Two hundred thousand jubilant people filled the streets of downtown Vancouver to celebrate and cap off two weeks of uncharacteristically vibrant, joyful street life in Vancouver. Just over a year later, on June 15, , the Vancouver Canucks lost the seventh hockey game of the Stanley Cup finals against the Boston Bruins. One hundred thousand people had been watching the game on outdoor screens.
Eventually , people filled the downtown streets. Why was the crowd response to the two events so different? A key insight of sociology is that the simple fact of being in a group changes your behaviour.
The group is a phenomenon that is more than the sum of its parts. Why do we feel and act differently in different types of social situations? Why might people of a single group exhibit different behaviours in the same situation? Why might people acting similarly not feel connected to others exhibiting the same behaviour? These are some of the many questions sociologists ask as they study people and societies. A dictionary defines sociology as the systematic study of society and social interaction.
How can the experience of companionship or togetherness be put into words or explained? While this is a starting point for the discipline, sociology is actually much more complex.
It uses many different theories and methods to study a wide range of subject matter, and applies these studies to the real world. The sociologist Dorothy Smith b. These aspects of social life never simply occur; they are organized processes. They can be the briefest of everyday interactions — moving to the right to let someone pass on a busy sidewalk, for example — or the largest and most enduring interactions — such as the billions of daily exchanges that constitute the circuits of global capitalism.
What collective processes lead to the decision that moving to the right rather than the left is normal? Think about the T-shirts in your chest of drawers at home.
What are the sequences of linkages, exchanges, and social relationships that connect your T-shirts to the dangerous and hyper-exploitative garment factories in rural China or Bangladesh?
These are the type of questions that point to the unique domain and puzzles of the social that sociology seeks to explore and understand.
Sociologists study all aspects and levels of society. A society is a group of people whose members interact, reside in a definable area, and share a culture. One sociologist might analyze video of people from different societies as they carry on everyday conversations to study the rules of polite conversation from different world cultures. Another sociologist might interview a representative sample of people to see how email and instant messaging have changed the way organizations are run.
Yet another sociologist might study how migration determined the way in which language spread and changed over time. A fourth sociologist might study the history of international agencies like the United Nations or the International Monetary Fund to examine how the globe became divided into a First World and a Third World after the end of the colonial era.
These examples illustrate the ways in which society and culture can be studied at different levels of analysis , from the detailed study of face-to-face interactions to the examination of large-scale historical processes affecting entire civilizations. It is common to divide these levels of analysis into different gradations based on the scale of interaction involved.
As discussed in later chapters, sociologists break the study of society down into four separate levels of analysis: micro, meso, macro, and global.
The basic distinctions, however, are between micro-level sociology , macro-level sociology and global-level sociology. The study of cultural rules of politeness in conversation is an example of micro-level sociology. At the micro- level of analysis, the focus is on the social dynamics of intimate, face-to-face interactions.
Research is conducted with a specific set of individuals such as conversational partners, family members, work associates, or friendship groups. If the same misunderstandings occur consistently in a number of different interactions, the sociologists may be able to propose some generalizations about rules of politeness that would be helpful in reducing tensions in mixed-group dynamics e. Other examples of micro-level research include seeing how informal networks become a key source of support and advancement in formal bureaucracies, or how loyalty to criminal gangs is established.
Macro -level sociology focuses on the properties of large-scale, society-wide social interactions that extend beyond the immediate milieu of individual interactions: the dynamics of institutions, class structures, gender relations, or whole populations.
The example above of the influence of migration on changing patterns of language usage is a macro-level phenomenon because it refers to structures or processes of social interaction that occur outside or beyond the intimate circle of individual social acquaintances. These include the economic, political, and other circumstances that lead to migration; the educational, media, and other communication structures that help or hinder the spread of speech patterns; the class, racial, or ethnic divisions that create different slangs or cultures of language use; the relative isolation or integration of different communities within a population; and so on.
Other examples of macro-level research include examining why women are far less likely than men to reach positions of power in society, or why fundamentalist Christian religious movements play a more prominent role in American politics than they do in Canadian politics. In each case, the site of the analysis shifts away from the nuances and detail of micro-level interpersonal life to the broader, macro-level systematic patterns that structure social change and social cohesion in society.
