SOC 1000 Unit 4.docx

SOC 1000 Unit 4 -You've now all heard about sociology, what it is, the kinds of questions it asks, its general character. So, let's move on to talking about two topics that are very important. -This unit focuses on the theories that sociologists generate. How do they claim to know what they think th...

SOC 1000 Unit 4 -You've now all heard about sociology, what it is, the kinds of questions it asks, its general character. So, let's move on to talking about two topics that are very important. -This unit focuses on the theories that sociologists generate. How do they claim to know what they think they know? -So sociological theories and methods are the two aspects of sociology that all sociologists have in common. -The rest of this course will introduce individual topics within sociology or what you might call subdisciplines of sociology. But all of them have in common basic sociological theories and research methods. So that's the importance of this unit and the next. -Social theories are simply different perspectives on social life or explanations of social life. That's really what a theory is. A theory is not describing something. A theory explains what it is. -So sociological theories and there are many of them. You will be introduced to just a few here. They are different perspectives or explanations of how society works on human life, and they obviously developed historically over time in their own historical context, shaped profoundly by the historical context in which they arose. -So, this is both an introduction to sociological theories as well as a little bit of history of sociology. So, let's start by talking about the origins of sociology. -Sociology emerged as a science or a social science, during the upheavals of the 18th century. So, whenever you hear 18th, you think this that's the 1700s, right? The 1700s is the 18th century. It was an era of profound upheaval and social change. -Probably the term that is most associated with the 1700s is the Enlightenment. I'm sure you've heard of the Enlightenment. It was marked by a breaking of traditions, of feudal society, of religious authority. Of inherited hierarchy. Enlightenment was the attempt spurred by scholars and thinkers and intellectuals, to move beyond the status quo of society via becoming enlightened to different kinds of and they would argue, better forms of truth. In other words, rationality would give us access to truth more than tradition would. And when rational, I mean humans like philosophers had always been rational, but what they had not done is go out and test their rationality. -It's one thing to reason about reality. It's quite another thing to go out and measure it, test it, observe it. And when you do that, what you're doing is not just philosophy, you are doing science. So enlightenment furthered science, which had begun prior to the Enlightenment, but it further accentuated the rise of rationality and science. -Yes, science had already begun in the previous couple of centuries, but had been applied only to the physical world, what we call natural sciences or the earth sciences, if you will. But what happens when you take that method of knowing that's what science is? It's a method of knowing. And instead of just applying it to the material physical world, you start applying it to the social world. You start applying it to humans. Well, that's when you get social science. And that's probably one of the origins of sociology as one of the social sciences. -In other words, enlightenment thinkers did not simply accept the status quo. They did not accept normality, social norms, social relations as preordained, the fatalistic way. No, they wanted to seize hold of their social reality and improve it. If Enlightenment can be described in any one single word, it would be the belief in progress. The belief in progress that instead of being fatalistic and resigned to the way things are, the status quo, humans could seize control of their own destiny, their own fate, their own quality of life, and improve it progress beyond what had been in the past. So that's some of the character of the Enlightenment. -At much the same time, we saw the rise of democracy. If you know a little bit about history, you know the United States of America was founded in 1776, the first nation state that was formed without an inherited king or queen or a monarchy. And then, of course, a couple of years later, in 1789, there was the famous French Revolution. Both the American Revolution and the French Revolution were very deliberate attempts to overthrow the feudal social order that had predominated the Middle Ages, giving power to the people to decide their own fate, to decide their own leaders. That's huge. That's revolutions. The notion that every human was equal, every human had inalienable human rights. Every human had the right to participate in structuring the society in which they lived. That's what democracy is. -At the same time, there was the Industrial revolution. There you see the dates approximately the last quarter, in the first half of the 18th century, the first half of the 19th century, as I just said, enlightenment and democracy took the feudal system apart, the system of lords and serfs and peasants based on inheritance. But there were also other aspects of it. -There were technological aspects of the change that was occurring. Ownership aspects, privatization of crown lands. So, what happens when you privatize is the land upon which all the serfs and peasants are living and you force them to go, Where are they going to go? Well, they're going to move to the city. So, urbanization is one aspect of industrialization. -So, when all these serfs and peasants moved to the city, how are they going to sustain themselves? How are they going to live? Well, the only way the thing that they can do is to sell their own labor, to sell their own labor for a wage instead of growing their own subsistence means of existence under feudalism. -So, the industrial revolution and urbanization created a whole new urban wage-earning labor force that had not existed previously. And as I mentioned, another huge dimension of the Industrial Revolution was the advance of technology. Technology is the application of science to solving human problems or problems of everyday living. -Science will tell you about physical reality. Technology will tell you how you can use that knowledge of physical reality to make tools, to