WHAT IS Marshall High School Sociology Mr. Cline Unit One- Slides C
The History of Sociology • The rise of scientific thinking was itself one of the major social changes in Europe. • The early Sociologists were both a part of the scientific tide that was sweeping Europe, and observers of it. • Adapting ideas and methods from the physical sciences, they gathered empirical data and constructed theories that are still influential today. • Using the social data they collected, and their developed theories, early Sociologists identified and developed five key concepts that have come to define the study of Sociology. • These five key concepts are: • Social Structure • Social Action • Functional Integration • Power, and • Culture
The History of Sociology • Social Structure • This concept refers to patterns of social relationships we develop throughout our lives as humans (i.e. marriage, employment) • It also includes our social positions (teacher, priest, carpenter, President), • And of numbers of people (statistical compilations such as numbers of people over 60 in the U.S., population of China) • Social Structures do change, but are rarely affected by the individual unless it is on a small scale, otherwise people normally adapt to these changes, making choices within the framework of the existing and current social structure
The History of Sociology • Social Action • Is behavior which is shaped by a person’s understandings, interpretations, and intentions and which is in response to, coordinated with, or oriented toward the actions of others. • In other, and simpler, terms, it is basically the choices you or I make as a result of the actions and choices of others. • Social Action can involve the large scale coordination of thousands of people, such as in forming a church or organizing a government, or can involve the formation of interpersonal relationships such as making a new friend at school. • It is difficult to separate any action you take as an individual from that of a social action. Let’s take for example the choice of whether to have a turkey or a ham sandwich for lunch some Saturday. • Making a ham sandwich instead of a turkey sandwich is an action, but not a social action, unless you plan on sharing it with someone.
The History of Sociology • Social Action • However the act of buying the ham and bread is a social action because your choice affects the person at the store who sells it, the pork farmer who raised the pig from which the ham came from, the farmer who raised the wheat the flour that made the bread came from, etc. • Functional Integration • Is the ways in which the different parts of a social system are often so closely interrelated that what happens in one affects the others, and is influenced by them in turn. • For example, the military depends on manufacturers for equipment, the manufacturers depend on school for good employees, schools depend on the government for financial help, and the government depends on the military for its defense. • Functionally integrated systems can also produce dysfunctions , which are side effects that are not good for the system. • Such as pollution being a dysfunctional consequence of modern industry
The History of Sociology • Power • Is the capacity of one social actor such as a person, or a group or organization, to get others to do its will, or to ensure that it will benefit from the actions of others. • For example, businesses in America have made a social system where it is impossible to get a high paying job without a college degree. • This requirement ensures that they will have highly educated and capable employees performing key functions, so it benefits from your action in choosing a college education, and in turn partly forces you to choose such an education. • Other situations of power occur everyday. • Why are you sitting in a classroom Monday through Friday not doing necessarily what you desire, but rather sitting quietly and listening to a teacher talk about subjects that may not even interest you?
The History of Sociology • Culture • Is the language, norms, values, beliefs, knowledge, and symbols that make up a way of life. It is the understanding of how to act that people share with one another in any stable, self reproducing group. The concept of culture is used to describe the distinctive way of life of a nation or people • Without culture, there would be no language for example • If we look at the broad descriptor “western culture” we can see these characteristics in that most of what comprises the culture; • Speaks a heavily Latin influenced language • Have a strong belief in the worth of the individual over the state • Value hard work • Have beliefs rooted in Christianity and the Christian tradition
The History of Sociology • Culture • Possess the basic knowledge necessary for scientific reasoning • Understand that the line through the picture of an action means “DO NOT DO THIS!” • Someone from an eastern culture, like the Chinese, however, find most of these concepts, and practices, foreign to them, as we would find their language, beliefs and practices foreign to us. • The development of these five key principles and how they are shown to affect our everyday lives is varied. • Many of the early influential founders of the science of Sociology disagreed with each other about the impacts and importance of each of the five key concepts, though they all, in theory, agreed that each existed and was vital. • Since Sociological theory builds on previous theory, it is important to understand the foundations laid by some of the early great thinkers in the field.
The History of Sociology • To understand how these early thinkers in the field organized their thoughts, we have to understand the importance of theory to social scientific thought and study. • The Importance of Theory • When you were in junior high or high school and you ate lunch, did certain types of people sit at certain tables every day? • Why do you think people tend to sort themselves into groups and stay with people they see as similar to themselves? • If you have a guess as to why this happens, you could say that you have a theory regarding how social groups function. • A theory is a statement of how and why processes work or the world operates. • Within sociology, theories attempt to explain why groups of people choose to perform certain actions and how societies function or change in a certain way.
The History of Sociology • It's important for social sciences, like psychology, economics, and sociology, to follow theoretical perspectives as a framework for understanding phenomena, such as the ways people form groups. • Without theories, we'd just have a huge list of individual tendencies, or decisions people make, or types of people, but we wouldn't have any way of organizing the field. • Theories help us see overall themes across many specific types of behaviors or decisions in the social world. • Each of the social science perspectives, in of themselves, are grand, over arching theories. • But, even within each social science field there are rationalities that attempt to explain various types of human behaviors, and tie them and connect them together into a broader understanding. • So, with that knowledge, let us begin looking at some of the more predominant theories within Sociology, beginning with the earliest foundational ones
The History of Sociology • The first of these we will examine is Adam Smith. Though not a Sociologist himself, his theories dealt a great deal with, and were influential upon other Sociologist’s views of social action. • Adam Smith is considered the founder of the science of Economics • His most famous work was a book called “The Wealth of Nations,” which laid out the basic fundamental concepts of modern economic science. • This book was concerned with how individual decisions- social action- could add up to the beneficial organization of the whole society • He posited that people make choices on the basis of very rational cost to benefit analyses. These choices are individual choices where the individual considers mainly the consequences to themselves, and not to others. • Smith’s theory was that economic choices motivated purely by self interest were good for an economy in the aggregate (each individual part which in total constitutes a whole) by leading to the efficient production of the goods consumers want, and as such society became wealthier.
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