Sociology: Basic Concepts and Social Action

• Sociology is an academic discipline using various research methods to study society and human social behavior.

Basic Sociological Concepts

• Agency: Undetermined voluntary action by an individual.
• Norm: Shared and expected social behavior.
• Social Role: Expected actions associated with particular social positions.
• Social Structure: Recurring patterns of interrelationship between individuals or groups.
• Socialization: Acquiring and internalizing the norms and values of a particular group.
• Society: Configuration of cohesive social relationships within a particular group.
• Sociology: Observation and analysis of societies.

Social Action

• Complex and should not be oversimplified using 'common-sense' understandings.
• Bauman (1997) outlines the differences between common sense and sociology:
  • Responsible Speech: Sociological propositions are founded on corroborative evidence, not beliefs.
  • Size of the field: Sociology recognizes the link between individual accounts and social processes, unlike the individual perspective of common sense.
  • Making Sense: Sociology understands actions are the result of social interdependence.
  • Make the Familiar Strange: Sociology scrutinizes the familiar to understand common sense.

Sociological Perspectives and Applications to Pharmacy

• Examines how social factors influence health behaviors, patient-practitioner relationships, and healthcare delivery.
• Understanding these dynamics helps pharmacists address patient needs and improve health outcomes.
• The nature of its subject matter (people and society) is diverse and diffuse.
• Perspectives- seek to understand how social structures interact with individual behaviors, varying in their level of analysis.
• Oriented towards Micro and Macro level issues:
  • Micro-level issues pertain to actions and beliefs of individuals.
  • Macro-level issues concern the way the "structures" of society are organized.
  • Includes the organizations of education, healthcare, economic systems, and social divisions.

Turner (1995) 3 Levels of Analysis:

• Individual Level:
  • Topic: Lay knowledge of health, illness, experience
  • Perspective: Interpretive approaches
• Social Level:
  • Topic: Cultural categories of sickness
  • Perspective: Structural-functionalism sociology of roles, norms, and deviance.
• Societal Level:
  • Topic: Health care systems
  • Perspective: Conflict of perspectives, e.g. political economy

Individual Level

• Sociologists examine personal accounts of illness experiences and health maintenance.
• Aspects of everyday life are illuminated from the individual's perspective.
• Analysis involves an ‘interpretive perspective' on how people make sense of their lives or actions.
• Focuses on face-to-face interactions.
  • Social circumstance = physical symptoms
• 'Meaning': How people make sense of what is happening to them.

Social Level

• Examines how society views sickness, illness, and disease.
• Disease categories reflect biophysical processes and social considerations.
  • Example; Homosexuality:
    • Can be treated
    • Result of physiological dysfunctions
• Medicine is a powerful social institution involving a "sick role"
• 'sick role' involves the obligation to get well with expert help
• Health professionals help society function by helping people get better.

Societal Level

• Highlights 'conflict' rather than cohesion
• 'Conflict' perspective shows how differential power and economic rewards lead to social tensions.
• 'Political economy approach'
  • Socio-economic factors create and produce illness.
• Medicalization has a sociological concept addressing how everyday life matters are dealt with by biomedicine.

Key Theories

• 19th-century sociological theorists, like Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, are considered the ‘founding fathers' of sociology.
• The French Revolution of 1789 and the European-wide Industrial Revolution inspired sociology.
• Historical revolutions were instrumental in the emergence of sociology as a discipline.
• The rapid social transformation led to the development of systematic enquiries into how society could undergo such change
  • Industrial Revolution
    • Increased production of goods and services on a hitherto inconceivable scale and change a way of life that has endured millennia

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

• Focused on how social order is maintained and cohesive social relations are established.
• 'Social facts' are forces like shared belief systems that coerce individuals.

Karl Marx (1818-83)

• Marxist perspective emphasizes the theory of capitalist society.
• People express themselves productively, but there's an element of exploitation.
• One group (the ruling class) takes advantage of other groups (the working class).
  • MEDICINES are internationally traded commodity.
  • Pharmacist's role - promotes drug consumption-serves the interests of the large pharmaceutical manufacturing corporations rather than the general population.
  • Pharmaceutical companies define ‘health problems' to which their product is the 'answer'

Max Weber (1864-1920)

• Industrialized world is the epitome of modernization, depending on technical efficiency for social order.
• Theory of rationalization within industrial societies.
• Bureaucracy was the classic form of rationalization.
• Argued that individuals resign themselves to a world ordered by bureaucracy, creating an 'iron cage.'
  • Community pharmacies increasingly function as part of large bureaucratic structures as multiple chains of pharmacies and in-store supermarket pharmacies proliferate.
  • Bureaucracies seek to enhance productivity and profits by instituting rationalized and routinized processes

Modernity

• A modernist approach assumes a hierarchy of knowledge.
  • SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE, GENERATED BY SCIENCE is at the pinnacle.
  • Common-sense knowledge or experience-based knowledge is relegated to being self-evident or subjective.

Post-Modernity

• 'Knowledge' is seen as socially constructed rather than passively discovered.
• Objective knowledge, like scientific inquiry, is maintained.
• Recognizes PHARMACOGNOSY.
  • Representations of nature.
  • It is possible to know medicinal properties of plants through practices beyond scientific trials.

Scientific Knowledge

• Revolutions in drug therapy include availability of powerful medications over the counter from community pharmacies
• Public access to medicines - OTC & Prescribed
• Individuals are involved in managing and assessing health-related risks
• Individuals are increasingly aware of risks
• Individuals are expected to assess and manage such risks themselves
• In a 'risk society', all actions involve calculating their associated risk.

Pharmacy in Contemporary Society

• Social dimensions of health and illness, combined with drug therapy knowledge, ensure pharmacists provide appropriate advice or treatment for individual needs.
• A sociological perspective on pharmacy helps understand individual responses to illness and medication use through the lens of social context.
• Collective beliefs, values, and attitudes explain motivations and constraints affecting the use, misuse, and non-use of medicines and healthcare services.