this is chapter 1 Introduction to Sociology so what is sociology obviously that's a good place to start in this class so sociology is the study of groups and group interactions of societies and social interactions so sociologists look at things from all levels including the macro level which is when we look at large-scale issues and Trends among and between large groups and societies but sociologists also look at things from the micro level which is studying small groups and even individual interactions so we're going to have examples of both kinds of research as we move through the class both perspectives are important and which you decide to use as a sociologist is really motivated by what is your research question right what are you trying to study in the social world and guided by that question that's going to lead you to either a macro or micro approach we'll talk more about that later so culture refers to a group's shared practices values and beliefs so culture includes a group's way of life from the normal or routine everyday interactions that we experience now one of the most important Concepts you can learn in this class that hopefully if you take away anything from this class into this it's the sociological imagination think of it as a lens through which to view Society right so the sociological imagination is a Viewpoint a way to look at the world it's basically when you connect the macro and the micro or to put it another way when you look at the entire picture and not just a small part of it so one example could be job loss or unemployment if we look narrowly at the individual or at that micro level we miss the larger picture so in 2008 when the economy crashed millions of people were affected with some people losing hours at their jobs some people face pay cuts or furloughs and many others were laid off so even during a normal economy millions of people lose their jobs so this shows how job loss is not just the result of individual actions sometimes there's a larger macro level issue that's causing these changes such as you know the global financial crisis which trust me we're going to talk about later another example could be homelessness so in America strongly in individualism this affects how we can then see the world around us now to be clear we do have agency meaning we all make choices in our lives but those choices are constrained by the social reality of the time we live in and really just kind of like what choices do we even have to choose from so when we talk about homelessness we tend to blame individuals for being in that situation we'll say well what do they do to make themselves homeless and often we ignore the larger structural reasons or factors that lead to some people being more likely to be homeless than others so going back to that 2008 example again many people became homeless when the financial crisis happened it wasn't because they decided like I just don't want to go to work anymore right like I don't feel like I think I'm gonna live on the streets right they were laid off since also over half the country has less than 500 in savings for emergencies and many many more live paycheck to paycheck when the job left so did their money for rent so if we look at this issue with the sociological imagination it helps us see both the micro of a person's experience alongside the macro of the structural forces or the historical factors or these things outside of their control that may be happening from the social institutions in society so all sociologists are interested in people's experiences and how those experiences are shaped by social institutions with social groups and with larger social institutions like the economy and education which we'll talk about in this class so some sociologists study social facts which are laws morals values even um Customs like religious beliefs or rituals or Fashions and other cultural rules that govern social life so again in this chapter we're just gonna kind of scratch the surface but a lot of these things we're going to have a full chapter on just to kind of drill into to get you a little bit more in depth okay so looking briefly at the history of sociology since as long as there's been people and communities people within those communities have been studying people and their relationships to their societies but the history of Sociology basically starts after the enlightenment in the 1700s which paved the way for more rigorous science which led to the creation of Sociology right so before we even thought you know if our early scientific Notions were you know the devil's in you or something like that you know we weren't um kind of using a more scientific approach once you get past that Enlightenment period you have thinkers like compte and who came up with this you know concept of positivism so he stated that sociology needed to be treated like any other scientific discipline so he laid the groundwork for the discipline though he called it social physics which to me sounds like way cooler maybe we should have stuck with social physics instead of Sociology but basically um he was a French scientist and he developed a theory of progress of human thinking from its earliest theological and metaphysical stages towards a positive or scientific stage so again positivism right now he was integral to developing positivism as an approach and again positivism just means that people can scientifically approach Topics in the social World alongside the physical world like the hard Sciences do right so if we can use science to understand you know how physics works then we can understand social physics again still think social physics would have been way cooler than sociology just to be be like yeah I have a degree in social physics anyway Harriet Martineau is another great thinker um very important to the development of Sociology as a discipline so Martino was a social activist who traveled to the