improve the quality of your life. There it is again progress. -So, what we have in the Industrial Revolution, in contrast to the agricultural revolution centuries previously, is that most of the society moves from farming and agriculture to manufacturing. So, you have this massive change from feudal agrarian society to urban industrial society. And this was viewed or at least experienced as some form of progress. -Obviously, the Ind. Revolution furthered the idea, the Enlightenment idea of progress, people again were in control of their own destiny. -We now have advanced scientific knowledge, technological knowledge, production, productive knowledge. We can improve a lot of our lives. -And then we have the rise of capitalism, a new system, a new economic system compared to the feudal economic system of capitalism. Emphasizes private ownership. Privatization of the crown lands, private property and perhaps most significantly, production. Not just for the sake of subsistence, not just to produce your own food and clothing and shelter, but to produce mass quantities of it. To sell it for profit production, for profit instead of mega subsistence. -That's the revolution of capitalism. We would now produce things to sell them for a profit instead of just use them ourselves. We'll talk lots about capitalism in further units of the course. -And then finally worth mentioning here is that Europeans were encountering other cultures colonialism, imperialism. And when they started going around the world and colonizing different territories, the people that they observed, the systems, the social systems that they observed were so profoundly different than they are, then their own interest raised all kinds of questions. How can human life so completely different in one place, in one society compared to another place, another society? -So that was a stimulus to think more systematically and thoroughly about comparative or relative social structures, societies. And you can see how that's the origin of sociology. -So, all five of these upheavals marked the beginning of what we call modernity. And you can argue when modernity began, but let's just say that these are all characteristic of the rise of modernity. -And in many ways, here's a big point in many ways, sociology is an attempt to explain the rise of modernity, which is all the above. -Okay, so if those are the social origins of sociology, here are some of the people, the founders of sociology. -We should get to know a few names, a few people that we can identify as formative to the discipline of sociology. -Here's the first: Auguste Comte (1789-1857) -was a French thinker, a Frenchman. He coined the term sociology in 1838. So, he gave the discipline its name. He promoted science and positivism as a whole philosophy of science, which argues that its only empirical, scientific knowledge that we can be positive about only science is real valid knowledge, only scientific facts and truths are that about which we can be positive compared to philosophizing and never actually going out and testing or measuring what you're philosophizing about. -So just as there are laws of the physical realm, there must also be laws of the social realm. So, what are the laws of society? What are the laws of human relationships compared to the laws of rocks and trees and physical matter and so forth? -Comte distinguished between what he called social statics and social dynamics. Static means things that stay the same. Dynamics mean things that change. So, he was interested in two separate aspects of society. -What stays the same, statics or what we might now call social order or social structure, which is static compared to social dynamics, what we today might call social change. -So even though we have different terminology today, the categories of conceptualization were already being articulated by Comte 200 years ago. -But he got extreme and radical in many ways. He promoted, even though he argued against the reality of religious belief, he claimed that sociology was going to be the new religion of science and that sociologists would be the priests of society, and that he himself would be the high priest of society and lots of eccentric and egocentric notions that that he adopted towards the end of his life. But nevertheless, he named the discipline, he gave us some of its founding concepts, which we'll hear more of during this course. -Another 19th century sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was English, sometimes described as a social evolutionist. -He was heavily influenced by Charles Darwin, who, of course, argued in 1859 Origin of Species that physical reality evolved. It didn't just appear so. -So, Spencer is often called a social Darwinist, so he applied Darwinian evolutionary thinking to the social realm. Society is constantly evolving, so he's focused on dynamics more than statics, on change, more than order. And he saw evolution as a social evolution, as a struggle. Actually, he was the one who coined the term survival of the fittest. Darwin never said that. That phrase, the survival of the fittest, which describes evolution, is Spencer’s term, not Darwin's term. -And, you know, if you want to look at the person, not just the social context, but the person, some have argued that because Spencer was the sole survivor of nine siblings, he was the fittest. He survived. And yeah, he was the strong one. He was the good one. All his siblings died off. -But as a social Darwinist argues, Spencer argued that we should not interfere with natural selection. And if you apply that to the social realm, he argued that we should not interfere with the survival of the fittest among people, not just among rocks and trees and animals. Okay, so he was very opposed to social reform. He argued that we should not prop up the weak in society. In essence, he argued that we should let the weak die, let only the strong survive, because that's the only way a society is going to progress. Also, a very radical notion. So, he believed in competition, in progress. -He was a very conservative, right-wing intellectual. -People have argued that Spencer's theorizing was just a legitimization of the British Empire of the 19th century, as if the British Empire was the pinnacle of social evolution and let the rest die or be overtaken or colonized or whatever. So also became very radical in his views, -both Comte and Spencer were more popular in their day than they are