Introduction to sociology

Mrs. Kruttika Bhat
Asst. Prof
KJSCCETR

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.
03/28/15 Kruttika Bhat, Asst. Prof 2

Definition - The systematic study
of human society and social
interaction.

A society is a large social grouping that shares the same
geographical territory and is subject to the same political
authority and dominant cultural expectations.

Sociological Imagination
 The ability to see the
relationship between
individual
experiences and the
larger society.
Private v. Public Issues

The Sociological Imagination
 C. Wright Mills (1959) coined this phrase,
which explained the need to move 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

 What Mills recognized was
that we have to step out of our
own life experience to truly
understand the social world.
He said that we must
understand history, biography,
and society before delving into
any particular social problem
or issue, as context is critical
to deeper understanding.

 Additionally, Mills emphasized the idea that
as sociologists, we must investigate topics
that might at first glance seem to be
individual concerns. For e.g.sociologists can
study topics like unemployment. We don’t
study one man or woman who loses a job,
but unemployment more broadly as a social
concern. To return to a topic like autism: It
does not affect only individual children, or
even individual families, but entire
communities, and should be studied in that
light.

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.
 The relationship between the individual and
society is a crucial one for any student of
sociology to consider. Certainly, individuals
have an effect on societies, but as sociologists,
we understand that societies also have
significant effects—some positive, some
negative—on individuals. In fact, in this
relationship society is typically the stronger
partner.

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
 It is also important to understand that the effects of society are not random,
but patterned—structured. Our social lives, in fact, can be found to have
many, many patterns based on social structures such as gender, social
class, and race. What is also true is that even with the power society
wields, it is not a static—stuck in place—reality. Societies are constantly in
flux, as they are made up of individuals and social groups whose actions
have meaningful impacts. The word sociologists use to describe this is

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.

 Once we have a sense of what society is and how
we, as individuals, relate to it, it’s also important
to think about the scope of sociology. In recent
years it has become increasingly important for us
to take a global perspective on the social world.
You’ve all heard the term globalization, and as
sociologists we need to think of this as it relates
to many, many social phenomena.

 Your textbook, for example, talks about the
sociology of coffee, which illustrates, not
only the global economics of a small brown
bean, but also the history of global
colonialism and its destructive force.
Students like you have grown up in a
largely globalized world, and as
sociologists you will need to systematically
consider social issues from a global
perspective

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

 Sociology is a discipline that was born of dual
revolutions: the French and the industrial. The
French Revolution was part of a major shift in
ideas, including the rise of secular thinking,
while the Industrial Revolution was a shift in
the economy. The culmination of both was
also a seismic change in political systems.
Those thinkers sociologists consider “the
classics”—Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and
Max Weber—spent much of their intellectual
energy attempting to understand these
changes. We’ll come back to them in just a
moment.

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.

 Sociologists continue to investigate
social change today. Our “world
system” is one that keeps changing:
Developing nations attempt to reduce
their debt, leaders of various sorts
come and go, young people change
their means of communication,
diseases reach epidemic proportions.
As sociologists, we want to
understand, not only what is
happening, but also why.

Social Theory
 Social theories intend to explain, not
what is happening, but why.
 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.

 Understanding social theory is an important part
of an introduction to the field of sociology.
Though of course we need to begin by knowing
what is happening regarding any particular
social issue or event, we also want to
understand why. In other words, we not only
collect facts, but we analyze them to gain a
deeper understanding of the roots of some
social problem or the causes of some event.
Thus, although we often talk about research
and theory as separate aspects of sociology, in
reality, the two have to be considered side-by-
side in practice.

 Auguste Comte ( 1798– 1857)
Essentials Of Sociology, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company

Early Theorists
 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.
 .

 Comte is often referred to as the
“father of sociology,” although that
seems to be mostly related to his
naming of the discipline and his
insistence on a scientific approach
rather than his empirical
contributions. Comte was primarily
a social policy maker, and as such
it makes sense that he saw
sociology as a tool for improving

Émile Durkheim ( 1858– 1917)

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.
Saw society as a body that needed
all its parts to function in harmony.

 Durkheim was, like Comte, a
Frenchman who believed very much in
the notion of a science of society.
Durkheim elected to pursue this
approach by using an analogy of
society to the human body, and aspects
of society like religion, the economy,
politics—these are often referred to as
social institutions—as parts of the body.
He saw that these various social organs
or parts had an effect on people, and
also on society as a whole.03/28/15 Kruttika Bhat, Asst. Prof 25

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.

