Sociology Week 2 Notes
What is Society? What is Sociology?
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A key insight of sociology is that the simple fact of being in a group changes your
behaviour.
Sociology is the systematic study of society and social interaction.
“Reasoned speech or discourse about companionship”.
The collective normative response to everyday activities, such as moving to the right side
of the street when you walk past someone.
A society is a group of people whose members interact, reside in a definable area, and
share a culture.
A culture includes the group’s shared practices, values, beliefs, norms, and artifacts
There are different levels of sociology can be analyzed, such as studying small face to
face interaction or large-scale historical processes which affect entire civilizations.
o Four levels: Micro, Meso, Macro, Global
the micro-level of analysis, the focus is on the social dynamics of intimate, face-to-face
interactions
o Conversational partners, family members, coworkers, friend groups
o Ex. How loyalty to criminal gangs is established
Macro-level sociology focuses on the properties of large-scale, society-wide social
interactions that extend beyond the immediate milieu of individual interactions:
o the dynamics of institutions, class structures, gender relations, or whole
populations.
o These occur outside of the intimate circle or social acquaintance.
o Ex. Why women are less likely than males to reach positions of power, why
Christianity plays a bigger role in American politics than in Canadian politics
o Shifting the focus away from micro level interpersonal relations to macro-level
systematic patterns that structure social change and cohesion in society.
Global Level the focus is on structures and processes that extend beyond the boundaries
of states or specific societies
o Things that influence us on a broad, global scale.
o Ex. The way the world has become divided into wealthy first world and
impoverished third world countries. The formation of institutions such as the
United Nations
The key conceptual problem confronting sociology is the relationship between the
individual’s life and social life.
Georg Simmel: macro level processes are the sum of all the unique interactions between
specific individuals at any one time, which would be overlooked if sociologists focused
purely on the interactions of specific individuals.
Emile Durkheim Suicide Study: The rates of suicide within different religious
communities cannot be explained by individual factors in each case, they are explained
by macro level variables associated with the different religious beliefs of the faith
communities.
The scale of sociological studies and the methods of carrying them out are different, but
each oh them looks at society using what pioneer sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916-
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1962) called the sociological imagination, sometimes also referred to as the “sociological
lens” or “sociological perspective.”
Mills defined sociological imagination as how individuals understand their own and
others’ lives in relation to history and social structure
In an individualistic society like our own, this is in fact the most likely way that people
will regard the issues they confront: “I have an addictive personality;” “I can’t get a break
in the job market;” “My husband is unsupportive,” etc.
However, if private troubles Introduction to Sociology - 2nd Canadian Edition 5 are
widely shared with others, they indicate that there is a common social problem that has its
source in the way social life is structured. At this level, the issues are not adequately
understood as simply private troubles. They are best addressed as public issues that
require a collective response to resolve.
By looking at individuals and societies and how they interact through this lens,
sociologists are able to examine what influences behaviour, attitudes, and culture. By
applying systematic and scientific methods to this process, they try to do so without
letting their own biases and preconceived ideas influence their conclusions.
Reification refers to the way in which abstract concepts, complex processes, or mutable
social relationships come to be thought of as “things.” A prime example of reification is
when people say that “society” caused an individual to do something, or to turn out in a
particular way
society and the individual are neither objects, nor are they independent of one another.
Sociology, as a social science, remains neutral on these types of moral questions. For
sociologists, the conceptualization of the individual and society is much more complex
than the moral framework suggests and needs to be examined through evidence-based,
rather than morality-based, research
A key basis of the sociological perspective is the concept that the individual and society
are inseparable. It is impossible to study one without the other
The development of modern science
Key to the development of science was the technological mindset that Max Weber termed
the disenchantment of the world: “principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces
that come into play, but rather one can, in principle, master all things by calculation”
(1919).
Modern science abandoned the medieval view of the world in which God, “the unmoved
mover,” defined the natural and social world as a changeless, cyclical creation ordered
and given purpose by divine will. Instead modern science combined two philosophical
traditions that had historically been at odds: Plato’s rationalism and Aristotle’s
empiricism (Berman, 1981).
The emergence of democratic forms of government in the 18th century demonstrated that
humans had the capacity to change the world. The rigid hierarchy of medieval society
was not a God-given eternal order, but a human order that could be challenged and
improved upon through human intervention.
Comte: Positivism, social physics, religion of humanity, deeply conservative and
hierarchical, “Great Priest of Humanity”
o Comte viewed the goal of sociology as recreating a unified, post-feudal spiritual
order that would help to institutionalize a new era of political and social stability
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Marx: Communist Manifesto: Marx developed a critical analysis of capitalism that saw
the material or economic basis of inequality and power relations as the cause of social
instability and conflict.
 historical materialism should be the “ruthless critique of everything existing,” as he
said in a letter to his friend Arnold Ruge (1802-1880). In this way the goal of
sociology would not simply be to scientifically analyze or objectively describe
society, but to use a rigorous scientific analysis as a basis to change it. This
framework became the foundation of contemporary critical sociology
 his sociological innovation was to provide a social analysis of the economic system
First Woman Sociologist: Harriet Martineau
 She was for a long time known principally for her English translation of Comte’s Course
in Positive Philosophy
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