Understanding the Sociological Imagination and Key Sociological Concepts

Posted on Nov 9, 2023 in Psychology and Sociology

Joud Altalag – 115956852

What is the Sociological Imagination?

• We can better understand many phenomena—like college admissions policies—using the sociological imagination.
• The application of imaginative thought to the asking and answering of sociological questions. Someone using the sociological imagination “thinks themselves away” from the familiar routines of daily life

Troubles vs Issues:

• Troubles • They “occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his immediate relations with others; they have to do with his self and with those limited areas of social life of which [people are] directly and personally aware”
• Issues • “…have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of his inner life. They have to do with the organization of many such millieux into the institutions of a historical society as a whole…”

Sociology is Similar to Other Sciences!

• Observation and measurement
• Systematic definitions of object of study and measures that are reliable and valid
• Reliability: using the same measurement of the same group under the same conditions gives you the same result
• Validity: you are measuring the underlying object you think you are
• Causes and explanation
• How can events in the (social) world be accounted for by other things in the world?
• Why do things happen?

Sociology is Different from Other Sciences!

• Sociology’s object of inquiry is irreducibly social
• People are reflexive—they can take themselves as objects of inquiry and react to being categorized and measured.
• Impossible objectivity
• Everyone, including social scientists, is embedded in social structures, so strict scientific objectivity is impossible.

Social Construction

• We tend to think of the world, even the social world, as given or inevitable, but sociology emphasizes that things are socially constructed, which means…
• An idea or practice that a group of people agree exists. It is maintained over time by people taking its existence for granted.
• Examples
• Gender roles in children
• A football game
• Money
• Love
• Language.

Social Order

• The relative durability and persistence of social structures across time and space
• The stability of social life shows that social structures exist, and have norms, roles, and values that both constrain and motivate
• These norms, roles, and values get “inside” people through socialization
• Socialization is…
• …the social process through which children develop an awareness of social norms and values and achieve a distinct sense of self.

Micro and Macro

• Sociology also distinctively thinks at dual levels of analysis
• Micro • The study of human behavior in contexts of fact-to-face interaction
• Macro • The study of large-scale groups, organizations, or social systems

Social Change

• Sociology arose to try and understand two giant, deeply-connected, world-historical shifts
• The rise of (now post-) industrial capitalism
• The rationalization of science, business, and government

What’s the difference between “troubles” and “issues”?

• On the one hand, it’s a matter of perspective – Most major “troubles” can be viewed as issues – In this sense, the sociological imagination invites us to see the social forces at work and to break our socialization into just individual responsibility
• On the other hand, it is possible to have only a “trouble” – If there are no plausible social forces that influence the outcome (relative to other similar instances), then it’s a “trouble” – Example: paired comparison between identical groups of friends ● One falls apart because of “personality conflict,” the other doesn’t

Background

• Sociology has an odd relationship to its founders
• Social science bends the lens of science back on society itself, so social science ideas tend to get rephrased over time rather than superseded
• The social sciences are still sciences, they just work differently.

Background II

• Some other social sciences do try to resemble the physical sciences in an important respect
• Examples: political science, economics, and psychology
• Sociology, meanwhile, turns back all the way to the Enlightenment
• “Enlightenment” = the search for a rational (based on reason) and secular (not religiously ordained) explanation for social order
• Begins in 17th century Europe and lasts roughly until the French revolution (1789)
• Each founder had an important influence on a whole body of assumption that underlie specific studies today
• It’s very hard in modern sociology not to fall into one of these traditions
• The list isn’t exhaustive, but includes most of the important figures.

August Comte (1798-1857)

• Coined term “sociology”
• Wanted a secular “social physics” or the world
• Bonus: wanted a priest-like caste of sociologists to run everything

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

• Influenced by Comte but thought he wasn’t scientific enough
• Developed key concepts like…
• Social facts—the aspects of social life that shape our actions as individuals
• Social constraint—the conditioning influence on our behavior of the groups and societies of which we are members
• Anomie—a situation in which social norms lose their hold over individual behavior

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

• Known today for the “communist manifesto”
• Historically and politically stupendously important
• Substantively important for his materialist conception of history
• Group behavior and outlook shaped by relationship to means of production
• Saw rising inequality under capitalism
• Bonus: commodified into a lego you can buy

Max Weber (1864-1920)

• Much more contingent view of history than Marx, but…
• ….also thought that modernity meant the spread of bureaucracy and rationalization
• Bureaucracy—an organization marked by clear hierarchy of authority and written rules of procedure and staffed by full-time, salaries officials
• Looks for the religious origins of both

“Lost Founders”:

