Theory lecture notes 2020
Module 1: Readings, Key Ideas, Notes and Videos
Overview
In Module I of the course we introduce the topics of theory and sociological theory. You will need to use the content outlined on this page to complete two quizzes later in this module.
Readings
C. W. Mills VIII-37
Max Weber on Verstehen III-11
Marx on false consciousness I-2
Durkheim’s Suicide II-8
Key Concepts and Theorists
Theory
Sociological theory
C. Wright Mills
“false consciousness”
Suicide and social integration
“Anomic Suicide”
Introduction
The world is a complicated place. People are good at understanding their immediate social reality but generally really bad at understanding large-scale social phenomena.
To understand the social forces that affect our lives, but that are not immediately tangible, we need ideas and concepts through which to filter and organize the world, particularly if we want to not only get by day to day, but to answer big, difficult, complicated questions.
For instance, if we want to answer questions about who is poor and who is rich. How this happens, why, and for what purpose? Who has power and influence in society? Who is free and who is oppressed? How is society organized? How are families and communities organized? And why?
We all have common sense ideas about these matters, but theories are a little different from common sense.
What is theory?
In the world right now there are thousands of students taking classes that are about only theory. Many smart people are writing articles and books about theory, in sociology and in many other fields. Some people spend their careers studying only theory.
The American sociologist C. Wright Mills argued, in his book The Sociological Imagination, that:
"the facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a person is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a person takes new heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesperson becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar operator; a wife or husband lives alone; a child grows up without a parent. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both."
So sociological theory is about giving ordinary people an ability to understand connections between the economy, their own friends and family, history, their biography, war, and technology.
More from Mills:
"People do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of people they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of individuals and society, of biography and history, of self and world. They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them."
So C. Wright Mills argued that people need, or at least can benefit from, a sociological imagination, or a way of thinking about the world in terms of large-scale processes and historical changes.
In the course reading “Culture and Politics” (1959) Mills described a world in which old certainties and ideologies had lost their power: liberalism and socialism. He described a “post-modern” world divided into very rich and very poor countries, with rich countries suffering their own unique, unprecedented problems: overconsumption, cultural degradation, and control by corporate and government elites. A superficial world of “cheerful robots.” He argued there was still a place in society for a “renaissance man,” a person who can see the big picture, understand where society is going and how things might be different.
So, for Mills and others, sociological theory involves the analysis, critique, and development of the ways in which we think about and discuss social reality.
What is a theory? What is sociological theory?
That is one general definition of sociological theory, but what exactly is a theory, and how do we know one when we see one?
One definition of a theory is: A theory is a statement of how and why specific facts are related (this is from the textbook).
Theories are general, not specific like facts.
Theories are important because when we try to explain things, no matter who we are, we use theories, although we don’t always know what theories we are using. We’re usually not reflective about our theories.
Philosophy and theology are, basically, concerned only with theory. Sociologists and theologians ask, what is time, what is reality, what is truth, does God exist, etc, etc.
Theory is important in sociology too, but sociology is different from philosophy and theology because in sociology, theories are about people and societies and culture and history, not truth, time, reality, god, the devil, etc. Sociological theories are about real things that we all experience in our lives, and that we tend to think are important.
Also, sociological theories are about how things are, i.e. how societies actually work, not how society should work. Sociological theories are almost always explanatory, not normative.
Two Classical Theories
Karl Marx on religion as “false consciousness” the ‘opiate of the masses’
Click for a YouTube Video on Marx's Theory of Religion
Emile Durkheim on suicide and social integration
Click for a YouTube Video on Durkheim's Theory of Suicide
Durkheim's analysis of suicide is one of the most famous sociological studies, and one of the earliest.
Emile Durkheim is considered to have been one of sociology’s three founding fathers, the other two being Karl Marx and Max Weber.
He did as much as anyone to establish sociology as a discipline in France in the 19th century. His most famous books are: The Division of Labor in Society, Suicide. and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Two of Durkheim’s key ideas
The study of “social facts”: a social fact is a real phenomenon that is collective in nature and irreducible to individuals’ actions. e.g. language…no such thing as a “private language”
Rigorous scientific methods of study: statistical analysis of survey data, data collected by French bureaucracies
Why would anyone commit suicide? Why does it happen?
It seems like the most personal decision a person can make. Usually when people do it, they are alone. And no one tells them to do it. In fact, other people are sure to tell them not to do it.
Can we possibly understand suicide, or is it just something that individuals do for their own reasons?
In his book, Durkheim tried to make one big point, which is that "Suicide, the most personal of all human actions, is in fact a social phenomena. This is because the individual is dominated by a moral reality greater than him- or herself, and it is this collective reality that is the cause of suicide. 'Society' is the cause of suicide."
Now, we need to work through Durkheim’s use of the term “society” a little bit, so as to avoid sounding silly: as in the Elementary Forms, it’s inappropriate to think of society strictly in terms of the modern nation.
It is better to think of society as a category. We can think of societies as social units in which individuals, families, and groups share language, cultural traditions, and institutions such as their government, church, marriage, etc.. Within any nation there are many kinds of sub-societies.
How does society influence the most personal decision a human being can make?
We can only understand suicide if we compare it across societies (“only comparison affords explanation”). So Durkheim’s method is comparative. He compares the social suicide rate in different countries, and also at different times.
He argues that society makes it more or less likely that a person will commit suicide, but society does not determine whether he or she will do so.
First, Durkheim tries to demonstrate that individual-level factors are insufficient to explain the social suicide rate.
What are some possible factors?
Abnormal psychology
For example being manic-depressive, or hallucinating
Rates of suicide among the insane
Catholics are less insane, and kill themselves less often, than Protestants
very low for Jews, although rate of insanity is high
Race
Durkheim sees no association between race and the social suicide rate, and his categories themselves should clue us in to the fact that race, conceived as something with empirical reality, is a red herring. His categories include the following:
The greatest differences in social suicide rates exist among nations of the same race
For Durkheim, religion is a far more important factor than race could possibly be
Climate
suicide is at a minimum in the North and South of Europe, maximum is in the center; therefore climate is not the cause
seasonal temperature: anecdotal evidence that extreme heat or cold induces suicide in those who are unaccustomed
sunlight: suicides seem to increase with average length of the day
Social causes of suicide
Durkheim gives 3 social types of suicide
Egoistic Suicide
Altruistic Suicide
Anomic Suicide
Egoistic Suicide
Results from lack of integration of the individual into society.
Suicide is rare in Catholic countries, stronger in Protestant ones, and rare among Jews. Why?
Level of integration of the community, due in part to hostility toward minorities by the surrounding population. This is a very clear hypothesis. What predictions might we make from this, beyond looking at Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in 19th-century Europe?
B) Openness to freedom of thought and lifestyle
Protestantism is high on freedom of thought, Judaism is low on freedom of lifestyle
Italy: Literacy –(+)→ Suicide
France: Professions (Lawyers, Doctors, Accountants) –(+)→ Suicide
Marriage with children –(-)→ Suicide
The cause is not knowledge per se, but the disintegration of old faiths without replacement by new scientific and rational ones. Thus religion is a society, and the breakdown of religion automatically encourages suicide.
Marriage with children provides a form of society (“conjugal society”) that has an independent immunizing effect against suicide, particularly for men…this is a detailed section, but it’s interesting and probably worth reading carefully
“Political society”: Suicide rates are low as societies build up and integrate, higher as they disintegrate. Durkheim cites as examples ancient Greece and Rome, the Ottoman Empire, and France on the eve of the Revolution. Suicides are rare during warsmuch more frequent afterwards.
This is not due to an innate psychological need for “meaning”; the malaise is social, and the individual is merely an agent of the society.
Evidence for this: suicide is very rare among the young and the very old, yet these groups are the least useful to society. Very young and very old individuals would naturally feel they had less of a purpose, that they had less to offer, and that life was less meaningful than people in the primes of their lives and careers; and yet it is people in the primes of their lives and careers who most frequently kill themselves because they feel the most need for self-completion through contributing to society. Society’s imperative are most strongly felt in them. Children and the elderly are closer to the margins, and more apt to be satisfied with the simple things.
