Bargeboe Slides

What is Sociology?

• Sociology is a systematic study of human society and interactions.
• Sociology is a scientific study of society, social interactions, and the structures influencing human behavior and relationships.

Why Study Sociology?

• To gain understanding of society.
• To explore social inequalities.
• To gain critical thinking skills.
• To inform public policy.
• To promote self-awareness.
• To address global challenges.
• To prepare for diverse careers.

Contributing Factors to Sociology's Development

• The French Revolution eliminated social distinctions between feudal society and the people.
• Industrialization brought rapid population growth and more demand for goods.
• Urbanization led to rapid population increase in cities.
• Enlightenment brought critical ideas and knowing reasons behind the primary values of society.

Early Thinkers of Sociology

• Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte (1798-1857) was the founder of sociology.
• Comte was interested in social order and stability.
• Comte saw sociology as a positivistic science.

Auguste Comte's Law of the Three Stages

• Theological Stage: Society and human interactions were explained based on religion and the supernatural.
• Metaphysical Stage: Explanations were based on abstract philosophical speculation.
• Scientific/Positivistic Stage: Explanations are based on systematic observation, experimentation, comparison, and historical analysis.

Emile Durkheim

• Durkheim lived from 1858–1917.
• Social Facts: Patterned ways of acting, thinking, and feeling that exist outside an individual but exert social control.
• Durkheim emphasized the social structure rather than the individual.

Two Types of Societies: Preindustrial vs Industrial Societies

• Preindustrial societies: Held together by strong traditions and shared moral beliefs/values.
  • Mechanical solidarity is a common conscience.
• Industrialized societies: Specialized economic activity became the basis of social bonds because people became interdependent.
  • Organic solidarity is individualism.
• Industrialized societies result in strains leading to anomie.
• Anomie is a condition where social control becomes ineffective due to loss of shared values.

Karl Marx

• Karl Marx (1818-1883) was influenced by Engels.
• Marx believed class conflict was necessary to produce social change and a better society.
• Marx believed that the capitalist economic system is responsible for poverty in society.

Karl Marx's Class Conflict

• Class conflict is the struggle between the capitalist class and the working class.
• The capitalist/bourgeoisie class comprises those who own/control the means of production (land, tools, money, factories).
• The working class/proletariat is composed of those who must sell labor to earn a livelihood.

Marx's Alienation

• Alienation is a feeling of powerlessness and estrangement from other people and oneself.
• Marx predicted the working class would become aware of its exploitation, overthrow capitalists, and establish a free/classless society.

Max Weber

• Weber was concerned about changes from the Industrial Revolution, but disagreed with Marx that economics is key to social change.
• Weber acknowledged economic interests are important in shaping human action.

Weber's Verstehen

• Verstehen means to empathetically understand other people's actions.
• Large-scale organizations (bureaucracies) were becoming oriented toward routine administration and specialized labor division, which Weber believed were destructive to human vitality and freedom.
• Rational bureaucracy, rather than class struggle, is the most significant factor determining social relations in industrial societies, according to Weber.

Max Weber on Social Action

• Social Action is the action that individuals perform with a subjective meaning attached to it, and which orients toward the behavior of others.
• Elements of Social Action
  • Subjective Meaning
  • Oriented Toward Others
  • Intentionality

Types of Social Action

• Traditional action is based on traditions.
• Affective/Emotional action is based on emotions or affection.
• Value-rational action is based on values.
• Instrumental rational action is based on utility calculations.

Sociological Imagination (C. W. Mills)

• The Sociological imagination is a quality of mind that seems most dramatically to promise an understanding of the intimate realities of ourselves in connection with larger social realities (Mills 1959, p. 15).
• It is the awareness of the relationship between personal experience and wider society.

Mills on Personal Troubles vs Public Issues

• Personal troubles are private problems of individuals and their immediate network.
• Public issues affect large numbers of people and require solutions at the societal level.

Sociological Perspectives

• Functionalist
• Conflict
• Symbolic interactionist
• Feminist
• Postmodern

Functionalist Perspective

• Assumes that society is a stable and orderly system.
• The stable system is characterized by societal consensus, where most members share common values, beliefs, and behavioral expectations.
• Functionalists believe society has interrelated parts that each function to sustain the whole.
• Parts/structures/institutions include family, religion, politics, education, and economy.

