Chapter 1 Sociology – Flashcards

o Sociology is the study of human society and the social structure and dynamics. o Making the familiar strange, a term coined by C. Wright Mills, he was meaning that to fully understand the human society, we need to make the look at natural habits or routines and break them down, look at them in a new way.

o Soc. Imag. -- the awareness of the relationship between personal experience and the larger society. o The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. People create history, Biography's are who and what these people are and what they did. History is what went on between people all over the world. History is the evidence of what was done, why it was done and how it turned out.

♣ Issues are local matters. ♣ Trouble is personable problems.

o such as economy and government, are the 'bike parts' and the overall society is the 'bicycle.' Social institutions are established sets of norms and subsystems that support each society's survival. ♣ Social identity is how a person defines themselves in a group, this relates back to social institutions because these groups can support each other, because they identify into those groups.

o Emile Durkheim ♣ First studies were over suicide. ♣ He found out a reason for suicide, called anomie, the sense normlessness caused by a drastic change in one's life. ♣ Often considered the founding practitioner of positive sociology, a strain with sociology that believes the social world an be predicted by certain relationships. o Karl Marx ♣ Most famous • His writings provided the theoretical basis for Communism. o Max Weber ♣ Emphasis on subjectivity became a foundation of interpretive sociology. ♣ On of his important contributions was the concept of Verstehen—understanding in German.

o Structural Functionalism—theory that attempts to explain why society functions the way it does by focusing on the relationships between the various social institutions that make up society ♣ Society, leads to social order/balance. o Conflict Theory—the idea that conflict between competing interests is the basic force of social change and society in general. ♣ Society, natural state of society, imbalance. o Symbolic Interactionism—a micro-level theory in which share meanings, orientations and assumptions form the basic motivations behind people's actions. ♣ Erving Goffman. ♣ Society, society is a network of roles.

o Feminist Theory—equality between men and women, want to see women represented in sociology studies. o Postmodernism—questioning the notion of progress and history. o Midrange Theory—attempts to predict how certain social institutions tend to function.

o Macro-- approach to sociology which emphasizes the analysis of social systems and populations on a large scale. o Micro-- one of the main points (or focuses) of sociology, concerning the nature of everyday human social interactions and agency on a small scale: face to face.