2. Altruistic Suicide
For Durkheim, this is the form of suicide most typical of premodern societies. Egoistic suicide doesn’t make much sense in the context of a premodern society, in which religion—basically one religion per society—dominates thought, and in which societal integration is high. Yet of course suicide existed long before modernity.
Altruistic suicide is the converse of egoistic suicide. This is suicide caused by strong society. Where the individual is highly integrated into society, he may kill himself because he believes it to be his duty.
Examples include:
The practice of Suttee, when Hindu women throw themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres
Suicides of old men on the threshold of old age or stricken with sickness
Suicides of followers or servants on the deaths of their chiefs
Young men kill themselves out of shame (e.g. Japanese ritual suicie: Hari Kari)
Suicide for reasons of religious enlightenment, martyrdom
Altruistic suicide exists in the modern world too, for example in the military; As evidence, Durkheim points out that suicide is more common among officers than among enlisted men
3. Anomic Suicide
Egoistic and Altruistic suicide are two sides of the same coin. In the former, suicide results when social regulation is too lax; in the latter, when it is overly strong. Anomic suicide is a third category that relates to both of the first two. In anomic suicide, individuals end their lives because of a profound shift in society that disturbs theindividual’s established way of life. A sudden loss of money is one example of such a shift, but so is a sudden windfall—a rapid financial gain that changes a person’s life, their expectations, and so on. A skeptic, or a cynical economist, would say that a sudden loss of wealth encourages suicide because it implies that an individual’s material conditions of life will worsen. Life is thus less worth living. But Durkheim contradicts this common-sense view with the following evidence:
As wealth increases in a society, and life becomes more comfortable, the social suicide rate either stays constant or rises. It would be expected to fall.
The poorest countries often have the lowest suicide rate. E.g. Ireland, where suicide among the peasantry was very rare. France, much wealthier than Spain, has ten times as many suicides.
National wealth –(+)→ Suicide
Based on this kind of evidence, it seems that suicide does not result from poverty.
For Durkheim, happiness does not result in an absolute way from a person’s material conditions, but the fit between those conditions and his or her expectations. So long as aspirations and attainments are reasonably consistent with one another over the course of a person’s life, he or she will be reasonably satisfied. Suicide is more likely when aspirations and attainments are suddenly made to be inconsistent, such as when, following an economic disaster, individuals brought up wealthy are suddenly cast into a lower class; i.e. when the scale is upset and “a new scale cannot be immediately improvised.”
Divorce ) –(+)→ Suicide
What does all of this tell us that is interesting if, say, we are not particularly interested in suicide? Seen in utilitarian terms, the social world is totally confusing if you’re accustomed to paying attention to individuals. In the case of suicide, some human beings resist horrible misfortune while others end their lives after only slight troubles. Whole societies are more prone to suicide than others, as are whole religions. For Durkheim, all of this only makes sense if we understand individual action in terms of broad social and especially cultural patterns. Societies are characterized by belief systems—religions and secular belief systems—and it is these systems that determine individual action. To understand even the most private individual actions, one must understand something about the beliefs of the whole society.
Was Durkheim right? For the most part, the answer seems to be yes. Empirical research on suicide generally supports his claims.
Module 2: Readings, Key Ideas, Notes and Videos
Overview
We cover the three 'classical' theoretical perspectives in sociology but focus on the first: functionalism/Social Darwinism. We cover the other two, conflict theory and cultural theory, later in the course.
Readings
There are no readings from the book in this module, only the notes and embedded videos.
Key Ideas and Theorists
Charles Darwin
Auguste Comte
Thomas Malthus
Herbert Spencer
Ferdinand Toennies
Emile Durkheim
Georg Simmel
Karl Marx
Functionalism
Conflict theory
Cultural Theory
Organic analogy
Theological stage
Metaphysical stage
Positivist stage
Natural selection
“survival of the fittest”
“Laws of Population Growth”
Meritocracy
Classical Theoretical Perspectives
The theoretical perspectives we turn to now are a little more general than theories.
These are basic images that guide thinking and research. Here are some of the classical theories. These are considered classical because they are not new, but they are, for the most part, still talked about.
Keep in mind that some of them might be flawed or just plain wrong. But they were at a minimum influential at one time.
The three classical theoretical perspectives are:
social functionalism (including French functionalism and Social Darwinism)
conflict theory (which is an important perspective that we will cover in this module as well as in the next several modules)
cultural theory (which we will cover in detail in the last module)
Social Functionalism
Functionalism is one of the oldest theoretical perspectives in sociology. It began with August Comte, the French thinker who coined the term Sociology.
It was influenced in the 1800s by Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, and by biology, Darwinism, and scientific positivism
It is associated with Auguste Comte, considered the founder of sociology. He coined the term 'sociology' from both Latin and Greek root words.
The basic image here is of society as a system or organism.
e.g. a human body
This is the 'organic analogy.'
The imagery comes from biology
Both societies and human bodies have different levels of organization:
The human body is analogous to the nation
Organs are analogous to ethnic groups, professions, and large organizations
Cells are analogous to individuals etc.
An implication of this idea is that the physcial, life, and social sciences are organized approximately as follows:
sociology > psychology > biology > chemistry > physics
The molecules, cells, and organs of the body work together so that the body functions.
We don’t know what our cells and organs are doing, and our cells don’t “know” what the rest of the body is doing (e.g. they don’t know where we are walking, what we want to do today)
But our cells and organs are functional for survival
In the same way that bodies have organs and cells that are needed for the functioning of the whole body, societies have institutions that are functional.
e.g. governments, laws, the family, greetings, the division of labor, the professions (doctors, professors, attorneys)
Why do we have these things? Because societies need them to function and survive
How does this work?
How does social change happen?
August Comte: differentiation, complexification, evolution
Click for a YouTube Video on Auguste Comte's Theory of Positivism and Societal Evolution
Comte's 3 stages of the development of human society:
theological—militaristic communities led by priests
metaphysical—legalistic, ruled by lawyers
positivist—scientific, industrial, ruled by sociologists
Herbert Spencer (from Darwin): Natural selection
Click for a YouTube Video on Herbert Spencer and the Tragedy of Modernity
From Charles Darwin, one of the most important scientists in history
In America, the sociologist Herbert Spencer used Darwin’s evolutionary ideas to explain not only how societies worked, but how they should work.
Spencer coined the famous expression “survival of the fittest” (p. 84 of the reader)
Has anyone heard this expression before?
What does it mean?
For Spencer, Darwin’s theory of evolution was perfectly applicable to human societies.
“Natural selection” ensured that the best institutions and people succeeded in societies. This is good for everyone because it is good for the whole society. Processes of natural selection, when left alone, ensured that the best forms of government would survive, the best religion would survives, the best ideas would survive, and the best people would survive and succeed.
For Spencer, and for many other thinkers (mostly in America and England) these processes are natural and inevitable, and when left alone would lead to progress for all of humanity.
Thomas Malthus provided a more pessimistic view of the human consequences of natural selection.
Click for a YouTube Video on Thomas Malthus, Population, and Sustainability
Malthus was a demographer and political economist who argued, from Darwin, that there were Laws of Population Growth: population increased at a geometric rate, while food increased at an arithmetic rate:
Starvation and conflict over scarce resources were inevitable
How would functionalism explain universities? Why are we here?
This explains, e.g., wealth and poverty. In a free capitalistic society, people who are wealthy become so because they are better than other people at something. And the whole society will improve if these people are allowed to succeed and other people are allowed to fail.
This is sometimes called Social Darwinism
Politically, it is associated with free-market ideologies: weakening central governments and lowering taxes on the wealthy
Why would social Darwinists want to lower taxes on wealthy people?
Why would they want to make governments smaller?
The Davis-Moore thesis
Open Education Sociology Dictionary
This is a mid-twentieth century American theory of stratification. It is an alternative to Marxist theory, which we will cover in the next module.
In this theory it is understood that stratification must be beneficial for society, ‘functional,’ otherwise it would not persist generation after generation.
Society is complex, jobs are complex, and the best people need to be placed in the most complex and important jobs (e.g. president, operator of a nuclear power plant, heart surgeon)
Therefore modern societies need to be meritocracies.
If functionalism were your only sociological theory, it would probably seem pretty good. It was a dominant theory in the 19th century in America and Britain, and it is similar in many ways to neoclassical economics, which is a dominant approach to economics today—again especially in America and Britain.