Merton's Functionalism

• Manifest functions are intended and/or overtly recognized by the participants in a social unit.
• Latent functions are unintended functions that are hidden and remain unacknowledged by participants.
• Dysfunctions are the undesirable consequences of any element of a society.

Conflict Perspective

• Conflict perspective says that groups in society engage in a continuous power struggle for control of scarce resources.
• They view society as a state of perpetual conflict due to competition for limited resources.
• It emphasizes power dynamics, inequality, and struggles between different groups in society.

Symbolic Interactionist Perspective

• Is based on a microlevel analysis, focusing on small groups rather than large-scale social structures.
• This perspective sees society as the sum of interactions between individuals and groups.
• It assumes that symbols (signs, gestures, written languages) play a role in giving meaning to human communication.
• It emphasizes the subjective aspects of social life and how people construct realities through everyday interactions.

Feminism

• There is a focus is on the significance of gender in understanding/explaining inequalities between men/women in the household, the paid labour force and the realms of politics, law and culture.
• We live in a patriarchy, a hierarchical system of power system in which males possess greater economic and social privilege than females (Saunders, 1999).

Feminism Continued

• Liberals aim to achieve gender equality between men and women through social policy reforms, within the system.
• Radicals argue to re-order society by eliminating male supremacy in all social and economic context.
• Socialists view patriarchy to exist in all institutions, and that all women share common interests against all men with brining down patriarchy as the goal.

Postmodernism

• Existing theories have been unsuccessful in explaining social life in contemporary societies that have post-industrialization, consumerism, and global communications.
• The rapid social change moving from modern to postmodern (or post-industrial) conditions has a harmful effect on people.
• Declining influence of social institutions.

Postmodernism Continued

• Those who live in postmodern societies typically pursue individual freedom and do not want the structural constraints that social institutions impose.
• Collective ties that once bound people together become weakened, placing people at higher levels of risk.

Research Design

• Research design is the blueprint or plan of the study.
• A research design defines the study type, research question, hypotheses, variables, data collection methods, and analysis plan.
• Operationalization: The process of measuring/comparing an abstract theoretical concept.
• A Variable is a measurable attribute or character.
• Good research design carefully justifies the decisions made around what data collection method is used, what population is investigated, and how the data are analyzed, taking ethics into account throughout the process.

Basic Concepts of Social Research

• Independent Variable: The variable you manipulate to explore its effect.
• Dependent Variable: Variable that changes as a result of the independent variable manipulation.
• Causality: Change in one variable brings about change in the other, thus cause and effect.

Collecting and Analyzing Data

• Quantitative methods rely on numerical values obtained through surveys.
  • Quantitative research looks at the relationship between two or more variables and tests a particular hypothesis (Deductive Approach).
• Hypothesis: A prediction or informed assumption about the relationship between two or more variables.
• Correlation: A measure of association between two variables, which can be either negative or positive.
• Reliability describes the extent to which findings can be replicated and are consistent across comparable situations.
• Validity refers to the extent that a concept/idea/measure accurately represents the real world.
• Statistics deals with large quantities of numbers, and provides the mechanisms to collate, analyze, interpret, and present these numbers.

Collecting and Analyzing Data Continued

• Qualitative methods examine characteristics that cannot be reduced to numerical values.
  • Qualitative methods rely on different kinds of data, often using interviews, images, videos, and narratives, rather than numerical values.
• Qualitative researchers attempt to produce rich accounts through deep engagement.
• The aim of qualitative work is not to test a existing theory derived hypothesis but to develop new theory from data gathered (Inductive Approach).

Collecting and Analyzing Data Cont'd

• Mixed methods use any combination of research methods.
  • This combines the strengths of different data collection and analysis approaches.
• Numerous benefits exist including:
  • Data triangulation serves to determine the validity of findings.
• Challenges faced
  • Studies are time consuming.
  • They require a scholar to have the expertise in different forms of data collection, analysis, visualization, interpretation, and write-up styles.

Conflict Theory

• Aims are directed toward the uncovering and better understanding of inequalities in society relating to access to resources, power, and privilege.
• Methodologies have three key features:
  • Position of researcher: Particular attention is paid to how researchers position themselves as authority figures who can define what constitutes knowledge.
  • Topic of inequality: Studies focus on marginalized social groups, expose inequalities in society, and investigate the mechanisms that bring about social change.
  • Critical reflection: Studies shift from standard notions of knowledge, data, objectivity, and methodology to deep understandings of critical, Indigenous, and antioppressive approaches.

