Week 8 - What About Agency - Sociology 1210 PDF

Week 8 What about Agency? Sociology 1210 Dr. Elisabeth Rondinelli  Week 2 The Power of Individualistic Thinking What is sociology and what is it not? These are opposed Part 1 Week 3...

Week 8 What about Agency? Sociology 1210 Dr. Elisabeth Rondinelli  Week 2 The Power of Individualistic Thinking What is sociology and what is it not? These are opposed Part 1 Week 3 The Sociological Imagination: Tools for Thinking like a ways of seeing the world. Sociologist Week 4 What do Sociologists Mean by Social Structure? What are the core forces Week 5 Our Cultural Lives that shape our everyday Part 2 Week 6 Navigating Everyday Life – From Socialization to Social life and how do we respond to them? Interaction Week 8 What about Agency? Week 9 Nature and Human-Centred Society What kind of society do we Week 10 Capitalism as a Social Problem live in? Using the tools of Part 3 Week 11 Race and Racialization sociology to understand the world we have made. Week 12 Gender and Inequality Remember, there’s still time! Get to know your profs; use office hours Visit the library; ask librarians questions Get to know people in this class now, these will be your people for the next 4 years Talk to them, share ideas Remember the resources on campus (Food Room, 5th floor of Student Centre, Early Assist [contact me]; writing centre (with one on one tutoring), workshops on time management, research; counselling centre Learning Objectives Define agency Define different forms of agency Understand how agency is part of a central tension in the discipline of sociology (the structure/agency divide) Understand how sociology provides tools for defining the human capacity to act individually and with others Imagine yourself as inheriting society from past generations of humans: What social problems do you wish you’d never inherited? What is something about society/social life that you’re glad to have inherited? Which of these inheritances do you think are changeable or unchangeable? Now think about your relationship to other people When was the last time time you felt deeply connected to other human beings? What was happening? What is agency? “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” - Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Émile Durkheim, in his foundational classic Suicide, argued that “[people] cling to life more resolutely when [they belong] to a group they love [which] prevents their feeling personal troubles so deeply.” Like most contemporary sociologists, Durkheim saw human life as inseparable from the social web in which we live and felt that to dissolve that web would be akin to destroying the self. We inherit a society not of our own choosing (social structures precede and outlive us) This society is marked by past acts, good and bad, and may instill feelings that this inheritance is impossible to change Yet, we need the social web of society to feel human and to develop a sense of self that is meaningful Yet, we make history as we pass through life, forming the inheritance of future generations The concept of agency points to the creative capacities of individuals and groups, as well as the essential practice of living life with others Agency The capacity of individuals to act independently of social structures It refers to the ability that people have to make their own choices, act independently and creatively, and with autonomy AGENCY IMPLIES POWER! The power people have to think for themselves and act in ways that shape their experiences and life trajectories. Agentic acts break with the path of least resistance  What kinds of agency are there?  Reflexive Spontaneous Organized Individual Collective Collective Contemplation, Acting together with Organized and critique, and reflection others in an deliberate actions that upon oneself; unplanned way; being explicitly seek to examining your taken co-present and achieve a goal of social for granted ideas and collectively sharing change and disruption assumptions and attention to a specific of status quo (ex. choosing to act thing (ex. Rise of new Social movements and differently (ex. cultural trends; building new Johnson and the collective institutions) woman) effervescence)  We need the social web Collective effervescence (Durkheim): the sense of connection and meaning that comes from collective events; occurs when a community or society comes together and simultaneously communicates the same thought and participates in the same action, which excites us, creates joy, and unifies people. Everyday events can give meaning, a sense of connection, and joy to life. Social integration: the extent to which individuals participate in a variety of social relationships and community; involves reciprocal obligations that anchor individuals to something greater than themselves. Social groups help us develop and maintain a sense of who we are, how we feel about who we are, and who we see ourselves becoming – thus promotes wellbeing of individual and society.  