Functionalism has a lot to recommend it: it provides a coherent set of explanations for societal development, it is ambitious and broad, and it links sociology to other sciences.
Functionalism has been mostly rejected by sociologists because of its innate conservatism, its post hoc style of explanation, and its inability to explain much of social life.
Other criticisms of functionalism are:
It is pseudoscience (sounds like science but does not actually produce testable hypotheses. Put another way, it is social theory not sociological theory (social philosophy rather than social science).
It is ethnocentric/Eurocentric (degrades non-Western societies and cultures which are seen as less advanced)
Its concepts are true by definition (If something is functional it will survive; if it has survived it must have been functional)
It cannot explain social change
The Conflict Perspective
The next perspective, the conflict perspective totally rejects functionalism.
In the conflict perspective, societies aren’t like biological organisms at all.
Instead, societies are arenas of inequality that generate conflict and change
Forms of inequality include:
Class, Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Money, Power, and Prestige
The focus here is on social divisions
Privileged groups try to keep their privileges, and pass them on to their children
Non-privileged groups sometimes resist, sometimes do not resist
This perspective is, again, radically different from functionalism
We will cover the conflict perspective in several sections of this course.
Question: What does each perspective imply about university education?
The conflict perspective is associated with two famous German thinkers: Karl Marx and Max Weber. We will cover their work in the next module and also later in the course.
Cultural Theory
This theoretical perspective focuses on language and communication.
It propooses that culture can create social solidarity and shared social identities.
Maybe not everyone wants money and power. Aren’t people also motivated by their values? Their beliefs? Don’t ideas matter in society? Haven’t some ideas changed the world?
The next classical theoretical perspective is cultural theory, although you should note that the way I’m presenting this is a bit different from what’s in the book.
This is the newest of the classical theoretical perspectives, although in sociology it’s at least a hundred years old.
In this perspective, societies are guided not, or not only, by functions or conflict,
But also by shared values, symbols, ideals, ideas, beliefs, religions, and rituals
Cultural theory is associated with Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, and also with anthropology
In cultural theory, scholars pay a lot of attention to language, symbols like flags and statues and national anthems, rituals like national holidays and religious rituals, and lots of other kinds of symbolic and ritualistic behavior.
They also pay a lot of attention to cultural difference between and within societies. This perspective is very international—probably more international than the functionalist or conflict perspectives.
So if we ask our usual question of why we have universities, cultural theory provides different types of answers. For cultural theory, education is like a religion, and we build universities because we believe in education.
Secular education is part of our value system.
Also, we build universities so that we can socialize children to have the right kinds of beliefs and attitudes.
It’s important for universities to have rituals like graduation ceremonies and symbols like diplomas, in order to make the experience of graduating meaningful to the students and parents.
Subsumes symbolic interactionism
Pierre Bourdieu eventually combined conflict and cultural theory
We will cover cultural theory in detail in the last module of the course.
Module 3: Readings, Key Ideas, Notes and Videos
Overview
We cover the historical context of the invention of sociology--the industrial revolution and urbanization of the Western world--and the theories that were developed to explain the consequences of industrialization and urbanization for society.
Readings
Simmel on urban life IV-16, 17
Durkheim on mechanical and organic solidarity II-6
Marx on the proletariat, bourgeosie, and capitalists I-1,3,4,5
Weber on Class, Stande, Conflict, and Rationalization III-13,14,15
Thorstein Veblen on the leisure class V-24
Pierre Bourdieu on the forms of capital XV-70
Key Ideas and Theorists
Ferdinand Toennies
Gemeinschaft (“Community”)
Gesellschaft (“Society”)
Mechanical solidarity
Organic solidarity
Anomie
Georg Simmel
Individualization
Network analysis
The Communist Manifesto
Das Kapital
Class conflict
Capitalists
Bourgeoisie
Proletariat
“Base” and “superstructure”
Control of the “means of production”
Capitalism’s “internal contradictions”
False consciousness and class consciousness
Revolutionary intellectuals
Alienation
De-skilling
Routinization
Boredom
Socialism
Thorstein Veblen
Max Weber
Pierre Bourdieu
“Conspicuous consumption”
“Conspicuous leisure”
“Conspicuous waste”
Class, Status, Power
Rationalization
Means-ends reasoning
“purely technical superiority”
Charismatic authority
Traditional authority
Rational-legal authority
Problem of succession
Technocracy
Meritocracy
Career ladders
Exams
Technical ability
Social Capital
Cultural Capital
Economic Capital
Habitus
Social Field
Symbolic Power
Notes
The Transition to Modernity: Capitalism and Urbanization
Sociology has always concerned itself with industrial and postindustrial (or modern and postmodern) societies.
Early sociologists (Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and others) were particularly concerned with the transition to industrial society in the 1800s. Why did this happen? How did it occur? Was it a net positive or negative for human welfare?
Let's review the work of major thinkers who attempted to explain the social consequences of the transition to industrial urban society.
Ferdinand Toennies
Known for his book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), translated Community and Society.
He was president of the German Society for Sociology until he was ousted by the Nazis in 1933.
He is remembered for these two concepts:
Gemeinschaft – tight-knit communities, intimate relations of kinship, friendship, trust, reputation
Often translated as “community”
e.g. rural villages, farming communities
Tonnies argued that Gemeinschaft relations were organic, natural, and healthful
Gesellschaft - modern urban relations – impersonal, based on money and prestige, and on rationality, efficiency, and instrumental value
Often translated as “”society”
Émile Durkheim
The Division of Labor in Society, 1893, was based on his doctoral dissertation.
Durkheim was especially interested in morality as a social phenomenon
He wanted to understand how people could remain socially integrated in a modern, capitalistic society
He was not romantic, as were Marx and Toennies
He was not interested in developing a critique of modern society. Rather, France had been humiliated by Germany in the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, and Durkheim and many of his peers wanted to support France and to modernize it.
Durkheim's major concepts:
Mechanical Solidarity, in which everyone knows everyone, and people are tied together through similarity
People work together (e.g. in the fields), and they share culture and “collective consciousness”
Defined as social bonds, based on shared morality, that unite members of pre-industrial societies
In pre-modern societies people almost automatically feel strong bonds toward each other. This is because they know each other, each person knows what everyone else is doing. And everyone is very similar, e.g. in religion, beliefs, race and ethnicity.
Organic Solidarity, here Durkheim reverses Toennies’ use of the term organic. For Durkheim, organic solidarity is like the solidarity of the heart and the liver. They are highly specialized, and work together.
Organic solidarity is defined as social bonds, based on specialization, that unite members of industrial societies.In industrial societies, there is a high level of division of labor. There are 1000s of different types of jobs, so not everyone knows what everyone else is doing. And not everyone shares beliefs, values, religion, or race or ethnicity. So people do not necessarily share the same morality. But they are functionally interdependent. They need each other for society to work properly. Tradition does not guide us. Functional interdependence does.
People operate in complex webs of interdependent relations.
People cultivate individual differences for the good of the whole.
People do not necessarily share culture or a “collective conscience” as in mechanical solidarity.
Organic solidarity arises from the natural development of the division of labor, although this can lead to anomie and over-individualization.
Now we move on to our third major explanation of the shift to modern industrial societies. This comes from Emile Durkheim, who wrote Suicide, among many other important books.
Like Max Weber, Durkheim comes along after Marx. And like Weber, he is in part reacting to Marx.
From our discussion of his study Suicide, we know that Durkheim argued that society has extraordinary power over individuals. Like Weber, and unlike Marx, he though that religion was very powerful social force that shaped individuals’ lives and decisions.
So society generally, and religion in particular, have power over the individual. But how does Durkheim explain the shift away from traditional religion to capitalism, industrialization, and so on.
Unlike Weber, he argues that modern societies have less control over individuals than do pre-modern societies. They do not give individuals the moral guidance they get from traditional religion. This leads to anomie, meaninglessness.
Anomie is a result of a shift in the basic economic and functional structure of society.
The shift is from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity
Durkheim was more optimistic than Marx or Weber. Marx predicted a violent socialist revolution. Weber predicted that life would become boring and routine. Durkheim thought that societies were experiencing a major shift, from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity, but that our morality would catch up with this shift. It is useless to look to the past for guidance; instead, people would develop a new kind of morality that fits the modern world better.
