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- C. Wright Mills
- "the ability to connect the most basic, intimate aspects of an individual's life to seemingly impersonal and remote historical facts" |
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a narrative, a story, or rather a set of stories embedded within a social network about the standard ways society meets its needs
(ex: college as defined by an informal set of stories told within the social network of students, faculty, administrators, alumni, etc) |
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how individuals define themselves in relationship to groups with which they affiliate (or dissociate from)
a.k.a. the grand narrative about someone, comprised of several individual stories told between pairs of individuals ("social network") |
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August Comte
- arose out of a need to make moral sense of the social order in a time of declining religious authority
- "social physics", could understand the overall structure of societies |
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| Comte's stages of human society |
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1. "Theological stage" - everything happens as a result of divine will
2. "Metaphysical stage" - Enlightenment thinkers, human behavior driven by natural, biological instincts (strip away society, nature wins over nurture)
3. "Scientific stage" - develop social physics in order to identify scientific laws that govern human behavior |
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| First to translate Comte into English, Comte claims the translations to be better than the originals, wrote books about the inferiority of women in society, might be considered one of the earliest English-writing feminist social scientists |
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| "historical materialism": theory that social changes in history have been driven by class conflict, history has been man's struggle to gain control of and eventually dominate his natural environment. |
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- Criticized Marx for focusing solely on economics, believing instead that sociological analysis should culture, economics, and politics
- "Verstehen": theory that in order to truly understand why people act the way they do, a sociologist must understand their perspective
- Emphasis of subjectivity is the foundation of interpretive sociology (study of social meaning) |
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- concerned with social cohesion/ membership in groups and what those groups require of its members (realized there were major benefits for individuals to become members of organized communities- integration & regulation)
- historical context: pre-capitalist families as production units (suffering and workload relate to each other, mechanical solidarity), under capitalism families transform into consumption units (inter-dependent to get needs met, resulting social bond is "organic socialization")
- founding practitioner of "positivism" |
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| Durkheim's theory behind suicide |
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| "Anomie": sense of normless-ness resulting from drastic changes in living conditions or arrangements, individual is neither integrated nor regulated and so lives in a state of limbo; confusion about right/wrong, how to behave, etc. |
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| Durkheim: four types of suicide and definitions |
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- Egoistic: not integrated or regulated; society fails to offer sufficient communal activity; dis-ease of individual
- Anomic: integrated, not regulated; social conflict, rapid change, etc disrupts normal social order, people feel lost and veer off course; dis-ease of former collectivists
- Altruistic: integrated and over-regulated; over-socialized by community, can no longer balance power of collective will against one's own interest, individual no longer exists; dis-ease of "smothering" collective
- Fatalistic: over-regulated, not integrated; over-regulated within an institution in which individual will is entirely suppressed (prison, etc); dis-ease of powerlessness/ no control and monotony |
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| Established formal sociology (sociology of pure numbers) - ex: fundamental differences between groups of two and groups of three or more (independent of reasons for group and who belongs to it) |
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| At forefront of emergence of American sociology; focused on empirical research and "social ecology", the belief that people's behaviors and personalities are shaped by their social and physical environments. |
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| theory that various social institutions and processes in society exist to serve some important (or necessary) function to keep society running |
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| the idea that conflict between competing interests is the basic, animating force of social change and society in general |
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| Catchall term for many theories; what all have in common is an emphasis on women's experiences and a belief that sociology and society in general subordinate women. Shares Marxist emphasis on conflict and political reform. |
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| a micro-level theory in which shared meanings, orientations, and assumptions form the basic motivation behind people's actions |
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| a condition characterized by a questioning of the notion of progress and history, and multiple, perhaps even conflicting, identities resulting from disjointed affiliations |
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| an institutionalized entity or artifact that exists because people agree to behave as if it exists, concur on following certain conventional rules, or behave as if such an agreement or rules exist |
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| a theory that attempts to predict how certain social institutions tend to function |
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| focuses on the meanings people attach to social phenomena, prioritizing certain situations over a search for social facts that transcend time and place |
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| 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 |
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| seeks to understand local interactional contexts; its methods of choice are ethnographic, generally including participant observation and in-depth interviews. |
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| generally concerned with social dynamics at a higher level of analysis - that is, across the breath of a society |
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