Sociological Perspective Essay
Chapter 1: Sociology: Perspective, Theory, and Method
What is the Sociological Perspective?
Reveals the power of society to shape individual lives.
C. Wright Mills called this point of view the “sociological imagination,” which transforms personal troubles into public issues.
Being an outsider or experiencing a social crisis encourages the sociological perspective.
The Importance of a Global Perspective
Global awareness is an important part of the sociological perspective because:
Where we live shapes the lives we lead.
Societies throughout the world are increasingly interconnected.
What happens in the rest of the world affects life here in the US.
Many social problems that we face in the US are far more serious elsewhere.
Thinking globally …show more content…
helps us learn more about ourselves.
Applying the Sociological Perspective
The sociological perspective
Is used by government agencies when developing laws and regulations that guide how people in the communities lives and work.
Helps us understand the barriers and opportunities in our lives.
Is an advantage in many fields of work that involves working with people.
Origins of Sociology
Rapid social change helped trigger the development of sociology:
Rise of an industrial economy
Explosive growth of cities
New political ideas
Auguste Comte named the discipline of sociology in 1838.
Early philosophers had tried to describe the ideal society, but Comte wanted to understand society as it really is.
Karl Marx and many later sociologists used sociology to try to make society better.
Sociological Theory
The structural-functional approach explores how social structures work together to help society operate.
Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim, and Herbert Spencer helped develop the structural-functional approach.
The social-conflict approach shows how inequality creates conflict and causes change.
Two important types of conflict analysis are gender-conflict theory, which is also called feminist theory, and race-conflict theory.
Karl Marx helped develop the social-conflict approach.
The symbolic-interaction approach studies how people, in everyday interaction, construct reality.
Max Weber and George Hebert Mead helped develop of the social-interaction approach.
Three Ways to Do Sociology
Positivist sociology uses the logic of science.
Tries to establish cause and effect
Demands that researchers try to be objective
Is loosely linked to structural-functional theory.
Interpretive sociology focuses on the meanings people attach to behavior.
People construct reality in their everyday lives.
Weber’s Verstehen is learning how people understand their world.
Is linked to symbolic-interaction theory.
Critical sociology uses research to bring about social change.
Focuses on inequality
Rejects the principle of objectivity, claiming that all research is political
Is linked to social-conflict theory
Gender and Research
Gender can affect sociological research if a researcher fails to avoid problems of androcentricity, overgeneralizing, gender blindness, double standards, or interference.
Research Ethics
Sociologists must ensure that subjects in a research project are not harmed, and include in their published results all sources of financial support.
Methods: Strategies for Doing Research
The experiment allows researchers to study cause and effect between two or more variables in a controlled setting.
Survey research uses questionnaires or interviews to gather subjects’ responses to a series of questions.
Through participant observation, researchers join with people in a social setting for an extended period of time.
Researchers use data collected by others from existing sources to save time and money.
Putting It All Together: Ten Steps in Sociological Research
1. What is your topic?
2. What have others already learned?
3. What, exactly, are your questions?
4. What will you need to carry out research?
5. Are there ethical concerns?
6. What method will you use?
7. How will you record the date?
8. What do the data tell you?
9. What are your conclusions?
10. How can you share what you’ve learned?
Chapter 2: Culture
What is Culture?
Culture is a way of life.
Culture is shared by members of a society.
Culture shapes how we act, think, and feel.
Culture is a human trait.
Although several species display a limited capacity for culture, only human beings rely on culture for survival.
Culture is a product of evolution.
As the human brain evolved, culture replaced biological instincts as our species’ primary strategy for survival.
We experience culture shock when we enter an unfamiliar culture and are not able to “read” meaning in out new surroundings. We create culture shock for others when we act in ways they do not understand.
The Elements of Culture
Culture relies on symbols in the form of words, gestures, and actions to express meaning.
The fact that different meanings can come to be associated with the same symbol shows the human capacity to create and manipulate symbols.
Societies create new symbols all the time.
Language is the symbolic system by which people in a culture communicate with one another.
