SOCIOLOGY_AND_Development.pptx

1.Education Raises the
Standard of living
Sociological analysis allows us to gain an in-
depth understanding of careers, as a fundamental
path of modern life and occupational niches, and
the development of new knowledge.
Professional training constitutes one of the
most important chores for society and has been a
leading factor for the changes seen in the XXth
century.
Sociological perspectives allow us to discover
in social life: structures, types of players,
behavioral traits, changes and acceptable values.

The importance of sociology resides in the elements for
interpretation that provide us the understanding of
professional career, in which we obtain our education, as a
social opening that also means responsibility and
commitment to the society in our surroundings.
Professional knowledge comes from the sciences for social
development associated with career as of the XIXth century.
It has emerged as a university institution with all its
associated development for almost a thousand years.
Types of Professional Institutions are analyzed to
understand how a professional is formed and the social
consequences that ensue. The implementation of professions
in México has been analyzed since the XVIth century,
seeking to understand its emergence and development, and
its social and economic significance up to the present.

The objective of this lecture is to explain the
function and place that the student will occupy
with his/her professional job in our
contemporary society.
Focusing on sociology means to analyze the
way in which sociology approaches the analysis
and reflexive thinking about society.
Sociological thinking allows the individual to
observe society through questions such as:
sociological structure, culture, social changes,
accepted values; and it provides the possibility
to adopt a perspective of or approach to the
desired or idealized society.

1.1 SOCIOLOGICAL THOUGHT
Humans think of themselves as being configured
in society by means of social relations established
among them, not only determined by social life but
by being capable of constructing and changing the
society to which they conform and constitute.
Individual integration into society is made
possible thanks to family structure.
“Sociological imaginary” according to C. Wright
Mills (1974) is the capacity to understand personal
and social history as components of one and the
same process. Biography refers to one person, who
is social by definition, and history refers to what has
been lived by others.

1.2 SOCIOLOGICAL TROUBLES
A ND QUESTIONS
Sociology is a scientific discipline because it is
capable of explaining social reality by defining
problems and concerns for research and to set
proposals for change.
Individuals do not just live, but provide meaning
to their life, provide meaning to that for which they
live, and provide meaning to the society in which
they live. The direction that life takes is oriented by
social values.
Each society sets it own values in agreement with
its historic development and the dynamics and
interactions with other societies.

1.3 SOCIOLOGICAL METHODOLOGY
In order to understand social problems, it is
essential to explain the theory of sociology. It is a
rich body of concepts, principles, fundamentals,
classifications, typologies, and other products that
allow for the search of the possible causes and
conditions that favor such phenomena.
The search for causes and conditions permits us to
understand problems from a scientific perspective.
The theory provides possible lines of explanations
to understand social phenomena.
Hypotheses are suppositions founded on theoretical
explanations, preliminary studies, and logical and
coherent conceptual schemes. Their objective is to
be proven; it demands an explanation of reality.

1.4 THEORY OF SOCIOLOGY
Sociologists’ work consists of studying the individual in
society, and because they form part of their study subject
matter; they get involved in the explanations they derive.
Explanations of phenomena in society are limited by the
developmental level of scientific knowledge at a specific
historical moment.
Social problems do not exist without reason, but rather
must be considered in relationship to the specific societal
set of values. That is, social circumstances are not
problems until considered so and conceptualized by the
individuals who want to study them.
Marxist theory fought for a society in which the
exploitation of humankind by humankind itself would
cease to exist.
Functionalist theory represents the possibility for further
development so that society benefits as a community.

FOUNDERS OF SOCIOLOGY
Auguste Comte was born in Montpellier,
France, the 19th of January,1798. He died
on September 5th of 1857 in Paris. From an
early age on, he showed a strong rejection
toward traditional Catholicism and
monarchy doctrines. He managed to get a
position as professor in mathematics at the
Polytechnic School in Paris by 1814, but by
1816 was kicked out of this center for
taking part in student revolts. During those
years, he became the personal secretary of
the theoretical sociologist Claude Henri de
Rouvroy, Count of Saint-Simon, whose
influence was to be to felt in some of
Comte’s work.

