Sociology: Émile Durkheim's Social Facts

• Sociology is the study of human society and its phenomena.
• It focuses on understanding how people interact, organize into groups, and develop social structures.

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

• He was a French sociologist considered a founder of modern sociology.
• His work established the discipline as an independent science with fundamental methods and concepts.
• The belief was that sociology should study society as an objective reality, external to individuals, with its own laws and structures.
• He rejected the notion that society is simply the sum of individuals.
• Social phenomena have their own existence and influence individual behavior.
• He proposed a scientific approach based on observation, comparison, and empirical research.
• To understand society, "social facts" should be analyzed.
• Social facts are ways of thinking, acting, and feeling external to the individual, which exert coercion.
• Social facts like laws, customs, norms, and institutions exist independently of individuals and influence them deeply.
• Society imposes these facts to unite its members in a similar way of thinking and acting.
• Examples are language or the monetary system, elements existing before individuals are born and learned within a culture.
• Society must fulfill various functions to stay alive, distributed among members, which is considered division of labor.
• Each role involves different capacities and training, leading to distinct rewards (hierarchy of functions).
• Inequalities are natural and healthy in society, with different roles for members to fulfill for adequate functioning.
• Social changes are slow, evolutionary, and unidirectional, entailing two risks: exacerbated individualism and weakening social norms.
• Individuals are part of a unified whole in interaction, referring to social solidarity.
• One of Durkheim's central concepts was "social solidarity," the force that keeps society united. He distinguished two types:

Mechanical Solidarity

• Occurs in societies with little or no division of labor, where functions are the same for everyone.
• Cooperation and collaboration are established for tasks or objectives not requiring special capacities.
• It is a more primitive type of solidarity in a rural/family context.

Organic Solidarity

• Predominates in modern and complex societies, with more specialized division of labor and different roles.
• Social cohesion is based on interdependence and mutual need.
• Restitutive law, which seeks to repair damage, is more common than penal law.
• Society seeks to maintain cooperation and social order through regulating interactions.
• Individuals are social and natural beings, determined by social reality, which imposes norms, beliefs, and external feelings.
• Education is a social fact that can be studied objectively and scientifically.

Max Webber (1864-1920)

• He was a German sociologist, economist, historian, and philosopher, also a founder of modern sociology.
• His work featured deep reflection on modern society, its power structures, and the rationalization of social life.
• Weber opposed the positivist view of sociology, which sought universal laws to explain social behavior.
• Weber advocated for a more interpretive and comprehensive approach.
• Human behavior is influenced by meanings and motivations individuals attribute to actions, not simple responses to stimuli

Social Action

• Weber emphasized analyzing the "social action" of the subject to understand society, rescuing decisions and subjectivity.
• Subjects are free to carry out their actions and transform their environment.
• Sociology is dedicated to interpreting social action and studying the relationship between the self and society as symbolic communications.
• The object of study is social action.
• Social actors present social action through qualitative methods and analysis of conversations in social settings. Language is the main means of communication.
• He focuses on individual actions to explain social changes; relevant changes relate to how people behave.
• It is not just any action, but one that considers the presence and behavior of others, performed with specific intention and meaning.
• It categorized four forms of social action as ideal models: traditional, affective, rationality with value-orientation, and rationality with means-to-ends.

Rational Action with Means-to-Ends

• An individual chooses rational means to achieve specific objectives, based on a cost-benefit calculation.
• Respecting traffic signals to avoid accidents is an example.

Rational Action with Value-Orientation

• Individuals are guided by personal principles and values, regardless of practical results.
• Actions are motivated by beliefs, ethics, or ideology.
• Respecting traffic signals to avoid hurting someone is an example.

Affective Action

• Action is driven by intense emotions and feelings.
• Individuals act according to their emotions without necessarily considering rational or ethical consequences.
• Working as a police officer because the whole family does it is an example.

Traditional Action

• Actions that are carried out by inertia or conformity to customs, norms, and traditions in society.
• These actions are based on continuity and repetition of past practices.
• Crying for something emotional is an example.
• Education has a field delimited by ideological domination, referring to the relationship between the educational system and social structure.
• Each educational system aims to help young people grow, imposing a certain lifestyle, suggesting an elite or group in power.
• There are three central aspects for education in sociological theory: the structural relation between church and school, different types of education, and the relations between school and bureaucracy.
• All aspects within the capitalist organization foster bureaucracy, implying domination thanks to knowledge.
• Bureaucracy tends to increase its power through service knowledge and professional secrecy.
• Social relation: Plural conduct that is reciprocally referred, oriented by that reciprocity.
• It relies on the possibility of acting socially in an indicable way; it's indifferent on what the probability rests.
• Power: A relationship of domination of men, based on legitimate coercion.
• Domination: The probability of finding obedience within a group for specific mandates.

