SYG 2000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Harriet Martineau, Social Stratification, Anomie
Document Summary
Sociology: the systematic and scientific study of human activity in society. Sociologists work to understand how human activities are organized, and how that organization affects people"s lives, thinking, and responses to others and the world around them. Sociology focuses on group life: we have to understand the collective before we understand the individual. The real world is about collectivities: ex: language- we do not come up with language individually, we are born into the collective of language. Thomas theorem: if people believe situations are real, they are real in their consequences. In terms of cause and effect, cause is typically collective. Sociologists are especially concerned with social forces that shape the ways people organize activities, such as: securing food, play, forming friendships, earning a livelihood. Social force is the idea that collective things influence our lives, such as: culture, race, gender, class, religion, education, etc. We do not have social laws, such as in physics.