Georg Simmel
Simmel was a brilliant itinerant German social theorist who wrote on an extraordinary number of topics.
Like Toennies and Durkheim, he argued that there was something fundamental about the transformation from rural life to modern urban life.
He argued that society is an event, it is interaction of individuals in groups
He developed a geometry of social life, an analysis of the “web of associations” that, for Simmel, make up society. Simmel’s ideas have reemerged almost 100 years later in the form of network analysis.
In modern societies, people have larger social, occupational, and associational networks. This leads to individualization, as people are more likely to develop social networks that are unique.
Simmel wrote about many topics: money, fashion, commodity fetishism, alienation—but his writings on the city are among his most influential.
The blasé attitude: due to sensory overload, overstimulation in urban areas. Today people fear the Internet is doing the same thing.
Karl Marx
This is the Marx lecture, so if you don’t know much about Karl Marx, here’s your chance. Marxist theory is almost synonymous with conflict theory as discussed in Part I of this course.
Who was Karl Marx?
Click here for a YouTube German documentary on Karl Marx
His most famous books were The Communist Manifesto and Capital (Das Kapital)
He was a theorist of the relationship between capitalism and class conflict; this was his first major concern
the second major concern was alienation
Background:
1818-1883
Ph.D. in philosophy in Germany
Became a newspaper editor and writer
Unlike most philosophers at the time, he thought you needed to understand society to understand ideas
Unlike most professors, he wanted to change society, not only to understand it better
Capitalism and Class Conflict
Marx wrote his articles and books during a time when the British Empire was at its strongest, when the Industrial Revolution had made Britain, a medium-sized island nation, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world.
At the same time, most British citizens were part of the proletariat, the factory workers, who were terribly poor, worked in polluted factories all day (remember there were no weekends), had no homes or lived in slums, and rarely lived past 30.
The aristocrats, industrialists and capitalists, who owned the factories, were unimaginably rich.
They lived lives of luxury in mansions with hundreds of servants.
Marx saw society, not only British society but all societies, as based on conflict between social classes.
He saw societies as made up of a base and a superstructure.
The base is economic; it is the mode of production of goods and services.
The superstructure is nearly everything else: the government, religion, culture, the family, and ideas
Social change occurs from the base, from the mode of production of goods and services. Whoever controls the mode of production controls the society, including the government, religion, culture, the family, etc.
So for example, British capitalists were able to control virtually all of British society because they were able to control Britain’s economic base. If they did not like a person or an idea, they could buy that person, or have that person put in jail or eliminated, because they were in control of the government. They could buy politicians…They could pretty much buy or control whatever they wanted.
Marx thought that this was true of horticultural and pastoral societies, agricultural societies (e.g. slavery in ancient Egypt; the European feudal system), and now of industrial societies. He thought this was true of every form of society that came after hunter and gatherer societies. Hunter and gatherer societies were communist because they shared their wealth and did not have social classes or class conflict.
So economic classes struggle over control of the means of production. But in industrial societies, the proletariat is much, much larger than the capitalist class. And they are terribly poor, and they generally know that the capitalists are amazingly rich.
If the workers got together and attacked the capitalists and took control over their factories, they could gain control over society.
So why don’t the workers revolt?
Marx had trouble with this question, and his answer was what he called false consciousness.
False consciousness is a kind of confusion about how society works. For example, poor workers blamed themselves for their poverty, when they should blame the rich capitalists. Because there’s really very little they can do to improve their lives.
Capitalists create false consciousness in the proletariat because they control the schools, the church, the press, and the whole “superstructure” of society. They control these things because they control the means of production. They control pretty much everything.
For the proletariat to revolt, false consciousness would have to be transformed into class consciousness. Workers would become aware that they were in the same economic class, and would organize themselves to challenge the capitalists.
How would the proletariat switch over from false consciousness to class consciousness? A revolutionary elite group of intellectuals would help them.
Also, capitalism would collapse due to its internal contradictions. Capitalists do everything possible to increase profits, and would be driven to reduce wages so much, to pay workers so little, that the workers would be forced to start a revolution.
Alienation
This is an important idea for Marx. It comes from some of his earliest writings, which were much more psychological than his later writings.
He was concerned, as many people were, with the change from farming and craftwork to low-skill factory work
Consequences of factory work:
de-skilling
routinization
boredom
Alienation:
workers come to see themselves as a commodity, as something capitalists can buy and sell
workers come to see themselves as machines, not as full human beings
Workers experience alienation (separation, or distancing) from the products of their work
factory workers do not see the products of their work. they get no satisfaction from their effort
alienation from their friends and families
workers are not allowed to socialize with friends
they work so long that they have little time left for their families
Alienation will only get worse as capitalists try to make bigger profits.
Other ideas from Marx:
The Labor Theory of Value: Value is based on the input of labor to a product, rather than on supply and demand.
Commodity Fetishism:Consumer products have special, near-magical charismatic powers (beyond the labor that has been put into them, or the practical use gotten out of them.
Revolution: The only way for workers to escape from alienation is to revolt, to start a revolution against capitalism.
Workers would take over the factories from the capitalists, and would replace capitalism with socialism
Socialism would be a humane, equal economic system that preserves social ties. Workers would take care of each other, and everyone would work for the good of the society.
Marx’s Predictions:
Marx thought this revolution would occur in England first, because England was the most advanced industrial country.
Eventually it would happen everywhere else. For Marx, it was inevitable.
Was he right? (not quite)
Did socialist revolutions occur? (yes, in Russia, China, Latin America)
What happened in England? (formation of the welfare state and labor party, mainstreaming of communism)
Max Weber
Founding father of German sociology, and world sociology, Weber argued against Marx and others that human history is fundamentally different from the material world—the subject of the natural sciences.
Human history is shaped by contingency, spirit, consciousness, culture. It is not governed by scientific laws.
Sociologists should try to interpret history to capture the way it is experienced subjectively by other people in other times and societies
Strict causal arguments are not appropriate for the study of human history, culture, society.
Click here for a YouTube video on Max Weber's sociology
What Weber thought about Marx:
Capitalists versus proletariat idea was too simple
There are not two or three social classes but rather three main dimensions of social inequality:
Class: money, wealth
Status: social prestige, social honor expressed through “styles of life” (stande)
Power: the ability to make people do things despite resistance
These dimensions are found in different configurations across societies and historical periods. While there are no laws that determine how these dimensions may interact, there are recurring patterns related to class interests and culture.
The Rationalization of Society
This is one of Weber's most important concepts. It refers to a process by which life becomes more rational, more subject to means-ends reasoning.
Weber lived in the 19th and early 20th century, mostly in Germany, but he took a long trip to America too.
He knew almost everything you could know about history, but in both countries, he felt strongly that a great shift was taking place in society.
This was not just a change in technology, not only industrialization.
The shift was from tradition to rationality.
What does this mean? Are people who follow traditional ways of life irrational?
Tradition: sentiments and beliefs passed from generation to generation
Rationality: Disciplined calculation of the best means to accomplish specific ends
So these are different ways of thinking and living.
The rationalization of society affects more than just technology or industry. It changes the whole way people think, what they believe, and the ways they live their lives.
Rationalization does not happen to individuals one at a time, so much as it happens to whole societies, or whole segments of societies, at a time.
It happens in Northern and Western Europe and North America first.
e.g. England, Holland, Germany, America
But Weber is similar to Marx, because Weber is also concerned with the social and psychological alienation that is associated with capitalism and industry.
In a famous line, Weber likens modern organizations to an “iron cage” tightening around individuals. People are left with little freedom to be creative or unique or to enjoy life or be social.
Weber's ideas about rationalization informed his analysis of modern organizations. He referred to these as formal organizations. What is a formal organization?
social group
specific goals
division of labor
formalization
Weber was concerned that Germany was lagging behind Britain—a question of comparative development—and wanted to understand why, and then to improve Germany’s position.
Modern organizations, from the government to Google or MacDonalds or Home Depot or Amazon, are supposed to be the ultimate examples of rationalization, of means-ends reasoning.
