SOC100H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: The Sociological Imagination, Altruistic Suicide, American Sociological Association
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Chapter 1- Introducing Sociology
⇒ Goal 1: Define sociology:
- Sociology: The systematic study of human behaviour in social context
- Social causes are distinct from physical and emotional causes.
- Understanding social causes can help clarify otherwise inexplicable features of famine, marriage,
- Sociology can help us to know ourselves, our capabilities and limitations
- Underlying the taken-for-granted fabric of your life:
- are patterns of social relations that powerfully influence your tastes, your hopes, your actions, and your future.
⇒ Goal 2: Identify the social relations that surround you, permeate you, and influence your behaviour:
The Social Imagination:
⇒ Social structure:
- We’ve known that we live in society but also a society lives in us
- Patterns of social relations affect our innermost thoughts, feelings, influence our actions and help shape you we are
which is know a (Social structure)
- Social structure: Stable patterns of social relations.
⇒ Wright Mills: He said that sociologist’s main task:
- To identify and explain the connections between people’s personal troubles
- The changing social structures in which they are embedded and ways they can contribute to improving their lives and
the state of the world
⇒ He defined the ability to see these connections as The Sociological Imagination.
Sociological Imagination: The quality of mind that enables one to see the connection between personal troubles and
social structures.
⇒ Applying Sociological Imagination:
If the woman and her son exercised the sociological imagination:
- They would realize that, they could help to elect a government that institutes similar policies in this country.
- They would stand a better chance of changing the course of historical forces that at first seem unstoppable,
- fixing a harmful aspect of Canada’s social structure and improving their quality of live.
⇒ The four levels of Social Structures:
(1) Microstructures: Patterns of social relations formed during face-to-face interaction.
- E.g. Families and friendship cliques
(2) Mesostructures: are patterns of social relations in organizations that involve people who are often not intimately
acquainted and who often do not interact face to face.
- E.g. Social organizations such as colleges and government bureaucracies
(3) Macrostructures: Overarching patterns of social relations that lie outside and above one’s circle of intimates and
acquaintance.
- lie above and beyond mesostructure
- E.g. Patriarchy: A system of power relations and customary practices that help to ensure male dominance in economic,
political, and other spheres of life.
(4) Global structures: Patterns of social relations that lie outside and above the national level.
- Fourth level of society that surrounds and permeates us.
- E.g. Economic relations among countries and patterns of worldwide travel and communication.
⇒ Personal problems are connected to social structure at the:
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- micro, meso, macro, and global levels
- Whether the personal problem involves finding a job, keeping a marriage intact, or acting justly to end world poverty,
considering the influence of social structures on us broadens our understanding of the problems we face and suggests
appropriate courses of action.
⇒ The sociological imagination: Some philosophers wrote about society, their thinking was not sociological:
- They believed that God and nature controlled society.
- They spent of their time sketching blueprints for the ideal society and urging people to follow those blueprints.
- They relied on speculation rather than evidence to reach conclusions about how society worked.
⇒ Origins of the Sociological Imagination: It was born when three revolutions pushed people to think about society in
an entirely new way.
(1) The Scientific Revolution: (1550)
- A movement to promote the view that sound conclusions about the workings of the world must be based on solid
evidence, not just speculation.
- People link Scientific Revolution to specific ideas such as Copernicus’s theory that Earth revolves around the Sun.
- Theory: A conjecture about the way observed facts are related.
- Science is less a collection of ideas than a method of inquiry
⇒ The core of the scientific method: using evidence to make a case for a particular point of view:
- In 1609, Galileo pointed his newly invented telescope at the heavens, made some careful observations, and showed that
his observations fit Copernicus’s theory
- By the mid-1600s, some philosophers were calling for a science of society.
⇒ Pillar of the sociological imagination: Commitment to the scientific method
- When sociology emerged as a distinct discipline in the 19th century,
⇒ It suggested that a science of society was possible.
(2) The Democratic Revolution: (1750)
- The process in which citizens of the United States, France, and other countries broadened their participation in
government, thereby suggesting that people can organize society and solve social problems.
