1. What is sociology?
Introducing sociology as a discipline
Week 4

2. Today
• The sociological imagination
– 6 aspects
• The historical development of sociological thought
– Copernicus, Galileo and the Englightenment
• Key sociologists
– Comte, Durkheim, Marx and Weber
– Forgotten sociologists
• Contemporary sociological strands (seminars)
– Functionalism, conflict theories and symbolic
interactionism

4. The Sociological Imagination
• What can we say about the simple act of
drinking a cup of coffee?

5. Social interaction and social
judgements

6. Global social networks and social and
economic development

7. • Did you know that
eighteenth-century
coffee houses were
centres of gossip and
political intrigue for
British social elites?
• A Coffee-house (c. 1700,
anonymous painting, British
Museum)
‘Coffee, (which makes the
Politician wise,
And see thro' all things with
his half shut Eyes)’
--Alexander Pope

8. Contemporary human rights debates

9. Use your Sociological Imagination
• a man cleaning his car on a Sunday morning.
• a woman jogging in the park
• a person in a suit queuing for the bus to work.
1. World in change – how do they show change?
2. Globalising of social life – how do they reflect globalisation?
3. Links to class and gender – how do they reflect status?
4. Comparative stance – is this the same in every country?
5. The personal = the social – who are the people?
6. Questions of gender – does it matter if it’s a man or woman?
With your partner: analyse the situations according to the 6 points. Focus
on how the individual’s act goes beyond his/her immediate context.
9

10. World in change and globalization of
social life
• The car is a symptom of
the industrialized
West—both cause and
effect of rapid social
change in the 20th C.
(Fordism: topic 14)
• Car manufacturers:
– export to every part of
the globe.
– Some cars (like the Ford
Mondeo) are
manufactured according
to a global division of
labour.
– same car may have a
different price
depending where and
when you buy it.

11. Class and comparative stance
Certain types of car:
symbols of status or
virility.
viewed as symbols of
freedom, mobility, and
affluence.
(Symbols: socialization
and identity.)
• It’s a Sunday, so we
assume this is a leisure
activity. Sunday is, after
all, a day when it is the
norm not to work in
Western Christian
societies.

12. The personal; the social and gender
However, the cleaner of the car
may be
– a taxi driver maintaining
his vehicle;
– a showroom car cleaner
doing overtime;
– reluctantly carrying out a
chore because their
partner made them.
• It’s a man:
– stereotyped interests and
leisure activities. Is there a
woman in the background?
– What is she doing on a Sunday
morning: having breakfast in
bed or housecleaning?
– Gender: topic 12

13. Questions of Gender/ Role reversal
Stereotypes—what about women washing
cars?
13

14. To summarise, the sociological imagination means
that the individual act goes beyond the immediate
context
• Using water for a non-essential
use:
– the politics of water is of
enormous significance, and the
ability to lavish scarce resources
on the upkeep of a consumer
durable is a luxury specific to
affluent ‘First World’ countries.
14

15. What is Sociology?
• Seeing the general in the
particular
– ‘Sociologists can identify
general patterns of social
life by looking at concrete
specific examples of social
life’ (Macionis & Plummer,
2008: 4)
– Many factors shape our
lives

16. What is Sociology?
• Seeing the strange in the
familiar
– ‘The first wisdom of sociology is
this: things are not what they
seem’ (Berger, 1963: 34)
– ‘Defamiliarise the familiar’
(Bauman, 1990: 15)
• Question whether people do things
by choice
• Accepting that society guides our
thoughts and deeds

17. What is Sociology?
• ‘The Sociological Imagination’ (C.
Wright Mills, 1959)
– Turns personal problems into
public issues
– Why is someone unemployed?
– ‘Something is wrong with me, I
can’t find a job’ (personal)
– ‘The economy’s collapsed, there
are no jobs to be found’ (public)

18. What is Sociology?
Is society a prison?
This question relates
to a key debate in
sociology: structure
versus agency.

19. Development of
Sociological Thinking
• Facts show that things occur, and sometimes how
they occur
• Theories are needed to show why they occur
• Theories involve ‘constructing abstract
interpretations’ that can be used to explain a wide
variety of empirical situations
• Not possible completely to separate research and
theory

20. Origins
• the late 1700s and early
1800s.
• the French Revolution and
mid-eighteenth-century
Industrial Revolution.
• The conditions of
possibility were laid before.
• We need to look at some
history, especially the
relationship between
religion, thought and
science.

