Chapter 1: A Sociological Compass

The Sociological Perspective

• Provides a unique perspective on social events that differ from commonsense.
• Can be used to see how people understand the world.
• Suicide is thought of an act that is anti-social.
Sociology -> The systematic study of human behaviour in social context.
Social solidarity -> Refers to: The degree to which group member share beliefs and
values, and the intensity and frequency of their interaction.
Values -> Ideas about what is good and bad, right and wrong.
Social structures -> relatively stable patterns of social relations.
Sociological imagination -> the quality of mind that enables one to see the
connection between personal troubles and socials structure.
Research -> The process of systematically observing reality to assess the validity of
a theory.
Experiment -> A carefully controlled artificial situation that allows researchers to
isolate hypothesized causes and measure their effects precisely.
Variable -> A concept that can take on more than one value.
Randomization -> In an experiment, assigning individuals to groups by chance
processes.
Dependent variable -> The presumed effect in a cause-and effect relationships.
Experimental group -> The group that is exposed to the independent variable in an
experiment.
Control group -> The group that is not exposed to the independent variable in an
experiment.
The Sociological Explanation of Suicide
• French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) showed that suicide rates are
strongly influenced by social force.
• Suicide rates varied as a result of difference in the degree of social solidarity and
social values.
• The more social solidarity in a group, the more firmly anchored its individuals are
to the social world. This means the less likely they are to suicide.
• High-solidarity groups tend to have lower suicide rates than low-solidarity
groups (up to a point.)
• Married adults are half as likely as unmarried adults to commit suicide.
Marriage creates social ties and moral cement that binds them to society.
• Women are less likely to commit suicide because they are more involved in the
intimate social relations of family life.
• Jews are less likely to commit suicide because centuries of persecution have
turned them into a group that is more defensive and tightly knit.
• Seniors are more likely to commit suicide because they are more likely to live
alone.
Social Solidarity and Values
• Weak = Weak social integrations and weak social control.
• Strong = Strong social integrations and strong social control.

Durkhiem's Theory of Suicide

• Figure 1.2 on page 6
• Egoistic suicide: Weak social integrations. Example: Being alone.
• Anomic suicide: Weak social values governing behaviour. Example: Stock market
crashes.
• Altruistic suicide: Strong social integrations and values. Example: Soldiers going
into war.
• Fatalistic suicide: Excessive social norms and values. Example: Prisoner serving a
life sentence committing suicide.

The Sociological Imagination

• Aspects of your social structures, such as the level of social solidarity of the
groups you belong to, affect your innermost thoughts and feelings, influence your
actions, and thus help to shape who you are.
• Mills argued that one of the sociologist's tasks is to identify and explain the
connection between people's personal troubles and the social structures in which
people are embedded.

Levels of Analysis
• Microstructures: Patterns of intimate social relations formed during face to face
interaction. Examples: Families, friends, work associations.
• Macrostructures: Patterns of social relations that lie outside and above your
circle of intimates and acquaintances. Example: Patriarchy, social class and
religious institutions.
• Global structures: International organizations, global economic relations, and
patterns of worldwide travel and communications.
Historical Background
• The Scientific Revolution (1550s):
• Statements about society must be based on evidence, not just speculation.
• The Democratic Revolution (1750s):
• The social order is a product of human actions.
• People are responsible for creating society and are capable of solving social
issues.
• The Industrial Revolution (1775s):
• Created new and serious problems for social thinkers.
• Problems such as lost of religion, poverty and wars.
• "Sociological imagination" was created.

The Tension Between Science and Values

• French social thinker Auguste Comte (1798-1857) coined the term sociology in
1838.
• Adopt scientific method to the study of society.
• Motivated by strong opposition to rapid change in French society.
• Similar tension found in the work of Durkheim, Marx and Weber.

Sociological Theory and Theorists

Functionalism
• Human behaviour is governed by stable patterns of social relations. Usually
macrostructures.
• Examines how social structures contribute to social stability.
• Based on norms and values. Social solidarity binds people together.
• Social problems are solved by agreement.