So many people think these organizations are good and rational. They make people work hard. Even Marx thought that capitalist organizations uproot people from the “idiocy of village life”
For Weber, capitalist organizations have “purely technical superiority” over all other organizations because of their
“precision, speed, unambiguity, continuity, discretion, unity, reduction of costs…”
Historically, Weber identified three types of 'legitimate authority':
These are “ideal types” that are never found in their pure form in reality.
Charismatic Authority:
Authority from personality, charisma: e.g. religious leaders, popular politicians, kings
Are there any problems with this kind of authority?
succession, irrationality, incompetence
Traditional authority:
authority from sacred traditions and leaders
e.g. a man is elected president because his father was president
e.g. a man is anointed king because his father was king
Are there any problems with this?
lack of charisma, irrationality, incompetence
Rational-Legal authority:
Authority based on specialized learning
rule by experts
technical ability
exams
career ladders
meritocracy
What are the problems with this?
lack of charisma, rigid hierarchy and inequality
For Weber, modern organizations, and especially capitalist organizations (corporations), must move from charismatic and traditional forms of authority to rational-legal authority. Rational-legal authority is more efficient, faster, better; and in capitalism, the older forms cannot compete.
Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class
Click here for a YouTube video on Thorstein Veblen's theory of the leisure class
Background
Son of Norwegian immigrants to the USA
Like Marx, he saw the rise of the bourgeoisie up close (the “nouveau riche”)
Veblen is the namesake of the economics term “Veblen goods” from economics: a group of commodities
for which people's preference for buying them increases as a direct function of their price, as greater price confers greater status, instead of decreasing according to the law of demand
. A Veblen good is often also a positional good
: e.g. luxury cars, wine, champagne, chrome spinner rims.
Contributed to the development of “institutional economics,” a less individualistic, rationalistic approach to the economy
He was influenced by Functionalism, Social Darwinism and evolutionary thought generally
Emphasized instincts for emulation, predation, curiosity, parental behavior
Most famous for ideas of conspicuous consumption along with conspicuous leisure and conspicuous waste.
Pierre Bourdieu on the forms of capital
Click here for a YouTube video on Pierre Bourdieu
Background
1930-2002
The most cited and important sociologist of the late twentieth century.
He was a celebrity intellectual in the 1990s.
Continues to have a major influence on contemporary social science research.
He is our last major 'conflict theorist'.
Bourdieu rejected Marxist theory, hoped to transcend Marx's ideas once and for all.
Early in his career he performed research for the French government on Kabyle tribes in Algeria during the revolution against French rule.
Used quantitative techniques, highly professional as a sociologist.
Politically active: spoke out often against neo-liberalism.
Major concepts:
“Social space” and “power field”
Forms of Capital and their Transformation
Habitus: bio-cognitive imprint of the social environment
Economic capital
Social capital
Cultural Capital
The transformation (conversion) of these into each other.
Position in social field/space is relative rather than absolute.
Position in social field/space predicts tastes, likes and dislikes: e.g. size and position of TV in house, preferred restaurants, music and alcohol
Habitus: why working-class men don’t like keyboard work, stockbrokers, eating fish, salads (see video below)
Click here for a YouTube video on the habitus concept
Critiques of Bourdieu
He was too agonistic, too focused on conflict and competition. What about cooperation? Altruism? Friendship?
Doesn't Bourdieu's own upward social trajectory contradict his theory?
His work is too Parisian, too French, and perhaps too old. Who cares about these old forms of cultural capital, like appreciation for classical music and wine?
Module 4: Readings, Key Ideas, Notes and Videos
Overview
We cover the history of sociological theory in America and the work of four major American sociological theorists: W.E.B. DuBois, George Herbert Mead, and Robert Merton.
Readings
A. Overview of the History of American Sociology (notes only)
B. W.E.B. DuBois V-22 (Course Objectives 1 and 3)
C. George Herbert Mead VI-31 (Course Objectives 1 and 3)
D. Robert Merton VIII-32
E. C. Wright Mills (notes only)
Key Ideas and Theorists
Reconstruction
Urbanization
Immigration
Oberlin College
Yale University
University of Kansas
University of Chicago
Progressive Movement
Social Darwinism
Herbert Spencer
William Graham Sumner
The Chicago School
Urban Ethnography
Symbolic Interactionism
Robert Park
Charles Horton Cooley
George Herbert Mead
Neo-Marxism
Feminist Theory
Postmodernism
Cultural Theory
W.E.B. DuBois
Fisk University
color line
Booker T. Washington
Tuskegee Institute
double-consciousness
the veil
the talented tenth
colortocracy
The Philadelphia Negro (1899)
The University of Pennsylvania
The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Marcus Garvey
George Herbert Mead
Mind, Self and Society
Behaviorism
Perspective-taking
Social sources of the self
The other
The generalized other
The I and the me
Play and game
Robert Merton
Manifest functions
Latent functions
Unintended consequences
Rain dance
Anti-gambling laws
Voluntary organizations
The Communist Party
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Role model
Middle-range theory
C. Wright Mills
The Sociological Imagination
The Power Elite
White Collar
Triangle of Power
Notes
Major American Theorists
The origins of American sociology:
American sociology originates during Reconstruction, following the Civil War. As in Europe, the mid- to late-19th century was a period of intense urbanization, but in the American case, also of immigration, mostly from Europe.
There was a very rapid flow of ideas from Europe (although translations from German and French were not always available or accurate). American sociologists were trained in European universities.
Some important dates:
1858- course in “Social Problems” at Oberlin College
1873- William Graham Sumner (Herbert Spencer’s American protégé) begins teaching “social science” at Yale
1880s- “sociology” courses begin to appear
1889- first American sociology department, at the University of Kansas
1892- Sociology department founded at the University of Chicage—becomes dominant American department for 30-40 years
American Versus European Sociology
Early American sociologists were not nostalgic (compare with Ferdinand Toennies).
They were for the most part political liberals, generally unfamiliar with Marx’s writing
They were for the most part social progressives; they believed in progress, w/or w/out government action
There was a strong influence of Protestantism, a desire to save the world, in this case using science rather than scripture: to “solve social problems” without radically changing society.
American sociology featured Applied Sociology, Social Problems-type sociology.
Compared with Europe, sociology was easily established in American universities, which were newer and rapidly expanding.
American sociology was mostly positivist, “scientistic” and pragmatic; American sociologists turned away from Weberian interpretive historical approaches, from Verstehen. So there was less theoretical interpretation of long-term changes and more quantitative analysis of short-term social changes.
Main Schools of Thought in American Sociology
1. Social Darwinism
Until WWI, Social Darwinism was highly influential
The influence came from Herbert Spencer (UK), to William Graham Sumner at Yale University. Social Darwinism was also popular with wealthy social elites, as we saw earlier in the course.
2. The Chicago School
The University of Chicago was dominant in American sociology from around 1900 to 1935.
Chicago School sociologists encouraged a scientific approach to sociology
Robert Park (former journalist, trained in Germany with Simmel) chaired the department and initiated a tradition of urban ethnography.
Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead theorized sociological social psychology or “symbolic interactionism,” a micro-sociological way of analyzing subjective experience and the formation and maintenance of social identities.
We’ll discuss Mead more later in this module.
3. Structural Functionalism
The Chicago School collapsed in the 1930s, center of influence in American sociology shifts to Harvard, specifically to Talcott Parsons, who was critical of “dust bowl empiricism” of the Chicago School and Midwestern sociology generally for its lack of theoretical ambition or imagination and focus on small problems that would soon be forgotten.
1937, Talcott Parsons published The Structure of Social Action. In it he discussed Weber, Durkheim and other European thinkers. With this book Parsons effectively introduced abstract theory as a legitimate area within American sociology.
His translation of Weber, and his interpretation of European theorists, are now seen as biased in favor of Parsons' own approach.
Parsons was concerned with “macro” sociology, with the relations among large-scale social structures and institutions. His emphasis was on order, dynamic equilibrium (as in functionalist approaches generally).
Parsons' three systems:
Social System
Cultural System
Personality System
For Parsons social change is orderly and evolutionary.
Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore were Parsons’s most famous students. Recall their functionalist theory of stratification.
Structural functionalism was moderately influential in American universities from the 1930s-early 1960s, then fell apart.