Feminism (Methodology)

• Adopts methodologies that uncover inequalities among social groups.
• Also adopts methodologies that describe the daily experiences of marginalized social groups like Black women, Indigenous women, or transgender individuals.
• Standpoint theory proposes the world is viewed from different locations depending on ethnic background, social status, class, and other demographic characteristics.

Functionalism (Methodology)

• Functionalism examines how society is organized and the role of institutions in reinforcing social order.
• It uses mostly quantitative data to describe changes over time to institutions and their compositions.
• Large-scale survey data and analyses are used to quantify and understand these changes.

Symbolic Interactionism (Methodology)

• Looks at how people come to understand the world through their interactions with one another.
• Aims to study how meaning is created and contested through social interaction and the role of symbols in meaning-making.
• Uses participant observation, a qualitative method where the researcher both observes and participates in interactions with the group they study.
• Uses ethnomethodology, focused on people’s accounts of situations—that is, the explanations a person develops to explain a particular social situation.

Material and Nonmaterial Culture

• Material culture consists of the tangible creations society's members make, use, and share (e.g., houses, dresses, food).
• Nonmaterial culture consists of the abstract or intangible human creations that influence behavior (e.g., beliefs, values, political systems, language).
• Technology is defined as the knowledge, techniques, and tools that make it possible to transform resources into usable forms, and the skills required to use them.
• Cultures can be concrete and abstract.

Cultural Universals

• Customs and practices that occur across all societies in diverse ways.
• They may include an education system, sporting activities, and rites of passage.

Components of Culture

• Symbols are anything that meaningfully represents something else, such as a country's flag.
• Language is a symbol system that expresses ideas and enables people to think and communicate.
  • Languages can be verbal or nonverbal.

Language, Race, and Ethnicity

• Language may create/reinforce perceptions about race/ethnicity by transmitting preconceived ideas about the superiority of others.
• Words may have more than one meaning, creating & reinforcing negative images; "black" and "Chinaman" produce negative and derogatory imagery.
• Words are frequently used to create/reinforce perceptions about a group. For example, Indigenous people have been described as savages/primitive while blacks have been described as uncivilized/cannibalistic/pagan.
• The “voice" of verbs may minimize/incorrectly identify activities/achievements of various minority groups.

Values

• Values are collective ideas about what is right or wrong, good or bad, and desirable or undesirable in a particular culture (Williams, 1970).
• Ideal versus real values
  • Ideal culture refers to the values and standards of behavior society professes to hold.
  • Real culture refers to the values and standards of behavior people actually follow.

Norms

• Norms stand as established rules of behavior, or standards of conduct.
• Prescriptive versus Proscriptive Norms
  • Prescriptive norms describe accepted or appropriate behavior.
  • Proscriptive norms portray what behavior is inappropriate or unacceptable.

Types of Norms

• Formal norms are written down and involve specific punishments.
  • The most common formal norm the law.
• Informal norms are unwritten standards of behavior understood by people who share a common identity
• Sanctions are the rewards for appropriate behavior, or penalties for inappropriate behavior.

More About Norms

• Folkways are informal norms or everyday customs that may be violated without serious consequences within a particular culture (Sumner, 1959/1906), such as dressing appropriately and practicing personal hygiene.
• Mores are strongly held norms with moral and ethical connotations that may not be violated without serious consequences.
• Taboos are the most serious norms, so strong that their violation is considered extremely offensive and even unmentionable.
• Laws are formal, standardized norms enacted by legislatures and enforced by formal sanctions.

Technology, Cultural Change, and Diversity

• Cultural lag is a gap between a society's technical advancement and its moral/legal institutions (Ogburn, 1966/1922).
• Discovery is the process of learning about something previously unknown or unrecognized.
• Invention is the process of reshaping existing cultural items into a new form.
• Diffusion is the transmission of cultural items/social practices from one group/society to another through exploration, military endeavors, the media, tourism, and immigration.

Cultural Diversity

• Cultural diversity refers to the wide range of cultural differences found between/within nations.
• Subculture: A group of people who share a distinctive set of cultural beliefs and behaviors that differ in some significant way from larger society, such as ethnic, religious, age-based, or deviant categories.

Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativism

• Ethnocentrism is the tendency to regard one's own culture and group as the standard—and thus superior—whereas all other groups are inferior.
• Cultural relativism is the belief that the behaviors and customs of any culture must be viewed and analyzed by that culture’s standards.
• Cultural imperialism is the extensive infusion of one nation’s culture into other nations.

Cultural Appropriation

• The adoption of certain language, behavior, clothing, or tradition belonging to a minority culture or social group by a dominant culture or group that is exploitative, disrespectful, or stereotypical.

The Culture of Consumerism

• The mid-twentieth century was seen as a time of mass conformity and mindless consumerism. According to David Riseman, people became more “other-directed.”
• A rise in other-directedness coincided with materialism, a preoccupation with owning material objects often at the expense of spiritual, intellectual, and moral values.
• Caught up in the competition for status and belonging, people ignore the harm that results from social inequality – harm to others and to the environment.

Culture as Hyperreality and Branding

• The explosion of consumer spending produced a new culture industry – the advertising industry.
• The media-constructed world is what Jean Baudrillard calls our hyperreality.
  • Within hyperreality, signs increasingly confer reality and significance in daily lives. This is illustrated in the business of branding products, places, and institutions.

Defining Logos

• A logo is a sign, letter, or symbol that represents a brand. Logos are expected to do two things:
  • First, help consumers recognize the brand.
  • Second, remind consumers of the brand’s claimed personality or history.
• One result of successful branding is the growth of brand communities.

High Culture and Popular Culture

• High culture refers to the subcultural preferences, habits, tastes, values, and norms that were historically supported by high-income groups in society, such as fine arts, classical music, ballet, and other “highbrow” concerns.
• High culture was created for wealthy and powerful people.
• Popular culture reflects the everyday life, arts, and artifacts of average people within a society. At the same time, however, popular culture reflects the influence of high culture.

Cultural Capital and & Literacy

• Cultural capital includes knowledge and social skills that help people get ahead socially, and often includes learning about/taking part in high culture.
  • Cultural capital defines & stabilizes class boundaries between highly educated & less educated ppl.
• Cultural literacy is general knowledge of a society's pop culture that allows one to communicate effectively with an average adult member of that society.
  • Unlike cultural capital (which is a luxury), cultural literacy is a necessity.

Cultural Values and Economic Behavior

• Cultural values influence people's behavior in every domain of life.
• Values from one domain (e.g., religion) can influence values in another domain (e.g., the economy).
• Max Weber said that changes to religious beliefs contributed to the rise of capitalism.

Weber on Culture and Economy

• Weber noted three reasons to see the link between cultural values and economic behavior as important:
  • It shows how cultural (i.e., religion) changes could produce, or at least support, changes in economic behavior.
  • It reminds us that one cultural change produces other kinds of (often unexpected) change.
  • It showed us that changes in cultural values can change world history.

Functionalist Analysis Of Culture

• It is assumed here that a common language and shared values help produce consensus and harmony. When a society contains numerous subcultures, discord comes from a lack of consensus and shared core values.
• Functionalists view culture as an integrated whole, not a mere ideology or collection of ideologies.
• Conspicuous consumption is the purchase of goods/services aimed at showing others how wealthy/tasteful one is.
  • This creates boundaries between the upper and lower social classes.

Conflict Perspectives on culture

• It's suggested here that values and norms help create and sustain privilege for those in power.
• Ideas are a cultural creation of society’s most powerful members, and can be used by the ruling class to affect the thoughts and actions of members of other classes.

Conflict Theory

• Conflict theory notes that those who hold the power will often try to manipulate culture in an attempt to influence the ideas and values of said culture's members.
  • Ideology is a set of beliefs or ideas that supports and promotes certain political actions.
  • Dominant ideology is a set of thoughts and beliefs that justify and perpetuate social inequality.

Critical Race Theory

• Critical Race Theory asserts that mainstream culture perpetuates the dominance of white people over racialized people.
• White privilege: The advantages and immunities that are unequally and unfairly experienced by people whom society views and treats as white, compared with what people racialized as people of colour experience under similar circumstances.

Symbolic Interactionist Perspectives

• According to this perspective, people create, maintain, and modify culture through their everyday activities
• Culture grows out of face-to-face interactions, and the things that people communicate to one another through these interactions.
• A symbol is a sign whose relationship with something else also expresses a value or evokes an emotion.
• Symbols assist in our communication with others by providing shared meanings.