in our day. Not too many contemporary sociologists give much credence to Comte and Spencer anymore. They're viewed, as I said, as very eccentric, very egocentric. Speaking of which, one of the personal practices that they both practiced was called cerebral hygiene. Cerebral hygiene, which was their term for refusing to read the writing in the works of anybody else for fear that it would contaminate their own mind. So, how's that for being arrogant and egocentric? -We also need to identify several early women sociologists. -It's very ironic that in a discipline that would evolve to study social inequality, women were equally victimized by sexism, by the very decent, by the very academic discipline that studies different forms of social inequalities, as we will later see in this course. -So, yes, early women sociologists were ignored, just like women elsewhere in society were, for the most part, ignored. Early sociology did not rise above sexism. Some have stated, rather facetiously or comically, that sociology is just the idea is of dead white European males. -Is that true? Well, yes. That's the history of sociology. But, you know, that's also the history of many other academic disciplines. -So, here's one female, Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), even though it's a French name, she was a British woman born into a wealthy English family, though still constrained by all the norms for women to not be intellectual, to not be educated. -She would hide her writing underneath her sewing because that's what women were supposed to do. They weren't supposed to be thinking and writing and so forth. But she also traveled extensively through the United States, through Britain, studying social life. -She translated Auguste Comte′s major works, the positive philosophy. She translated into English. And when Comte edited her copies, he admitted that she had said it better than he had in her translation. -She was equally committed to the science of society, applying the method of knowing of science to society. But she was more interested that it be widely accessible and not just there for intellectuals. She wanted the general public to benefit from this science, not just become some esoteric, cryptic science. -She argued against many of the social evils of the day. She argued against slavery. She fought for all the factories, workers in the Industrial Revolution to have better working conditions, to have rights. She fought for the rights of women. She argued that society would be better if women could vote. So, she was arguing for women's suffrage, that they get the right to vote. -By the end of her life, she had written 50 books and 1600 articles and much of her work was focused on whom she termed the sufferers of society-the mentally ill, the criminal, the handicapped, the poor, the alcoholic. Those were of great concern to her, and she wrote a lot about them. -Jane Addams was American (1860-1935), lived slightly later than Martineau, as you see here. One of the first women to ever graduate from a university with a university degree. -She's famous for founding what was called Hull House. It was in the slums of Chicago, and the residents of Hull House were female intellectuals who were equally committed to social activism and not just academia. They focused on helping the disadvantaged of society. So, the whole house became this center of help, but also center of thought. So, it was sort of this combination of education and social activism. -Addams also argued for women's suffrage, the rights of women. She was a pacifist. She argued for peace in international relations. She maintained relationships with the faculty at the University of Chicago, which is one of the highest profile universities, especially at that time. -She was their equal in every way, except she was a woman, so she could not be on the faculty of the University of Chicago. Toward the end of her life, she was called Saint Jane. -Everybody admired her so much until World War One, when she took a strong stance against violence because, as I said, she was a pacifist. Then most Americans turned against her. But she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. The Classical Big Three Last video we talked about, or we introduced ourselves to two male founders of sociology and two female founders of sociology. We will talk about what are regarded as the big three. -So here they are, usually conventionally understood as the three most influential founders of sociology. -Let's start with Karl Marx (1818-1883). I'm sure you've heard of Karl Marx. Interestingly, he described himself as a philosopher and a revolutionary, not as a sociologist. There weren't many recognized sociologists in his day. -Here's one of his more famous quotes: Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. -So, there he is, declaring himself as a revolutionary, not just a philosopher, because he wanted to change the world. And that theme within sociology will appear repeatedly in many ways. -Some people have also called him an economist more than a philosopher because he focused very extensively, not exclusively, but very extensively on economic issues, but with much sociological insight. So here are some of his main ideas: 1. Historical materialism. -This was really radical. He argued that society and social relations are not determined by ideas and values. They are not determined by what we think. They are instead determined by the economic structure in which we live. -So, one of his concepts was the mode of production. And so think of the difference between a nomadic hunting and gathering society that has no private property because they're constantly on the move. They really don't have any social classes within them. Compare that to modern industrial society as we talked about in the last video, which has private ownership, which does have firm announced social inequality, social classes. -So, what's the effect of living in a nomadic hunting and gathering society compared to living in an urbanized, industrialized, capitalist society? And Marx argued that it's the social conditions that you inhabit that will determine what you think. -It's not that what you think will determine how you organize society. No, it's the other way around. So that's what historical materialism means. It's focused on the material and social conditions of life as formative of our ideas and beliefs and philosophies, not the other way around. -He was