U.S and wrote about social changes that were pretty radical for that time period right she's one of those um parts of our sociological history that shows that sociologists we like to kind of see ourselves as ruiners we're those people that spoil stuff for other people because they don't want to see the reality in front of them so you know um becoming a sociologist you become one of a long line of people that call people out on stuff anyway so speaking of which Martin Noe is first known because she translated compete's work into English which made his ideas accessible to England in the Americas and really spread sociology as a discipline but on her own she became a journalist and a political economist and again in a time period where women had very little rights and opportunities and she proclaimed a lot of views that were Radical for her time because she was using that sociological imagination for example she supported labor unions she supported the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage she very famously came to the U.S and called us out and said hey how do you purport to say that you believe in Freedom and equality and Liberty yet you put people in Chains yet women have no rights to their bodies or to the vote and um because of that people were like cheered her in the streets and were like you're great no I'm just kidding people hated that and they were like get out of the country so sometimes when you speak truth to power um Power does not like that right that's kind of the whole point so um you know she's one of those integral people within sociological history that really show you know stick to your guns and call out the BS speaking of calling out BS you have Karl Marx so Marx was a German philosopher and political activist who contributed significantly to sociology's conflict theory and we're going to be talking about conflict theory throughout the class there are these main paradigms of sociological thought which we'll get into in a minute and one of the three main ones and I should just preface there's more than three but for an intro class all you really need to know is the three main ones um one of which is conflict theory it's very important to how we understand the world especially through the lens of uh looking at capitalist societies so Marx is one of those dudes you might have heard about him because of like political people fighting back and forth over it or you hear like someone's a Marxist right scary but really when you break down who marks was what he said um it's a valuable contribution to political and social thought and you know it's only controversial if you're afraid of people knowing things so anyway Marx theorized that capitalism created social inequality so that's why people aren't super stoked about this guy so now I gotta give you a little bit of backstory this dude was you know again a historian a political activist a philosopher he was a guy who got kicked out of a lot of countries for kind of the same thing Harry Martineau did right calling folks out so basically you have to understand the time period in which he's developing these these thoughts so he saw the Advent of capitalism through the you know the Industrial Revolution time period and the ways in which the kind of factory labor jobs were so exploitive people were dying children working these factories you know um being maimed all sorts of stuff and being paid so you know such little compensation for their work and so looking at it through that context you can better understand the world he was looking at though kind of incredible rapid development that happened right at the Industrial Revolution he you know kind of predicted some of the things that then came to pass so anyway he basically again he said capitalism creates social inequality between the bourgeoisie who are the people who own the means of production meaning the people that have money or factories or natural resources or land and the proletariat or the workers so again if you've heard someone say oh that person's so bougie yeah they're getting that from bourgeoisie from Marx but anyway so Mars predicted that inequality leads to social class conflict and sociologists have found that Marx's theories continue to provide powerful tools for understanding social phenomena his ideas that conflict between social groups is Central to the working of society and serves as the engine of social change is one of the most vital perspectives in sociology today so Marx noted that a small percentage of the population owned the means of production and thus were able to exploit the masses and thereby ensure greater gains for themselves so this is the basic tenet of capitalism today many modern sociologists use Marxist theories to evaluate contemporary workplaces I mean marksby rolling over in his grave about you know Bezos and some of these other billionaires that um you know have the most concentration of wealth that we've ever seen in the history of time I mean it's fascinating time to be analyzing these things from a sociological approach so we're going to get way more into marks later and you'll know much more about bourgeoisie and the proletariat I'll give you some history there and all sorts of other stuff but this chapter is more about just kind of sit in the groundwork okay so um Herbert Spencer this guy this poor guy people have really misinterpreted what he said but still he's kind of a jerk so Herbert Spencer was famous for applying evolutionary theory to social environments and he came up with the term social Darwinism because he believed the societies evolved Through Time by adapting to their changing environments so it's important to understand the actual evolutionary theory before you then apply it to social World basically if the evolutionary theory is saying that you know survival of the fittest what makes someone fittest it's really interesting oftentimes people misinterpret this