Chapter 1 Slides Flashcards
Who was Ibn Khaldun?
He was a precursor to sociology before sociology existed
What did Ibn Khaldun look at and what questions did he ask?
He looked at structures in society in his time and the patterns of power he witnessed there. He asked questions like who gets to make decisions in society and who has power over others and how.
When was Sociology born and where?
More formally in the 1700s in Europe out of the French Revolution
Why did Sociology become born out of the French Revolution?
France was changing rapidly and the enlightenment and industrial revolution was underway. Though was becoming the basis for knowledge and authority instead of religion
Who is referred to as the father of Sociology?
Comte
What did Comte believe?
Science can be used to understand social change
What happened in Sociology from the 20th to 21st century?
There is a shift from the presence of disciplinary boundaries to a blurring and blending of these boundaries. Sociology becomes more closely related to other disciplines like psychology and anthropology
What is Post Disciplinarity?
When boundaries between social disciplines have blurred
What can Post-disciplinarity allow for?
Sex, our thought processes, and social structures can now be approached through a wide array of disciplines
What are the two changes brought about by the 21st century?
Post-disciplinarity and Interdisciplinarity
What is Interdisciplinarity?
Working together to understand a social phenomenon
What are some examples if Interdisciplinarity?
Family Studies
Gender Studies
Where they don’t necessarily restrict themselves to working within a specific disciplinary boundaries
What is Sociology?
Sociology is the systematic study of society using the Sociological Imagination
What is the Sociological Imagination?
The ability to perceive interconnections between individual experiences and lager sociocultural forces
What is Micro level?
Individual experiences
What is Macro level?
Sociocultural forces
What is Definition 2 of the Sociological Imagination?
The cognitive ability we develop to think about micro individual experiences and larger macro forces as they relate to one another
Who coined the idea of Sociocultural forces?
C. Wright Mills
Who is the Sociological Imagination for?
It isn’t just for academics but for everyone who is part of society
What are the 2 important products of the book of Sociological Imagination?
The concepts of personal troubles and public issues
What did Mills suggest about Personal Troubles?
Personal troubles occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his immediate relations with others. They have to do with those limited areas of social life of which he is directly and personally aware.
What do Public issues have to do with according to Mills?
Matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and range of his inner life. They have to do with the organizations of many such milieu into the institutions of society as whole, with the ways in which various milieu overlap and interpenetrate to form the large structure of social and historical life. Some values cherished by public’s us felt to be threatened
What do sociologists study?
The interconnections between the micro (individual) and the macro (broader, zoomed out, structural levels)
What is important to note about the macro and micro?
It is bi direction and something on the micro level can influences the macro level and vice versa
What is agency?
The Capacity to make choices fee from society
What are Life Chances?
The opportunities that an individual has in life, based on various factors including stratification, inequality, race, ethnicity, gender
What are Norms?
Society’s expectations for how we are supposed to think, look and act.
What does it mean to look for the strange in the familiar?
Examining larger social forces that have influenced a choice
What are the tools we use to build our Sociological Imagination?
Empirical Research methods
Sociological theorizing
Critical thinking
What is Empirical Research Methods defined as?
Data collection that produces verifiable findings and is carried out by systematic procedures
What is Theory?
A set of propositions intended to explain a fact or phenomenon
What are the 3 different approaches to building a theory?
Positivist
Interpretive
Critical
What is Positivism an extension of?
The natural sciences or hard sciences like biology, chemistry etc.
What does the Postivism approach to building theories aim to do?
Understand the relations between variables to better understand some phenomenon and the result is theories that operate like scientific laws
What do the Interpretive and Critical approach to building theories do?
They reject the positive pursuit of laws or any such laws that exist and instead emphasize cultural and historical specifics analyzing phenomenon. They recognize that sometimes context in which some phenomenon exists or occurs is important to understanding it.
What does the Interpretive form of theorizing focus on and recognize?
It focuses on understandings and recognizes the significance in the way people come to understand themselves and their social worlds, and that humans develop these understandings through culture. That is how do they come up with the meanings they give themselves, and the world around them.
What does the Critical approach to theorizing focus on?