People use language—both spoken and written—to transmit culture from one generation to the next.
Because every culture is different, each language has words or expressions not found in any other language.
Values are abstract standards of what ought to be.
Values can sometimes be in conflict with one another.
Lower-income countries have cultures that value survival; higher-income countries have cultures that value individualism and self-expression.
Beliefs are specific statements that people who share a culture hold to be true. Norms, rules that guide human behavior, are of two types:
Mores, which have great moral significance.
Folkways, which are matters of everyday politeness.
Technology and Culture
Culture is shaped by technology. We understand technological development in terms of stages of sociocultural evolution.
Hunting and gathering
Horticulture and pastoralism
Agriculture
Industry
Postindustrial information technology
Cultural Diversity
We live in a culturally diverse society.
This diversity is due to our country’s history of immigration.
Diversity reflects regional differences, and also differences in social class that set off high culture from popular culture.
Subculture is based on differences in interests and life experiences.
Hip- hop fans and jocks are two examples of youth subculture in the US.
Multiculturalism is an effort to enhance appreciation of cultural diversity.
Multiculturalism developed in reaction to the “melting pot” idea, which was thought to result in minorities losing their identity as they adopted mainstream cultural patterns.
Counterculture is strongly at odds with conventional ways of life.
Any militant group in the US that would plot to destroy Western society would be an example of a counterculture.
Cultural change results from
Invention (e.g. the telephone and the computer)
Discovery (e.g. the recognition that women are capable of political leadership)
Diffusion (e.g. the growing popularity of various ethnic foods and musical styles)
Cultural lag results when some parts of a cultural system change faster than others.
Ethnocentrism links people to their society but can cause misunderstanding and conflict between societies.
Cultural relativism is increasingly important as people of the world come into more contact with each other.
Theories of Culture
Structural-functional theory views culture as a relatively stable system built on core values. All cultural patterns play some part in the ongoing operation of society.
Social-conflict theory sees culture as a dynamic arena of inequality and conflict. Cultural patterns benefit some categories of people more than others.
Feminist theory highlights how culture is “gendered,” dividing activities between the sexes in ways that give men greater power and privileges than women …show more content…
have.
Sociobiology explores how evolution has shaped patterns of culture in today’s world.
Culture and Human Freedom
Culture can limit the choices we make.
As culture creature, we have the capacity to shape and reshape our world to meet our needs and pursue our dreams.
Chapter 3: Socialization: From Infancy to Old Age
Social Experience: The Key to Our Humanity
Socialization is a lifelong process.
Socialization develops our humanity as well as our particular personalities.
The importance of socialization is seen in the fact that extended periods of social isolation result in permanent damage.
Socialization is a matter of nurture rather than nature.
A century ago, most people thought human behavior resulted from biological instinct.
For us as human beings, it is our nature to nurture.
Understanding Socialization
Sigmund Freud’s model of the human personality has three parts:
Id: innate, pleasure-seeking human drives
Superego: the demands of society in the form of internalized values and norms
Ego: our efforts to balance innate, pleasure-seeking drives and the demands of society
Jean Piaget believed that human development involves both biological maturation and gaining social experience. He identified four stages of cognitive development:
The sensorimotor stage involves knowing the world only through the sense.
The preoperational stage involves starting to use language and other symbols.
The concrete operational stage allows individuals to understand causal connections.
The formal operational stage involves abstract and critical thought.
Lawrence Kohlberg applied Piaget’s approach to stages of moral
development:
We first judge rightness in preconventional terms, according to our individual needs.
Next, conventional moral reasoning takes account takes account of parental attitudes and cultural norms.
Finally, postconventional reasoning allows us to criticize society itself.
Carol Gilligan found that gender plays an important part in moral development, with males relying more on abstract standards of rightness and females relying more on the effects of actions on relationships.
To George Herbert Mead:
The self is part our personality and includes self-awareness and self-image.
The self develops only as a result of social experience.
Social experience involves the exchange of symbols.
Social interaction depends on understanding the intention of another, which requires taking the role of the other.