to mean strength or power but if you think of it that way what happened to the dinosaurs right they were the biggest the most powerful creatures right but they weren't the fittest meaning they weren't the most adaptable the ones that could adapt and change to their environments as their environments changed and that's part of why they died out right so that's kind of more of what they mean by survival the fittest is who's the most adaptable who can change as our environments change right and so um he was influential in spreading sociology in Britain and America but he was also a racist POS so that's a whole other thing okay I mean we're talking about a bunch of old dead white people so there's there's some of that sprinkled in um George simmel this was a German sociologist who was influential in the discipline in its early years and really he was important to inspiring other critical theories and theorists that came later like making them think of stuff and inspiring them so that they kind of became some of the big thinkers in sociology so he's an important stepping stone there durkheim we're going to talk all sorts about durkheim in this class and apply him a little bit so durkheim studied social factors that Bond and hold people together he wanted to demonstrate that you could study anything as a societal issue and so he picked something really personal and something that seems like really individual and looked at it from a societal you know perspective and that was suicide so he studied the relationship between social isolation and suicide at the macro level so first off is really interesting backstory on that durkheim did this kind of you know deductive approach situation where he took the theories at the time that were actually pretty racist sexist you know Etc um that said you know who would commit suicide had to do with who had less social power the most marginalized people right so basically at the time period they thought women were just kind of insane so that women would commit suicide more than men because they're just less mentally stable of course this is the time period of like the yellow wallpaper where they would just like lock a woman in a room and be like you're not allowed to read because it'll hurt you um so anyway obviously our ideas about women during that time period were wow wow but anyway um he broke through some of those assumptions there was assumptions that like religious minorities would be more likely to commit suicide um all sorts of just dumb things that people thought and they were considered knowledge at the time and this is why we have to be really careful about the knowledge in our time period and make sure we're not just reifying stereotypes that we do have empirical data something that can actually show us a relationship and not just say well because we know it is right because people know things that are stereotypes they know things that aren't true every day right so as sociologists we break through that crap so durkheim again he studied all those things he said hey I'm going to take these three hypotheses that are out there in the world and test them and see whether they're relevant or not and they weren't right none of the data supported those assumptions that people had so instead he did an inductive approach he took the research the other direction and said let me just you know compile all the data about suicides and see what patterns emerge and what he found out was that um there were certain relationships which was pretty interesting meaning if a person had you know was married and had kids they were less likely to commit suicide um there were certain times a year people were more likely to commit suicide all sorts of these patterns he found and he developed a new Theory based on what he found and basically said that if people don't have a strong connection to society then they're more likely to commit suicide so meaning all of us go through really bad things in our lives that's a part of life unfortunately and for most of us if we're lucky to have someone there that cares about us that supports us then we can have you know someone to lean on through those time periods and get through them but for people who have no attachments to the community to other resources to family to friends to anything like that they're more likely to commit suicide so again he took something he demonstrated using scientific empirical methods to study social realities so basically completing what compte had anticipated about half a century earlier also he looked at the division of labor and Society and expressed his belief that social bonds are present in all types of societies but different types of societies created different kinds of bonds we'll talk about that a little bit more in chapter three but just because learning is repetition I'll give you a little snip snippet of it here so he suggested that mechanical solidarity was experienced by people in agrarian societies what bound them together was the basis of shared tradition and beliefs meaning everyone's life was pretty similar so that's what kept them in solidarity in mechanical solidarity on the other hand he came up with you know trying to understand industrial societies where factory work was increasingly Specialized or where people had very very different jobs and he calls this organic solidarity meaning people's bonds with each other are based on the tasks they perform and this interdependence meaning we're bound to each other we need each other right and that you know affects the qualities of the bonds so meaning that they're different instead of us all being the same we need people to be different like I need someone to be a veterinarian and a doctor and a mechanic and whatever so I don't have to be all of those things right so durkheim believed that even the most individualistic of actions has social explanations so he set out to establish a scientific methodology