Power and the role it plays in social processes. How some ways of thinking about the world become the dominant way of thinking
What are the three forms of theorizing and their main points?
Positivist - Explanation and prediction
Interpretive - Understanding self and others
Critical - Power and Emancipation
What gives rise to Theoretical Frameworks?
The broad approaches to theorizing
What are the different Core Theoretical Frameworks?
Functionalist Conflict Interaction isn’t Feminist Postmodern
What are Core Theoretical frameworks?
Lenses through which to view society. Each lens focuses on different aspects of society and be combined to create new unique perspectives
What kind of perspective is the Functionalist perspective and why?
A macro level perspective meaning it focuses on broader, structural factors in society and not individual micro phenomenon
What can the functionalist perspective be compared to?
A house of cards where each card is a structure with a function to help support the cards around it. Each card plays a part in keeping the whole thing up. If one card falters the whole thing can come down. Can be thought of how society functions
What is the main concern of the functionalist perspective?
How society maintains itself and order, particularly in the context of societal change
What is the understanding of Functionalism?
Society is built of structures that have significant functions and that everything is working to maintain stability
What are the kinds of structures in Functionalism?
Family Money Economy Education Government etc.
What are Manifest functions found in functionalism?
Those intended of that structure
What are Manifest functions in structuralism?
The unintended functions of a given structure. The things it’s doing but not on purpose
What can cause a society to become dysfunctional under the Functionalist perspective?
When societies equilibrium becomes distrusted because of change happening too quickly
What did Durkheim suggest?
Periods of repaid social change create a condition known as anomie which is the lack of normalness which may cause people to lack social norms and act outside of those norms
What type of framework is Conflict perspective and what is it focused on?
A macro level framework focused on broad structure rather than the individual, micro level events
How can the conflict perspective be depicted?
As a hierarchy with fewer people on the top than at the bottom
How does conflict theory view society?
It focuses in power and emancipation. Society is a dog pile with each person fighting to get to the top to have the most power and resources at their disposal.nit considers the relationship between those who have power and those who don’t
What does the conflict perspective suggest about power?
That society is built on the core of conflict and competition over scarce resources. And that the people on the top are more powerful and have control over resources. The people at the top are in a position to Mel the large powerless group at the bottom so that they do no need to share their resources
Who is the founder of the conflict perspective?
Karl Marx
What were the two groups that Marx focused on when coming up with the conflict perspective?
The bourgeoisie who own the means of production and the proletariat who were the workers
What was the only out of class conflicts that Marx developed?
Class consciousness where he wanted people to understand the relationship between themselves and the bourgeoisie so they could see how they were being taken advantage of, hold their power in numbers, and create change
Who spelt out the idea of Praxis and what is it?
Marx and it is the duty of scholars to provide marginalized groups thr knowledge that they need to end their powerlessness
What is Symbolic Interactionism?
Looking to find and understand shared meanings and shared meaning-making
Who created the Interactionist perspective?
Mead and Blumer
What do Interactionist see when they look at society?
Individual people communicating with each other through words, facial expressions, gestures, body language, clothing, and more
What type of perspective is an Interactionist perspective?
A micro perspective
What does the interaction perspective emphasize?
Significant others
What does the Feminism perspective focus on?
Gender and often contains social or political activism components
What is Feminism?
The system of ideas and political practices based on the principle that women are human beings equal to men
What were the different waves of feminism advocating for?
First - citizen, voting, and property rights for women
Second - workplace equality and reproductive rights
Third - Redefining what it means to be a feminist and intersectionality
What is Intersectionality in relation to feminism?
How various aspects of identity can come together in certain contexts to result in very specific forms of oppression
What is Patriarchy?
The legal and social power invested in males and maleness
What does androcentric mean?
Male centered
What did the Postmodern perspective come from?
WWI
How did WWI create the Postmodern perspective?
Society moved from manufacturing products to the production of ideas and images. Resulting in an endless array of ideas and images that were changing and often contradictory
What is Critical Thinking?
The mode of thinking, about any subject, content, or problem in which the quality of their thinking by skillfully taking charge of the structures inherent in thinking and imposing intellectual standards upon them
What is Public Sociology?
The translation of sociological knowledge into something digestible for public audiences