⇒ It suggested that people are responsible for organizing society and that human intervention can therefore solve social
problems.
⇒ It suggested that people could intervene to improve society.
- Before the Democratic Revolution, most people thought that God ordained the social order.
- The American Revolution (1775–83) and the French Revolution (1789–99) helped to undermine that idea.
- American and French revolutions were democratic upheavals, that show society could experience massive change
quickly by replacing unsatisfactory rulers
- They suggested that people control society
- It’s possible to change society through human intervention, a science of society could play a big role.
- The new science could help people find ways of overcoming social problems and improving the welfare of citizens.
- Much of the justification for sociology as a science arose out of the democratic revolutions that shook Europe and NA.
(3) The Industrial Revolution (1780s in Britain)
- A process of rapid economic transformation that involved the large-scale application of science and technology to
industrial processes, the creation of factories, and the formation of a working class.
⇒ It created a host of new and serious social problems that attracted the attention of social thinkers.
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As a result of the growth of industry:
- Masses of people moved from countryside to city, worked agonizingly long hours in crowded and dangerous mines and
factories, lost faith in their religions, confronted faceless bureaucracies
- People reacted to the filth and poverty of their existence by means of strikes, crime, revolutions, and wars.
⇒ Presented social thinkers with a host of pressing social problems crying out for solution.
- They responded by giving birth to the sociological imagination.
Goal 3: Founders (Theory I)
Émile Durkheim and Functionalism
⇒ Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) is the first modern sociologist
- First professor of sociology in France
- In Durkheim’s view, social facts define the constraints and opportunities within which people must act.
- He’s interested in the conditions that promote social order in “primitive” and modern societies
- He explored this problem in depth in such works as The Division of Labor in Society (1997 [1893]) and The
Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1976 [1915/1912])
⇒ Argued that human behaviour is influenced by “social facts” or the social relations in which people are embedded
⇒ Study of suicide:
- Using hospital records, proved suicide rates in different categories of the populations, have nothing to do with
psychological disorders
- He found that suicide rates varied with different degrees of social solidarity in different population categories.
⇒ Social Solidarity: A property of social groups that increases with the degree to which a group’s members share
beliefs and values, and the frequency and intensity with which they interact.
- He believes that the greater the degree to which a group’s members share beliefs and values, and the more frequently
and intensely they interact, the more social solidarity exists in the group.
- The higher the level of social solidarity, the more firmly anchored individuals are to the social world and the less likely
they are to commit suicide
- Durkheim found that groups with a high degree of social solidarity had lower suicide rates than groups with a low
degree of solidarity
⇒ Rate: The number of times an event happens in a given period per 100 000 members of the population.
Durkheim’s Theory of Suicide
⇒ States: That the suicide rate declines and then rises as social solidarity increases.
⇒ Suicide in low-solidarity settings may be egoistic or anomic.
⇒ Egoistic suicide: results from the poor integration of people into society because of weak social ties to others.
- Someone who is unemployed and unmarried is more likely to commit suicide than is someone who is employed and
married
⇒ Anomic suicide: occurs when vague norms govern behaviour.
- The rate of anomic suicide is likely to be high among people living in a society that lacks a widely shared code of
morality.
⇒ Suicides that occur in high-solidarity settings altruistic.
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Document Summary
Sociology: the systematic study of human behaviour in social context. Social causes are distinct from physical and emotional causes. Understanding social causes can help clarify otherwise inexplicable features of famine, marriage, Sociology can help us to know ourselves, our capabilities and limitations. Underlying the taken-for-granted fabric of your life: are patterns of social relations that powerfully influence your tastes, your hopes, your actions, and your future. Goal 2: identify the social relations that surround you, permeate you, and influence your behaviour: We"ve known that we live in society but also a society lives in us. Patterns of social relations affect our innermost thoughts, feelings, influence our actions and help shape you we are which is know a (social structure) Social structure: stable patterns of social relations. Wright mills: he said that sociologist"s main task: To identify and explain the connections between people"s personal troubles.