21. Science as an Idea
• 1600s: men thought same as for millennia- 100 years
later Europe was already transforming its ways of
thinking by rationalism.
• Nikolaus Kopernikus (1473-1543)
– Catholic Priest, mathmatician and astronomer.
– heliocentric theory of planetery movement. What‘s this?
• New cosmology (replace 15 century-old
Ptolemaic system)
• earth no longer the centre of the universe, but the
sun.
• Galileo Galilei (1564- 1642):
– believed Copernican cosmology
– could prove it using telescopes
• Social implications of these ideas:
– wholly subversive of the social order.
Copernicus
Galileo

22. Why subversive?
• The use of science instead of religion to understand
the world. ‘What is human nature?’

23. The Enlightenment
• Scientific study of society
developed out of the
‘scientific revolution’
• Early ‘sociologists’
believed that human
societies can be studied
in the same way as in the
natural sciences
• A period of great
optimism – why would
science make people
optimistic?

24. Ten features of The Enlightenment
1. Reason
2. Empiricism
3. Science
4. Universalism
5. Progress
6. Individualism
7. Toleration
8. Freedom
9. Uniformity of human nature
10. Secularism

25. Ten features of The Enlightenment
1. Rationalism– we can gain knowledge using reason, certainty,
logic, analytic methods
2. Empiricism – the belief that all knowledge comes from
experience; application of scientific method, synthetic methods
3. Science - biology, physiology, physics
4. Universalism – there are rules which are true everywhere
5. Progress – making things better, moving forward
6. Individualism – the individual has different ideas, hopes,
desires, and rights
7. Toleration – tolerance of different religious beliefs
8. Freedom –human rights, democracy (Rousseau)
9. Uniformity of human nature – we are the same
10. Secularism – the Church should be separate from the State

26. Who was the first sociologist?
• French author Auguste Comte (1798-
1857)
– Coined the term ‘sociology’ in age of
turbulent post-revolutionary France
– Positivism: a means to understand the
world based on science
– Saw sociology as the end of a line of
development: most complex of all the
sciences

27. Who was the first sociologist?
• French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-
1917)
– ‘Study social facts as things!’
– social life can be analysed as rigorously as
objects in nature.
– Social facts:
• aspects of social life that shape our actions as
individuals:
• the state of the economy
• the influence of religion.
– Rapid change disrupts traditional life –
results in anomie (feeling of aimlessness
and despair)

28. Critical thinking
• Durkheim asked why some people
decide to take their own lives:
– Ethnicity?
– Climate?
– Mental disorder?
– Do the pressures come from inside or
outside?
• Durkheim chose to study suicide with
a purely sociological methodology:
– More women
– More Protestants than Catholics
– More single people than married
people
– Lower suicides in wartime. Why?

29. Durkheim (1897)
1. Egoistic suicides:
1. Low integration in society
2. Ties to group are weakened or broken
3. Catholics have less suicides that Protestants (strong social community vs stand
alone before God)
4. Marriage protects against suicide
5. Low suicides in wartime
2. Anomic suicide:
1. Lack of social regulation
2. Normlessness due to rapid change or instability in society (eg. Economic
upheaval)
3. Altruistic suicide:
1. Over-integration – social bonds are too strong
2. Society is valued more than the invidual
3. WW1; Japanese kamakazi pilots; suicide bombers; ETA; Anti-slave campaigners in
USA; hunger striking feminists
4. Fatalistic suicide:
1. Individual is over regulated by society
2. Oppression leads to feeling of powerlessness before fate

30. Emile Durkheim – Suicide (1897)
• Suicide seems to be a purely
personal act, the outcome of
extreme unhappiness. Is it?
• Durkheim discovered different
levels in suicide rates in
different countries.
• social factors influenced suicidal
behaviour.
• Durkheim turned a personal
problem into a public issue.