a student of Hagel. Hagel was a famous and German idealist who argued, as most people assumed, that our ideas will shape our social conditions. And Marx famously turned Hagel on his head and said, no, Hagel, you have it upside down. It's really our social and material conditions that will determine our ideas. -That is a very radical proposition. Here's one way he used to describe it: 2. Social class is the second. -Marx was very interested and very observant about how social inequality of class structures, society and social class is based on ownership of the means of production. -So, he talked about capitalists compared to workers. Obviously, capitalists own the means of production. Workers don't own anything, all they can do is sell their labor, their time and effort and perhaps skill. -And he saw social class as the engine that drove history. The engine of human history was class conflict. -Here's the opening line of the Communist Manifesto, which he wrote in 1848: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." -The first sentence in the book shows Marx was also a social evolutionist, but though we described Spencer as a social evolutionist or a social Darwinist, who was very, very conservative, Marx was the opposite of Spencer. -He was a radical left-wing evolutionist in thinking about how society evolves eventually. 3. One more of his main ideas: infrastructure versus superstructure, sometimes called base versus superstructure. -And what he meant by this was that the infrastructure or the base of society is its economic system. It’s political economy. -The superstructure is everything else about society. All the other, what we will call social institutions. So, law, politics, religion, art, philosophy, all those aspects of society are superstructure that are built on and based on the infrastructure. Therefore, the economy determines the shape and the function of all the other social institutions in society. -For example, he argued that religion in another famous phrase: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." -So, religion is just part of the superstructure there to soothe and comfort people who are driven by the infrastructure, the base, the economic system. -It's very difficult to be neutral towards Karl Marx. You either love him or you hate him. But he might be one of the most formative intellectuals of the last 150 years. -Here's the second of the big three, Emile Durkheim. -He did two things for sociology. -First of all, he distinguished it from psychology, right? Psychology is the study of what happens inside the person. Sociology is the study of what happens between or among people. And Durkheim emphatically differentiated psychology from sociology. -Secondly, he also established sociology as a social science. What makes it a science? Well, it's a method of knowing. So, what he's doing is separating sociology from philosophy. -He has first separated sociology from psychology, but he has also separated sociology from philosophy because it is scientific. It's empirical. It's truth. Claims are based on observation, not just on rationality alone. -Here are some of his main ideas. 1. He argued for social facts. -The world is not just comprised of physical facts of the material universe. It is comprised of social facts such all the social norms that you know and adhere to or rebel against our social facts that are out there. And when I say they're out there. Social facts are external to the individual, like they're outside of every one of us. They're not inside of any one of us. They are outside of all of us together collectively. They are external to the individual and they are coercive of the individual. -Like those social norms, they cause you to behave in certain ways. You may deviate from the social norms, but the fact of the existence of the norm is still there. -Does society/social norms actually determine the individual. We'll talk about that as we go along. -But social norms or organizations have a life of their own. They are social facts independent of any one individual or independent of any personality, any one member of a society. He said it this way: "A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations." -So, there you have it external to individuals and coercive on individuals. 2. Another big idea was the division of labor in society, and Durkheim was fascinated with what he termed the evolution of mechanics of society, based on mechanical solidarity to society, based on organic solidarity. And again, we will talk more about this. -But just by way of introduction, mechanical solidarity already is a non-specialized society where everybody does the same thing, believes the same thing, acts the same way. So, you think of all those subsistence farmer peasants in a feudal society, they're all doing the same thing. -But we in modern societies, in organics, have an organic solidarity by which Durkheim meant specialized interdependence. We're all a bunch of specialists. I can do one thing reasonably well, but I can do a thousand things not very well at all. But you can do something else very well. And we're all a bunch of specialists now, and because of that, we're all interdependent on each other in a whole new way. We depend on each other because we don't know how to do everything. We don't know how to do one or two things say. And that's a massive change in society in the division of labor. 3. And thirdly, Durkheim talked about Anomie -Noam means Norm. So, A means without Norm. So, anomie means norm lawlessness. -And he was fascinated with how modern society had lost its norms, or at least the regulatory power of its norms. We now live in anomie, norm, looseness, aimlessness, purposelessness, and it comes due to loss of moral control. Here's a quote from Durkheim: "Man is a moral being only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear, and morality will disappear with it." -He was in some ways the first sociologist of morality. -One of his famous studies was about suicide, and he collected data from governments in countries across Europe and noted that there were systematic differences in rates of suicide. For example, males commit suicide more than females. Singles commit suicide more than married people. Protestants commit suicide more than Catholics do. -And so how do you explain, like, what's your theory that can explain the social fact of the different rates of suicide in society? Well, his answer was anomie. -Certain categories of people are normless, they are less integrated into society. And as a result, they take their own life in despair more than people who are integrated and are connected. -So those are the main ideas that Durkheim brought, -Actually, Harriet Martineau wrote on the variables of suicide long before Durkheim did. She wrote about scientific research methodology long before Durkheim did. But of course, she was ignored because she was female. And there's the sad truth about the history of sociology. 