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Summary - Introduction to Sociology
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Sociology 1 - IntroductionOrigins of sociology
Auguste Comte (1798-1857);
Three Stages of understanding society
1. Theological stage
– Thoughts about the world were guided by religion
– People regarded society as an expression of god’s will
2. Metaphysical stage
– People understood society as a natural rather than unnatural
phenomenon
– Thomas Hobbes; society reflected a selfish human nature instead of a
reflection of God
3. Scientific stage
– Applying scientific approach to the study of society
– Positivism: a means to understand the world based on science
– Society conforms to never changing laws
Emile Durkheim – LE SUICIDE
Regulation
- Cultural human desires need to be regulated by something external
- Anomic Suicide: too little regulation, when not functioning well, humans are in state
of anomy
- Fatalistic Suicide: too much regulation, leads to state of fatalism
Integration
- Society needs to provide for cohesion and integration among its members
- Egoistic Suicide: too little integration, if society is too much dissolved and cohesion
is lacking, individuals feel alone and socially isolated
- Altruistic Suicide: too much integration, individual dissolves into society in which
individual offers life for society
,Societal Background
- Society was born out of massive social transformation; The 1789 French Revolution
and the industrial revolution were dissolved forms of social organization
1. Industrial economy
• Birth of capitalism
• Home manufacturing to factory
• Home fields – waterpower – stem power – large machines – factories
• Because of the development of the machines and factories, people became part
of large industrial work forces instead of working from home.
• The new industrial economy resulted in great poverty.
• The progress of new machines was also the breakdown of any kind of society or
social order as we previously knew it.
2. Growth of cities
• Pull factors of the factories
• Push factors of the countryside
• Landowners fenced of more and more ground, turning farms into grazing lands
for sheep; for the wool in textile mills
• Forced countryside farmers to the cities in search for work in the factories
• Villages were abandoned and factory towns turn into large cities
• Widespread of social problems; poverty, disease, pollution, crime, homelessness
• Because factories attracted a lot of people in need for work, large cities grew
around them.
3. Political Change
• Divine legitimation: royalty claim to rule by ‘divine right’
• Economic development and rapid growth of cities leads to political change
• Shift in focus on people’s moral obligations to be royal to their ruler to the idea
that society is a product of individual self-interest
• Key phrases in the new political climate: individual liberty and individual rights
• Because of this new capitalistic society, the idea emerged that society was a
product of individual self-interest rather than moral obligations. A new political
climate emerged that focused on individual rights and freedom.
, 4. Social revolution
• Ferdinand Teonnies: Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft
– Modern world as the progressive loss of Gemeinschaft
– Industrial revolution fostered individualism and business-like emphasis on
facts and efficiency
– Societies gradually became rootless and impersonal
– Kinship, virtue, loyalty -> instrumental, self-interest
– Collectivism -> individualism
Gemeinschaft Gesellschaft
– Families lived in rural towns and – Modern world turned societies
villages inside out
– Tightly integrated into a slow- – Most people live among strangers
moving, hardworking way of life – Ignore those who passed on the
– Before telephones and television, street
families and communities – Trust is hard to come by
entertained themselves – People tend to put their personal
– Communicating by letters needs ahead of group loyalty
– Inevitable conflicts and tensions – Essentially separated in spite of
characterized past communities uniting factors
– Teonnies: traditional ties of
gemeinschaft bound people of
communities together
– Essentially united in spite of all
separating factors
* Ferdinand Teonnies: a German sociologies came up with the following idea, because of the
new social organization, Gemeinschaft (a tightly integrated human community) declined and
made place for gesellschaft (the pursuit of self -interest, separation and individualism)
, A Short tour of Theory
What is sociological theory?
- General frameworks of explanation linking phenomena in the social world.
Robert K. Merton
Grand Theories:
– theoretical systems aimed at explaining all social phenomena in one theory
– abstract thinking rather than empirical thinking
– Marxist Conflict Theory, Parsonian structural-functionalist theory
Middle-range Theories
– Theories grounded in empirical reality
– Smaller theories, starting from specific and testable hypotheses
– Eventually abstracting from the specificities of the context to arrive at abstract and
generally applicable theories
– Reference group theory, social control theory, anomy theory
• Three major ways of thinking that have shaped sociology: classical, new and emerging
perspective
• Classical Perspective:
– Macro-level; functionalism, conflict
– Micro-level; Social action
Functionalist perspective
- A framework for building theory that visualizes society as a complex system whose
parts work together to promote solidarity and stability
- Our lives are guided by social structure: relatively stable patterns of social behaviour
- gives shape to the family, directs people to exchange greetings on the street
- leads us to understand social structure in terms of its social function: consequence
for the operation of society
- all social structures contribute to the operations of society
Herbert Spencer
- compared society to organisms of the human body
- body and society both have interdependent elements which contributes to
the survival of the entire organism
- various social structures are interdependent working in concert to preserve
society
- society as a system
- components with a function
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