In global- level sociology, the focus is on structures and processes that extend beyond the boundaries of states or specific societies. The example above of the way in which the world became divided into wealthy First World and impoverished Third World societies reflects social processes — the formation of international institutions such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and non-governmental organizations, for example — which are global in scale and global in their effects.
With the boom and bust of petroleum or other export commodity economies, it is clear to someone living in Fort McMurray, Alberta, that their daily life is affected not only by their intimate relationships with the people around them, nor only by provincial and national based corporations and policies, etc.
The context of these processes has to be analysed at a global scale of analysis. The relationship between the micro, macro, and global remains one of the key conceptual problems confronting sociology. While suicide is one of the most personal, individual, and intimate acts imaginable, Durkheim demonstrated that rates of suicide differed between religious communities — Protestants, Catholics, and Jews — in a way that could not be explained by the individual factors involved in each specific case.
The different rates of suicide had to be explained by macro-level variables associated with the different religious beliefs and practices of the faith communities; more specifically, the different degrees of social integration of these communities.
We will return to this example in more detail later. On the other hand, macro-level phenomena like class structures, institutional organizations, legal systems, gender stereotypes, population growth, and urban ways of life provide the shared context for everyday life but do not explain its specific nuances and micro-variations very well.
Although the scale of sociological studies and the methods of carrying them out are different, the sociologists involved in them all have something in common. Each of them looks at society using what pioneer sociologist C. Mills reasoned that private troubles like being overweight, being unemployed, having marital difficulties, or feeling purposeless or depressed can be purely personal in nature. However, if private troubles are widely shared with others, they indicate that there is a common social problem that has its source in the way social life is structured.
At this level, the issues are not adequately understood as simply private troubles. They are best addressed as public issues that require a collective response to resolve. Obesity, for example, has been increasingly recognized as a growing problem for both children and adults in North America. Michael Pollan cites statistics that three out of five Americans are overweight and one out of five is obese In Canada in , just under one in five adults Obesity is therefore not simply a private concern related to the medical issues, dietary practices, or exercise habits of specific individuals.
It is a widely shared social issue that puts people at risk for chronic diseases like hypertension, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. It also creates significant social costs for the medical system.
Pollan argues that obesity is in part a product of the increasingly sedentary and stressful lifestyle of modern, capitalist society. More importantly, however, it is a product of the industrialization of the food chain, which since the s has produced increasingly cheap and abundant food with significantly more calories due to processing.
Additives like corn syrup, which are much cheaper and therefore more profitable to produce than natural sugars, led to the trend of super-sized fast foods and soft drinks in the s. As Pollan argues, trying to find a processed food in the supermarket without a cheap, calorie-rich, corn-based additive is a challenge. By looking at individuals and societies and how they interact through this lens, sociologists are able to examine what influences behaviour, attitudes, and culture.
By applying systematic and scientific methods to this process, they try to do so without letting their own biases and preconceived ideas influence their conclusions. All sociologists are interested in the experiences of individuals and how those experiences are shaped by interactions with social groups and society as a whole. To a sociologist, the personal decisions an individual makes do not exist in a vacuum. Cultural patterns and social forces put pressure on people to select one choice over another.
Sociologists try to identify these general patterns by examining the behaviour of large groups of people living in the same society and experiencing the same societal pressures. When general patterns persist through time and become habitual or routinized at micro-levels of interaction, or institutionalized at macro or global levels of interaction, they are referred to as social structures.
As we noted above, understanding the relationship between the individual and society is one of the most difficult sociological problems. Partly this is because of the reified way these two terms are used in everyday speech. This conventional distinction between society and the individual is a product of reification, as both society and the individual appear as independent objects.
As we will see in the chapters to come, society and the individual are neither objects, nor are they independent of one another. One problem for sociologists is that these concepts of the individual and society, and the relationship between them, are thought of in terms established by a very common moral framework in modern democratic societies — namely, that of individual responsibility and individual choice.
The individual is morally responsible for their behaviours and decisions. Talking about society is akin to being morally soft or lenient. Sociology, as a social science, remains neutral on these types of moral questions.
For sociologists, the conceptualization of the individual and society is much more complex than the moral framework suggests and needs to be examined through evidence-based, rather than morality-based, research. The sociological problem is to be able to see the individual as a thoroughly social being and, yet, as a being who has agency and free choice.
Individuals are beings who do take on individual responsibilities in their everyday social roles, and risk social consequences when they fail to live up to them. However, the manner in which individuals take on responsibilities, and sometimes the compulsion to do so, are socially defined.
