Sociology Established and New Directions Flashcards
What did Durkheim stress the importance of?
importance of social structure; societies as systems of structured relationships
What did Weber stress the importance of?
social action; societies and social structures as the outcome of human actions
What are the three main sociological traditions?
Structural theories (ex: Parsons, Merton, etc.)
Conflict theories (ex: Dahrendorf, C. W. Mills, Habermas, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, etc.)
Action theories (ex: Blumer, Mead, Cooley, Simmel, Goffman, Garfinkel, etc.)
What purpose does the structure of society serve?
a framework of norms that define people’s expectations and obligations (roles) that govern people’s actions and shape their social relations
What do conflict theories focus on?
Highlight the role of conflicts, divisions, power, force, domination and struggle. Analysis of group organization for collective action, fight/protest and domination.
What do action theorists believe?
Individuals give meaning to the world by defining and interpreting it in certain ways (i.e. The world is never experienced directly, by through the ideas that we hold about it).
What does Husserl (1930s) say that Phenomenology emphasizes?
focus on people’s subjective experiences and interpretations of the world.
The phenomenologist wants to understand how the world appears to others, without recourse to theory, deduction, or assumptions from other disciplines.
What is phenomenology the study of?
“phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things.
Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective point of view.
Who suggested that the everyday world is a product of human subjectivity.
Berger and Luckman (1966)
How did Garfinkel (1960s) criticize structural functionalists?
criticised structural functionalist as they tend to assume that people are simply socialised into a cultural consensus and so have no real freedom of action