Feminism (Culture)

• Cultural values are said to perpetuate the dominance of men over women.
• Feminism focuses a lens on gender socialization (the ways we are taught how to perform gender-specific roles and value masculine traits).
• Gender scripts are what we are expected to follow to perform our parts.

Queer Theory & Feminism

• Queer theory focuses on sexuality, gender identity, and the ways they intersect with other social identities and power structures.
• Queer theorists view culture as something that perpetuates binary categories of sexuality.

Post Modern Perspectives on Culture

• Highlights that culture is diverse, fluid, and constantly changing.
• Stresses the dynamic/contested nature of cultural identity and acknowledges that culture is constantly evolving in response to changing social, political, and economic conditions.
• Theorists here believe that today's culture is based on a simulation of reality, rather than reality itself
• The postmodern perspective argues that to gain new insights, we should deconstruct existing understanding and theories about culture.

What is Socialization?

• Socialization is the lifelong social learning of norms, values, and ideologies that allows a person to become a member of society and interact with others.
• A sense of self is a stable understanding of one's identity and who one is in relation to others.
• Socialization occurs at the micro - and macro-levels.
  • Micro-level: the study of one-on-one or small group interactions.
  • Macro-level: examines large-scale trends and changes in social institutions.

Stages of Socialization

• Two Stages are seen in the process of socialization -Primary socialization: Children develop basic values and norms and an idea of self. -Secondary socialization: Learning the knowledge/skills needed to take part in society beyond the family
• Children will need to learn how to balance new norms/values with old ones as the impact of influences outside the family grow.

Types of Socialization

• Primary Socialization

  • It is essential for harmonious physical and mental development of the child and is satisfied generally by the family (parents), in the first 7-8 years of the child's life.
  • It is when "learning of the rules of behavior", and the implementation of norms and values, begin.

• Secondary socialization refers to the period in which a child begins to interact strongly with other social environments than the family

Anticipatory Socialization and Resocialization

• Anticipatory socialization is associated with the process of preparing to take on a new position or social role in society.
  • Social roles are the set of behaviors associated with a specific status in the social structure.
• Resocialization is a process that involves a replacement of a person's values, beliefs, and sense of self. Resocialization can be -Voluntary: People learn about their new status with free will. -Involuntary: Occurs against one's wishes generally within a total institution.

Total Social Institutions

-The total institution is an isolated, confined community in which controls most aspects of its members' lives.

• Residential schools are an example of a total institution.
  • Indigenous communities resisted and protested the aggressive, colonial, and unethical form of resocialization. -Intergenerational trauma helps to understand how parents' trauma in residential schools can impair the socialization of their children.

Socialization Over the Life Course

• Agents of socialization are at play at each life stage.
• Additionally, life stages are associated with critical events.
• Sociologists recognize five stages:
  • Child
  • Teenager
  • Young adult
  • Mature adult
  • Older adult
• Each stage is associated with a set of expectations and behaviors.

Functionalism & Socialization

• Social roles and institutions are the building blocks that dictate social behavior.
• The transmission of norms and values through socialization provides stability in society over time.

Conflict Theory On Socialization

• Socialization is directly linked to social inequalities.
• The norms and behaviors we learn provide advantages and constraints in life. -Social mobility is a change in social status where individuals or families move from one stratum to another.
  • Movement may be vertical or horizontal, across generations or within a generation.

Feminist Views on Socialization

• Focus is concentrated on differential forms of socialization between genders, and the inequalities which grow out of these differences.
• Gender socialization is the learning of what it means to be a girl or a boy (leaving no room for any other option, in mainstream Canadian society) : what to wear, what activities to engage in, and how to express oneself
• Gender roles are modeled first in the home, where parents often engage in a gendered division of labor.

Symbolic Interactionism

• Social interactions create a person’s self-concept.
• The looking-glass self, is the idea that a person's self develops from interpersonal interactions in society and via the observations of how we interpret others' self concepts and perceptions.
• The looking-glass self has three principal elements:
  • We consider how others will see us.
  • We analyze how others react to our behaviors.
  • Considering both above points, and how we view our own behavior, we develop a self-concept that conforms to these judgements.

Explore the basics of sociology, including its definition, importance, and key contributing factors such as the French Revolution, industrialization, urbanization, and the Enlightenment. Learn about early sociological thinkers like Auguste Comte.