At the same time, a society is nothing but the ongoing social relationships and activities of specific individuals. A key basis of the sociological perspective is the concept that the individual and society are inseparable.
It is impossible to study one without the other. German sociologist Norbert Elias called the process of simultaneously analyzing the behaviour of individuals and the society that shapes that behaviour figuration. He described it through a metaphor of dancing. There can be no dance without the dancers, but there can be no dancers without the dance. Without a dance, there is just a group of people moving around a floor. Similarly, there is no society without the individuals that make it up, and there are also no individuals who are not affected by the society in which they live Elias, They all expressed desires to be able to deal with their drug addiction issues, return to their families, and assume their responsibilities when their sentences were complete.
They wanted to have their own places with nice things in them. This is consistent with national statistics on Aboriginal incarceration which showed that in —, the Aboriginal incarceration rate was 10 times higher than for the non-Aboriginal population. Aboriginal overrepresentation in prisons has continued to grow substantially Office of the Correctional Investigator, The outcomes of Aboriginal incarceration are also bleak. The federal Office of the Correctional Investigator summarized the situation as follows.
Aboriginal inmates are:. This is clearly a case in which the situation of the incarcerated inmates interviewed on the CBC program has been structured by historical social patterns and power relationships that confront Aboriginal people in Canada generally.
How do we understand it at the individual level, however — at the level of personal decision making and individual responsibilities? One young inmate described how, at the age of 13, he began to hang around with his cousins who were part of a gang. He was expelled from school for recruiting gang members. The only job he ever had was selling drugs. The circumstances in which he and the other inmates had entered the gang life, and the difficulties getting out of it they knew awaited them when they left prison, reflect a set of decision-making parameters fundamentally different than those facing most non-Aboriginal people in Canada.
Since ancient times, people have been fascinated by the relationship between individuals and the societies to which they belong. The ancient Greeks might be said to have provided the foundations of sociology through the distinction they drew between physis nature and nomos law or custom. Histories by Herodotus — BCE was a proto-anthropological work that described the great variations in the nomos of different ancient societies around the Mediterranean, indicating that human social life was not a product of nature but a product of human creation.
If human social life was the product of an invariable human or biological nature, all cultures would be the same. The concerns of the later Greek philosophers — Socrates — BCE , Plato — BCE , and Aristotle — BCE — with the ideal form of human community the polis or city-state can be derived from the ethical dilemmas of this difference between human nature and human norms.
The ideal community might be rational but it was not natural. In the 13th century, Ma Tuan-Lin, a Chinese historian, first recognized social dynamics as an underlying component of historical development in his seminal encyclopedia, General Study of Literary Remains. The study charted the historical development of Chinese state administration from antiquity in a manner very similar to contemporary institutional analyses.
Key to his analysis was the distinction between the sedentary life of cities and the nomadic life of pastoral peoples like the Bedouin and Berbers. The sedentaries of the city entered into a different cycle in which esprit de corps is subsumed to institutional power and the intrigues of political factions. The need to be focused on subsistence is replaced by a trend toward increasing luxury, ease, and refinements of taste.
The relationship between the two poles of existence, nomadism and sedentary life, was at the basis of the development and decay of civilizations Becker and Barnes, However, it was not until the 19th century that the basis of the modern discipline of sociology can be said to have been truly established.
The impetus for the ideas that culminated in sociology can be found in the three major transformations that defined modern society and the culture of modernity: the development of modern science from the 16th century onward, the emergence of democratic forms of government with the American and French Revolutions — and — respectively , and the Industrial Revolution beginning in the 18th century.
Not only was the framework for sociological knowledge established in these events, but also the initial motivation for creating a science of society. Early sociologists like Comte and Marx sought to formulate a rational, evidence-based response to the experience of massive social dislocation brought about by the transition from the European feudal era to capitalism.
This was a period of unprecedented social problems, from the breakdown of local communities to the hyper-exploitation of industrial labourers. The development of modern science provided the model of knowledge needed for sociology to move beyond earlier moral, philosophical, and religious types of reflection on the human condition. The focus of knowledge shifted from intuiting the intentions of spirits and gods to systematically observing and testing the world of things through science and technology.