 Durkheim wanted to understand what
society needed to function
harmoniously, and additionally wanted
to be able to diagnose the problem
when a social issue arose. One
important example was Durkheim’s
study of suicide, which is typically
understood to be a personal problem,
but which Durkheim approached
sociologically.

 What he found was that people with either
too much or too little connection to society
or who, for whatever reason, felt a sense of
normlessness (anomie) were more likely to
commit suicide, as were people of certain
religious traditions or those who lived under
particular types of political systems. In all
this, Durkheim was also busy trying to
understand the way the changes wrought
by industrialization were affecting
individuals and societies. Durkheim’s
theoretical perspective is often described
as consensus theory

Karl Marx ( 1818– 1883)

Early Theorists
 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.03/28/15 Kruttika Bhat, Asst. Prof 30

 Marx took a very different approach to
understanding social change. Unlike Durkheim, Marx
was never actually a professional sociologist. His
training was largely in philosophy and economics,
and his career was largely as a politically active
journalist who found himself exiled from his native
Germany

 Marx eventually settled in England,
where he became increasingly focused
on the lives of urban laborers in the
expanding factory system. He then
spent much of his career describing in
exquisite detail the workings of the
capitalist system and the exploitation it
wreaked on workers. He juxtaposed the
wealth and power of the bourgeoisie
(the capitalists) with the poverty and
servile nature of the proletariat (the
workers).03/28/15 Kruttika Bhat, Asst. Prof 32

 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.

 What Marx saw was an inevitable revolution
where the proletariat would rise up and
overthrow the bourgeousie. What followed would
be a new kind of society where no single, small
class would control all the resources. As you are
likely aware, for much of the second half of the
twentieth-century, an ideological Cold War was
waged between democratic, capitalist countries
(mostly in the West) and those that claimed
communist or socialist forms of organization
(mostly in the East). These communist and
socialist regimes claimed a Marxist ideology, but
in practice they deviated in significant ways from
Marx’s own ideals.03/28/15 Kruttika Bhat, Asst. Prof 34

Max Weber ( 1864– 1920)

Early Theorists
 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

 Weber is said to have been arguing with the
ghost of Marx in much of his work. While he
surely agreed with Marx that changes in the
economy—namely industrialization—played a
critical role in the broader shifts taking place in
society, Weber also emphasized the importance
of culture and ideas

 In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism, Weber put forward a
now-famous thesis wherein certain
aspects of Calvinist theology had an
affinity with certain aspects of early
capitalism. This was one example of
how culture (in this case, Protestant
Christianity) could play an important
role in the development of a major
social system (capitalism).

 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.
 Like Marx, Weber was not strictly a sociologist.
He studied religion, law, and power and in
innovative ways. For instance, Weber wrote a
massive comparative study of world religions
that continues to be important in religious
studies today, and which offered an excellent
example of comparative research methods for
sociologists.

 Weber was also interested in politics and
science and wrote on many more topics as
well. A final thing that set Weber apart from
the other early theorists was his interest in
how individuals make meaning out of their
lives. Though he was clearly focused in
many ways on large-scale social institutions
like religion and bureaucracy, he also
wanted to understand how the changes in
these aspects of the social institutions
affected individuals and how they
themselves would understand their lives.

Harriet Martineau ( 1802– 1876)

Neglected Founders
 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
 Martineau was a very important figure for
several reasons, not least of which is that
she was a prominent female scholar in an
era where she was very much the
exception.

 Martineau brought sociology from France and
Germany to England, when she translated
Comte’s work. Among her contributions was
the idea that sociologists must not only study
important institutions in the public sphere—
the economy, religion, politics—but must also
look to the private sphere and examine
families, children and the lives of women.
Martineau was also a strong proponent of
both women’s rights and the emancipation of
slaves.

W. E. B. Du Bois ( 1868– 1963)

Neglected Founders
 W.E.B. Du Bois was the first significant
African American sociologist. He made
many contributions to the field, including
the notion of the “double consciousness”
experienced by all American blacks. Du
Bois was also a founding member of the
National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP).

 Du Bois’s work has been profoundly
important, not only in the sense of
emphasizing the need to examine the history
of groups in society, but also in study of the
development of identity. The now-famous
idea of “double consciousness” is intended to
express the way in which all African
Americans must see themselves, not only
through their own eyes, but also through the
eyes of a society that degrades them.