We make history Reflexivity: refers to the capacity of an agent to recognize and critique the forces of socialization and alter their place in the social structure, to work to shape new norms, values, etc.; involves examining what we believe is normal and inevitable; ideas about ourselves and others that appear ‘obvious’ to us and which we take for granted Social change: refers to the relation between human agency and the contexts in which those agents find themselves; involves the interchange between structure and agency that lead to changes in the structure of systems. Refers to the future that is forged in the present, formed out of past inheritance and current innovation  What is the structure/agency debate? Recall! Structure - refers to the patterns of relationships and distributions that characterize the organization of a social system Relationships connect various elements of a system (like social statuses, roles) to one another and to the system itself (how are people related to one another and to social systems in a society? Distributions involve valued resources and rewards, such as power and income, among specific social statuses (who gets what in society?). “Social structure” refers to the interconnected set of social forces, relationships, and institutions that work together to shape the thought, behaviour, experiences, choices, and overall life courses of people.  What ‘makes us’ do what we do, think what we think? What abilities do we A central tension have to live our lives in ways that didn’t for sociology is exist before? Do we act in line with the structures between that we’ve inherited? Are we structure and reproducing the gender, racial, anthropocentric, and capitalist system agency in that we’ve been born into? shaping human Can and do we come up with new norms, new values, new cultural ideas behaviour to live by?  To explain social action, too much of A central tension one explanation undermines the other for sociology is - Too structural: We’re all just following already existing norms and rules! between - Too much agency: We can make the structure and world anew however and whenever agency in we want! Our choices are totally free! shaping human The best sociology: Social action cannot be fully explained by structure behaviour nor agency alone, but by their interaction What is a sociological approach to agency?  Sociology offers us a warning Agency is not Agency is not evenly always distributed progressive  I. Agency is not evenly distributed When we begin to understand the power of structural forces, we can fall into deterministic thinking Determinism: the idea that an individual's actions, thoughts, and life course is determined (controlled) by external, structural forces Positions individuals and groups as predictable Reduces human activity to a reflection of structure – all we do is reproduce already existing structural forces, already existing cultural norms, and unsurprising outcomes in social interactions Very little conception of social change, resistance, creativity, innovation, and autonomy  I. Agency is not evenly distributed To understand that we don’t have equal access to agency, we need to consider the relationship between the statuses and agency Plummer: “Some of us can develop ways of being the active agents of our lives, many others may be restricted in doing so […] while no one is determined, we are not all capable or knowledgeable actors in the world to the same degree” (3) The reality of inequality (which we turn to in Part 3 of the course), helps us understand how some can be greater active agents in their own lives than others  II. Agency is not always progressive We cannot assume that agency moves in one direction, toward more social justice, more equality, and less divisiveness New norms are being created and old symbols are being transformed, coopted, and re-imagined to align with groups and beliefs that explicitly do not seek equality, or which explicitly espouse hate  ‘Freedom Convoy’ 2022 - how was agency used here? - what norms and symbols were created or transformed, what valued were adopted?  The agentic capacities given to us by sociology We adopt an ‘outsider’ status – the ability to shed light on and analyze what is taken for granted, what is deemed ‘normal’, to understand the interaction between structure agency “Sociology becomes the systematic, skeptical study of all things social” (Plummer 5) “Stand in amazement at the complex patterns of human social life, we examine both the good things worth fostering and bad things worth striving to remove” “The sociologist gets up every day and stands in wonder at the little social worlds – and indeed human societies – that we have created for ourselves: their meaning, order, conflict, chaos and change” “wasted lives” – at core of is the drive that agency can be used to build peaceful, creative, equitable lives in harmony with one another and with nature Week 8 Key Concepts Agency Structure/Agency debate Determinism Social integration Reflexivity Critique Collective effervescence Social change Gen Z 1997-2012 / Millennials 1980-1996 What structural forces do you see as impacting your life the most? Start with your earliest socialization to your life now – what structures have been present? Do these forces intersect in some way? How so? Do you think that individualism and the individualistic society that we currently live in makes you feel like more or less agentic (more or less capable of exercising agency)? How so? Which of the three forms of agency do you feel you are most able to exercise? Why? Do you think there are new norms and forms of socialization that are emerging that can make social change? What are these norms? What kinds of change do they encourage? “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” How would a sociologist interested in structure and agency make sense of this claim?