Three forms of legitimized domination:

• Rational Character: it is based on norms established by the association, obedience is due to the norms that defend their authority.
• An example is a judge imposing the law.
• Traditional Character: Based on the belief in the sanctity of orders and powers of command inherited from distant times, their mandate should be based on tradition and habits that are sacred to the dominated, to avoid resistance.
• An example is a dad who is a police officer and his child following the same path
• Charismatic Character: Based on extraordinary dedication to holiness, heroism, or the exemplary nature of a person and the orders created or revealed by them.

Karl Marx - Social Change

• Social change is the result of class struggle, where things change when power relations change due to who wins the fight.
• Education is a state apparatus that molds human beings and social action, as education is not considered social action but rather is collective.
• It is a state apparatus because it serves the dominant classes by reproducing social conditions of domination.
• Sociology is the struggle of classes, divided into the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
• Social class is the group of people who share their tradition with the means of production.
• Historical materialism considers that the base of society is the economy and that relations of production determine the social structure and the dominant ideology.
• History is a process of class struggle, where social classes conflict over control of the means of production.
• Productive forces (means of production, technology, and labor) conflict with relations of production (social relations regulating property and control of the means of production) in each historical epoch. These contradictions generate tensions and conflicts that culminate in social revolution, transforming the structure of society and leading to a new mode of production.
• The central element is that humans need nature to subsist and satisfy basic needs.
• Modes of production are how society organizes itself.

Modes of Production

• Primitive Communism: Simple productive forces (rudimentary tools), relations of production based on communal ownership.
• There are no social classes or exploitation.
• Slavery: Productive forces depend on using slave labor, relations of production are based on private ownership of slaves and exploitation of their labor.
• Feudalism: Productive forces characterized by agriculture and livestock.
• Relations of production are based on the lord-serf relationship, where the serf works the lord's land in exchange for protection and a small piece of land.
• Capitalism: Productive forces dependent on industry and modern technology, relations of production based on private ownership of the means of production by the bourgeoisie and the sale of labor by the proletariat, marked by the exploitation of labor and the accumulation of capital.
• Socialism: Capitalism would be overcome by socialism, a mode of production based on collective ownership of the means of production and central planning of the economy.
• For Marx, modes of production not only determine how goods and services are produced, but also influence all other aspects of social life.
• Class structure: Each mode of production generates a specific class structure, with inherent conflicts between dominant and exploited classes, such as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in capitalism.
• Ideology: The dominant ideology of society is influenced by relations of production, as the dominant ideas are those of the dominant class, which it uses to maintain power and legitimize the system of exploitation.
• Culture and Superstructure: Art, religion, morality, and politics (what Marx calls "superstructure") are interrelated with the economic base of society, reflecting and reproducing relations of production, legitimizing the existing social order.
• Alienation is a complex process in capitalism, where the worker feels separated from their work, the product, other workers, and their human essence, deriving from capitalist exploitation.
• Alienation from Labor: Workers feel separated from the labor process, which they neither control nor direct, becoming a means of earning a wage rather than a source of creativity or personal satisfaction.
• Alienation from the Product of Labor: Workers feel separated from the product of their work, which they do not own or control, becoming a commodity that is sold in the market, with the worker only receiving a wage without benefiting from the value they produced.
• Alienation from Fellow Workers: Workers feel separated from their fellow workers, with whom they do not have cooperation but a relation of competition and individualism, increasing separation and hindering the formation of class consciousness.
• Alienation from the Human Species: Workers feel separated from their human essence, their capacity to create, express themselves, and realize their human potential, turning them into a mere appendage of the machine.
• Socialization involves introducing, generating, or stimulating desired traits in individuals' personalities to align with society's expected behaviors.
• Socialization aims to convince individuals and stimulate desired behavior for self-control, integrating them into society.

Two types of Socialization

• Primary: Transmitted in the first institution, the family, where authority resides, and we acquire survival knowledge and skills (social control). It's heterogeneous.
• Secondary: Transmitted in neighborhood and educational institutions. We acquire new habits, knowledge, activities, and incorporate values and behaviors as we grow, including school, which shapes and molds individuals with schedules, information, knowledge, uniforms, rules, norms, language, and communication.
• Social Control: Another form of socialization that ensures individuals behave regularly and comply with civil norms, punishing the undesired behavior.
• A social organization needs both social control and socialization.
• Education provides specific knowledge, skills, aptitudes, and acceptance demanded by the job market, depending on effort and attendance. Students must complete activities according to instructions from the teacher.
• School forms citizens, construing students as members of a group and a collective, learning to behave in the collective, expressing themselves freely, which is what society expects. The formation of citizens is dynamic and depends on each society and its political regime, reinforcing ideology through government programs.
• Schools instill values and habits, favoring politics through democratic and antidemocratic regimes, allowing freedom of expression.
• Civil society interpretation: Schools transmit the appropriation and acceptance of values, norms, rights, and respectabilities, and laws and social formats that must be fulfilled and respected, reflecting the logic of authority.

