An Introduction to the Introduction to Sociology
Chapter Study Outline
The Sociological Imagination
- Sociology is the study of human society.
- In the mid-twentieth century, sociologist C. Wright Mills argued
that we need to use our sociological imagination to think critically about the
social world around us.
- 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 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 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
- 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 to English, was one of the earliest feminist social scientists.
- Historical materialism, a theory developed by Karl Marx,
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.
- Emile Durkheim, 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.
- Georg Simmel established what is today referred to as formal
sociology, or a sociology of pure numbers.
- The Chicago School focused on empirical research
with the belief that people's behaviors and personalities are shaped by their
social and physical environments.
- 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. History and anthropology tend to focus more on particular
circumstances, though in cultural anthropology in particular, there can 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's 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.