( Very personal notes, English not edited)
Gloria L. Gallardo Fernández
Assoc. professor in sociology
CEFO's Director of Research Studies,
CSD (Centre for Sustainable Development)
Uppsala University
Villavägen 16, 752 36 Uppsala, Sweden
Fax: 46-(0)18-471 27 96, Phone: 46-(0)18-471 72 13 http://www.csduppsala.uu.se/cemus/

What is the task of a social scientist?
To understand, explain (& predict):
- human behaviour & patterns,
- social structures & processes, as well as
- the social forces underlying these social
structures & processes.
Human behaviour such as:
- why do we go to the church?,
- why we commit criminal acts?,
- why do we marry?, why we divorce?, etc.

If we want to explain divorces, crimes & religiosity, we must take into account individuals' own choices.
We do choices & these play a large role in the social patterns we observe.
Meteorologists for example, explaining why
Kiruna is colder than Sevilla, do need to take in consideration the ambitions, choices or desires of Kiruna.
What you will learn here, hopefully, is to recognize the patterns of human behaviour and understand the forces that they create.

As a social scientist, we might start to become interested in individual behaviour.
Why does Charlie drinks so much,
Why is Erik unemployed?
Why does Erica consume so much?
Why Paul through away so much food?
Why does Oscar leaves the light of his house on the whole day?
If it was only Charlie who drinks or Erik who is unemployed, we might try to explain their problem by referring to their personality.
But we know it's not just Charlie and Erik who have these problems, or that Erica, Paul and Oscar behave this way, but millions of people do the same or are in the same situation.

We know it's not just that particular individuals have these problems, or behave in a special way, but millions of people do the same or are in the same situation.
• So, to understand these people, we must place them in a larger context and study the forces that conditions people’s behaviour.
• We must also understand problems that people experience and suffer from.
• So we are talking about phenomena that are common for many millions of people worldwide.

We thus go from understanding a problem as being a private, an individual-based problem, to understand that is also a social problem.
Individual-based problem Social problem

Society is the social scenario in which we individuals act. This scenario
(metaphorical) includes roles and social structures: two common social science concepts.
The concept of role refers to the expected behaviour of someone who holds a certain position.
We all have roles, a lot of those. I am your teacher right now, I' m a mother, I am friend, daughter, sister, etc.
Each role has specific rules, regulations, gestures that society is expecting you to follow when we interact with each other

• Many social scientists are concerned with identifying what roles are out in the community and how these roles are interrelated; why people choose certain roles over others.
• You, for example, why have somebody choose to become students instead of a bus driver. Can we cannot always choose? That is another relevant issue
• Roles are thus always played in certain social arenas or social structures in society. My role as a mother, it must be understood within a larger structure called the family. Swedish family perhaps combined with what as Chilean family is.

Your role as students and mine as a teacher need to be understood within an educational structure.
With the help of, among other things, these two concepts (role and social structure ) social scientists try to understand society or parts of it.
This is what Wright Mills (1959) called the sociological imagination .
This is the ability to see personal experiences (our own or others) within the social structure’s context .

In other words, the sociological imagination is about the ability to see individual problems as public affairs/collective phenomena.
Seeing personal problems and tragedies as part of a larger pattern of social problems is a vital element in the sociological imagination.
Wright Mills believes that many of the things that we have experience of as individuals are beyond our control.
They have to do with society as a whole, its historical development and how it is organized .

The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

When a person is unemployed, we chose to analyse her, perhaps focusing on her skills, age, education and personality. But if we think that the
EU has the ca. 18 million unemployed, what do we see?
From this 18 million unemployed, we have to move our focus from the individual, and focus on the structures, labour political, market economic, etc.
Another example: if my friend divorce, this is probably a personal tragedy for him & his family, but when 50% of all married couples divorce, then this percentage is an indicator of a bigger problem: on the marriage and family as institutions in our society.

• Usually, we do not define our personal experience in sociological terms.
• We do not link our stories or see the social structures of our own experiences when this are intimately connected to the society we leave on.
In other words, success or failure in life is not total individual, but it is also social structured, socially determined.
For example, parents' social class/economic status is a good indicator of whether their children will go to college or not. So if one's father is a professor, then it is pretty sure that the child will also have university studies.

Social sciences thus deals with the systematic study of society.
Social sciences focuses on social relationships, the patterns of human social interaction, i. e , how these evolves, kept and changed.

1. Write it in a flipchart in BIG CAPITAL LETTERS to present your results for the class.
2. Identify one problem related to sustainable development that you see as individual. Define in what way is personal. Identify what are the solutions.
3. Redefine the problem as a social one. Define in what way is this problem social. Identify what are the solutions.
4. What are the main differences in the two ways of analysing this problem.