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• Personal troubles — matters involving a person’s character and his or her relations with others over which the individual has control
• Public issues — societal conditions that transcend the individual and lie beyond his or her personal environment and control- like the structure of the society, how the institutions in a society are arranged etc.
• Sociological imagination —enables individuals to understand how broad features of society and the times in which they live affect and describe them.– How society is structured– How and why it seems to be changing– How these affect people– SI= H+B+SS and how these are related
Sociology: Intellectual Traditions and Core Concepts– Auguste Comte- coined the word “sociology” and sought to model it after the physical sciences- “social physics”
Sociology: Intellectual Traditions and Core Concepts– Appropriate relationship of individual to society is one of accommodation and adaptation.- Deviants are inadequately socialized
and so we need agencies of social control
- Social control agencies will ensure that individuals adapt to society are re-socialized adequately.
Sociology: Intellectual Traditions and Core Concepts•Social facts — social and cultural
features of a society, existing independently of individuals who make it up, which influence people’s behavior- the “extrinsic coercion” that guides behavior.
– Sum total of social facts= collective conscience
• Durkheim talked about division of labor and society based on either 1. Mechanical or 2. Organic Solidarity.
1. Mechanical Solidarity: like a machine, each part useless without the others– Small rural communities with little division of labor– Strong group relations, individual non existent outside
the group.– Individual conscience is the same as the collective
conscience– People interested in each other because of the group
and common values
• Repressive law, punishment for the sake of punishment, eliminating the individual for the sake of the group
Organic Solidarity: like organs of a body, each organ autonomous but depends for its survival on other organs-City communities, high level of division of labor-Weak group relations. People interested in each other only because of functions each can perform for them “ what can he or she do for me”-Individual conscience not the same as collective conscience- Restitutive law: for the purpose of restoring the
individual so he continues functioning for society.
Sociology: Intellectual Traditions and Core Concepts– Karl Marx: Proponent of Radical Change• Marx concluded industrial capitalism—
an economic system in which the means of production were owned by relatively few (thesis)—produced class inequalities (antithesis) that led to the system’s downfall and a new system based upon socialism- (synthesis)
Sociology: Intellectual Traditions and Core Concepts•False consciousness —failure of
workers to understand that capitalism and not themselves are to blame for their alienation and misery
•Class consciousness —workers’ understanding of what capitalism was doing to them and their realization that it would be desirable to join others in struggle against capitalist class
Sociology: Intellectual Traditions and Core Concepts• Weber was very concerned over implications of
increasingly bureaucratized society. Bureaucracy stifles freedom and reason because everything is predetermined and clear-cut based upon rules. Weber called it the “Iron cage of Bureaucracy”.
Ours is a highly bureaucratized society. There are rules governing every aspect of your behavior, rules based upon laws, from the moment you are born to the moment you die and even beyond (wills, debts etc). Two types of societies described by Tonnies
• Gemeinschaft (community- based natural will- Wesenwille ) and Gesellschaft (society- based on rational will or Kurwille)
that focuses on such topics as the ways in which shared meanings among individuals develop or changes through social interaction by use of language
– George Herbert Mead, the “I” (subjective part of the personality) and the “me” (objective part of the personality) By judging yourself through the eyes of others you become aware of your self. In other words, you see yourself as others have seen and reacted to you. Your image of the “self” develops in this manner
– Me-memory images of social conduct of others towards you
– “I” spontaneous reaction based upon those memory images, whenever you encounter anything.