Rationalism sought the laws that governed the truth of reason and ideas, and in the hands of early scientists like Galileo and Newton, found its highest form of expression in the logical formulations of mathematics. Empiricism sought to discover the laws of the operation of the world through the careful, methodical, and detailed observation of the world. The new scientific worldview therefore combined the clear and logically coherent, conceptual formulation of propositions from rationalism, with an empirical method of inquiry based on observation through the senses.
Sociology adopted these core principles to emphasize that claims about social life had to be clearly formulated and based on evidence-based procedures. It also gave sociology a technological cast as a type of knowledge which could be used to solve social problems.
The emergence of democratic forms of government in the 18th century demonstrated that humans had the capacity to change the world. The rigid hierarchy of medieval society was not a God-given eternal order, but a human order that could be challenged and improved upon through human intervention.
Through the revolutionary process of democratization, society came to be seen as both historical and the product of human endeavours. Age of Enlightenment philosophers like Locke, Voltaire, Montaigne, and Rousseau developed general principles that could be used to explain social life. Their emphasis shifted from the histories and exploits of the aristocracy to the life of ordinary people.
Significantly for modern sociology they proposed that the use of reason could be applied to address social ills and to emancipate humanity from servitude. Wollstonecraft for example argued that simply allowing women to have a proper education would enable them to contribute to the improvement of society, especially through their influence on children. The Industrial Revolution in a strict sense refers to the development of industrial methods of production, the introduction of industrial machinery, and the organization of labour to serve new manufacturing systems.
These economic changes emblemize the massive transformation of human life brought about by the creation of wage labour, capitalist competition, increased mobility, urbanization, individualism, and all the social problems they wrought: poverty, exploitation, dangerous working conditions, crime, filth, disease, and the loss of family and other traditional support networks, etc.
It was a time of great social and political upheaval with the rise of empires that exposed many people — for the first time — to societies and cultures other than their own. Millions of people were moving into cities and many people were turning away from their traditional religious beliefs.
Wars, strikes, revolts, and revolutionary actions were reactions to underlying social tensions that had never existed before and called for critical examination. Sociology therefore emerged; firstly, as an extension of the new worldview of science; secondly, as a part of the Enlightenment project and its focus on historical change, social injustice, and the possibilities of social reform; and thirdly, as a crucial response to the new and unprecedented types of social problems that appeared in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution.
It did not emerge as a unified science, however, as its founders brought distinctly different perspectives to its early formulations. In , the term was reinvented by Auguste Comte — He was born in , year 6 of the new French Republic, to staunch monarchist and Catholic parents.
This ended his chances of getting a formal education and a position as an academic or government official. He became a secretary to the utopian socialist philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon — until they had a falling out in after St.
Nevertheless, they both thought that society could be studied using the same scientific methods utilized in the natural sciences. Comte proposed a renewed, organic spiritual order in which the authority of science would be the means to create a rational social order.
Through science, each social strata would be reconciled with their place in a hierarchical social order. Comte named the scientific study of social patterns positivism. While Comte never in fact conducted any social research, his notion of sociology as a positivist science that might effectively socially engineer a better society was deeply influential. Karl Marx — was a German philosopher and economist. In he and Friedrich Engels — co-authored the Communist Manifesto.
This book is one of the most influential political manuscripts in history. Whereas Comte viewed the goal of sociology as recreating a unified, post-feudal spiritual order that would help to institutionalize a new era of political and social stability, Marx developed a critical analysis of capitalism that saw the material or economic basis of inequality and power relations as the cause of social instability and conflict. In this way the goal of sociology would not simply be to scientifically analyze or objectively describe society, but to use a rigorous scientific analysis as a basis to change it.
This framework became the foundation of contemporary critical sociology. As such, his analysis of modern society was not static or simply descriptive. He was able to put his finger on the underlying dynamism and continuous change that characterized capitalist society.
He felt, rather, that a critical social theory must engage in clarifying and supporting the issues of social justice that were inherent within the existing struggles and wishes of the age.
In his own work, he endeavoured to show how the variety of specific work actions, strikes, and revolts by workers in different occupations — for better pay, safer working conditions, shorter hours, the right to unionize, etc. Harriet Martineau — was one of the first women sociologists in the 19th century.
Through this popular translation she introduced the concept of sociology as a methodologically rigorous discipline to an English-speaking audience. From the age of 12, she suffered from severe hearing loss and was obliged to use a large ear trumpet to converse. She impressed a wide audience with a series of articles on political economy in In she left England to engage in two years of study of the new republic of the United States and its emerging institutions: prisons, insane asylums, factories, farms, Southern plantations, universities, hospitals, and churches.
