Conceptual Definitions Flashcards
Formal Sociology
Simmel’s formal sociology focuses on forms of social interaction.
Is characterized by its 3 core concepts: form, interaction, and dualism.
Forms are the persistent patterns and structures of interactions that cross-cut various contents. Form differs from content, which is what interactions are about. Although business and marriage vary in content, they share common features characteristic of conflict as a form.
Interactions have their own dynamics, independent of individual psychology, but
also different from Durkheim’s social facts.
* Social forms are constituted through intersubjective and reciprocal influence, not
external and coercive to individuals.
Dualism highlights that meaning emerges from “conflicts and contrasts between opposed categories”
Example:
(i.e. conflict, sociability, exchange,
domination, secrecy, flirting etc.)
Form v. Content
Forms are the persistent patterns and structures of interactions that cross-cut various contents. Form differs from content, which is what interactions are about. Although business and marriage vary in content, they share common features characteristic of conflict as a form.
Part of simmel’s formal sociology, Form is one of its 3 core concepts.
example
i.e. business, marital, religious conflict, vary in content, but share common
features characteristic of conflict as a form
Dyad & Triad
Dyadic relationship (two people)
* Whole association depends on only the two people. If
one withdraws, it falls apart
* More fragile and demands deeper engagement of
each member
Marked by sense of mortality
Forms basis of intimacy
* However, because dyad requires regular
commitment to exist, it can also descend
into triviality
By just adding ONE more member to group, it
qualitatively changes the form of the
associations:
* Factions can emerge
* Group can dominate the individual
* Creates new roles:
* Non-partisan mediator
* Tertius Gaudens (‘Third who enjoys’)
* third party can use disputes between
the other two for his or her own gain
* These possibilities don’t exist with Dyad;
function of ‘social geometry’ - change in form
Part of Simmel’s former sociologyL Quantitative aspects of groups provide important
example of formal sociology (i.e. influence of pure
structure of associations, independent of content)
The Stranger
- A social type refers to the type of character who occupies typical
positions within a form of interaction - Most famous social type Simmel articulates is “the stranger”
- Doesn’t require “unusual” qualities
- Simmel understands it formally: anybody who is simultaneously close
and distant to the members of a social circle, part insider part outsider.
Three traits that are characteristic of the Stranger as a social type:
Objectivity
* Belonging outside of the community, the stranger offers greater objectivity, since they are
untethered from the normative expectations and constraints among insiders
Emotional Confidants
* Closeness makes it possible to receive revelations “at times reminiscent of a confessional,”
while distance makes it possible to reveal matters normally kept from close ones
Abstractness
* proximity to strangers leads us to feel that we share something in common with them, but our
distance means what we share are general, impersonal qualities that we could in principle
share with anybody, from anywhere.
Sociability
Sociability is one of the purest forms of social
interaction: association for the sake of
associating (not driven by content).
*Three Features of Sociability:
* Autonomous: When being sociable, interaction is
defined by nothing else than the pleasures of
interacting, no ulterior motive.
* Artifice: Leave behind statuses, and act as if
everybody is equal.
* Playful: “play-form” of association – takes even
the most serious content and transforms it into
fodder for conversation
Sociability is important because it provides
distance from seriousness of life
Racial Order
Racial Order
Emirbayer and Desmond define race as a “symbolic category,
based on phenotype or ancestry and constructed according to
specific social and historical contexts, that is misrecognized as
a natural category”
* Reject substantialist view of race as ‘biological essence’ but rather
relationally constituted
“Racial groups must be situated in matrices of
racial transactions” – Racial fields
* Racial fields structured by various forms of
capital, but above all racial capital
* In the American racial field, white people of
European descent possess the most capital and have
thereby been able to define the relative value and
merit of racialized persons
“Doing Gender”
Doing gender “involves a complex of socially guided perceptual,
interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits
as expressions of masculine and feminine ‘natures.’”
* Successful displays of femininity or masculinity in everyday life that are
accountable to ones sex category
* Gender is constantly being produced in interactions
* ‘Doing gender’ is way of ‘accomplishing’ everyday reality in Garfinkel’s sense
* If sex category is omnirelevant, then so is task of doing gender
Gender not simply aspect of what one is, but something that one does
* Gender socialization is ‘self-regulating process’- children four-five begin
to deliberately enact gender displays
* ‘Doing gender’ renders social arrangements based on sex category
appear natural
* Creates ‘interactional scaffolding of social structure’
* Overcoming gender inequality therefore involves changes in everday life
Symbolic Violence
Bourdieu argues that language, the meanings, and the symbolic system of those in power are imposed on the rest of the population through the educational
system.