for these actions so he chose for his research like I talked about not just suicide he also looked at religious affiliations um and religion as an institution um you know and really tried to show that even the most individual things could be studied sociologically pretty interesting guy so we're gonna definitely talk more about durkheim throughout um because he applies to a lot of the chapters we're gonna go through so anywho you'll hear him again George Herbert Mead studied the connection between thought and action or between the individual and Society so this dude's what we call a symbolic interactionist and we'll get through that later right I was saying how Karl Marx is a conflict theorist symbolic interaction is another main theoretical Paradigm that we'll talk about too throughout the class so if you're like what the hell are you talking about no worries you'll get it at some point so Mead suggested that social processes give meanings to objects in our society so people interact and the meanings come from the interactions so for example let's get real philosophical here a chair isn't inherently important as an object for sitting so as many of us know if you know let's say you got to reach something up high you're going to stand on the chair the chair becomes a step stool right or let's say you want to block an entrance you throw a chair there right or you could just pick up a chair and throw with somebody then it becomes a weapon so but because we interact on a daily basis with others who use chairs most commonly for sitting we come to accept that this is the meaning of the object so it's a trivial example but the idea can be applied to lots of objects in our society for example things like Flags or religious icons have meanings that have been shaped by social interactions so again needs that symbolic interactionist we'll talk more about that so he came up also with the term significant others and generalized others which we'll go over more when we talk about theories of Child Development which were pretty interesting also for some reason the chapter does not mention Urban Goffman or sorry Goffman um but he was a symbolic interactionist as well that was important to the discipline and we will definitely talk about his concept of dramaturgy later on which says that life is like a play and you know when we talk about the chapter on social interaction we'll we'll get into that dude okay so Max Weber um like marks Weber also studied how Society was becoming industrialized and he was concerned with the process of rationalization meaning applying economic logic to all of human activity I think of it as like computerizing logic so he believed that contemporary life was filled with disenchantment the resulting you know um consequence of dehumanizing features of modern society so much of Weber's work expressed a pessimistic view of social forces obviously such as the work ethic that shaped modern life but like other social theories of his time Weber was interested in the shift from a traditional Society to a more industrial society and as we'll talk about later because they were watching this happen in their lifetime and it happened so quickly it was such an impact it's kind of like the way in which if you think about the impact of the internet or the impact of cell phones the impact of smartphones or you know um social media or things like this like when those things develop so quickly they have such a strong impact on society in such a short period of time so Weber proposed that modern industrial societies were characterized by efficient goal-oriented rule-governed bureaucracies and we'll talk all about bureaucracies later so he believed the individual Behavior was increasingly driven by bureaucratic goals which had become more important motivational factors than tradition values or emotion and so Weber believed this lifestyle left people trapped by their you know the what we were expecting how we're expected to live in what he called the iron cage of bureaucratic rules uh he's so right but anyway and if you've ever been to the DMV and had to like stand in line and deal with the stuff and if they don't have an exact form for you or the right line for you you know exactly what that iron cage of bureaucratic rules feels like okay um last up on this list is and again there's like a million other thinkers but this is as many as I'm gonna go through today um WB Du Bois was also essential in developing sociology because he pioneered several sociological methodologies or the ways we do research though he was omitted from the history for years because he was African-American so he was also the first black man to earn a doctorate at Harvard in 1895. some of his classes because of you know um laws on segregation he literally had to sit in the hallway I mean to boys man came up with so many theories we still use today and like I said methodologies so his studies and principles became the foundation for modern sociology other than being a sociologist he was a civil rights activist and he gave us the term double Consciousness which is the internal conflict that can be experienced by colonized groups in an oppressive society which we'll talk about later all right Siri we're still going with theories let's just keep talking about it okay so theoretical perspectives are really important in sociology it really shows that no matter what topic you're looking at you can see it from many different perspectives so Theory and hypothesis right so theory is a way to explain dimensions of social interaction or social life and our Theory will often develop for us a testable thesis argument that guides our research or a hypothesis right so there's what you think is going to happen and then you test whether or not that's what happens paradigms are philosophical and theoretical Frameworks used within a discipline to formulate theories generalizations and experiments formed