4. Contemporary Sociological Theory
From the 1960s onwards many trends competed within an expanding American sociological field, including:
postmodernism
identity theory
gender
race
sexuality
globalization
cultural theory
conflict theory
Bourdieu's synthesis of cultural and conflict theory
Further “Europeanization” (and later globalization) of American sociology, renewed interest in Marx, Weber and Durkheim, minus Parsons’s idiosyncratic interpretation of them
A return of conflict theories: neo-Marxisms, e.g. Critical Theory; Feminist theory
The emergence of cultural theory:
Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Michele Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu
Social Constructionism (Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann)
Post-positivism, postmodern rejections of science and "scientism”
W.E.B. DuBois
The first sociologist of race. Sociology was generally Eurocentric and race-blind or casually racist before DuBois.
DuBois taught sociology at Atlanta University, although is remembered more as a public intellectual than as an influential theorist.
Like Marx, DuBois did not distinguish theory from practice. Sociology and social advocacy were intertwined. He was not a pure professional academic theorist but rather a thinker who wanted to explain and improve the situation of African-Americans. He lived in a difficult time being born not long after abolition and passing away before the Civil Rights movement.
Background:
DuBois’s mother was a maid, father a barber, preacher, drifter—left the family.
His mother died while he was a boy.
By age 16 he was self-conscious of his race and of social class.
Four white men paid for his education at Fisk University, in Nashville, Tenn.—an all-black university
DuBois taught poor black children in the east Tennessee countryside, goes on to Harvard University.
7th ever African-American student at Harvard; first to complete a PhD there
While studying at Harvard, DuBois traveled to Germany. Was astounded to find himself studying among non-racist whites—including Max Weber, who likes DuBois’s work.
DuBois returns to the U.S., is politically active:
—against racism, colonialism, imperialism
—for communism, socialism
Major ideas:
DuBois thought that African-Americans should organize together, accept the color line—they should not organize and strive in terms of values of individualism, egalitarianism, or economic participation (e.g. Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute, a technical institute in Atlanta)
The race idea—which he accepted without much questioning. Race is a real thing, not a social construction that changes as society and culture change.
The color line—relation of the “darker” and “lighter races” across the world. For DuBois the American Civil War was just one example, there was nothing special or unique about the Civil War.
Double-consciousness or two-ness—the experience of being of African origin and American—a divided identity (prefigures identity politics, sociological interest in identity construction)
The veil—a metaphor, in which African-Americans and their problems are hidden from white America, and African-Americans have a unique perspective on “White America”
Colortocracy of light-skinned blacks in the African-American community—excessive pride in their noses, skin color, hair
The talented tenth of African-Americans would lead their communities
DuBois wrote The Philadelphia Negro (1899), which was commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania as a study of the problems of Philadelphia’s black community. DuBois is ambivalent about this kind of study. It is insulting, patronizing, and probably won’t lead to any real change—on the other hand, he does it, and it makes known the social situation of African-Americans, which would otherwise be hidden.
The Souls of Black Folk (1903) was his major book on race and class. He was the first to write about these issues sociologically and systematically
DuBois's Political Career
Debated with Jamaican Marcus Garvey, who wanted to bring African-Americans back to Africa. He lost most of his popular appeal due to these debates in which he was seen as elitist and snobbish.
He was a proponent of socialism and communism—neither were popular in America.
He regained popularity since the 1970s.
Post-colonial studies, studies of globalization
Ethnic and racial studies, departments, multiculturalism
DuBois posthumously contributed to the establishment of departments of African-American studies, e.g. Harvard has the W.E.B. Dubois Institute for African and African American Research—a famous institute, often in the news, a site of major academic controversies
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cornel West—academic, philosopher, and rapper, he appeared in The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded. Very much in DuBois's mold.
George Herbert Mead
What is the conscience?
Are people ethical when no one else is looking? If so, why?
What is the self? How do we know who we are?
These are the kinds of questions Mead sought to answer.
Background
1863-1931
Born in Massachusetts, trained at Harvard and with the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt in Germany.
Was interested in Darwinism and economic theory, as well as psychology and sociology
Upon graduating from Oberlin in 1883, Mead took a grade school teaching job, which, however, lasted only four months. Mead was let go because of the way in which he handled discipline problems: he would simply dismiss uninterested and disruptive students from his class and send them home.
His most famous book: Mind, Self and Society, was published after his death. His students published the book from his collected notes.
Mead was a pragmatist philosopher and psychologist as well as a sociologist. He was an independent thinker whose ideas do not fit neatly within academic disciplines.
He is considered a pioneering figure in American sociological social psychology, or micro-sociology.
As a psychologist he was opposed to Watson’s positivism and behaviorism—which were based on the idea that the person could only be studied using scientific methods developed for the physical sciences (e.g. B.F. Skinner).
Positivism ignored the self-concept, and the social sources of the self. Thus Mead was a social psychologist.
Humans are unique in that they can take the perspective of other actors towards objects. This is the other. As a child matures, by taking others’ perspectives routinely in daily life, they internalize the generalized other, the amalgamation of all the other people with whom they have meaningful interaction. This is how social influence works, and it enables complex human society and social coordination.
A contrast to this view is behaviorism and rational-choice economics. In both, people respond to their environments by directly calculating what is in their self-interest, and pursuing their chosen goals through the optimal means (see Weber on the forms of rationality). UNT today has a department of behavioral psychology.
For Mead, existence in community comes before individual consciousness. First one must participate in the different social positions within society and only subsequently can one use that experience to take the perspective of others and thus become self-conscious.
Major Concepts
Mead wrote in Mind, Self and Society that human beings begin their understanding of the social world through “play” and “game.”
"Play" comes first in the child's development. The child takes different roles he/she observes in "adult" society, and plays them out to gain an understanding of the different social roles.
When more mature, the child can participate in the game, for instance the game of baseball. In the game he has to relate to others and understand the rules of the game. Through participating in the "game", he gains the understanding that he has to relate to norms of behaviour in order to be accepted as a player. This is the child's first encounter with “the generalized other.”
There are two phases (or poles) of the self: (1) that phase which reflects the attitude of the generalized other and (2) that phase which responds to the attitude of the generalized other. Here, Mead distinguishes between the "me" and the "I." The "me" is the social self, and the "I" is a response to the "me" (Mind, Self and Society 178).
“The 'I' is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others; the 'me' is the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself assumes”
Mead defines the "me" as "a conventional, habitual individual," and the "I" as the "novel reply" of the individual to the generalized other (Mind, Self and Society 197).
The "me" is the internalization of roles which derive from such symbolic processes as linguistic interaction, playing, and gaming; whereas the "I" is a "creative response" to the symbolized structures of the "me" (i.e., to the generalized other).
Mead's Political Utopianism
For Mead, the human social ideal . . . is the attainment of a universal human society in which all human individuals would possess a perfected social intelligence, such that all social meanings would each be similarly reflected in their respective individual consciousnesses — such that the meanings of any one individual's acts or gestures (as realized by him and expressed in the structure of his self, through his ability to take the social attitudes of other individuals toward himself and toward their common social ends or purposes) would be the same for any other individual whatever who responded to them(Mind, Self and Society 310).
Supporter of the League of Nations, forerunner of the United Nations.
C. Wright Mills – Radical Sociology in America
Background
Born in Waco, TX in 1916, conventional middle-class background
PhD at the University of Wisconsin, spends most of his career at Columbia University
Dies of his fourth heart attack at age 45, 3 marriages with one child from each, many affairs
Outsider in many ways, had trouble with his professional relationships as well
He was at odds with American society
Challenged Talcott Parsons (Structural Functionalist), but also Paul Lazarsfeld (rememberd for his contributions to sociological methodology).
Main Ideas
Marx was either reviled or ignored in American sociology, although there were exceptions, and C. Wright Mills was one of the most notable
Not a sophisticated Marxist, not very familiar with Marx’s ideas
He was a rare American “radical sociologist” though, meaning he was a class theorist, a power theorist.
Major Works
White Collar – analyzed the new occupational category of white-collar workers
The Power Elite
showed how America was dominated by a small group of white male businessmen, politicians, and military leaders—in spite of American conceits of pluralism and democracy, of a balance of competing interests. This is a “political economy” that Mills refers to as the triangle of power.