3. Here's the third character of the Big three, Max Weber, maybe one of the smartest guys ever. -He had encyclopedic knowledge about everything, about economics, law, philosophy, history, religion. -I sometimes joke that if you're writing a sociology test and you're not sure, the right answer is always Max Weber. He knew everything about everything. -He also disagreed profoundly with Karl Marx. -Here's where we start to see the different theoretical perspectives. Remember, Karl Marx argued that the economic structure is what drives society, and Weber said, no, no, no, I don't think so. -So, Marx, as well as most of the 20th century, has been in a lifelong debate with the ghost of Marx. That's how influential Marx was. -Weber argued that society is far too complex to be explained by a single cause like economics. Even though Weber himself barely came very close to explaining modernity as caused by a single variable rationality. -So, he disagreed with Marx. He disagreed with Comte. He disagreed with the positivism Comte and Durkheim promoted. -Here are a couple of his main ideas. And I’m only going to list two that have to do with sociological methodology because he contributed so much insight into every other corner of sociology that we can't even start. -So here are two main methodological ideas. 1. Interpretive Sociology="verstehen". The first one was that he wanted sociology to not just describe and not even just explain behavior, but to understand it, to understand its meaningfulness. So, he is the first theorist to argue for an interpretive sociology. -He's a German. He uses a German word, which means to understand deeply or it's a deep, empathetic understanding of not just what people do, but why they do it. What does it mean to them? What is the subjective meaning of their behavior? -Don't just tell me that they committed suicide. Tell me why they committed suicide. Not just the rates of suicide, but why. What did it mean? -Okay, so you can see how Weber's going beyond Durkheim here. -That's what's known as interpretive sociology. Very contrary to the social facts that Durkheim argued for. -"Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law, an interpretive one in search of meaning."- Glifford Geertz -A 20th century anthropologist Glifford Geertz later said the above quote which can be interpreted as a rejection of Comte's positivism and more in agreement with Max Weber’s insights -We're not content to just describe behavior. We want to understand the meaning of behavior that comes from the Weber. 2. Another argument Weber made about the methods of sociology is that it should be value free, it should be objective, it should be ethically neutral, it should be descriptive and explanatory and interpretive, but not value, not value judgments. -So that has come to characterize sociology to a certain extent. -And note here how completely opposite Weber's is from Marx. Marx was an activist. He was out to change the world. He was pronouncing value judgments on everything. And Weber's Weber's saying, No, no, we're not social activists. We just want to understand and describe and then let people choose how they want to behave. -So very contrary to Marx, Weber understood the goal of sociology to be advancement of understanding, not revolution or reformation of society. -Now it's by now recognized that to be value free is impossible. It's still a worthy goal. We should be as objective as we are, but it's ultimately impossible to be value free because even pretending to be neutral is to uphold the status quo. Neutrality is conservative. If you're neutral about everything, then it's just going to perpetuate the status quo. So, you're either contributing to the conservation of the status quo or the change of the status quo. You cannot do nothing. You're going to be one or the other and both are valued. Contemporary Theoretical Perspectives We're now going to turn to what is known as contemporary theory. -But before that, I want to differentiate different levels of sociological analysis as the concentric circles on the bottom of the PowerPoint suggest, there's three levels of sociology. -Here is the first the outside. The macro level of sociology. Macro sociology is the study of large patterns formed by large groups of people over a long period of time. So, we've talked a lot about the economy. E.g., the Canadian economy is a macro topic, or indigenous relations throughout Canadian history is a macro topic or I mentioned the urbanization of industrialization. That's a macro process that we'll talk about later. Thus, this is generally the study of slow changing social systems. It's not immediate, it's not temporary, it's not active. This would be social statics or social order that we've also named as originating with August Comte. -The inner circle of the three levels is the micro. So, sociology also studies small groups of people face to face interactions. What happens in a love affair, sports team, family, classroom, and so on? These are more transitory temporary encounters, but notably, they are the only thing that you and I experience. Like you and I don't experience the Canadian economy. We experience the salesperson, the cashier. We only experience-confront or engage with individuals. So, the interaction at the micro level is formed by the macro level, but which forms which. This is a big question we will come back to. -And then in the middle ring is what we call the meso level of sociology, which is a study of, not so large groups, but organizations, communities. The middle level of scale is what we're talking about here. So, what happens not just in the store but in the corporation at large? What happens not just in the sports team, but in the whole league? What happens in the whole town? This would be a measured level of sociological analysis and sociology links them all together. You can see how one influences the other the more you study sociology. -Here’s a few