On the basis of extensive research, interviews, and observations, she published Society in America and worked with abolitionists on the social reform of slavery Zeitlin, She also worked for social reform in the situation of women: the right to vote, have an education, pursue an occupation, and enjoy the same legal rights as men. Together with Florence Nightingale, she worked on the development of public health care, which led to early formulations of the welfare system in Britain McDonald, He was born to a Jewish family in the Lorraine province of France one of the two provinces, along with Alsace, that were lost to the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War of — Durkheim attributed this strange experience of anti-Semitism and scapegoating to the lack of moral purpose in modern society.
In this respect, Durkheim represented the sociologist as a kind of medical doctor, studying social pathologies of the moral order and proposing social remedies and cures. He saw healthy societies as stable, while pathological societies experienced a breakdown in social norms between individuals and society. He described this breakdown as a state of normlessness or anomie — a lack of norms that give clear direction and purpose to individual actions.
Social facts are those things like law, custom, morality, religious rites, language, money, business practices, etc. Social facts:. For Durkheim, social facts were like the facts of the natural sciences. They could be studied without reference to the subjective experience of individuals. Individuals experience them as obligations, duties, and restraints on their behaviour, operating independently of their will.
They are hardly noticeable when individuals consent to them but provoke reaction when individuals resist. Durkheim argued that each of these social facts serve one or more functions within a society.
They exist to fulfill a societal need. Laws create a basis for social solidarity and order. In this manner, each identifiable social fact could be analyzed with regard to its specific function in a society. Like a body in which each organ heart, liver, brain, etc. The honouring of totemic animals through rites and privations functioned to create social solidarity and cohesion for tribes whose lives were otherwise dispersed through the activities of hunting and gathering in a sparse environment.
Durkheim was very influential in defining the subject matter of the new discipline of sociology. For Durkheim, sociology was not about just any phenomena to do with the life of human beings, but only those phenomena which pertained exclusively to a social level of analysis.
It was not about the biological or psychological dynamics of human life, for example, but about the external social facts through which the lives of individuals were constrained. Moreover, the dimension of human experience described by social facts had to be explained in its own terms. It could not be explained by biological drives or psychological characteristics of individuals. It was a dimension of reality sui generis of its own kind, unique in its characteristics.
It could not be explained by, or reduced to, its individual components without missing its most important features. Suicide is perhaps the most personal and most individual of all acts. Its motives would seem to be absolutely unique to the individual and to individual psychopathology. However, what Durkheim observed was that statistical rates of suicide remained fairly constant, year by year and region by region.
Moreover, there was no correlation between rates of suicide and rates of psychopathology. Suicide rates did vary, however, according to the social context of the suicides. For example, suicide rates varied according to the religious affiliation of suicides. Protestants had higher rates of suicide than Catholics, even though both religions equally condemn suicide. Durkheim argued that the key factor that explained the difference in suicide rates i.
A social fact — suicide rates — was explained by another social fact — degree of social integration. The key social function of religion was to integrate individuals by linking them to a common external doctrine and to a greater spiritual reality outside of themselves. Religion created moral communities.
In this regard, he observed that the degree of authority that religious beliefs held over Catholics was much stronger than for Protestants, who from the time of Luther had been taught to take a critical attitude toward formal doctrine.
Protestants were more free to interpret religious belief and in a sense were were more individually responsible for supervising and maintaining their own religious practice. Moreover, in Catholicism the ritual practice of the sacraments, such as confession and taking communion, remained intact, whereas in Protestantism ritual was reduced to a minimum.
Participation in the choreographed rituals of religious life created a highly visible, public focus for religious observance, forging a link between private thought and public belief. Because Protestants had to be more individualistic and self-reliant in their religious practice, they were not subject to the strict discipline and external constraints of Catholics.
They were less integrated into their communities and more thrown back on their own resources. They were more prone to what Durkheim termed egoistic suicide : suicide which results from the individual ego having to depend on itself for self-regulation and failing in the absence of strong social bonds tying it to a community. Contemporary research into suicide in Canada shows that suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people aged 15 to 34 behind death by accident Navaneelan, The greatest increase in suicide since the s has been in the age age group, increasing by 4.
