Module 1 - What Is Sociology?

Question 1

Why did sociology emerge?

Answer 1

Due to decline of the feudal social order and rise of a new social order, feudal philanthropy and bourgeois philanthropy began to fight. As well, statistics began to be gathered on lower class households which showed how unhappy people really were. As well, study of culture, and history emerged, leading to increased autonomy of thought and perspective. Positivism and the scientific method progresses.

Question 2

How did Émile Durkheim further the study of the Sociological Method?

Answer 2

He thought sociology should focus on discovering and interpreting what is external to the individual. Therefore, the sociological method must be empirical, represent positive science, and have nothing to do with “philosophy.” In general, the sociological method must be objective. Durkheim’s main interests were in social solidarity, social order and cohesion, and the development of sociology as a positivist, empirical science.

Question 3

Social Facts:

Answer 3

Social facts are social “things” that are external to the individual and are able to exercise coercive power and control over individual will (whether you want it to happen or not, you feel compelled to do it). For example, when going to a funeral, you feel like you have to dress appropriately and cannot show positive emotions openly. Just like facts in physical sciences, which exist regardless of whether humans believe in them or not, Durkheim considered social facts to be similar. Social facts are informed by norms and values (social forces) on one hand; on the other, they are collective, abstract phenomena. Crime and suicide rates fall under this second conception. These abstract phenomena, which happen outside of us, are driven by other social facts; i.e., abstract social facts need to be explained by other social facts. Statistical rates of suicide are explained, under Durkeimian sociology, by larger social forces. In this way, the suicide RATE is the social fact in and of itself, and it is driven by other social forces which are external to individuals.

Question 4

What is the difference between suicide in psychology and sociology?

Answer 4

In psychology, suicide is a mental illness, part of a personal character, whereas through a social lense, it’s social rate follows patterns of social relations (forces). The social rates of suicide are social facts.

Question 5

How is social order possible?

Answer 5

Through social solidarity, integration and regulation.

Question 6

Who was Karl Marx?

Answer 6

Marx was known as a philosopher and political economist who contributed to sociology through the materialist conception of history with emphasis on the dynamics of change in human societies. He was not trained as a sociologist (the word sociology was not in widespread use back then). He drew attention to how people are classified and how different classes relate to each other with an emphasis on how humans and human societies change over time and through history. He was interested in the engine of social change in society and understanding the relationships of people in society, especially unequal relationships. Marx’s research was not field-based, like other empirical researchers; a lot of his work was historical, reviewing the existing knowledge and literature on previous societies and histories. He managed to trace these disparate histories to each other and connect them to the political economy of his time.

Question 7

What was the superstructure and infrastructure of a hunter-gatherer society?

Answer 7

In a hunter-gatherer society, the infrastructure consists of certain material productive forces: hunters, gatherers, simple tools and technologies. You have a subsistence economy. You don’t have a lot of trading and selling things. You also have a specific type of relations of production: Within a hunter-gatherer society, the division of labour exists in a cooperative manner. People share things with one another. Big families do different parts of a job.

Within a hunter-gatherer society superstructure, you don’t need a hugely complicated political system. Instead, people might just discuss things informally to make decisions. They also do not have a highly complex education system. Education is something that is handed down from generation to generation, in an informal setting. As for religion, religious beliefs reflect people’s actual conditions of life. Families had to be big because this is how you ensured survival.

Question 8

What was the superstructure and infrastructure of a feudal society?

Answer 8

The infrastructure consists of material productive forces and the relations of production. Material productive forces include agricultural tools, land, seeds, natural fertilizers, peasants, and feudal overlords. Relations of production consists of unequal relations between the peasants and the overlord. Peasants were tied to the land and couldn’t leave. At the same time, the landlords could not fire them either. There was a system of unequal but reciprocal obligations and duties.