more examples of the micro, meso, and the macro. So yeah, the small to medium to large. So, for example, under Meso you see neighborhoods, schools, local organizations, and groups of people. The macro level, we're talking about political economy, international associations. Big stuff. -Let's turn to contemporary theoretical perspectives. -There's a huge difference between what's called classical sociology. You'll note that in the previous two videos we were talking about people, individual people. Theorists. That's characteristic of classical sociological theory. -But when we talk about contemporary theoretical perspectives, we are no longer talking about individuals. We're talking about perspectives. Entire schools of thought. Lots of people, you know, some represent different schools or perspectives more than others. But we can no longer really talk in terms of individuals. -And you will know very quickly that there is no one uniting paradigm in sociology. There's no one theoretical perspective that explains everything. There are many theoretical perspectives that look at different parts of the social world. -They start with different problems. They ask different questions. They see different things. They ignore different things. No one theoretical perspective is definitive and comprehensive. That's what perspective is. You can examine some reality from one perspective or another, and the two perspectives can see profoundly different things. They can see something very, very different. -Let me introduce you to just the basic three. 1. structural functionalism. -Defined as society is a stable, orderly system composed of several interrelated parts, each of which performs a function that contributes to the overall stability of society. -So, society is an entity made up of many different individual parts. So, it has a structure. Parts working together. Create the whole. Each part has a particular function to play, to sustain the whole. If one part isn't performing its function, we have problems, right? That's the notion that society has structure. And each part of the structure has a function that contributes to the overall stability of society. -So, for example, Durkheim argued that religion is a structure, but it is also a function. What is the function of the structure of religion? Well, creates social cohesion. That was Durkheim's argument. Religion performs the function of social cohesion. -Or we could use other analogies. Look at car engines. They're made up of many, many different parts. But if everything is working, the engine will work. The car will drive. Or look at the human body in the same way that the skin holds the human body. What functions do various organs contribute to the organism? What functions do various parts contribute to the engine? So do norms and values bind society together. That's all the same way of thinking. -But we can break it down a little bit further into different types of functions. -Here's the first one: some functions are manifest. In other words, are known to the group. They're intended by the group. This is what this part of society is doing. We all know it. We all want it. That's why it's there. This is the immediate, obvious function. -But then there are latent functions that are unknown to the group and therefore, of course, unintended by the group. Sometimes there are aspects of society that exist, are perpetuated, even though they don't appear to be doing anything. But the sociologists would argue they are doing something. They're not senseless. They're not meaningless. Even though it's not obvious. So, take some examples. E.g., the rain dance of the Hopi in New Mexico. Well, they thought that doing the rain dance would bring rain. That's the manifest function. But even if it doesn't bring rain, it still has a latent function of social cohesion. There's their kind of religion as social cohesion. The latent function of religion. Or think of funerals. The manifest function of the funeral of all is to honor the person who has passed. What's the latent function of funerals? To bring the family together and to talk and reminisce and bond. And social cohesion you could argue. What about buying expensive goods? What's the manifest function? Well, gratification. Ensuring the quality of what you possess. But what's the latent function of buying expensive stuff? Available in an American sociologist at the beginning of the 20th century talked about conspicuous consumption. So, when you buy really expensive stuff, it's there for show so that everybody else will view you as rich or high status or something. The latent function of it is not what the thing itself does, but what it communicates to the rest of society. In addition, think beyond the immediate effect and what effect it has on society. -But then there's a third. It's known as dysfunctions. Sometimes not only is it not manifest and not only is it latent, but it's downright harmful. Some things in society harms society more than they help. Well, maybe we should be careful not to say more, because if it harms more than it helps, presumably we would get rid of it. But even if it helps more than it harms, we don't recognize the harm that it's doing. And if we would, maybe we would do something about that too. -So, for example, the alcohol industry, what are the manifest and the latent and the dysfunctions of alcohol? Well, the manifest function is that it's pleasurable. It's fun. It's a social lubricant. You go to a party and everybody's a little bit extra extroverted. There's relief, there's pleasure, there's enjoyment, release of stress. However, you experience alcohol. But what are the latent functions of the alcohol industry? Well, it creates jobs. Law enforcement, social work, health care. Think of jobs in multiple sectors of society that are sustained or fed, partially because they serve people who have consumed excessively. It generates taxes. The government collects all kinds of taxes from alcohol, tobacco, and lots of things. I mean, just think that that what the government taxes, it's sort of invested in that. And it sort of legitimates that compared to, say, psychoactive drugs which gets sold on the street. Government doesn't collect any taxes, doesn't benefit in any way. So latent function of alcohol is that it creates jobs, generates taxes. Now, for the dysfunction. Let me count the ways. Right. It obviously damages productivity when people show up at work drunk, it damages individuals because of their addictions. It damages relationships. It stimulates domestic violence. It damages public relationships. Drunk driving. I mean, look at all the harm that alcohol does. So, is alcohol a good thing or a bad thing? Well, I don't know. But there are some manifest functions, latent functions, and dysfunctions of the alcohol industry. -So that's the way a structural, functionalist thinks and analyzes society. Structural functionalism as a perspective dominated sociology. It probably peaked in the middle of the 20th century. It has declined since then in its popularity. -Note that just looking for the structure and function of some aspect of society is to justify it and it justifies the power differentials within the existing social structure. It's very good at analyzing social order, social statics. But it's not very good at analyzing change/conflict. 