Ex: konwning someone won’t pull a gun out if we say hi
Society: Sum of social behavior
Two major functions of society
(1) Frees us up to specialize to do things we wouldn’t be able to do on our own.
(2) Constrains our behavior- called peer pressure. Not free to do whatever we want.
Without environmental cues, we cannot interpret and understand society, and the specific situations in which we find ourselves, including what is normal (culturally acceptable) and what is deviant (against the norm)
Sociology: scientific study of social/patterned/repeated behavior (social structure) or sociology is the study of people and how they behave in groups
Rural Sociology: same but with rural populations.
Ten Sociological Concepts
(1) Society: people who share a culture and live together. People in same society live with same social structure.
(2) Culture: a set of interrelated beliefs, values, and norms and their physical or material products shared by members of a society.
(3) Norm: what one should and shouldn’t do. Socially acceptable actions
(4) Value: Cultural statement about what is important or valuable.
(5) Belief: A cultural statement about what is real or not real, what is true/not true.
(6) Subculture: group with distinctive values, beliefs, norms, and behaviors
(7) Status: Your location or position in a society. Comes with status symbols. Roles that are expected behaviors and attitudes associated with status.
(8) Community: a place within a society (usually with a political boundary) where people live on a day-to-day basis.
(9) Power/influence: the ability to achieve desired ends, despite resistance from others.
(10) Sociological Imagination: the intellectual ability to see the relationships between individual behavior and attitudes and a larger societal and cultural context.
C.W. Mills: fired from