Conflict Theory
• Focuses on large macro level structures.
• Social inequality produce conflict.
• Powerful groups try to maintain their power, while weaker groups struggle for
inequality.
• Lessening privilege will lower conflict and increase human welfare.
• Karl Marx (1818-1883):
• Class Conflict: The struggle between classes to resist and overcome the
opposition of other classes.
• Large and growing class of workers oppose a small class of wealthy owner.
• Workers will become aware of their class (class consciousness.)
• They will form a social movement to abolish private property and a communist
society.
• Max Weber (1864-1920):
• Argued against Karl Marx, that Capitalism will create a middle class, that will
stabilize the conflict between the poor and rich.
• Social conflict also include: Religion, ethic, political and class.

Symbolic Interactionism
• Focuses on micro level social settings.
• Social life is possible if only people attach meaning to things.
• Help people create their social circumstances and do not merely react to them.
• Symbolic integrationists sometimes validate unpopular and unofficial
viewpoints.
• Erving Goffman (1922-1982):
• Dramaturgical approach to Sociology.
• People are social actors that act a certain way to impress others.

Feminism
• Patriarchy: Male domination in society.
• Patriarchy is determined by structures of social power and convention.
• Patriarchy in micro, macro and global levels.
• Getting rid of gender inequality will be benefit everyone in society.

Conducting Research
• Controlling bias and assessing the validity of theories by conducting research.

The Research Cycle

1. Formulate question: A question must be stated so that it can be answered by
systematically collecting and analyzing sociological data.
2. Review existing literature: Stimulates the sociological imaginations, allows
them to refine their initial questions and prevent duplication.
3. Select method: Each data collection has strength and weakness.
4. Collect data: Observing subjects, interviewing them and so forth.
5. Analyze data: Learn things that nobody knew before. Data confirm some of
your expectations and cofound others.
6. Report results: Allows other sociologists to scrutinize and criticize the
research. Errors can be corrected and new sophisticated questions can be
formulated.

Ethics in Sociological Research

• Must do no harm to the subjects.
• Subjects have the right to decide whether their attitudes and behaviours may be
revealed in public.
• Cannot use data in a way that allows them to be traced to a particular subject.
• Subject must be told how the information they supply will be used. Must also be
allowed to judge the degree of personal risk involved in answering questions.

The Main Sociological Research Methods

Experiments
• Allows researchers to isolate single cause of theoretical interest and measure its
effect with high reliability.
• Argued that experiments are highly artificial situations.
• Removing people from their natural social settings lowers the validity of
experimental results.

Surveys
• Results of surveys show a weaker relationships between two variables than
experiment.
• To ensure survey questions elicit valid responses, researchers must guard
against four danger:
1. Exclusion of part of the population from the sampling frame.
2. The refusal of some people to participate in the survey
3. The unwillingness of some respondents to answer questions frankly.
4. The asking of confusing, leading or inflammatory questions or questions that
refer to several, unimportant or non-current events.

Field Research
• Observing people wherever they meet.
• Presence of the researcher may cause the person to act a different way.
• Meaning of the observed behaviour may remain obscure to the researcher.
• Allows researchers to develop a deep and sympathetic understand of the way
people see the world.
• Usually involved one researcher in one social setting, it is difficult to know
whether other researchers would measure things in the same way and is difficult
to know how broadly findings can be generalized to other settings.

Analysis of Existing Documents and Official Statistics

• Existing documents and official statistics are created by people other than the
researcher for purposes other than sociological research.
• Save time and money.
• Historical analysis.
• Reactivity is not a problem.
• Not created with the researcher's needs in mind.
• Contains biases.
Chapter 2: Culture

Culture as Problem Solving

• Culture is the sum of practices, languages, symbols, beliefs, values, ideologies
and material objects people create to deal with real-life problems.
• High classes is associated with the upper class. Judge in relation to the majority
culture. "Popular culture."
• Ethnic culture is associated with a cultural minority group. Judge in relation to
the perspective of the majority ethnic culture. "Ethnocentrism."
• Culture is socially transmitted and it require a society to persist.