2. This leads us to the second theoretical perspective: Conflict theory. -This is built on Karl Marx and using some of the points of analysis, we've already had structural functionalism claims, value neutrality. Conflict theory does not claim value neutrality. -Marx did not pretend to be value neutral the way Weber did. If you want to use sort of a religious metaphor here, depending on how well you understand what priests and prophets do. For functionalism is like a priest supporting the tradition, supporting social harmony. But conflict theory is like the prophet who is calling for change, who's calling for repentance of sins, looking for a change. -So here we see the first marked difference between theoretical perspectives. And here's a definition of conflict theory, social order: Structural, functionalist focus on is the product of the struggle for power between different vested interest groups. -So, conflict theorists are constantly looking for the struggle for power between groups. That's the main point. Who controls what? Who controls scarce resources? Who controls the money? The rich versus the poor? Who controls decision making? Is it men? Women? -Conflict theory also assumes that the social order is not static. It's not stable. It's very unstable. The social order is constantly fluid in flux. Fragile. A very different assumption than the assumption of the engine in the car or the skin on the body. The basic question of conflict theory is who benefits most from the existing arrangements? In other words, yeah, it's functional, but functional for whom? And dysfunctional. For whom? -Power. Struggle. Vested interest groups. -Now, one more note here. Conflict theory doesn't necessarily view conflict as negative. Many conflict theorists also point out the positive benefits of recognizing conflict in society, where conflict emerges as we focus our attention. I haven't thought about this. I haven't noticed this. It focuses our attention on problems that need to be solved. That's a good thing. It creates energy to solve them. -You know, people get activated. We have got to do something here. Or it unites people to realize that their group, their social category, conflicts with another one. So, there are some positives to conflict as well. -Think of the major social movements of the past- 50 years the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the anti-globalization movements, the ecology movements, whatever. -They are alive and active because they conflict with social order. The existing social order structure. -So here are some main ideas from conflict theory: a) ideology. And here's a definition of ideology. -You will get a more elaborate one later. But ideologies or coherent set of interrelated beliefs that explain and justify social conditions. The status quo. So, we live in a society that has a very liberal ideology. -What does that do? What does liberal ideology do? Well, it explains success and failure due to the individual's ability and effort. Becoming a success or failure is to the person's own personal credit or blame. Individualism. Very liberal ideology is individualistic. And if you buy into that, if you believe in individualism, you will vote a certain way. It affects your political allegiance. You will interpret life in a certain way. So that's what ideology is and what it does. And all societies have more than one. -There will always be a dominant ideology, but there will be counter ideologies that are in the minority but still in conflict with and so on. And so forth. b) False consciousness is another concept in conflict theory. -This is Perception of a situation not in accord with reality and it's self-explanatory. So, let's go back to liberal ideology and success being to the credit or blame of the individual, what if the individual is actually a victim of the system? -In other words, the individual cannot be credited or blamed for their failure. What if they fail because they're a victim of a system that potentially sets them up to fail? -Well, then to think then to believe in liberal ideology is a false consciousness. It's wrong. That's the point. c) Another third concept or idea within conflict theory: Alienation. -Because conflict theory is so focused on power, they're also going to pay attention to those who feel powerless or those who live with a sense of meaninglessness. -Marx called it alienation, feeling powerless to control your own life. -Or when you go to work every day and it's just completely meaningless to you. It's just a paycheck. You're alienated from what you do, every day. It's just a means to an end. It has no meaning or when what you produce is owned by somebody else. They get rich from it. You just get your minimum wage. That's it. Well, that's kind of alienating, right? So that is something that conflict theorists explore. -So far, we've had structural functionalism and conflict theory. They're both macro, okay? They're very similar. They focus on the large-scale dimensions of society. But conflict theory rejects the notion that society is this smooth, harmonious, integrated whole. They say, no, it's not a smooth, harmonious, integrated whole. It's just a power struggle all day long, every day at every level. So even though they're both macro, they see the character of the macro very differently. -And conflict theory would agree with the social facts of structural functionalism, but sees it in terms of conflict, not consensus. Structural functionalism is all about consensus. It assumes consensus conflicts. Theory assumes conflict. Big difference there. -And yes, even though structural functionalism was the dominant perspective in the middle of the 20th century, by now, conflict theory has become the dominant perspective. I mean, feminism is just a subcategory of conflict theory, right? It's gender conflict. That's what it is. Race relations, critical race theory, all those things are just subcategories of conflict theory. 