On the other hand, married people are the least likely group to commit suicide. Single, never-married people are 3. How do sociologists explain this? It is clear that adolescence and early adulthood is a period in which social ties to family and society are strained.
It is often a confusing period in which teenagers break away from their childhood roles in the family group and establish their independence. Youth unemployment is higher than for other age groups and, since the s, there has been a large increase in divorces and single parent families. These factors tend to decrease the quantity and the intensity of ties to society.
Married people on the other hand have both strong affective affinities with their marriage partners and strong social expectations placed on them, especially if they have families: their roles are clear and the norms which guide them are well-defined. Adolescents are less integrated into society, which puts them at a higher risk for suicide than married people who are more integrated.
It is interesting that the highest rates of suicide in Canada are for adults in midlife, aged Midlife is also a time noted for crises of identity, but perhaps more significantly, as Navaneelan argues, suicide in this age group results from the change in marital status as people try to cope with the transition from married to divorced and widowed.
Prominent sociologist Max Weber — established a sociology department in Germany at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich in Weber wrote on many topics related to sociology including political change in Russia, the condition of German farm workers, and the history of world religions.
He was also a prominent public figure, playing an important role in the German peace delegation in Versailles and in drafting the ill-fated German Weimar constitution following the defeat of Germany in World War I.
Weber also made a major contribution to the methodology of sociological research. Along with the philosophers Wilhelm Dilthey — and Heinrich Rickert — , Weber believed that it was difficult if not impossible to apply natural science methods to accurately predict the behaviour of groups as positivist sociology hoped to do. They argued that the influence of culture on human behaviour had to be taken into account. What was distinct about human behaviour was that it is essentially meaningful.
Human behaviour could not be understood independently of the meanings that individuals attributed to it. This insight into the meaningful nature of human behaviour even applied to the sociologists themselves, who, they believed, should be aware of how their own cultural biases could influence their research.
Rather than defining sociology as the study of the unique dimension of external social facts, sociology was concerned with social action : actions to which individuals attach subjective meanings. The actions of the young skateboarders can be explained because they hold the experienced boarders in esteem and attempt to emulate their skills, even if it means scraping their bodies on hard concrete from time to time. Weber and other like-minded sociologists founded interpretive sociology whereby social researchers strive to find systematic means to interpret and describe the subjective meanings behind social processes, cultural norms, and societal values.
This approach led to research methods like ethnography, participant observation, and phenomenological analysis. Their aim was not to generalize or predict as in positivistic social science , but to systematically gain an in-depth understanding of social worlds.
The natural sciences may be precise, but from the interpretive sociology point of view their methods confine them to study only the external characteristics of things.
Georg Simmel — was one of the founding fathers of sociology, although his place in the discipline is not always recognized. In part, this oversight may be explained by the fact that Simmel was a Jewish scholar in Germany at the turn of 20th century and, until , he was unable to attain a proper position as a professor due to anti-Semitism. Despite the brilliance of his sociological insights, the quantity of his publications, and the popularity of his public lectures as Privatdozent at the University of Berlin, his lack of a regular academic position prevented him from having the kind of student following that would create a legacy around his ideas.
It might also be explained by some of the unconventional and varied topics that he wrote on: the structure of flirting, the sociology of adventure, the importance of secrecy, the patterns of fashion, the social significance of money, etc. He was generally seen at the time as not having a systematic or integrated theory of society. However, his insights into how social forms emerge at the micro-level of interaction and how they relate to macro-level phenomena remain valuable in contemporary sociology.
This is a basic insight of micro-sociology. However useful it is to talk about macro-level phenomena like capitalism, the moral order, or rationalization , in the end what these phenomena refer to is a multitude of ongoing, unfinished processes of interaction between specific individuals. Nevertheless, the phenomena of social life do have recognizable forms, and the forms do guide the behaviour of individuals in a regularized way.
A bureaucracy is a form of social interaction that persists from day to day. One does not come into work one morning to discover that the rules, job descriptions, paperwork, and hierarchical order of the bureaucracy have disappeared.
How did they emerge in the first place? What happens when they get fixed and permanent? His analysis of the creation of new social forms was particularly tuned in to capturing the fragmentary everyday experience of modern social life that was bound up with the unprecedented nature and scale of the modern city. In his lifetime, the city of Berlin where he lived and taught for most of his career expanded massively after the unification of Germany in the s and, by , became a major European metropolis of 4 million people.