Human action is partly spontaneous and partly in response to others.
We gain social experience through imitation, play, games, and understanding the generalized other.
Charles Horton Cooley used the term looking-glass self to explain that we see ourselves as we imagine others see us.
Erik H. Erikson identified challenges that individuals face at each stage of life from infancy to old age.
Agents of Socialization
The family is usually the first setting of socialization.
Family has the greatest impact on attitudes and behavior.
A family’s social position, including race and social class, shapes a child’s personality.
Ideas about gender are learned first in the family.
Schools give most children their first experience with bureaucracy and impersonal evaluation.
Schools teach knowledge and skills needed for later life.
Schools expose children to greater social diversity.
Schools reinforce ideas about gender.
The peer group helps shape attitudes and behavior.
The peer group takes on great importance during adolescence.
The peer group frees young people from adult supervision.
The mass media have a huge impact on socialization in modern, high-income societies.
The average U.S. child spends as much time watching television and videos as attending school and interacting with parents.
The mass media often reinforce stereotypes about gender and race.
The mass media expose people to a great deal of violence.
Socialization and the Life Course
The concept of childhood is grounded not in biology but in culture. In high-income countries, childhood is extended.
The emotional and social turmoil of adolescence results from cultural inconsistency in defining people who are not children but not yet adults. Adolescence varies by social class.
Adulthood is the stage of life when most accomplishments take place. Although personality is now formed, it continues to change with new life experiences.
Old age is defined as much by culture as biology:
Traditional societies give power and respect to elders.
Industrial societies define elders as unimportant and out of torch.
The “graying of the United States” means that the average age of our nation’s population is going up.
Acceptance of death and dying is part of socialization for the elderly. This process typically involves five stages: denial, anger, negotiation, resignation, and acceptance.
Resocialization: Total Institutions
Total institutions include prisons, mental hospitals, and monasteries.
Staff members supervise all aspects of life.
Life is standardized, with all inmates following set rules and routines.
Resocialization is a two-part process:
Breaking down inmates’ existing identity.
Building a new self through a system of rewards and punishments.
What is the Sociological Perspective?
Reveals the power of society to shape individual lives.
C. Wright Mills called this point of view the “sociological imagination,” which transforms personal troubles into public issues.
Being an outsider or experiencing a social crisis encourages the sociological perspective.
The Importance of a Global Perspective
Global awareness is an important part of the sociological perspective because:
Where we live shapes the lives we lead.
Societies throughout the world are increasingly interconnected.
What happens in the rest of the world affects life here in the US.
Many social problems that we face in the US are far more serious elsewhere.
Thinking globally …show more content…
helps us learn more about ourselves.
Applying the Sociological Perspective
The sociological perspective
Is used by government agencies when developing laws and regulations that guide how people in the communities lives and work.
Helps us understand the barriers and opportunities in our lives.
Is an advantage in many fields of work that involves working with people.
Origins of Sociology
Rapid social change helped trigger the development of sociology:
Rise of an industrial economy
Explosive growth of cities
New political ideas
Auguste Comte named the discipline of sociology in 1838.
Early philosophers had tried to describe the ideal society, but Comte wanted to understand society as it really is.
Karl Marx and many later sociologists used sociology to try to make society better.
Sociological Theory
The structural-functional approach explores how social structures work together to help society operate.
Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim, and Herbert Spencer helped develop the structural-functional approach.
The social-conflict approach shows how inequality creates conflict and causes change.
Two important types of conflict analysis are gender-conflict theory, which is also called feminist theory, and race-conflict theory.
Karl Marx helped develop the social-conflict approach.
The symbolic-interaction approach studies how people, in everyday interaction, construct reality.
Max Weber and George Hebert Mead helped develop of the social-interaction approach.
Three Ways to Do Sociology
Positivist sociology uses the logic of science.
Tries to establish cause and effect
Demands that researchers try to be objective
Is loosely linked to structural-functional theory.
Interpretive sociology focuses on the meanings people attach to behavior.
People construct reality in their everyday lives.