Meritocracy

• Schools were originally meritocratic for a small sector of society where the social order legitimizes itself.
• Schools make people see differences in wealth, power, and prestige as a result of individual competition, perceiving a divided society where each individual faces their own luck.

Ideological Apparatuses of the State

• Althusser defines the state as an instrument at the service of domination, as a means of enforcement.
• The State apparatus is not the same as the power of the state.
• Apparatuses aim to reproduce social relations of domination.
• Ideological apparatuses of the state: Mostly functional through ideology and morally shaping (religion, school, family, legal system, political and union systems, culture, media). They are multiple, heterogeneous, horizontal, and susceptible to contradiction (not only reproduce but also produce), functioning through ideology and privately.
• Repressive apparatuses of the State: This apparatus cannot have contradiction. They intend to reproduce social relations of production through repression and violence (government, administration, army, police, tribunals). They are vertical, with unity of command, repressive, and public.

Infrastructure and Superstructure

• According to Marx, the structure is assembled by two levels, determined by either an infrastructure, or an economic system of powers of production.
  • The Juridico-Political are the rights and the state, and the other side by differing ideologies (religious, moral, juridical, policies).
• The economy and the productive forces will determine the superstructure based on moral, juridical, political, and religious ideology, and is based on the AIE.
• The Capitalist School in France is criticized for neither uniting nor conveying equal teachings regardless of students’ social classes.
• Schools do not provide the same ease in learning at the same pace for all due to differences in social class.
• The school is not equal in practice, but is unequal, unfair, discontinuous, as it’s only for those who can pass it entirely.

Schools:

• Tend to divide the social classes by dividing people into social representations, stigmas and working class.
• Do not produce unified education, causing students who abandon primary educational systems to discontinue.
• Benefit students that are capable and have continuous access to education. The students whom did not have continuous access have a harder time advancing towards an educational career.
• Do not unify since they engender inequality.
• Allows for people to integrate socially, is the unique school for every social area.
• It’s not a unity it makes a selection of the social areas, there are unequal different classes. Should reduce the gaps.
• Cannot be thought as in the educational primary system.
• Are arranged so that student can traverse as an attachment.
• 3 Industrial Revolutions*
• Revolution 1: 17th/19th century, class separation, mass production after hard labor, factories, steam revolutions.
• Revolution 2: Division between bosses and subordinates, teamwork increased and so did productivity. Taylorism: Someone with expertise does one thing. Fordism: Each person does one task.
• Revolution 3: Revolutions in information. The internet, technology, rapidity. Knowledge increases faster than technology.

Important Notes of the Industrial Revolutions

• Rich = logo, Poor= no logo. Education and hard work are the road to riches.

• More and more mechanization, less jobs, competition called artificial intelligence. Loses information monopoly, teachers jobs are being questioned.

• They should be captivating, not coercive, and not make school boring for the students. Learn how to best extract the best teacher info.

Jurco

• There is a sector that does not belong to the culture and it has difficulty socially incorporating and system margin,so the school it is not neither unitary nor uniting. In this process not just the student does not reproduce to school, sino que el estudiante realises estrategias para resistir esa hegemonia.
• Basically only doesn’t reproduce , Sino tambien produces info and individual resistance, collective would prove transformadora.
• 2 types of Students: Those whose are incorporated into the labor marker and connect to school and labor areas.
• Colleagues: Working class people are going to create resistance cause it doesn't provide what they need/dominate thinking, make them losers. Will marcar su idiosincrasia atacando al central answering student with resentment.
• Students in class, a gang with group codes, makes noises and gestures, bother classmates, they seek to control the is situation. Before one called attention is always has the teacher always has the reason.
• The colleagues knew the student level was limited and that they want to follow up because they interrupt the dominance. Want teachers to sacar nada bueno. They don’t reproduce culture. And seek to create a new normal en desprecio.
• They maintain and independent attitude, they show valor.

Orejas Agujareadas

• The teachers are the one whom are favored and beneficiaries by dominating teaching.They want higher score, grades, titles, prestige and higher power.
• Poor students that go to class but don’t anything,

2 Types Teachers

• Tradicionales: Those whose are reproducen los saberes a através de lo que rige en designing.
• Relations between students and teacher are high, the books are the content and are not connected.
• Humanistas: Participations that are democratic is less rigida. Contents are connect . Teachers work with the student. Critical thinking and a group that connects and helps will be the goal. Teachers that are valiosos’