As for the superstructure of the feudal society, it reflects the infrastructure. The political system is a reflection of economic inequalities: the peasants didn’t have any say in politics. It was the king/queen and the landlords who ran things. Religion justified these inequalities. It put a veneer of divinity over kings and queens and landlords, and made inequalities seem legitimate. Inequalities were portrayed as the will of God. As for education, there was limited literacy. Laws were limited and also enforced inequalities.

Question 9

What was the superstructure and infrastructure of a capitalist society?

Answer 9

Infrastructure: Material productive forces consisted of natural resources, wage workers, factories, centralized/industrialized tools, etc. Relations of production was based on an unequal relationship between workers and those who owned the means of production (like factories, industrial farms), employees and employers, etc.

Superstructure: Families are small because children are expensive and now you need higher qualifications for education because jobs are much more complicated and require greater specialization. The division of labour is based on skill and expertise.

Question 10

What was a materialist society like?

Answer 10

Private property and class inequality.

Question 11

What is the highly debated capitalist mode of production?

Answer 11

It’s argued to be broken into social classes of the bourgeoisie, proletariat, and petite bourgeoisie.

Question 12

The bourgeoisie:

Answer 12

Owners of the means of production.

Question 13

The proletariat:

Answer 13

Workers or wage labourers.

Question 14

The petite bourgeoisie:

Answer 14

Small and independent owners e.g., farmers, small business owners

Question 15

Wage Labour:

Answer 15

The physical or mental capacity sold for a wage. Wage labour only exists in capitalism; individuals get a wage but everything else is controlled by the capitalist class (how they produce, what they produce, the speed of production, who the product is sold to, etc.).

Question 16

Capitalist Alienation:

Answer 16

A loss of control over the product or the process of making it during commodity production.

Question 17

Who was Max Weber?

Answer 17

Weber introduced interpretive sociology, stating that individuals should look at social actions and what meaning it has for the people engaged in it. Weber wasn’t interested in seeing action as a total, social fact; rather, he wanted to understand motives.

Question 18

Action:

Answer 18

A deliberate choice to do - or not do - something.

Question 19

Social Action:

Answer 19

A deliberate act which takes into account the actions and reactions of individuals. Social action has something extra compared to action. For example, when you are driving and you put on the blinker; the person behind you knows what this blinker means (so do you). By looking at another driver and their facial expression (or lack thereof) we know what they might do.

Question 20

Ideal Types of Social Action:

Answer 20

Traditional, Affectual, Value-Rational, Instrumentally Rational

Question 21

Social Reality:

Answer 21

The accepted social tenets of a community, involving thereby relatively stable laws and social representations.

Question 22

First Order Social Construction:

Answer 22

Some things are created PURELY through social relationships- they don’t have a natural origin and wouldn’t exist without human social interaction. For example, money (in the form of physical cash or in bank accounts) is a social construction. Money doesn’t exist outside of humans (and even didn’t exist in certain human societies). It only started existing once people started interacting more with other societies.

Question 23

Second Order Social Construction:

Answer 23

Things that DO exist outside of human relationships, but what we believe about them are constructed. For example, the sun and the moon exist without humans; they’d be here regardless so they are not created by human social relations, but human cultures give the sun and the moon various meanings. Many cultures consider the sun masculine, and the moon feminine; these concepts wouldn’t exist in nature. There are religious and scientific and poetic ideas and beliefs about the sun and the moon.

Question 24

Controversy around Social Construction:

Answer 24

It questions our taken-for-granted assumptions about our own ways of doing things and often has political implications.

Question 25

Personal vs Public Issues:

Answer 25

The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men and women. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

Question 26

Inverted Quarantine:

Answer 26

Isolating one’s healthy self from the general sick public.

Question 27

Quarantine:

Answer 27

Isolating the sick person from the general healthy public.

Question 28

Moral Statistics:

Answer 28

In the nineteenth century, as urban problems grew in industrial cities, a bunch of people started using statistics to keep track of “moral” problems, such as crime, suicide, illegitimate children, education (or lack thereof), divorce and so on. But they had no interest in the crime and immorality of the rich. André-Michel Guerry and Joseph Fletcher pioneered this study of numerical measures of social and moral phenomena (divorce, suicide, and other “vices” of the working class); gathered from surveys and census records.