31. Karl Marx (1818-1883)
One of the most famous
sociologists?
What do you know
about Marx?

32. Key founders of sociology
• Karl Marx (1818-1883)
– Sought to explain the changes that
were taking place in society during the
time of the Industrial Revolution.
– Capitalism and class struggle central to
writing: capitalists vs. proletariat
– Materialist conception of history –
economic influences drive social
change
– Series of stages: primitive; feudal;
capitalist, communist
– Final stage achieved through
inevitable workers’ revolution

33. Karl Marx
• The Communist Manifesto
• ‘The history of all hitherto
existing societyis the history of
class struggles’
• Influences far reaching and taken
up by certain leaders as
justification of the forced change
of a political and social order:
• China
• Cuba
• North Korea

34. Marx and Religion
• God was:
– a human construct
– an alienated projection of humanity
• Religion alienates man from himself
by creating an all powerful image of
perfection, thus making himself
unhappy in the process.
• Philosophy must break this
dangerous enchantment and bring
man back to himself by exposing
the sources of religious illusion.

35. Marx, Capitalism & Class
• The possession of power by
one group or class inevitably
meant the subordination of
another.
• Revolution was the only
answer to this alienation.

36. Founders of Sociology
• Max Weber (1864-1920)
– Nature and causes of social change
– disagrees with Marx about class –
people influence society
– Economics, law, philosophy, history
– Cultural ideas and values shape
society and our individual actions.
– The sociology of religion. The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism:
• Religious ideas (espec. Puritanism)
created capitalist mentality

37. Max Weber (1864-1920)
• Studied religions of China, India and
the Near East, comparing them to
the West
• The ideal type:
– A pure form of a conceptual or
anyalytical models that can be used
to understand the real world
• Rationalization
– Tradition, superstition becomes
rational, instrumental.
– No room for sentiment (emotions) -
disenchantment
– Science, modern technology &
bureaucracy
– Bureaucratic domination could
crush the human spirit
– The Enlightenment has a dark side
with new dangers

38. Summary of The Aims of the Early
Sociologists
• To use scientific methods to study society – to
establish a ‘science of society’;
• To explain and understand social change;
• To improve/ transform society.

39. The Aims of the Early Sociologists
• Why did they have these
aims?
• The answer to this
question can only be
found if put into
historical context
• A period of rapid
modernisation in Europe

40. The Aims of the Early Sociologists
• Industrialisation and the
French Revolution (1789)
led to a range of rapid
social changes, for
example:
– the breakdown of
traditional society (the
growth of cities)
– the breakdown of religion
– the rise of science

41. The Aims of the Early Sociologists
• Modernisation led to new
problems that needed new
solutions.
• For example, urbanisation
led to homelessness,
poverty, crime, pollution, ill
health.
• Sociology can help us solve
these problems.

42. Today
• The sociological imagination
– 6 aspects
• The historical development of sociological thought
– Copernicus, Galileo and the Englightenment
• Key sociologists
– Comte, Durkheim, Marx and Weber
– Forgotten sociologists
• Contemporary sociological strands
– Functionalism, conflict theories and symbolic
interactionism

43. Homework
Giddens, A (2009), ‘Globalization and the Changing World’,
in Giddens, A (2009) [6th Edition] Sociology
Cambridge:Polity, pp107- 152
Macionis, J. J. and Plummer, K., Sociology. A Global
Introduction, Fourth Edition, (Harlow: Pearson
Education Ltd.), 2008. Chapter 2.
Suggested headings to focus reading and note taking:
1. Types of societies
2. Social change
3. Factors contributing to globalization
4. Theories of globalization
5. The Impact of globalization
6. Global Governance