Sociology Branches Overview

Role-Taking Theory

• Development of social awareness is traced to our early social interaction
• Agents of socialization include:
  • Family
  • School
  • Peers
  • Mass Media
  • Workplace

Conformity and Deviance

• Conformity: act of exhibiting the same behavior as most other people in a society
• Deviance: recognized violation of cultural norms
• Social Control: set of means to ensure people generally behave in expected and approved ways
  • Internal Social Control: knowing it's the right thing to do
  • External Social Control: system of rewards and punishment

Forms of Deviance

• Innovation: rejecting the use of socially accepted means to achieve success
• Ritualism: rejecting the importance of success goals but continuing to work diligently
• Retreatism: withdrawal from society, not caring about success
• Rebellion: attempting to change the goals and means of society

Human Dignity, Human Rights, and The Common Good

• Human Dignity: something that can't be taken away
• Human Rights: inherent to all human beings, interrelated, interdependent, and universal
• The Common Good: something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members

Industrial Society

• Developed in the 1700s with the introduction of machines
• First machine: Steam and water, later replaced by electricity
• Good effects:
  • Political freedom
  • Study of medicine (long life span)
  • "Rags to riches" concept
• Bad effects:
  • Less social life
  • Riots and urban violence
  • Helped the rise of modern police force
  • Poverty
• Sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies divided societies into:
  • Gemeinschaft: everyone knows everyone
  • Gesellschaft: acquaintances

Post-Industrial Society

• Information age
• Wireless technology views with machines and factories
• People lacking a college education will have even more trouble finding gainful employment

Four Major Civilizations

• Sumerian Civilization: developed along the Tigris and Euphrates River in West Asia
• Indus Valley Civilization: started along the Indus River Valley in India
• Shang Civilization of China: developed near the Huang Hi/Huang He River
• Egyptian Civilization: Nile River

Becoming a Member of Society

• Enculturation/Socialization: acquiring personal identity, learning norms, values, behavior, habits, beliefs, and social skills
• Theoretical Perspectives on Enculturation:
  • Charles Horton Cooley's Looking Glass Self Theory
  • Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives on Culture and Society

Perspectives on Culture and Society

• Anthropological Perspectives:
  • Unilineal Evolutionism
  • Cultural Diffusionism
  • Historical Particularism
  • Anthropological Functionalism
  • Anthropological Structuralism
  • Cultural Materialism
• Sociological Perspectives:
  • Sociological Functionalism
  • Sociological Conflict Perspective
  • Symbolic Interactionalism
  • Evolutionism

Society

• Derived from the Latin word "societas," meaning companion or associate
• Refers to a population of people organized in a cooperative manner to carry out the major functions of life
• Views of society:
  • Anthropological: a group of people sharing a common culture with a territory
  • Sociological: an association organized by men with a territory

Culture

• Refers to an individual's taste, inclination, and interest in the "fine arts"
• Aspects of Culture:
  • Dynamic and flexible
  • Shared and contested through time
  • Learned through socialization or enculturation
  • Patterned social interaction
  • Integrated and timely
• Explicit Culture: directly observed
• Implicit Culture: abstract, not quite observed

How People View Culture

• Cultural Relativist: it's wrong to judge culture
• Ethnocentrism: own culture is superior
• Xenocentrism: inferior/other culture is better
• Xenophobia: fear of what is perceived as foreign

How Society is Organized

• Social Group: a group with shared expectations and common identity
• Branches of Sociology:
  • Social Organization
  • Social Psychology
  • Applied Sociology
  • Population studies
  • Human Ecology
  • Sociological Theory and Research
  • Social Change

Political Science

• Study of Government
• Study of complex behaviors of political actors
• Systematic study of political and Government institutions and processes

Politics

• Originated from the Greek word "polis," meaning city or state
• Art or science of governing a city/state
• Social process of strategy in any position of control, which people gain

Government

• Agency to which the will of the state is formulated
• Organized agency in a state tasked to impose social control
• Groups of people that govern a community or unit

Human Biocultural and Sociopolitical Evolution

• Hunting and Gathering Society:
  • During the Paleolithic Period, which lasted from the beginning of human life until about 10,000 BCE
  • People were nomads, societies were small, consisting of 20-30 members