Question 29

André-Michel Geurry:

Answer 29

He had looked at differences between industrialized and rural areas in France, prompting him to pioneer the research of population statistics. People like Guerry tabulated crimes and suicides using judicial records, and kept track of who commits these acts, where, when, which age groups, genders, which jobs or social classes, town or country, etc. These comparisons within and between countries became a source of sociological insight into how different social conditions create different tendencies to crime or divorce or other things.

Question 30

What were the Statistical Societies?

Answer 30

In the U.K. some of these bourgeois philanthropists who emerged after the Industrial Revolution got together and created the Statistical Societies, whose mandate was to study any and every social and economic problem statistically. One of the things they did was to create the first statistical surveys, which were essentially questionnaires. They got a bunch of young, educated people to take these questionnaires and go to the homes of the poor and count how many beds they had and how many books and what kinds of dishes and furniture. These people were instructed specifically to not go to the homes of the rich; The focus was always on the poor. The rich wanted to propose education for children as a solution (rather than saying capitalism was the problem or protecting workers).

Question 31

Why can statistics be termed “a tricky tool”?

Answer 31

It’s tricky because it can show things but it can also hide things. It can look objective but it can also be very subjective. It can on the one hand shed light on problems but on the other hand it can also put some communities or groups under the spotlight and scrutinize them or show them in bad light while leaving others out of the spotlight. It likes to point out issues experienced by the poor, but hide the fact that these issues are due to systemic systems enforced by the rich.

Question 32

Anthropology:

Answer 32

A discipline that uses ethnography often. It rarely uses statistics and focuses mainly on studies into culture and the customs of people. Ethnography and anthropology, unlike statistics, is an attempt at direct observation and in-depth study of people in their social settings. Ethnography is done on a smaller scale and often conducted in disordered neighbourhoods. Early ethnographers wrote down their observations and in-depth inquiries in cities like London. In any case, these also became a source of early sociological insight into culture and social institutions such as politics, law, customs, family, gender and so on in a comparative fashion.

Question 33

Colonial Ethnography:

Answer 33

There were anthropologists like Henry Mayhew, post-Industrial Revolution who went around the world and started looking at the customs and morés of other people around the world, comparing them to their own. There was a power relationship of white middle/upper class men who went around the world and poked their nose in people’s lives (because they felt entitled to) and then wrote about them and published and made an academic career out of it.

Question 34

Morés:

Answer 34

The commonly defined morals of a culture/society; most of the time unwritten, but agreed upon collectively.

Question 35

Positivism:

Answer 35

The nineteenth century was a time of huge trust in science and the possibility of progress in everything with the use of rational and scientific methods. People began to think that if they could use the scientific method to look at and dissect for instance a frog or a cheetah, they could do the same with human societies. Employing the scientific method in all disciplines was believed to be the way to a better society. This, to perhaps oversimplify things, is positivism.

Question 36

Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte:

Answer 36

Both claimed to have coined sociologie (sociology). Comte’s admirer and the first woman sociologist Harriett Martineau was also involved in the discipline. While Comte had talked about using the scientific method in sociology, Martineau actually used the scientific method in sociology to study the American society (published in 1837 as a book called Society in America). She wrote the first methodological book in sociology, like a user’s manual for how to actually conduct research on society. The book is called How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838).

Question 37

Historical Comparison:

Answer 37

Large-scale studies of past societies and nations, usually tracing the interconnections of power, social customs, and solidarities between societies.

Question 38

What are the three origins of sociology?

Answer 38

Moral statistics, ethnography, and historical comparison.

Question 39

Where did Karl Marx think class inequalities came from?

Answer 39

There is a persistent assumption that class inequalities result from natural differences between people. According to this assumption rich people become rich because they are thrifty, smart, and hard-working, and reinvest their money while poor people are lazy, spend too much and are undisciplined. Marx argues that this is just a myth. In reality, violence, conquests, enslavement, robbery, murder and force have a big impact on the creation of class inequality, with rich people being the dominant class and the poor being the subordinate class.

