Untitled Quiz

Introduction to Sociology

• Sociology is the systematic study of human social lives, groups, and societies.
• It examines how the world came about and how it differs from previous generations.
• It considers the future direction of societal changes.

Social Change and Modernity

• Sociology analyses social change and the rise of modernity.
• It involves understanding the features, causes, and potential outcomes of such changes.
• A key aspect is the comparison between utopian and dystopian views.

Sociological Imagination

• This concept encourages individuals to connect personal experiences to larger societal issues.
• It helps to understand history and biography within the context of society.
• This includes the ability to connect individual biographies with broader historical forces.

Major Sociological Perspectives

• Structural-functionalist perspective: Views society as a complex system with interconnected parts that function to maintain stability and solidarity.
• Social-conflict perspective: Emphasises the role of conflict between different groups with competing interests in shaping society.
• Symbolic interactionist perspective: Focuses on the subjective meanings individuals give to social phenomena and how these meanings are socially constructed in daily interactions.

Gender/Feminist Perspective

• Examines how social life is structured according to gender, highlighting the unequal status and subordinate roles of women.
• Key slogan: "The personal is political."
• Early key figures include Harriet Martineau and Jane Addams.

Theoretical Dilemmas

• Involves studying human actions versus social structure, the concept of consensus and conflict, and the problem of gender.
• It examines the evolution of the modern world.

Three Dimensions of Sociology

• Scientific sociology: This perspective seeks to understand and control human behavior and uses sociological knowledge to inform public policies and manage social issues.
• Interpretative sociology: Aims to uncover the meanings behind human actions, emphasizing the importance of cultural context for interpreting behavior.
• Critical sociology: Examines social institutions that perpetuate injustice, focusing on challenging and changing these institutions by revealing their constructed nature.

Culture and Social Interaction

• Culture encompasses a shared way of life within a society.
• Key components of culture include symbols, language, beliefs, values, and norms.
• Material culture includes the tangible artifacts of a society which demonstrate how human beings interact with each other.

Reproduction of Culture and Socialization

• Primary socialization occurs within the family, while secondary socialization happens in schools, amongst peers, and elsewhere
• Theories on socialization include those of Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Erik Erikson.

Status, Role, and Identity

• Social positions and identities are shaped by ascribed and achieved statuses.
• Roles represent expected behaviors associated with certain statuses.
• Identity encompasses how individuals view themselves and how others see them.

Sociological Perspectives on Social Structures

• Micro sociology focuses on the small-scale aspects of everyday life through the different perspectives of Phenomenology, Symbolic interactionism, and Goffman (dramaturgy).
• Macro sociology focuses on broad societal structures.
• Includes Social exchange theory.

Sociological Perspectives on Social Structures: The Social Construction of Reality

• Humans are both products and creators of societies in which we live, with society as an objective reality.
• Societal production involves processes: typification, sedimentation, externalization, habitualization, internalization, and socialization.
• Includes symbolic interactionism.

Looking-Glass Self

• Individuals develop a sense of self through the perceptions and reactions of others.
• This includes imagining how others perceive them, then imagining the judgement of those perceptions, and finally, developing feelings about themselves based on these perceptions.
• This 'looking glass self' is based on the 'I' (the active self) and the 'me'(the objective self).

The Social Self and Symbolic Interactionism

• People's understanding of objects depends on the meaning those objects have for them.
• Meanings are socially constructed and emerge through interaction.
• People interpret and act upon meanings within their social interaction context.
• Includes the tenets of symbolic interactionism: Human beings are active, creative actors; they act on the basis of symbolic meanings; they retrieve meanings through interactions; meanings change over time; interaction procedures affect meanings.

Social Rules and Talk

• People use lay or folk methods to understand each other, relying on shared cultural assumptions.
• Conversations are analyzed through the examination and precision of timing of interchanges (pauses, interruptions, etc.).
• Interactions are situated within specific time and space parameters.

Social Structures in Everyday Life

• Social life is a kind of a theatre drama.
• Social occasions highlight social rules.
• Individuals prepare for and enact roles.
• Social interaction creates a particular social environment.

Emotional Labour

• Emotional labour in the workforce is about managing emotions and creating publicly observable facial and bodily displays.
• Includes different forms of labor: Physical, Mental, and Emotional.
• The concepts of feeling rules and emotional labour are essential.

The Formation of Modern Societies

• Lenski's concept of socio-cultural evolution describes the progression through various societies, from hunting and gathering to post-industrial societies.
• Enlightenment and the project of modernity emphasize reason and progress and the ideas of the unity of humankind, as well as the struggle between utopian and dystopian societal arrangements.

Social Inequality: Class Stratification

• Social stratification is a system of ranking people in a hierarchy.
• There are various forms of social stratification, such as the caste system and the class system. The class system is typical of industrial societies.
• Different perspectives of the class system include, but are not limited to the functionalist viewpoint (Davis-Moore thesis) and the conflict perspective (Marxism). The Davis-Moore thesis focuses on how social inequality is beneficial for a society. This contrasts with the conflict perspective which examines the issue of social domination and inequality in capitalist societies.
• Other key figures include Weber, who adds a multidimensional view focusing on the interplay between class power, social power, and political power.
• Bourdieu proposed that different groups differentiate themselves by patterns of consumption.

Deviance

• Activities inconsistent with societal norms and expectations.
• It's not merely individual actions, but a product of social factors and interactions, labeling, responses, and definitions of these actions by others.
• Sociological perspectives, such as functionalism, labeling theory, conflict theory, and feminist perspectives, all analyze aspects of deviance.

Mass Media and Culture

• Mass media functions include information dissemination, socialization, entertainment, and propaganda.
• Theoretical perspectives on mass media include the mass society theory, the neo-Marxist tradition, the liberal-pluralist perspective, an audience as a perspective, the reception analysis, and Hall's encoding/decoding model.
• Media can be viewed as a source of social relations and acts to naturalize the current social order as inevitable. Media and cultural industries have become good business investments for multinational corporations.

Sociological Research Methods

• Two common methods are survey research and ethnography.
• Survey research typically involves collecting data from a large number of individuals using questionnaires or interviews, and is good for statistical analysis.
• Ethnography and the Biographical approach usually involves studying stigmatized social groups in their natural setting through observation and in-depth interviews. These methods are used to uncover meanings behind social behavior.
• Experiments are usually done in psychology and attempt to measure cause-and-effect relationships under highly controlled conditions. Unobtrusive research uses available data such as statistics or census data; policy analysis, historical analysis, content analysis, and media analysis.
• Ethical implications for any study should also be considered (i.e., consent, risk of harm, confidentiality, anonymity, power elements, and erotic elements).