Weber’s Verstehen is learning how people understand their world.
Is linked to symbolic-interaction theory.
Critical sociology uses research to bring about social change.
Focuses on inequality
Rejects the principle of objectivity, claiming that all research is political
Is linked to social-conflict theory
Gender and Research
Gender can affect sociological research if a researcher fails to avoid problems of androcentricity, overgeneralizing, gender blindness, double standards, or interference.
Research Ethics
Sociologists must ensure that subjects in a research project are not harmed, and include in their published results all sources of financial support.
Methods: Strategies for Doing Research
The experiment allows researchers to study cause and effect between two or more variables in a controlled setting.
Survey research uses questionnaires or interviews to gather subjects’ responses to a series of questions.
Through participant observation, researchers join with people in a social setting for an extended period of time.
Researchers use data collected by others from existing sources to save time and money.
Putting It All Together: Ten Steps in Sociological Research
1. What is your topic?
2. What have others already learned?
3. What, exactly, are your questions?
4. What will you need to carry out research?
5. Are there ethical concerns?
6. What method will you use?
7. How will you record the date?
8. What do the data tell you?
9. What are your conclusions?
10. How can you share what you’ve learned?
Chapter 2: Culture
What is Culture?
Culture is a way of life.
Culture is shared by members of a society.
Culture shapes how we act, think, and feel.
Culture is a human trait.
Although several species display a limited capacity for culture, only human beings rely on culture for survival.
Culture is a product of evolution.
As the human brain evolved, culture replaced biological instincts as our species’ primary strategy for survival.
We experience culture shock when we enter an unfamiliar culture and are not able to “read” meaning in out new surroundings. We create culture shock for others when we act in ways they do not understand.
The Elements of Culture
Culture relies on symbols in the form of words, gestures, and actions to express meaning.
The fact that different meanings can come to be associated with the same symbol shows the human capacity to create and manipulate symbols.
Societies create new symbols all the time.
Language is the symbolic system by which people in a culture communicate with one another.
People use language—both spoken and written—to transmit culture from one generation to the next.
Because every culture is different, each language has words or expressions not found in any other language.
Values are abstract standards of what ought to be.
Values can sometimes be in conflict with one another.
Lower-income countries have cultures that value survival; higher-income countries have cultures that value individualism and self-expression.
Beliefs are specific statements that people who share a culture hold to be true. Norms, rules that guide human behavior, are of two types:
Mores, which have great moral significance.
Folkways, which are matters of everyday politeness.
Technology and Culture
Culture is shaped by technology. We understand technological development in terms of stages of sociocultural evolution.
Hunting and gathering
Horticulture and pastoralism
Agriculture
Industry
Postindustrial information technology
Cultural Diversity
We live in a culturally diverse society.
This diversity is due to our country’s history of immigration.
Diversity reflects regional differences, and also differences in social class that set off high culture from popular culture.
Subculture is based on differences in interests and life experiences.
Hip- hop fans and jocks are two examples of youth subculture in the US.
Multiculturalism is an effort to enhance appreciation of cultural diversity.
Multiculturalism developed in reaction to the “melting pot” idea, which was thought to result in minorities losing their identity as they adopted mainstream cultural patterns.
Counterculture is strongly at odds with conventional ways of life.
Any militant group in the US that would plot to destroy Western society would be an example of a counterculture.
Cultural change results from
Invention (e.g. the telephone and the computer)
Discovery (e.g. the recognition that women are capable of political leadership)
Diffusion (e.g. the growing popularity of various ethnic foods and musical styles)
Cultural lag results when some parts of a cultural system change faster than others.
Ethnocentrism links people to their society but can cause misunderstanding and conflict between societies.
Cultural relativism is increasingly important as people of the world come into more contact with each other.
Theories of Culture
Structural-functional theory views culture as a relatively stable system built on core values. All cultural patterns play some part in the ongoing operation of society.
Social-conflict theory sees culture as a dynamic arena of inequality and conflict. Cultural patterns benefit some categories of people more than others.