Symbols
• Abstraction: The capacity to create general ideas or ways of thinking that are
not linked to particular instances.
• Anything that carries a particular meaning.
• Allow us to classify experience and generalize from it.

Norms and Values

• Cooperation: The capacity to create a complex social life by sharing resources
and working together.
• Accomplished by using norms and values.

Production, Material Culture, and Non-Material Culture

• Production: The capacity to make and use tools. It improves our ability to take
what we want from nature.
• Material culture: Tangible tools.
• Non-material culture: Symbols, norms and other non-tangible elements of
culture.

Types of Norms
• Folkway: The least important norm, least severe punishment.
• Mores: Core norms that people believe are essential for the survival or their
group or their society.
• Taboos: The strongest norms, when someone violates a taboo, it causes
revulsion in the community and punishment is severe.

Language and The Sapir-Whorf Thesis

• Language is one of the most important parts of culture.
• Language allows culture to develop.
• Sapir-Whorf Thesis: We experience certain things in our environment and form
concepts about those things. We then develop language to express out concepts.
Finally, language influences how we see the world.

Verbalization
(language)

Conceptualization
(thought)

Culture as Freedom and Ethnocentrism

• Ethnocentrism: Judging other cultures exclusively by the standards of your own.

Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Production

• Symbolic interactionist regard culture as an independent variable.
• In their view people do not accept culture passively.
• People produce and interpret culture and choose how culture influences us.
Cultural Diversity
• Canadian society has diversified.

Multiculturalism
• Policy that reflects Canada's ethnic and racial diversity in the past and
enhances its ethnic and racial diversity today.
• Critics of multiculturalism say:
1. Hurts the education of minority students by forcing them to spend too much
time on non-core subjects. (Countered by saying minority students develop
pride and self-esteem. )
2. Causes political disunity and results in more interethnic and interracial conflict.
(Political unity and interethnic and interracial harmony simply maintain
inequality.)
3. Encourages the growth of cultural relativism. (Modern cultural relativism
encourages tolerance and it should be promoted.

A Conflict Analysis of Culture: The Rights Revolution

• Rights revolution: The process by which socially excluded groups have struggled
to win equal rights under the law and in practice.
• Some members of groups who have suffered demand reparations in form of
money, symbolic gesture, land and political autonomy.
• The rights revolution fragment Canadian culture by: Legitimizing the grievances
of groups that were formerly excluded from social participation and renewing their
pride in their identity and heritage.

From Diversity to Globalization

• Cultural fragmentation picked up steam during industrialization.
• Globalization allows expansion of international trade and investment.
• Globalization destroys political, economic and cultural isolation and brings
people together.
• People are less obliged to accept the culture in which they are born and are
freer combine elements of different culture.

Aspects of Postmodernism
• Postmodernism: Culture characterized by an eclectic mix of cultural elements
from different times and places, the erosion of authority, and the declines of
consensus around core values.

Blending Culture
• Easier to create individualized belief systems and practices by blending different
culture and historical periods in the postmodern era.
• The increasing number of Canadians now identify themselves as Eastern non-
Christian religion or have "no religion."
• Canadians are increasingly willing to feat from a religious buffet.
• We have many more ways to worship than we used to.

Erosion of Authority
• We have become more likely to challenge authority.
• Likely to be critical of social institutions, such as religious organizations.

Instability of Core Values

• Value shifts are more rapid and consensus has broken down.
• There is a decline of consensus because of the "big historical projects."

Is Canada the First Postmodern County?

• Image of Canadians were: peaceful, conservative and respectful of authority.
• Canada became an independent country in a gradual, evolutionary manner.
• American culture is an anti-authoritarian culture.
• The contrast between deferential Canadian culture and anti-authoritarian
American culture is inaccurate today. The questioning of authority has speeded.
• Americans are more deferential to traditional institutional authority than
Canadian are because of the attitudes towards family, state, government, religion
or big businesses.
• Canadian culture is characterized by a high degree of tolerance and respect for
diversity.