The development of a metropolis created a fundamentally new human experience. The inventiveness of people in creating new forms of interaction in response became a rich source of sociological investigation.
Sociologists study social events, interactions, and patterns. French philosopher Auguste Comte grew up in the wake of the French Revolution. He rejected religion and royalty, focusing instead on the study of society, which he named "sociology.
Comte's ideas and use of scientific methods greatly advanced the field. He was born in the shadow of the French Revolution and as modern science and technology gave birth to the Industrial Revolution. During this time, European society experienced violent conflict and feelings of alienation. Confidence in established beliefs and institutions was shattered. Comte spent much of his life developing a philosophy for a new social order amidst all the chaos and uncertainty. While attending the University of Montpellier, Comte abandoned these attitudes in favor of republicanism inspired by the French Revolution, which would influence his later work.
He left school before graduating and settled in Paris with no viable way to support himself. He earned a meager living teaching mathematics and journalism while deep in the study of economics, history and philosophy. At 19, Comte met Henri de Saint-Simon, a social theorist interested in utopian reform and an early founder of European socialism. Deeply influenced by Saint-Simon, Comte became his secretary and collaborator.
On his own, Comte developed a social doctrine based on scientific principles. His ideas about social conflict are still relevant today. Karl Marx — was a German philosopher and economist. In he and Friedrich Engels — coauthored the Communist Manifesto. This book is one of the most influential political manuscripts in history.
He believed that societies grew and changed as a result of the struggles of different social classes over the means of production. At the time he was developing his theories, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism led to great disparities in wealth between the owners of the factories and workers. Capitalism, an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of goods and the means to produce them, grew in many nations. Marx predicted that inequalities of capitalism would become so extreme that workers would eventually revolt.
This would lead to the collapse of capitalism, which would be replaced by communism. Communism is an economic system under which there is no private or corporate ownership: everything is owned communally and distributed as needed.
Marx believed that communism was a more equitable system than capitalism. Instead, he favored a form of government that allowed market forces to control capitalism. Georg Simmel was a German art critic who wrote widely on social and political issues as well. Simmel took an anti-positivism stance and addressed topics such as social conflict, the function of money, individual identity in city life, and the European fear of outsiders Stapley Much of his work focused on the micro-level theories, and it analyzed the dynamics of two-person and three-person groups.
His work also emphasized individual culture as the creative capacities of individuals. Durkheim helped establish sociology as a formal academic discipline by establishing the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in and by publishing his Rules of the Sociological Method in In another important work, Division of Labour in Society , Durkheim laid out his theory on how societies transformed from a primitive state into a capitalist, industrial society. According to Durkheim, people rise to their proper levels in society based on merit.
In , Durkheim attempted to demonstrate the effectiveness of his rules of social research when he published a work titled Suicide. Durkheim examined suicide statistics in different police districts to research differences between Catholic and Protestant communities.
He attributed the differences to socioreligious forces rather than to individual or psychological causes. George Herbert Mead was a philosopher and sociologist whose work focused on the ways in which the mind and the self were developed as a result of social processes Cronk n. He argued that how an individual comes to view himself or herself is based to a very large extent on interactions with others.
Weber wrote on many topics related to sociology including political change in Russia and social forces that affect factory workers. The theory that Weber sets forth in this book is still controversial. Some believe that Weber argued that the beliefs of many Protestants, especially Calvinists, led to the creation of capitalism. Others interpret it as simply claiming that the ideologies of capitalism and Protestantism are complementary. Weber believed that it was difficult, if not impossible, to use standard scientific methods to accurately predict the behavior of groups as people hoped to do.
They argued that the influence of culture on human behavior had to be taken into account. This even applied to the researchers themselves, who, they believed, should be aware of how their own cultural biases could influence their research.
To deal with this problem, Weber and Dilthey introduced the concept of verstehen , a German word that means to understand in a deep way. This approach led to some research methods whose aim was not to generalize or predict traditional in science , but to systematically gain an in-depth understanding of social worlds. The different approaches to research based on positivism or antipositivism are often considered the foundation for the differences found today between quantitative sociology and qualitative sociology.
Quantitative sociology uses statistical methods such as surveys with large numbers of participants. Researchers analyze data using statistical techniques to see if they can uncover patterns of human behavior.
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