 His claim was that this necessarily led
to the construction of a negative self-
identity for those in the black
community. What he wanted to bring
to the fore was the reality that
although slavery was over, the “color
line” remained a major social problem
in the United States. He remained
involved in issues of race relations for
most of his life, but ultimately, in a
state of disenchantment, he left the
country for Ghana.03/28/15 Kruttika Bhat, Asst. Prof 47

Contemporary Theory
 Symbolic Interactionism
All social interaction involves an exchange
of information via symbols.
This exchange may be through language,
but may also be non-verbal or may be
conveyed by setting.
We learn about ourselves and the world
through this meaningful interaction.
Key figure: George Herbert Mead

Contd…..
 Mead was a pragmatist philosopher who was
a key figure in developing the symbolic
interactionist perspective. Mead’s interest was
largely in the development of the self, and he
showed that language, along with other
exchanges of symbols, was paramount in this
process. More broadly, symbolic
interactionists study society by examining all
aspects of interaction and are often able to
learn a tremendous amount about culture,
power, and relationships in doing so.

Contemporary Theory
 Functionalism
This perspective is derived from Comte
and Durkheim and emphasizes large-scale
social institutions and processes.
Functionalist approaches are 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

 At its core, the functionalist perspective
is one that seeks to understand society
as a unified social system in which
different social institutions and events
serve particular functions, or roles, in
maintaining societal harmony.
Functionalism finds its earliest
proponents in figures like Durkheim, but
it was renewed in the mid-1950s under
the leadership of Talcott Parsons and
Robert Merton.

 Though there is, today, concern
among some sociologists about
an ideological conservatism in
functionalist thought, systems
theory (derived from Parsons),
and middle-range theories
(derived from Merton) have
remained influential perspectives.

Contemporary Theory

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.03/28/15 Kruttika Bhat, Asst. Prof 53

 In many ways, Marxism is exactly what it sounds
like: an approach that is based on the ideas of
Karl Marx. Largely that is the case, but given the
wide array of Marxist approaches, it is important
to recognize that they are not all speaking for
Marx. Marxism as a theoretical perspective is
largely focused on the economy, on the power
structures that result from particular economic
systems, on the ideologies used to reproduce
(maintain) these systems, and on the conflicts
that arise and are built in to these systems.
Those that utilize Marxist approaches are often
what we might call scholar-activists, who believe
that part of their work in examining economic
systems is to expose and work to challenge
inequality and exploitation.

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.

 For most of the history of sociology, as with most
academic disciplines, the voices of women have
been marginalized. Beginning with figures like
Harriet Martineau, however, there has been an
ever-growing movement toward the inclusion of
women, not only as scholars, but also as
subjects worthy of investigation. Today, feminist
theory has grown to the point of being a full-
fledged academic discipline, usually called
Women’s Studies, and within sociology it is an
important and expanding field of both theory and
practice.
 .

 Postmodern theorists make the claim that
the grand historical narratives of, for
example, “modernity” and “industrialization”
are no longer relevant or useful in people’s
lives. Postmodernists argue that we are now
in a new period in which there are a
multitude of equally relevant (or irrelevant)
stories, and that we are all subject to the
many voices in the media, which tell us
about the social world without the anchor of
context or history. In this new social reality,
there are no dominant stories, only more or
less mobilized stories

Levels of Analysis
 Microsociology is the study of everyday,
face-to-face interaction. Symbolic
interactionists study primarily at this level of
analysis.
 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

 When we begin to think about the
connections between theory and research,
one of the first things to consider is the level
of analysis. Some theories, like symbolic
interactionism, are focused on small events:
conversations between individuals in
particular social roles, for example. Others,
like functionalism, have a broader focus on
entire social institutions: the role
fundamentalist religions play in modern
democratic societies.

 The first of these is what we call
microsociology, and the second is called
macrosociology. Though the two are different
in important ways, in practice they inform
each other, and in the best research both are
addressed. An excellent example of both
levels of analysis being investigated can be
found in Elijah Anderson’s The Code of the
Street, where he examined the broad problem
of inner-city violence by looking at interactions
in one neighborhood and simultaneously
considering the massive loss of
manufacturing jobs from the 1980s forward.

 As sociologists there are innumerable
questions we may have about the social
world, but we must ask them in particular,
agreed-upon ways in order to work within a
scientific framework. Our questions must be
ones that we can answer empirically; we must
go out and collect data, not just base our
answers on our own experiences and
philosophies. The four basic types of
questions are factual: what happened or is
happening; comparative: whether this
happens everywhere; developmental: whether
this has always happened; and theoretical:
why this is happening.

A Sociologist’s Line of Questioning

Theoretical Approaches in Sociology

New York City’s Times Square serves as the backdrop for live
television programs such as ESPN’s Sports Center and Dick
Clark’s New Year’s Rock in’ Eve with Ryan Sea crest.

In Philip Zimbardo’s make- believe jail, tension
between
students playing guards and students playing
prisoners
became dangerously real

Introduction to sociology

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