Culture as Constraint

Rationalization
• Rationalization: The application of the most efficient means to achieve given
goals and the unintended, negative consequences of doing so.
• The use the work clock is an example of rationalization.
• The use of work clock allows us to maximize work, but leads to a "too-hectic
life."
• Max Weber's thesis about rationalization are:
1. The application of the most efficient means to achieve given goals.
2. The unintended, negative consequences of doing so.

Consumerism
• Consumerism: The tendency to define ourselves in terms of the goods and
services we purchase.
• Subculture: A set of distinctive values, norms and practices within a larger
culture.
• People started skipping ads on television.
• Advertisers had an idea to place products in TV shows and television.
• People are motivated by advertising, which is based on the accurate insight that
people will tend to be considered cultural outcasts if they fail to conform to stylish
trends.

From Counterculture to Subculture

• Counterculture: Subversive subcultures that oppose dominant values and seek
to replace them.
• Consumerism tames counterculture.
• It does this by transforming deviations from mainstream culture into means of
making money and by enticing rebels to become entrepreneurs.
• The system of social control keeps counterculture from being a threat to social
stability.
• Two examples of this are Ozzy Osbourne and hip-hop.

Chapter 3: Socialization

Social Isolation and Socialization

• Socialization: The process by which people learn their culture. They do so by
entering into and disengaging from a succession of roles and becoming aware of
themselves as they interact with others.
• Role: A set of expected behaviours, or the behaviour expected of a person
occupying a particular position in society.
• Rene Spitz: Without childhood socialization, human potential remains
undeveloped.

The Crystallization of Self-Identity

• The central growth process in adolescence is to define the self through the
clarification of experience and to establish self-esteem.

The Symbolic Interactionist Foundations of Childhood Socialization

• Social interaction enables infants to begin developing a self-image or sense of
self.
• Self: A set of ideas and attitudes about who one is as an independent being

Sigmund Freud
• Infants being to form a self-image when their demands are denied.
• The infant begins to sense that its needs differ from it's parents, has an
existence independent of others and must balance its needs with the realities of
life.
• The infant eventually develops a sense of appropriate behaviour and a sense of
what is right or wrong.
• A physiological mechanism develops.

Cooley
• Looking-glass self: Cooley's description of the way our feelings about who we
are depend largely on how we see ourselves evaluated by others.

George Herbert Mead (1863-1932)

• I: The subjective and impulsive aspect of the self that is present from birth.
• Me: The objective component of the self that emerges as people communicate
symbolically and learn to take the role of the other.
• Seeing yourself from other people's points of view.

Mead's Four Stages of Development

1. Children learn to use language and other symbols by imitating important
people in their lives. Meads called this significant others: The people who play
important roles in the early socialization experiences of children.
2. Children pretend to be other people. They use their imaginations to role-play
such as "doctor."
3. Children learn to play complex games at the age of seven that require them to
simultaneously take the role of several other people.
4. Taking the role of a generalized other: A person's image of cultural standards
and how they apply to him or her.
• The structure of a person's society and his or her position in it also
influences socialization.

Gender Differences
• Carol Gilligan showed that sociological factors help explain differences in the
sense of self that boy and girls usually develop.
• Parents and teachers tend to pass on different cultural standards to each
gender.
Civilization Differences
• Sociological factors help explain the development of different ways of thinking
or cognitive styles of different civilizations.

Function, Conflict, Symbolic Interaction, and Gender: How Agents of Socialization

Work
• Functionalists: Socialization helps maintain orderly social relations.
• Conflict and feminist: Discord based on class, gender and other divisions that is
inherent in socialization and that sometimes causes social change.
• Symbolic interactionist: Highlight the creativity of individuals in attaching
meaning to their social surroundings. Focus on the ways in which we often step
outside of, and modify the values and roles that authorities try to each us.