Èmile Durkheim (1858- 1917), was born in Epinal, France, in a
Jewish family. He is considered one of the French working on
social theory to pioneer and develop modern sociology. He
graduated from the Ècole Normale Supériure in Paris in 1882, and
later worked as a professor teaching law and philosophy. By 1887,
he started teaching sociology, first at the University of Bordeaux,
and later on at Paris. He used scientific methods to approach the
study of social groups, believing that individuals are the product of
complex social forces, which cannot be understood out of the social
context in which they live in.

Karl Marx (1818-1883), born in Trèveris,
Germany the 5th of May, 1818, studied at
the University of Bonn, Berlin, and Jena. He
published articles in the Rheinische Zeitung
(Renan Gacet) in Cologne by 1842, and later on became
chief of editors. In spite of his radical way of thought, he
cannot be considered a communist. His critiques on the
social and political environment spread through the daily
newspaper and caused the government authorities to
oppose him. He was forced to resign by 1843, and later
the newspaper was canceled, after which he moved to
Paris. His studies about philosophy, history, political
science, led him to adopt the philosophy of Friedrich
Engel. When they met in1844, they realized that they had
independently arrived at the same conclusions about the
nature of the revolution problems.

Max Weber (1864-1920) was born in
Erfurt, Germany, and studied at the
University of Heidelberg, Berlin and
Gottingen. He lettered in Berlin, and
taught economy at the University of
Freiburg (1894), Heidelberg (1897)
and Munich (1910). He was the
editor for years at the Archiv für
Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik,
a German publication on sociology.
Shortly before he died, he formed
part of the German delegation for
peace negotiations at Versailles and
also took part in the redaction
committee for the Weimar
Constitution.

Talcott Parsons (1902-1979) was born in
Colorado Springs, Colorado USA, and studied at
Amherst College, London School of Economics,
and the University of Heidelberg in Germany. By
1939, he lectured on sociology at Harvard
University, USA, and by 1944 received full
tenure. Only two years later, he would occupy
the presidency of the Department of Social
Relation at the same university.

Robert King Merton (1910 ) was born in
Philadelphia and received his PhD at Harvard
University in 1936. He became a professor at Tulane
University, lectured in sociology at Columbus
University, and formed part of the Bureau of
Applied Social Research at the latter university. He
proposed functional analysis based on the study of
society from a relative point of view. Opposed to
the “absolute” functionalism of Bronislaw
Malinowsky. Merton proved that it is excessive to
maintain that all cultural or social elements have a
function, and is therefore indispensable.

Borislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) was a British
anthropologist born in Krakow, Poland. He
completed his studies at the University of Krakow,
Leipzig and London. Malinowsky began teaching at
the University of London by 1924, and worked as an
invited professor at Yale University during 1939-
1942. His research about the formation of human
culture led him to conduct many studies in Africa,
Latin America, and some regions of the United
States. For him, the notion of context and
interdependence of social facts were fundamental
to the study of culture.

Antonio Caso (1883-1946) was a Mexican writer
and philosopher, one of the most renowned and
active figures of Mexican intellectuality for the first
half of the XXth century. Since the beginning, he
opposed the prevailing positivism (introduced by
Gabino Barrera), criticizing its limited concept on
experience. He introduced to his country the most
advanced philosophical tendencies, in particular the
ideas represented by Henry Bergson and Edmund
Husserl. Casos’s thought, distant from systematic
speech, was characterized by a pluralist character,
and the trust in insight as a way to access
knowledge. He was concerned with the idea of
“synthesis” as a philosophical knowledge goal, in
which it must convey morals, arts, sciences, and
culture.

2. Technical and scientific knowledge
and its relation to professional
knowledge

2.1 SCIENCE IN HISTORY
Science has its roots founded in:
1. Technical tradition, where skills and experience
are developed and transferred from generation to
generation, and in
2. Spiritual tradition, in which ideas and human
aspirations are cultivated and are communicated.
Such traditions existed well before human
civilization appeared.
Scientific explanations are characterized by
providing interpretations for natural and social
phenomena based on the objectivity and causation
of the principles of knowledge. To solve a problem,
you have to establish what causes it.

