. This patterned nature of social contexts is what sociologists refer to as which one of the following?
a. structuration b. functionalism c. macrosociology d. social structure 40
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Clicker Questions
4. What is microsociology?
a. the study of the internal dynamics of individual consciousness b. the study of face-to-face interaction in everyday life c. the study of children in social life d. another name for the sociology of computing 41
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Clicker Questions
5. Sociology can be considered a science because it does which of the following?
a. It uses systematic methods of empirical investigation to study a phenomenon.
b. It uses haphazard methods of theoretical thinking.
c. It involves the making of recommendations to policy makers.
d. It is conducted by people with advanced professional degrees wearing white lab coats.
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Clicker Questions
6. Which of the following best reflects the definition of ethnography?
a. the study of ethnicity, race, and urban social relations in multicultural contexts b. questions that relate to the knowledge produced when sociologists link a current phenomenon to historical forces c. the study of something with a historical basis (e.g., the Russian Revolution) and involving the analysis of documentary sources such as government statistics, newspapers, and so on, to explain a type of human behavior during a certain time in history d. a way of studying people firsthand using participant observation or interviewing 43
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Clicker Questions
7. What role do theoretical questions play in sociological research?
a. They gather factual information and observations.
b. They seek to explain specific observations.
c. They make moral judgments about the collected facts.
d. They draw comparisons between societies. 44
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