in support of them so we're going to explore a few major paradigms in this class functionalism conflict theory and symbolic interaction but I'm also going to throw like feminist Theory and some other ones at you because you need them um but those are like the three big ones um and even under those umbrellas there's like thousands of different micro theories and there's also other paradigms than just these three these are the three like you gotta know to take this class but anyway okay so let's briefly functionalism we're going to keep going over this like week now through a week the end so you've got plenty of time to understand it let's just set the groundwork so functionalism is society is viewed in functionalism as an ordered system of interrelated parts or structures which are the social institutions that make up our society and social institutions like family education politics the economy the way I like to explain it is it's like if each institution in society is a puzzle piece and all the puzzle pieces have to fit together in order for society to function and according to functionalists when one of those pieces changes all the other ones have to change to adapt I think about that if you change a puzzle piece then all the pieces around it would have to change to fit so each of these different structures those social institutions is there to meet the needs of society by performing specific functions for the whole system so think about that education's there for some specific needs family politics economy so many other institutions will talk about so the key word there is function according to this Theory everything in our society has a function and the main principles of functionalist Paradigm is that Society is a stable ordered system of interrelated parts or structures and again we'll challenge that stable part later two that each structure has a function that contributes to the continued stability or equilibrium of the whole so they often study and use the term social institutions again which we're going to explore a lot in this class and remember social institution is just patterns of beliefs and behaviors that focus on meeting people's social needs so like government Health Care education all sorts of crap okay Convoy Theory this looks as society as a competition for limited resources so conflict theory sees conflict as the basis of society and social change so conflict theory proposes that conflict and tension are basic facts of social life and they suggest that people have disagreements over goals and values and are involved in struggles over both resources and Power so the theory looks at the processes of dominance competition upheaval and social change and their main emphasis is on materialistic view of society which looks at you know labor practices and economic realities meaning you have someone like Jeff Bezos who has so much money like a ridiculous amount of money that we can't even comprehend how much money this guy has and yet his workers have to pee into bottles because they have such bad labor um conditions that they're making him that money yet they're not sharing in those resources we'll talk about this more in depth later and another part of conflict theory is looking at a critical stance towards existing social Arrangements right saying you know who has power doesn't necessarily mean that those people are better right largely because the people that have power also have more Social Power to affect the way that we perceive things in society right so you think about the way in which people want to be like a Kardashian or live in a mansion or these things because the media promotes the value system of the richest people in society so we see that as our own value system instead of what you know Marx calls it as false consciousness we'll get to that later and also conflict theory is really a dynamic model of historical change so they really look at how transformation of society is inevitable it's going to happen actually Mark says that each new kind of phase in society like sows the seeds of its own Rebellion right so we'll talk more about that later and apply that to some specific stuff we're seeing in society today and then last up you got symbolic interactionist Theory so this sees interaction and meaning essential to society and assumes meanings are not inherent but rather created through interactions so symbolic interactionism is America's unique contribution to sociology and is proved to be the most influential perspective of the 20th century so four symbolic interaction a society is produced and reproduced through our interactions with each other by means of language or our interpretations of that language symbolic interactionism sees face-to-face interaction as the building block of everything else in society because it's through interaction that we create a meaningful social reality so some of the basic tenets of symbolic interactionism as laid out by Bloomer is that we act towards things on the basis of their meanings so kind of like that chair example right A tree can provide a shady place to rest or it could be an obstacle to building a road or a Home each of these meanings suggests a different set of actions and this is true for any physical object like trees or just like it is for people right like mothers or police officers right or just like it is for institutions like church or school or for beliefs like honesty or equality or any social activity so meanings are not inherent rather they're negotiated through interactions with others that is whether the tree is an obstacle or an oasis is not intrinsic to the tree it's something that people determine and put on that tree that same tree can mean one thing to one person and something else to another also meanings can change will be modified through interaction for example the contractor who sees the tree as an obstacle may be persuaded to spare it by the neighbor