Aristotle was born in Étagère, Macedonia, in 384 BC, and
died in 322 BC in Calcis, Eubea. He separated for the first
time the philosophy disciplines of logic, ethics,
metaphysics, politics, and aesthetics. He studied and
systematized almost every branch of knowledge and
provided the first ordered relations for biology, sociology,
physics, and literary theory, according to a systematic and
analytical method. Aristotle is perhaps the most
important thinker to have influenced Western history and
intellectual development.
The role of philosophers was substituted during the
Middle Ages by that of the theologian or church’s doctor,
figure from the Hebrew tradition, well before the time of
Catholicism. They interpreted and applied the Holy
Scriptures to real problems. The Doctor was a wise man
who provided “erudite or learned” opinion.

2.2 THE INSTITUTION UNIVERSITY
Major changes occurred in medieval Europe from
the XIth through XVIIth centuries, leading to the
conviction that the world does not follow a
“necessary and immutable order.” The Crusades,
Eastern culture and America’s discovery, all of which
shook the Europeans and forced them to change
their conceptions on philosophy, religion, politics,
ethics, geography, astronomy, technologies, uses
and costumes; all of them led to a crisis. All of those
changes can be summarized and conceptualized by
Ptolemaic and Copernican thought.

THOLOMEUS AND THE COPERNICAN SYSTEMS
In the VIth century BC. the philosopher Thales of Millet,
introduced the concept of the earth being a flat disc
floating in the universal element water.
In the IIIrd century BC. the mathematician and
philosopher Pythagoras established a school of thinking
in which mathematics became the fundamental discipline
for all scientific research. Pythagorean’s thinking
postulated that the earth was a sphere that moved in a
circular orbit around a central fire.
In the IInd century BC during the Hellenist epoch,
following the death of Alexander the Great, the
mathematician, astronomer and geographer Eratosthenes
made an astoundingly precise measurement of the
earth’s dimensions; and the astronomer Aristarco of
Samos proposed a sun-centered planetary system,
although such system failed to gain acceptance in those
early times

The University appropriated from the Greeks,
Romans and Arabs their culture for constituting the
spirit of modernity for the future.
Middle Ages is a term used to refer to a period in
European history following the fall of the Roman
Empire in the Vth century and lasting through the
XVth century. It seems this term was used for the
first time by Flavio Biondo de Forli, a historian who
published in 1438 his work: “Historiarum ab
inclinatione romanorun imperii decades” (Decades
of history since the fall of the Roman Empire). The
term implies in its origin, a paralysis of social
progress, considering Middle Ages as a period of
cultural stagnation, chronologically set in between
the glory of the ancient classics and the
Renaissance. It is usually divided into three epochs:
early, high, and low Middle Ages.

SCHOLATICISM was a philosophy and theological
movement which tried to use natural human reasoning,
in particular the Aristotle philosophy and scientific
approach to analyze and understand natural and Christian
revelations. Main stream in schools and universities of
Europe during the Middle Ages, from the XIth through
the XVth centuries, its outmost ideal was to integrate a
systematic order for natural Greek and Roman
knowledge, and for the religious wisdom of Christianity.
Originally, scholastic referred to the teachers of the
monastic and cathedral schools of the Middle Ages, after
which the university began, but later applied to anyone
who taught philosophy or theology. The scholastics main
worries were about how to integrate the knowledge
already acquired, separating the reasoning character of
Greek philosophy from that of Christian revelation, rather
than being concerned with the creation of knowledge.

REFORMATION was a religious movement that
emerged in the XVIth century in the Catholic Church
environment, which led to the end of the Church’s
hegemony and the rise of distinctive churches
linked to Protestantism. The Reformation was
preceded by the culture of the Renaissance, and
was then followed by the French Revolution. The
Reformation completely altered the way of life of
Western Europe and initiated a modern age. It
began with Martin Luther challenging the Pope’s
authority; the circumstances that drove him to this
situation started much earlier and were conjured in
doctrinal complex elements, politics, economy, and
culture.