Family Functions
• Primary socialization: The process of acquiring the basic skills needed to function
in society during childhood.
• Families are still an important agent of primary socialization, but they are less
important than they once were.

Schools: Functions and Conflict

• Secondary socialization: Socialization outside the family after childhood.
• Hidden curriculum: Teaches students what will be expected of them as
conventionally good citizens once they leave school.
• Teaches students punctuality, respect for authority, the importance of
competition in leading to excellent performance and other conformist behaviours
and beliefs that are expected of good citizens.

Symbolic Interactionism and The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

• Thomas theorem: Situations we define as real become real in their
consequences.
• Self-fulfilling prophecy: An expectation that helps bring about what it predicts.
• Hidden curriculum suggest that the expectations of working-class and racial-
minority students often act self-fulfilling prophecies.

Peer Groups
• Peer group is the dominant socializing agent from middle childhood through
adolescence.
• Young people become to develop their own identities by rejecting some
parental values, experimenting with new culture and engaging in various forms of
rebellious behaviour.
• Once adolescents mature, family has a more enduring influence.
• Peer groups help integrate young people into larger society.
• Teaches them how to adapt to the ways of larger society.

The Mass Media

• Important socializing agent.

Self-Socialization
• Self-socialization: Choosing socialization influences from the wide variety of
mass media offerings.

The Mass Media and Feminist Approach to Socialization

• Gender roles: The set of behaviours associated with widely shared expectations
about how males or females are supposed to act.
• Males are expected to be the sexual aggressors.
• Females are portrayed to desire love before sexual intimacy.
• People are able to choose which media messages influence them.
• These messages are those that support conventional expectations about how
males and females are supposed to act.

Resocialization and Total Institutions

• Resocialization: What occurs when powerful socializing agents deliberately
cause rapid change in a person`s values, roles and self-conception, sometimes
against that person`s will.
• Initiation rite: A ritual that signifies the transition of the individual from one
group to another and helps ensure his or her loyalty to the new group.
• Three stages:
1. Separation from the person`s old status and identity.
2. Degradation, disorientation and stress.
3. Acceptance of the new group culture and status.
• Erving Goffman (1922-1982)
• Total institutions: Settings in which people are isolated from the larger
society and under the strict control and constant supervision of a specialized
staff.
 • Resocialization takes place in total institutions.

Socialization Across the Life Course

Adult Socialization and the Flexible Self

• Anticipatory socialization: Beginning to take on the norms and behaviours of the
roles to which one aspires.
• People will always have to learn new roles and adopt new cultural values.
• Two factors that changes people identities are globalization and the freedom to
design our selves.
• People defined themselves partly in terms of their bodies.
• People can change their body: Exercise, sex-change, plastic surgery and organ
transplant.

Self-Identity and The Internet

• Computer-assisted social interaction affects how people think of themselves.
• Virtual communities: An association of people, scattered across the city or
around the world, who communicate via computer about a subject of common
interest.
• People are free to assume new identities and are encouraged to discover parts
of themselves they were formerly unaware of.

Dilemmas of Childhood and Adolescent Socialization

• In pre-industrial societies, children did not have time for a childhood.

The Emergence of Childhood and Adolescence

• Prolonged childhood was necessary for better educated adults to do complex
work because childhood gave young people a chance to prepare for adult life.
• Prolonged childhood is possible because the average lifespan is now higher than
before.
Problems of Childhood and Adolescent Socialization Today

Declining Adult Supervision and Guidance

• Young people are left alone to socialize themselves and build their own
community.
Increasing Media Influence
• Making young people uncertain about how they should behave.

Declining Extracurricular Activities and Increasing Adult Responsibilities

• Extracurricular activities help develop concrete skills and make sense of the
world and their place in it.
• Young kids these days are too busy with other things to enjoy extracurricular.

``The Vanishing Adolescent``

• Because of all these factors sociologist wonder if childhood and adolescence are
starting to disappear.
• The experience and meaning of childhood and adolescence now seem to be
changing radically.