3) Here's the third perspective: symbolic interactionism -The first two are macro. This one is micro. -It does not focus on macro structures like social facts. -It asks very different questions. It sees very different things. It's a very different perspective. -And we can define it as the notion that society is the product of continuous, every day, face to face interaction between individuals. You see how that's micro, right? -They're not looking at social institutions or large-scale organizations or anything like that. No, they're just looking at you and I face to face every day. -And their perspective is that we individuals create society. We are not created by society. -You see how structural functionalism and even conflict theory sort of imply that we all have no choice. -We are simply created by the structure of society. And symbolic interactionism is saying, no, people create society. They're not created by it. People are active subjects. We're not just passive objects, passive dupes in society. So, a very different perspective. -What I've just talked about here is the interaction part. What about the symbolic part? -Well, what's a symbol? Well, a symbol is anything that represents something else, right? Word or a gesture or a sign or something. -And so symbolic interaction, is an exchange of meanings. People do not respond to the world directly. They respond with their interpretation of the world, the meanings they attach to the world. That's where symbolic interaction is. It gets its name. It's an exchange of meanings. -If you've taken any psychology, you know, psychological behaviorism, stimulus response, stimulus causes response just automatically. -Symbolic interaction interprets this as not just stimulus response. It is a stimulus interpretation response. So, the responses not to the stimulus, the response is to your interpretation of the stimulus, the symbolic meaning of the stimulus. -Classic examples: -When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1985, when the Taliban fought back again to fight back against the Russians, we all called them freedom fighters. -But when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2015 and the very same Taliban did the very same thing. Now we call them terrorists, the same person doing the same thing. -What's your interpretation? Why do you interpret it this way? Why do you interpret one as a freedom fighter and the other one is a terrorist? We see how the stimulus remains the same, but the interpretation of the stimulus changed. -And that's the point of symbolic interaction. It's about the interpretive meaning of social action. No social action has some predetermined definitive meaning to it. It's always about interpretation. -So, you can also see perhaps how this is built on Max Weber's interpretive sociology. I hope you can start making some of those connections. -This is interpretive sometimes called soft sociology. It's not hard social facts of suicide statistics. No, this is about the interpretation of why people commit suicide or do this or do that or whatever. -So here are the main ideas: a) definition of the situation. -People are responding and according to their interpretation or their definition of the situation, not the situation itself. "Good" people/actors will act meaningfully according to their definition of the situation. -W.I. Thomas famously said in the 1920s, it is not important whether the interpretation is correct. If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. So, you put that in today's language a new gender, neutralize it and say that which is defined as real is real and its consequences. -That which is defined as real is real in its consequences. b) taking the role of the other. -In our interaction with each other. How do I understand you? Well, I placed myself in your shoes, trying to get into your head and see what you are seeing or interpreting our meaning. Otherwise, I don't know how to talk to you. You don't know how to talk to me. -We must take the role of the other person and then respond according to our perception of that. That too, is an interpretation, right? It's all interpretive. Taking the role of the other, anticipating the other perspectives, their attitudes, their feelings. We must take that into account when I converse with you. It's what makes interaction possible. -If we didn't do that, it would be chaos. There'd be absolute chaos. It's also very important in the development of the self, as we'll talk about later. c) Significant others, generalized others -So, when we engage with people or when we take the role of the other, who are we doing that with? -Well, first, originally, it's with significant others. Parents, family, friends matter most, but eventually it's just they and them, the generalized others society. -You can’t even name it, it's just a generalized other. -So, the shift from significant others to a generalized either that shapes our interpretations. -So there you have three theoretical perspectives. -There are at least 25 theoretical perspectives approximately, but you're just started getting to know this. -Here's the basic theoretical dilemma, what sociologists call the question of agency versus social structure. -Are you and I creative actors, actively controlling our lives or is most of what we do the result of general social forces outside of ourselves and beyond our control? That's the basic question. Are we creators of society or creatures of society? -Well, to the extent that you've understood the three perspectives so far, obviously symbolic interaction is, I would argue that we are creators and symbolic approaches. Structural functionalism and conflict theory would argue that we are creatures of society. And it's an ongoing open question. -And maybe something you should keep in mind as we keep going throughout this course. Think of it this way. Here's a little metaphor: -When you are caught in traffic gridlock, do you have agency? Can you do whatever you want? Or are you controlled by the situation? And how much of the rest of life is like that? That's the question.