Feminist theory highlights how culture is “gendered,” dividing activities between the sexes in ways that give men greater power and privileges than women …show more content…
have.
Sociobiology explores how evolution has shaped patterns of culture in today’s world.
Culture and Human Freedom
Culture can limit the choices we make.
As culture creature, we have the capacity to shape and reshape our world to meet our needs and pursue our dreams.
Chapter 3: Socialization: From Infancy to Old Age
Social Experience: The Key to Our Humanity
Socialization is a lifelong process.
Socialization develops our humanity as well as our particular personalities.
The importance of socialization is seen in the fact that extended periods of social isolation result in permanent damage.
Socialization is a matter of nurture rather than nature.
A century ago, most people thought human behavior resulted from biological instinct.
For us as human beings, it is our nature to nurture.
Understanding Socialization
Sigmund Freud’s model of the human personality has three parts:
Id: innate, pleasure-seeking human drives
Superego: the demands of society in the form of internalized values and norms
Ego: our efforts to balance innate, pleasure-seeking drives and the demands of society
Jean Piaget believed that human development involves both biological maturation and gaining social experience. He identified four stages of cognitive development:
The sensorimotor stage involves knowing the world only through the sense.
The preoperational stage involves starting to use language and other symbols.
The concrete operational stage allows individuals to understand causal connections.
The formal operational stage involves abstract and critical thought.
Lawrence Kohlberg applied Piaget’s approach to stages of moral
development:
We first judge rightness in preconventional terms, according to our individual needs.
Next, conventional moral reasoning takes account takes account of parental attitudes and cultural norms.
Finally, postconventional reasoning allows us to criticize society itself.
Carol Gilligan found that gender plays an important part in moral development, with males relying more on abstract standards of rightness and females relying more on the effects of actions on relationships.
To George Herbert Mead:
The self is part our personality and includes self-awareness and self-image.
The self develops only as a result of social experience.
Social experience involves the exchange of symbols.
Social interaction depends on understanding the intention of another, which requires taking the role of the other.
Human action is partly spontaneous and partly in response to others.
We gain social experience through imitation, play, games, and understanding the generalized other.
Charles Horton Cooley used the term looking-glass self to explain that we see ourselves as we imagine others see us.
Erik H. Erikson identified challenges that individuals face at each stage of life from infancy to old age.
Agents of Socialization
The family is usually the first setting of socialization.
Family has the greatest impact on attitudes and behavior.
A family’s social position, including race and social class, shapes a child’s personality.
Ideas about gender are learned first in the family.
Schools give most children their first experience with bureaucracy and impersonal evaluation.
Schools teach knowledge and skills needed for later life.
Schools expose children to greater social diversity.
Schools reinforce ideas about gender.
The peer group helps shape attitudes and behavior.
The peer group takes on great importance during adolescence.
The peer group frees young people from adult supervision.
The mass media have a huge impact on socialization in modern, high-income societies.
The average U.S. child spends as much time watching television and videos as attending school and interacting with parents.
The mass media often reinforce stereotypes about gender and race.
The mass media expose people to a great deal of violence.
Socialization and the Life Course
The concept of childhood is grounded not in biology but in culture. In high-income countries, childhood is extended.
The emotional and social turmoil of adolescence results from cultural inconsistency in defining people who are not children but not yet adults. Adolescence varies by social class.
Adulthood is the stage of life when most accomplishments take place. Although personality is now formed, it continues to change with new life experiences.
Old age is defined as much by culture as biology:
Traditional societies give power and respect to elders.
Industrial societies define elders as unimportant and out of torch.
The “graying of the United States” means that the average age of our nation’s population is going up.
Acceptance of death and dying is part of socialization for the elderly. This process typically involves five stages: denial, anger, negotiation, resignation, and acceptance.
Resocialization: Total Institutions
Total institutions include prisons, mental hospitals, and monasteries.
Staff members supervise all aspects of life.
Life is standardized, with all inmates following set rules and routines.
Resocialization is a two-part process:
Breaking down inmates’ existing identity.
Building a new self through a system of rewards and punishments.