GS 2 Flashcards
(33 cards)
Who are the 3 founding fathers of sociology?
Marx, Weber, Durkheim
What does Marx talk about as a whole?
Social inequality
What does Weber talk about as a whole?
Rationalization
What does Durkheim talk about as a whole?
Social cohesion
What was the emergence of sociology? (what events were important)
The French revolution & Industrial revolution
How did the French revolution impact sociology?
By overthrowing the monarchy, there was an abolition of the feudal system and the class society making it possible for different ways of thinking about society to emerge
How did the Industrial revolution impact sociology?
There was a decline of traditional communities and of familiar social order, the traditional authority structures crumbled in its place democracy. Urban growth as well as a new industrial economy that emerged modern capitalism especially capital accumulation and profit principle
How did the Enlightenment influence sociology?
Because of the core ideas of the Enlightenment that are its emphasis on rationality and reason, empiricism, belief in science, universalism and believing in progress
Sociology as a positivist, modern science?
Comte & Spencer: use positivist science to find social laws. Social darwinism, survival of the fittest. Meritocracy: social allocation of people by achievement = by own merit not inheritance (example: education degree). Emphasis on individual
Karl Marx GS
- Seeking to understand society and how it has changed out of concern for the working class.
- Economic elites own means of production and are dominants in society
- Consumers society keeps people ignorant and happy through senseless entertainment
- People are made to ‘want’ products they don’t need
- Exploitation of workers
Durkheim GS
- the social, social life and institutions have a life of their own
- study social facts to understand social change and growing societal complexity: division of labor, solidarity
Talcott Parsons: Functionalism
- What keeps societies together?
- Internalization of social rules through socialization (micro-level)
- did not work to conceptualize society as in conflict-free equilibrium
Weber GS
- Social action theory, interactionism
- protestant ethic (hard work, efficiency)
- work can be a calling
Symbolic interactionism: beyond weber
- Focusing on micro-level interactions and meaning-making through the use of language and symbols
George Herbert Mead: - the self emerge through social interaction
- the self (creative), and the ME (socially conditioned part of the self)
Symbolic interaction assumes meaning and interpretation, we must empathize with the perceptions of others - imagining how others see us helps us develop
Phenomenology: beyond weber
It is to understand the world as it presents itself to actors: how do they make sense of their (taken for granted) life world
- typification: how we classify people and experiences in daily life
(Example: she’s smart, he looks untrustworthy, they are scary)
Ethnomethodology: beyond weber
Also wants to understand how ‘natives’ construct their social world. They are not functionalism’s ‘cultural dopes’ but create their own understanding
Macro-level examples
Studying religious values to explain differences between countries
- learning political systems to explain differences across countries
- Inflation
Intersectionality examples
- black lesbians face more harassment than white lesbians
Structuralism
Assumes the existence of relatively fixed social structures often expressed in binaries, underlying social reality
- Origin in the study of language
(Examples: edible, non-edible, public, private, life, death
-these binaries let people create meaning
Poststructuralism
Claims that such structures are less fixed and determining the structuralist thought claimed
- studies the power relations and discourse to argue how meanings change historically due to narratives of the powerful
Postmodernism
Emerged as a critique of modernist ideas of social progress or meta-narratives (big stories claiming to understand and predict where we are going)
But: science brings risks, inequality is growing, censorship so how can sociology deal with these upcoming issues using ideas of founding fathers who only theorized the modern world
Decolonizing sociology
Modern sociology did not incorporate colonized countries and did not address colonialism when discussing european societies. As well as knowing that the voices of the colonized should be included in the sociological narrative rather than Western scholars who could offer a biased story
Structure versus agency: unresolved business
Society feels like an external thing that affects us while at the same time it is created and maintained by humans
Elias: unresolved business
People only exist in network groups in which they are dependent on other
- we are not autonomous but social selves
- what we find normal today was developed over a long period of time
- studying society like this implies there is no structure-agency dichotomy as structure and agency cannot be separated