so now the tree's something to build around rather than to bulldoze so although symbolic interactionism is focused on how both self and Society develop their interaction with others it's useful in explaining and analyzing a wide variety of specific social issues from inequalities of race gender to group dynamics of families or co-workers okay so they're not in here as much but I'm still going to squeeze a couple more in here right they're not part of the three main paradigms but feminist theory is another one we'll talk about throughout the class it's kind of they both both of these ones feminine Theory and queer Theory kind of come out of conflict theory and have developed their own approaches so feminist Theory looks at both gender inequalities in society and the way that gender structures the social world and considers remedies to these inequalities so there's a link between feminist Theory and conflict theory because both deal with stratification and inequality in society and both seek not only to understand the inequality but to fix that inequality to end that inequality queer theory proposes that categories of sexual identity are social constructs and that no sexual category is fundamentally either deviant or normal so queer theory was inspired by gay and lesbian rights movements in the 70s and 80s and queer Theory you know itself arose in the late 80s and early 90s and they propose the categories of sexuality such as you know homosexual heterosexual bisexual you know that these are all social constructs in other words no sexual category is fundamentally normal what we consider normal is what we've been socialized to believe is normal right which means that meanings can change as we change our opinions about these things so anyway that's a little bit more theory for you and then um I'll sprinkle in a little bit of some other stuff we'll talk about too is post-modernist theory so post-modernist Theory suggests that social reality is diverse pluralistic and constantly changing and post-modernism was a reaction to modernism right to understand post-modernism you have to juxtapose it with modernism which was the movement against which it was a reaction right so modernism is both a historical period and an ideological stance that began with the 18th century Enlightenment or Age of Reason and modernist thoughts they basically thought that scientific knowledge a linear you know time-like view of history and a belief in the Universal versatility of human nature was the way to understand the world but in post-modernism there are no absolutes no claims to truth reason right order or stability everything therefore is relative fragmented temporary contingent now why why would we talk about this well because again post-modernism is important to understanding a lot of these theories in a more modern context for example easy example for this one that I think helps set up the context of it is under modernism if you looked at an issue like climate change they would say science will fix it right science will find a way but if you looked at it from a more post-modern perspective you could say we already could solve it if we wanted to there's billionaires that have the resources there's plenty of choices we make in our governmental structures and who's in power that they make to not address climate change there's also technologies that have existed for 20 plus years that could really deal with the climate crisis and energy you know um issues and all sorts of stuff but the power of the fossil fuel Industries affects the kind of Science and the way that we understand what can be done and what can't the fact that the oil and gas industry and the coal Industries line the pockets of politicians who make the decisions about what we do or don't do as the world Burns right so again post-modernism just an interesting approach that we're going to sprinkle in as well as we go through to better understand the more modern world we're in okay so why why take this class why study sociology um to understand Society right we want to understand the social world that we're a part of just as anthropologists study other cultures or ancient cultures we study our own culture which can be really hard to do since it's everything that seems normal to us it makes it really hard for people to be critical of their own Society right if you're an Insider you know the social rules they just seem normal to you it's often when we leave those worlds and travel into other social groups that we experience a form of culture shock that makes the invisible become visible to us so what what you know Society or what sorry what Society what sociology teaches people is not to accept easy explanations it teaches us to organize our thinking so we can ask better questions and find better answers so a lot of it is critical thinking which is super needed these days right and these times we live in and when thinking about sociology in the workplace it's one of those Majors that people always say yeah but how do you use that like what are you gonna do with it it's kind of ironic I ended up teaching because people would always be like what are you going to teach you're going to be a social worker and I was like nah nah to both but then somehow I ended up teaching and I actually like it which is weird but anyway um so honestly though sociology is super applicable to many career fields for example a Cal State Fullerton where I also teach there's literally an entire class that just is like here's what you can do with your with your major and it shows how being able to look at the macro and the micro being able to understand groups of people being able to organize information being able to critically think and you know have these kind of sociological imagination perspective is actually incredibly applicable to many different career Fields right all right well that's it for this one and I'll catch you in chapter three