1.2 The Development Of Sociological Thinking Flashcards
Auguste Comte
Believed that the scientific methods could be applied to the study of human behaviours and society, and that his new field could produce knowledge of society based on scientific evidence.
He initially called the subject social physics
His ideas about social planning were predicated on an understanding that society and the social order are not natural, but rather are CONSTRUCTED BY INDIVIDUALs
Emile Durkheim
According to Emile Durkheim, the aspect of social life that shape our actions as individuals.
He believed that social facts could be studied scientifically, and that social life could be analyzed like any object or event in nature.
He saw society as an organism comprised of specialized parts that needed to work in harmony for the whole structure to endure.
Organic Solidarity
According to Durkheim, the social cohesion that results from the various parts of a society functioning as an intergrated whole.
Durkheim argued that the continuation of a society depends on cooperation, which presumes a general consensus amoung its members regarding basic values and customs.
Social Constraint
The conditioning influence on our behavouour of the groups and societies of which we are members.
This was regardered by Durkheim as one of the distinctive properties of social facts.
He argued that social structure is an external constraint on our choices and activités.
Division of Labour
The specialization of work tasks by means of which different occupations are combined within a production system.
All societies have at least some rudimentary form of division of labour, especially between the tasks allocated to men and those performed by women.
The development of industrialism, has made the division of labour become more complication than in any prior production system.
Anomie
A feeling of aimlessness or despair provoked by modern social life.
This was first brought into wide usage by Durkheim to apply to situations such as suicide,
According to Durkheim, processes of change in the modern world are so rapid and intense that they give rise to major social difficulties, with he linked to anomie.
Karl Marx
He developed the materialist conception of history. This is about material or economic factors have a prime role in d’iCal change.
For Marx, it is not the ideas or values human being hold that are the main sources of social change, but the economic influences.
Capitalism
An economic system based on the private ownership of wealth, which is invested and reinvested in order to produce profit.
Marx argues that capitalism is a class system in which conflict is inevitable.
The ruling Class
Capitalists who own factories, machines, and large sums of money
The working Class
Wage workers who do not own the means of their livelihood but must find employment provided by the owners of capital
Post-Capitalism
Marx imagined a future where societies would no longer be split into a small class that monopolizes economic and political power and a large mass of people who benefit little from the wealth their work creates.
His ideal economic system, while not eradicating all inequality, would be characterized by communal ownership and would lead to a more equal society than we know at present.
Max Weber
RELIGION
- Weber was influenced by Marx, but he thought ideas and values were just as important for social change as economic factors.
- He focused on why Western societies developed. So differently from other societies, studying religion in particular.
Bureaucracy
A type of organization marked by a clear hierarchy of authority and the existence of written rules of procedure and staffed by full-time, salaried officials.
Bureaucracy enables large organizations to run efficiently, but it also poses problems,s for effective democratic participation in modern societies.
In a Bureaucracy experts make desicisons without consulting those whose lives are affected by these decisions
Weber saw the advance of bureaucracy as an inevitable feature of our era.
Harriet Martineau
The first woman sociologist.
She was an active proponent of women’s rights and the abolition of slavery.
She is credited with introducing sociology to England. Through her translation of Comte’s Positive Pholosohy
Martineau’s Insignts
She is significant because of her mythological insights.
She argued that when one studeis a society, One must focus on all its aspects, including key Political, religious, and social institutions.
She also insisted an analysis of a society must include all its members, a point that emphasized the absence of women’s lives form the sociology of that time.
First person to turn a sociological eye to marriage, childern, domestic and religious life, and race relations.
She believed sociologists should act in ways that benefit society. Not just observe.