Power in the United States had once been decentralized, spread among the states with a weak federal center
Since WWII, business and government have become increasingly unified—think of Eisenhower’s warning about the “military-industrial complex”
The men of the power elite come from similar social and educational backgrounds, similar careers and styles of life
These men move easily between the three points of the triangle
Mills argued that competing interests and competition only occurred among members of the middle class, and middle-sized enterprises (e.g. labor unions and political parties—these change, but the structure of power and privilege does not).
At the “commanding heights” of the economy, military, and government, there is unity and class self-interest.
Social revolts against this system—the agrarian revolt of the 1890s, the small-business revolt since the 1880s, the labor revolt of the 1930s—have all failed to change anything (also the Reagan revolution in the 1980s, the Republican Revolution in the 1990s, Clinton’s “reinventing government” in the 1990s)
Mills argued that intellectuals need to openly discuss and debate the structures of power in American society.
He advocated a separation of the civil service from corporate interests.
Free associations of communities, families, smaller groups should be able to influence the national political economy.
“The Sociological Imagination” (1959)
We discussed this book in Module 1.
It included Mills' damning critique of the social theorist Talcott Parsons.
Robert Merton
Background
1910-2003
Born Meyer R. Schkolnick to immigrant parents in New York
Was interested in immigrant assimilation, social integration
Spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University
Major Concepts
Many of Merton's concepts have entered into ordinary language.
."
"
Merton revised Parsonian functionalism, retaining an interest in the integrative functions of social institutions, and, with Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons, a focus on the integrative role of normative values in social life.
Merton parted ways with Parsons in his analysis of the dysfunctions of social systems, for example in his discussion of manifest functions
and dysfunctions
, which are conscious and deliberate functions of social institutions, and latent functions that are mostly unconscious and unintended.
The manifest function of a rain dance
, is to produce rain.
.
The rain dance’s latent function is to produce social integration.
: "...the “manifest” function of antigambling
may be to suppress gambling, its “latent” function to create an illegal empire for the gambling syndicates
.
Or the control of the Communist Party
over all sectors of social life
in Russia
“manifestly” was to assure the continued dominance of the revolutionary ethos
, “latently” created a new class
of comfortable bureaucrats
uncannily bourgeois
in its aspirations.
Or the “manifest” function of many voluntary associations
in America is sociability
and public service
, the “latent” function to attach status
indices to those permitted to belong to such associations.” "
The manifest function of bureaucracy (Weber’s rational-legal authority) is to produce efficient outcomes. But bureaucracy has "unintended consequences
,” dysfunctions and latent functions. Merton discusses the “bureaucratic personality” as an example.
Bureaucrats who work in the same role for long periods of time become mentally inflexible, they cling to routines that may no longer be functional, and they treat customers badly because they come to feel that they know all that can be known within their small area. At home they treat their families as they treat their customers and coworkers at the office (e.g. schoolteachers treating adults as children)
Merton also developed theories of deviance and a sophisticated sociology of science. He emphasized normative values and culture, and manifest and latent functions, in this work.
Merton advocated middle-range theory – smaller theoretical ideas that would allow broader theoretical frameworks (Marxist, Weberian, Durkheimian, Parsonian, etc.) to be challenged and tested.
He combined broad [European-ish] theory and historical knowledge with an attention to empirical detail and verification
In this way he was a forerunner of contemporary sociology. Modern sociologists almost never create theories ex nihilo. So, in some ways “theory” ceases to exist as a separate sphere within sociology after the 1960s. Since Parsons, there has been almost no one who can be considered a major theorist per se.
Module 5: Readings, Key Ideas, Notes and Videos
Overview
We cover the sociology of gender with a focus on the pioneering nineteenth-century sociological thinker Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Readings
Charlotte Perkins Gilman V-23 XI-50, 5
Key Ideas and Theorists
Charlotte Perkins Gillman
Gender Inequality
Women and Economics (1898)
Nuclear family
Gender socialization
Sex differences
Women’s economic independence from men
Public day care
Cooperative kitchens
Notes
Gender Theory
A. Gender Inequality
In the 19th century, women were legally analogous to children. Today, worldwide, women are ½ the population but own a small fraction of the world’s land and property, make a fraction of the income of men. They are often limited in terms of their educational and career opportunities and denied legal rights afforded to men. Society’s expectations and standards for women are often different from those for men, and these differ across societies and cultures.
B. Women and Sociological Theory
As sociology developed, women naturally became interested in trying to explain gender inequality (just as Marx wanted to explain class inequality, and DuBois the “color line”). Women, however, were generally denied opportunities for higher education, and certainly for careers in the academy.
C. Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Click here for a YouTube video on Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Background
1860-1935
From a prominent New England family, difficult childhood—father left, moved around.
Deeply depressed after her marriage and the birth of her daughter. Divorced husband, gave her blessing to his remarry her close friend and raise her daughter.
Gilman’s depression lifted when she was able to work, unencumbered by family responsibilities.
She gave lectures around the U.S.A. and secured her reputation in feminist circles when she published her major work Women and Economics (1898).
Major Ideas
Advocated for:
women’s economic independence from men
Public day care
Cooperative kitchens
Peaceful socialism
She argued that the nuclear family was dysfunctional for women. It was more natural for “women’s work” (cooking, cleaning, childrearing) to be done communally, as was the case in most human societies, rather than alone and isolated in the home.
Traditional family structures are inherently exploitative—women work, but are not paid.
Gender inequality is a product of socialization in the family, not inherent biological differences.
Girls and boys learn their gender (not sex) by dressing differently, being praised and scolded for different things.
And yet, she thought that men and women were innately different. Because of evolution, women are antiselfish, they want to love, to nurture. Men are competitive, want to fight, take control.
There were racist sections of her writings, and she seemed to be speaking mainly for white women. She was against slavery and the oppression of African-Americans, and genocide and oppression of Native Americans, though.
D. Contemporary Feminist Theory
Gilman’s feminist theory is almost common sense to many sociologists today, aside from the racist parts.
Feminist theory today has taken a postmodern turn:
Feminism against sociology: some feminist theorists are highly critical of sociology because of its male-centeredness, blindness to women
Feminism against science: view of science as a masculine, dominating enterprise
Feminism against globalization and neo-liberalism (more expressly political): the structure of the world economic system is inherently exploitative of women: e.g. sex slaves, wage inequality, poor health care and day care for immigrant working women.
Module 6: Readings, Key Ideas, Notes and Videos
Overview
We cover the basic concepts of cultural theory in sociology and the work of the critical theorists on mass media and Emile Durkheim on religion.
Readings
Max Horkheimer on Critical Theory XIII-62 (Course Objectives 1 and 4)
Emile Durkheim on aboriginal religion and modernity II-9,10 (Course Objectives 1 and 4)
Key Ideas and Theorists
Instinct vs. Culture
Meaning
Blinking vs. Winking
Symbols
Languages
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Linguistic Relativism
Linguistic Determinism
Linguistic Categories
Beliefs
Values
Norms
Material Culture
High Culture
Low Culture
Popular Culture
Cultural Capital
Subcultures
Countercultures
Ethnocentrism
Cultural Relativism
Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno
The culture industry
The Dialectic of Enlightenment
The sacred
The profane
Collective effervescence
Rituals
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Notes
Cultural Theory
Cultural theory in sociology is all about symbols, language and communication. Culture can create social solidarity and social identities.
After all, aren’t people motivated by their values? Their beliefs? Don’t ideas matter in society? Haven’t some ideas changed the world?
In this perspective, societies are guided not, or not only, by functions or conflict, but also by shared values, symbols, ideals, ideas, beliefs, religions, and rituals.
Cultural theory is associated with Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, and also with anthropology
In cultural theory, scholars pay a lot of attention to language, symbols like flags and statues and national anthems, rituals like national holidays and religious rituals, and lots of other kinds of symbolic and ritualistic behavior.
They also pay a lot of attention to cultural difference between and within societies. This perspective is very international—probably more international than the functionalist or conflict perspectives.
So if we ask our usual question of why we have universities, cultural theory provides different types of answers. For cultural theory, education is like a religion, and we build universities because we believe in education. It is part of Western or American culture. Secular education is part of our value system.