Question 40

How did the idealist and materialist concepts of history defer?

Answer 40

Idealist concepts said that ideas are the engine of change. If you want to understand a society or culture, you have to understand their ideas and belief systems. Change occurs with a revolution of ideas (shifts in religion and politics). It tends to apply these ideas to the present- if a poor country wants to rise out of poverty, it must change its ideas to fit with more “developed” ideas. With materialist concepts, it was thought that material conditions are the engine of change. Something material has to change in order for a society to change - this could be a change in livelihood sources, agriculture, tools, wealth-resources, etc. For instance, the shift from hunter-gatherer cultures to agricultural cultures, which innovates housing, develops villages, causes population growth, which leads to creation of societies.

Question 41

Describe the interplay between Marx’s ideas of infrastructure and superstructure:

Answer 41

The infrastructure determines the superstructure. The infrastructure is the economic foundation of society. This foundation or infrastructure itself is made of two things: forces of production and relations of production. It has to do with how people make their living so it is material in nature. The superstructure is the ideas and way of life in the society. It consists of things such as family, politics, laws, education, religion, values, etc.

Question 42

How did Weber view action?

Answer 42

“Action,” under Weber’s framework, is any action that has a subjective meaning attached to it. Example: Zohreh was biking and she jumped off the bike when there was something wrong with the back wheel. This is not action according to Weber because it was reflexive and had no meaning. The key point is subjective meaning. Sneezing is not an action, but a reflex- there is no thinking behind it- there’s no motive behind it. Action has to have a subjective meaning behind it (not instinct or a reflex). All sorts of values, meanings which are subjective, which we internalize, are behind action.

Question 43

Traditional Social Action:

Answer 43

Social actions following larger social traditions (how it’s always been). Meanings are handed down through tradition.
Example: Thanksgiving celebration always has a turkey
Example: Brides at weddings wear white dresses and there is an exchanging of vows ceremony.
Example: Having monarchs / a prime minister / a president.

Question 44

Affectual Social Action:

Answer 44

Actions motivated by emotion, affection and love.
Example: Playing with kids, doing acts of service.
Example: Kissing and hugging each other.
Example: Following singers, sports teams; fandoms in general.

Question 45

Value Rational Social Action:

Answer 45

Actions taken in service to an inner, motivating value. These are things that we do because we consciously believe in the value of something.
Example: Something happened to your parents when you were young and in the future, you want to make sure nothing like that happens to other people (like Batman).
Example: GoFundMe - you care about children and want to donate.

Question 46

Instrumentally Rational Social Action:

Answer 46

Similar to value-rational in its thinking/planning process, an individual takes action to fulfill a purpose. However, a value isn’t present. They’re doing the action, but thinking and rationalizing the action is merely a means for achieving a goal.
Example: Driving - people usually drive because it’s a means to an end.

Question 47

What would Weber mean by the term “The Iron Cage”?

Answer 47

We cage ourselves, our actions, and our beliefs within a rationalizing framework. The logic of instrumental rationality dominates our individual wills and motivations and makes us act in ways that go against our values, affections, and traditions.

Question 48

Sociological Snapshots:

Answer 48

Sometimes sociologists focus on the present - the state of things as they are today - and take a snapshot of current lives, relations, and entities. For example, sociologists can look at employment rates at this point in time.

Question 49

Sociology In Flux:

Answer 49

A way for sociologists to ask how things change. Historically, things HAVE changed, and we understand that they can change again. For example, looking at the North Saskatchewan river and seeing how clean it is compared to the past (looking at historical trends).

Question 50

The Social Imagination:

Answer 50

Pioneered by Mills, the sociological imagination asks us to look at how our personal troubles and daily milieus influence the public issues of social structure and how social structural issues influence our personal issues. We cannot understand society without understanding individuals; and we cannot understand individuals without understanding society.