SOCY 122 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Talcott Parsons, Émile Durkheim, Anomie

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Social Sci, Edu and Soc Work - Sociology
• Course: SOCY 122
• Professor: Rob Beamish

Document Summary

In the rules of sociological method (1895), durkheim defined social facts as ways of feeling, thinking, and acting external to an exercising constraint over the individual. He thought they should be treated as things, realities in their own. Functionalist and structuralist theories emerged, but then talcott parsons combined the two that emphasized four functional problems of social systems: adaptation, goal attainment, social integration, and cultural pattern maintenance. The institutions serving these functions were the economy, polity, household, school, law as examples. Individual expressions and actions represented variants within established social and cultural structures such as the economy or the family. Foucault diminished the role of the subject in his studies of madness, the clinic, the prisons, and changing systems of knowledge. Suicide: durkheim"s suicide (1897) stated that groups lacking ties in society are expected to be at a higher than average risk of suicide. Those who are not socially-integrated are at a greater risk.