• Harriet Martineau (1802-1876)
• “Uhhh, dudes? Women exist!”
• Focused on key neglected social institutions like marriage, children, home life, and race relations
• Bonus: lost sense of taste, smell, and most of her hearing at a young age

• W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)
• Traced racial inequality in the U.S. back to its institutional underpinnings
• Historical analysis of the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War and subsequent social and economic policies
• Bonus: first black person to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard

Symbolic Interactionism

• A theoretical approach…that emphasizes the role of symbols and language as core elements of all human interaction
• Symbols: One item used to represent another
• Allows the exchange of meaning among people, and hence basically all social life
• Example: stop sign
• Example: diploma
• Most powerfully: language representing the self and identity

Functionalism

• …social events can best be explained in terms of…the contributions they make to the continuity of society
• These functions can be manifest (knowns to the group) or latent (unintended functions)
• Examples: rain dance, color guard and sporting events
• Things can be functional at one time and dysfunctional at another
• Example: religion in politics.

Marxism and Class Conflict

• Key agonistic theory (both SI and functionalism are consensual) focusing on power and ideology
• Power: the ability of individuals or the members of a group that achieve the aims or further the intentions they hold
• Ideologies: shared ideas or beliefs that serve to justify the interests of dominant groups
• Example: meritocracy in neoliberalism
• Meritocracy: “progress based on ability and talent”

Feminism and Feminist Theory

• Gender (and women’s experiences) are a central category of analysis
• Gender intersects with race and class
• There are persistent inequalities in Gender over time and across different societies that should be overcome

Rational Choice Theory

• The theory that an individual’s behavior is purposive (oriented to achieve a known goal)
• Narrow appropriation of Weber’s theory of action
• Used very expansively today, especially when coupled with “behavioral economics” and some strands of neuroscience

Postmodern Theory

• The belief that society is no longer governed by history or progress. Postmodern society is highly pluralistic and diverse, with no “grand narrative” guiding its developments
• Rejection, among other things, of Marx’s materialist conception of history
• The “play of representation” – Gap between a symbol and what (if anything) is being represented
• Example: postmodern gender representation

Sociology as Science

• You may think of science is only about achieving certainty about the world and holding an objective distance to learn about specific things, but…
• Science is about deep and wide knowledge about the world
• It is about the systematic use of different kinds of observation to…
• search for error, and
• recognize (and describe) uncertainty!
• The object of sociological analysis (society) is big and complex, so we need many different tools (methods) to study it
• Each tool is “scientific,” because each…
• Systematically searches for explanations for a broad class of phenomena
• Works to “self-correct,” by reproducing findings and looking for errors in a theory
• Carefully describes the uncertainty of its conclusions
• BUT, how do we put the findings of different tools in dialog?

Ethnography

• The firsthand study of people as they go about their lives, often using participant-observation or interviewing methods
• Pros
• Excellent window into people’s self-understanding of their social location
• Cons
• Very difficult to generalize
• Ethical concerns

Surveys

• Questionnaires sent to a population to gauge attitudes and behaviors
• Can be fixed-choice or open-ended, and of any kind of question of interest
• Can ask about behavior and/or belief
• Behavior: (National Health and Social Life Survey
• Belief: (General Social Survey
• Pros
• Can be of breathtaking scope (e.g., National Longitudinal Survey of Youth)
• Easier to quantify
• Cons
• Validity of findings
• Difficulty of sampling
• Example: research on undocumented immigrants

Key Statistical Terms I

• You are generally interested in a population….
• But you only have access to a sample…
• Which can be nonrandom (e.g., “convenience”) or random
• Your sample (and population) have some statistical characteristics, like
• Measures of central tendency (mean, mode, median)
• What best describes where the data is gathered?
• Measures of dispersal (standard deviation)
• How “spread out” is the data?

Key Statistical Terms II

• Using statistical techniques, especially correlation coefficients, you can infer, first, whether your sample is likely to be representative of your population, and second, whether there is (potentially) a causal relationship between two factors

Experiments

• Goal: to find out how a single causal mechanism works
• Random assignment of people into “manipulation” (also called “treatment”) and control groups
• (Better) example: double-blind RCT of drugs ( VERY hard to achieve in sociology!)
• Pros: precise control over variables and the environment of the experiment
• Cons: “external validity”
• Presumption of (many) random assignment designs: college populations are representative of “average” people

Comparative-Historical

• Use historical documentation to examine how people and institutions change over time
• Pros
• Ability to plumb the very deep past of human history
• Ability to trace out profound transformation in great detail
• Cons
• Limitation of the archive
• Limitation of scope.