Also, we build universities so that we can socialize children to have the right kinds of beliefs and attitudes.
It’s important for universities to have rituals like graduation ceremonies and symbols like diplomas, in order to make the experience of graduating meaningful to the students and parents.
Cultural theory subsumes symbolic interactionism (from the Chicago School from a previous last module).
Pierre Bourdieu eventually combined conflict and cultural theory
What is Culture?
What is Culture? What does the word Culture mean?
One definition is that it is different from economic and political processes.
This might help, but it’s not a very good definition.
Most discussions of Culture start with the idea that people are different from animals because people have culture. Some animals use tools and some teach each other how to do things. But overall, non-human animals operate by instinct.
What are animals’ instincts? What are human instincts?
Food, water, sex, friendship, play, take care of young, aggression
Unlike most animals, humans are born incomplete; we need other people to teach us how to live. Our instincts are not enough. “Human nature” is not enough.
e.g. Blinking vs. Winking
instinct vs. culture
For example, in the 19th century scientists found feral children—wild children who grew up by themselves in the forest. They could not speak, and did not know how to live or how to interact with other people. No one taught them how to be social, how to eat, how to speak, how to read or write, etcetera. These were some of the only people ever found who had no culture.
A second definition: Culture is something we have to learn from people in our society (family, community, nation).
Social scientists talk about two kinds of culture:
material culture: tangible things people make in a society, e.g. cell phones, worry beads, houses, cars, clothing, food
non-material culture: ideas, meanings, beliefs, values, utopias, moral judgments
The components of culture
Blinking is not culture, winking is
Roughly five things are thought to count as culture
1. Symbols (or signs) (the difference is not important)
Anything that carries meaning for people who share culture
e.g. The flag is a symbol; it is meaningful, but it means different things to different people
e.g. a blink is not really a sign; a wink is a sign
Symbols and signs have two parts:
The signifier (e.g. the winking eye)
The signified (e.g. flirting)
2. Language
Languages are systems of symbols
Without language, there would be no culture, because we could not pass on our culture to our children and to other people
Does language shape reality?
Two famous anthropologists, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, thought so.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: Language shapes the way we think
Different languages have different ideas, categories, distinctions
e.g. Hopi Indians had one word for everything that flies, including insects, planes, pilots.
But there’s a different word for birds.
e.g. Inuit Indians (eskimos) have many different words for different kinds of snow.
Many words from one language cannot be translated into another language
What are some words or ideas that are hard to translate into other languages?
e.g. words for emotions are different in different languages
Angst
Shoddenfreude
3. Values and Beliefs
Beliefs are specific statements that people think are true
e.g. God created the universe
Humans evolved from Apes
Values are standards about what is right and wrong
e.g. individualism versus collectivism, family values, tolerance, freedom
4. Norms
Rules about appropriate behavior
e.g. How do you treat guests? If you are a guest in someone’s home, how are you supposed to act?
5. Material Culture
Physical differences between cultures, e.g. in clothing, architecture, how people eat
THINKING ABOUT CULTURE
We need some theoretical concepts to be able to analyze culture from a sociological point of view.
High versus Low
high culture (elite culture)
popular culture (mass culture)
cultural capital (culture used for social climbing; Pierre Bourdieu)
Subcultures and Countercultures
alternative cultures within a nation; small cultures; cultures that rejection the mass culture
e.g. youth cultures; professions; street culture; ethnic groups
Ethnocentrism
The idea that your culture is the main, central, or best culture
Seeing reality only through your own culture
Judging other cultures based on your own culture’s standards
e.g. Indian Suttee (Google it); eating dogs in China
It is hard to avoid being ethnocentric.
Relativism
Trying to understand other cultures on their own terms
The belief that different cultures have different truths and different ways of being moral, and that no one culture is better than others
Cultural Lag
The idea that material changes in society occur quickly, while culture (ideas, values, customs, habits, norms) change more slowly.
Sociologist William Ogborn, 1920s and 1930s
Example of deforestation, slow shift to conservation methods
e.g. high price of gas, gradual shift in preferences toward small cars
TWO THEORIES OF CULTURE
Functional Theories of Culture
Combines functionalism that we saw before (structural-functionalism) with idealism (cultural functionalism)
Different societies have different basic values
Societies and cultures work hard to preserve these basic values.
Elements of culture (symbols, norms, language, material culture, etc.) function to preserve these values
e.g. Why do the Amish refuse to use high technology? Are they dumb?
Why do some Indian communities practice Suttee?
Because cultural practices reflect basic values.
e.g. individual freedom, hard work, community, family, tradition
Like Weber (at times), cultural anthropologist view culture as a system.
They analyze cultures in synchronic, not diachronic, terms. This is part of what makes cultural anthropology unique.
Their approach and methods are interpretive; they see cultures as texts that are open to interpretation, and contain recurring themes and symbolism
Cultural anthropology can tend to be functionalist in its thinking.
Everything in a culture serves a function
Everything in a culture is part of an integrated whole
Society is a system of mutual interdependence that must be kept in equilibrium
Cultures are necessary for human life, serve concrete needs:
For rearing and socializing children
For creating social solidarity and harmony
An implication of these functionalist views is that indigenous cultures should be protected or preserved
i.e. if Westerners tamper with one part of an indigenous culture, they may destroy the whole thing
This view was crucial for anthropology during its early years in the 20th century, when Western powers still operated systems of colonial control in “3rd world” countries.
Conflict Theories of Culture
Marx: culture is determined by whomever has control over the means of production
Critical theory (The Frankfurt School): Mass culture (pop music, films, tv) is created by the culture industry, and is like an opiate. It keeps people from thinking too much.
The Frankfurt School
A group of intellectuals who were associated with a research institute in Frankfurt in the 1920s, but were dispersed with the rise of Nazi Germany
We will focus on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.
They were members of the German cultural elite, and Adorno moved to Los Angeles in the 1940s.
They saw Nazi populist propaganda, then in America television commercials, popular newspapers and films.
A and H, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, argued that the project of the European Enlightenment had reached an end, and had led to a world of narrow pragmatic rationality and a mass society of passive, uniform consumers
Popular media produced by the culture industry appeals to the lowest common denominator, simple likes and dislikes, in the interest of maximum profits
“No independent thinking must be expected from the audience”
Audiences are zombie-like and amused, but unthinking and gullible
Classical and avante-garde art, however, is much better
The Sacred and the Profane
Emile Durkheim, the father of French sociology, explained religion sociologically. All societies and all religions, he thought, divided the world between the sacred and the profane
The Sacred and The Profane (in Latin, profane means “outside the temple”)
Pure things / things that are normal,
Magical, have special powers / Everyday things
Holy / Nothing special
Clean / Can be dirty
Set apart
Contagious—makes you sacred Contagious—makes you unholy if you touch it
Inspires awe, fear, reverence Boring or disgusting
e.g. in Hinduism, cows are sacred; Brahmins are more sacred than untouchables, who are profane and dirty
in Judaism and Islam, pigs are profane
The Koran and the Torah are sacred
Mosques and Synagogues are sacred
Communities, not individuals, draw lines between what’s sacred and what’s profane
These lines are social and cultural
Different communities draw different lines
Communities do rituals so that they can show themselves what is sacred and what is profane
e.g. Baptists, who are a Christian sect in America, dunk people under water to cleanse them of sin
Hindus bathe in the Ganges River every 12 years
Muslims go to Mecca
Christians drink the wine and eat the wafer, which symbolize the body and blood of Christ
Durkheim’s functionalism
Durkheim defined totems as objects a community defines as sacred.
They can be anything: a piece of wood, a book, a place, a mountain, a building, an animal, a word, even a person.
Religions are based on totems, rituals, and on the distinction between the sacred and the profane.
Together, these things create a religion, and religions have several functions for society. Religion turns individuals into a community.
Social cohesion:
religion unites people
defines what is ethical, defines the rules of the game of life
religion channels our emotions (love, hatred)
Social control:
Elites can control people through religion
Religion encourages conformity
Religion makes the political system seem legitimate
Meaning and purpose:
For individuals, religion makes life meaningful
Religion, and by extension culture, makes death and suffering socially meaningful and thus less painful.
For Durkheim, “God” is another word for “society”