Educational system promotes ‘symbolic violence’: gets “the dominated to accept legitimate their own conditions of domination.”
Ties to his broader ideas on class Habitus, cultural capital, economic capital, and class inequality.
Example: The education system has primary role in defining what is considered legitimate culture.
Sociology of Interest
Bourdieu advances a “sociology of interest” conceiving all practices,
even the most seemingly disinterested, as “economic” practices
directed [thought often unconsciously] toward the maximizing of
material and symbolic profit”
* While this recalls utilitarianism, Bourdieu rejects association and
criticized their approach
* Says utilitarians failed to account for origins of preferences
* Rejected utilitarian idea that real action processes were mostly rational and
reflexive
– Habitus as answer
Habitus
Bourdieu’s concept of Habitus responds to questions
over origins of preferences, and nature of social action
* Habitus is a relatively enduring schemes of
perception, appreciation, and appropriation of things,
embodied in and through socialization and enacted in
everyday choices and taste
* Formed through redundant experiences during earlychildhood socialization
* Habitus is structured (materially-conditioned)
* Embodied dispositions that shape action through habitual,
and even unconscious way
* Habitus is structuring (probabilistically informs social action)
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
Public sphere is where private individuals come together
to communicate about matters of general concern,
using rational deliberation to form public opinion
* Comes out of life-world (though Habermas doesn’t
use this terminology yet)
* Habermas traces its origins to ‘bourgeoisie public
sphere’ in 18th and 19th century
* Begins in non-political setting (coffee houses,
salons, literary societies etc.)
The bourgeois public sphere is
constituted by an ideological
separation between public and
private
Closest approximation of ‘ideal speech situation’ based
on
* equal access to communication
* free of coercion and domination
* Oriented to reaching consensus and mutual understanding
* Sincerity
* Status of interlocutors bracketed to ‘private’ matters,
allowing force of rational argumentation to be decisive
Habermas thought public sphere
departed from ideal form in 20th
century
* Expansion of state apparatus (political
manipulation, censorship) well as
economic market (commercialization
and commodification) made inroads
into public sphere, undermining its
democratic potential
* Systems contributed to ‘colonization
of life-world’
* Potential for communicative action
eroded
Communicative Rationality
Discourse based on consensus could be a source of legitimate power
– power of the ‘better argument’
* Wanted to rescue rationality from narrow neoutilitarian conception
and pessimistic postmodernist conception
* Formulates more comprehensive conception of rationality –
“communicative rationality
Drew on insights of interactionists: in everyday life, there is an expectation that agreement, and
rational consensus can be achieved
Every utterance entails three ‘validity claims’ that we are prepared to defend
1. Validity claim to objective truth
* What are the facts?
2. Validity claim to normative correctness
* What is appropriate given “definition of situation”
3. Validity claim to expressive self-presentation
* Whether speech sincerely expresses one’s subjectivity
More comprehensive concept of rationality must be open to all three validity claims since all may
be disputed or refuted through rational argument
Panopticon
New technology of disciplinary
power rests on a surveillance
exemplified by Panopticon
* Inmate constantly observed, and
visible to supervisor who they
can’t see
Prisoners control themselves
because of fear of the omnipresent
watchful eye
Foucault’s broader ideas on Discipline and Punish
Foucault says that the new system was not designed
to be more humane, but “to punish better … to
insert the power to punish more deeply into the
social body”
The Breaching Experiement
Breaching experiment disrupt people’s taken-for-granted assumptions about how
interaction is supposed to go and elicits reaction
- Social order doesn’t come from abstract norms like “justice”, it comes
from near compulsive drive to “make things make sense”, to make
things comprehensible - Social order operates even where there are no formal rules
- Reality is accomplished before official rules come into being
- Another basic rule that makes everyday life possible, is that we
assume others generally agree with us - Even though what people say is often vague, we assume clarity –
people get mad when we stop doing this - Social order is guaranteed by self-evident validity of the everyday
world, and that is protected by a high degree of trust
Interaction Rituals
Goffman
Everyday life is composed of interaction rituals –
performed gestures that signal “social identity …
mood, intent, and expectations, and about the state
of his relation to them”
* Ritualized expressions establish micro-definitional
situations that maintain order
* For example, urban sociability sustained by ‘civil
inattention’
* Civil inattention is a subtle interaction ritual where
strangers glance at one another before averting their gaze
* Demonstrate that we recognize the other person’s
presence, but are not seeking a sustained interaction, and
have no hostile intention
* Proper level of indifference