2.3 DEVELOPMENT OF THE UNIVERSITY
Up to the XVIIIth century, university institutions
were composed of five “faculties” or teaching
groups:
1. Faculty of Arts. It was equivalent to present day
high school, for debate of authors of the classics.
2. Faculty of Medicine. It was for the treatment of
illness, with hand books developed from Greek and
Roman tradition.
3. Faculty of Jurisprudence. To litigate juridical
agreements on canonical, Roman and “local” rights
and laws.
4. Faculty of Philosophy. It was about the
dissertation on the Greek and Roman classics,
fathers of the Catholic Church.
5. Faculty of Theology. It was to study issues about
the relations between God, Man, and Nature.

Universities have been described as conforming
to models, with other perspectives regarding
the development of the university institution.
There are four types of universities based on
their relation to knowledge itself and its
structural organization:
1. German Model. This is an institution
profoundly specialized with regard to the
subjects of knowledge, and is oriented towards
research. Academic labor is distributed among
the departments and research institutes
according to their theoretical discipline. Its
students are developed principally for research
in specific areas.

INTERNATIONAL TRANSFER OF UNIVERSTY
MODELS
The German university experience in the XIXth
century would provide the contemporary type
of university with modern ideas. It was home for
the most advanced science.
Japan would take from the German model that
most compatible with Japan’s society for those
times, that is: the notion of State control of the
University system within a disciplinary
authoritarian frame.

2.4 SCIENCE AND TECHNIQUE IN
MODERN WORLD
The work of Philosophers, Wise men and
Theologians was not applied to productive forces in
the society of the ancient world nor of the Middle
Ages, nor was their product used in the economy
environment, neither to promote social changes. It
only served to demonstrate that the royal society
was elitist and imperfect.
The changes were induced in Europe during the
XVIth – XVIIth centuries as a result of such events
as the battles in the Crusades, the discovery of the
Americas, growth of maritime trade in commerce
and discovery of the route to the East. All the latter
events produced a great number of changes and
demands for knowledge and basis for applied
development.

Between the XVIth and XVIIth centuries Europe
experienced a flow of information that brought a
great number of new demands and foundations to
apply those new skills and knowledge. This derived
into seafaring commerce and colonization. The
decadent feudal system had nothing to do with the
development of cities, commercial trade, the
industrial revolution, and social and Church reform.
Engines are not a product of the slow
improvement of artisans’ tools based on its every
day use; on the contrary, engines burst into the
laborer’s world. They “appear” in practice to
displace him. Machinery is the product of
theoretical principles applied to production
problems, and this process is not a function of the
laborers.

Some authors refer to it as “capitalist
development” mostly during the last third of the
XXth century, with its new contractor’s
organization, trust, holdings, cartels, new energy
sources as oil and electricity, and new financial
systems. This speaks rather of a Second Industrial
Revolution.
First industrial revolution took place in the United
Kingdom by the end of the XVIIIth century; it
brought about a profound transformation of the
economy and British society. The most immediate
changes were produced by the production
processes such as: what was produced and how and
where. Labor was conducted at factories for
manufactured primary goods and services.

Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, and it was
for a long time the leading producer of industrialized
goods in the world. This meant changes in the
distribution social values. In the early stages, the
workers’ buying power was reduced and there was a loss
in quality of life in regard to their social values. Later on,
it translated into an increase in the social quality of life
for the entire population.
Afterwards, an industrial revolution was set into motion
in other countries, first in France, Belgium, Germany and
the United States by middle of XIXth century. By the end
of this century, it made its way to Sweden and Japan, and
by the early XXth century to Russia and Canada. However,
it was not until after the middle of the XXth century that
the industrial revolution finally arrived in Latin America,
Near East, Central and Southeast Asia, and part of Africa.

SOCIOLOGY_AND_Development.pptx

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