Chapter 1

Copyright ©2013 W.W. Norton, Inc.
You
May Ask
Yourself
Core Third Edition
Dalton Conley
You
May Ask
Yourself
Third Edition
Dalton Conley
Chapter 1
Sociological
Imagination:
An Introduction

2Copyright ©2013 W.W. Norton, Inc.
Paradox

What Is Socialization?
• Sociology is the study of human society.

The Sociological Imagination
• Coined by C. Wright Mills, this tool
helps us to:
– connect our personal experiences to society
at large and greater historical forces.
– “make the familiar strange,” or to question
habits or customs that seem “natural” to us.

What Is a Social Institution?
• Social institutions are networks of
structures in society that work to
socialize the groups of people within
them. Examples include:
– the legal system
– the labor market
– the educational system
– the military
– the family

What Is Social Identity?
• The way individuals define themselves in
relationship to groups they are a part of
(or in relationship to groups they choose
not to be a part of).

The History of Sociology
• Auguste Comte — society is better understood
by determining the logic or scientific laws
governing human behavior, called social
physics or positivism.
• Harriet Martineau — first to translate Comte’s
written works to English; one of the earliest
feminist social scientists
• Karl Marx — theory of historical materialism,
which identifies class conflict as the primary
cause of social change

• Max Weber — emphasis on subjectivity
became a foundation of interpretive sociology
• Émile Durkheim — founder of positivist
sociology; developed the theory that division
of labor helps to determine how social
cohesion is maintained, or not maintained, in
that society
• Georg Simmel — formal sociology, or a
sociology of pure numbers (for instance, how a
group of two is different than a group of three)

• Functionalism, conflict theory, feminist theory,
symbolic interactionism, postmodernism, and
midrange theory are all modern sociological
theories.

American Sociology
• Early American sociology became prominent at the
University of Chicago, so the perspective that
emerged became known as the “Chicago School.”
Chicago thinkers include:
– Charles Horton Cooley
– George Herbert Mead
– W. I. Thomas
– W.E.B. DuBois
– Jane Addams
• The Chicago School focused on empirical research,
with the belief that people’s behaviors and
personalities are shaped by their social and physical
environments.

Sociology and Its Cousins
• Sociology focuses on making comparisons
across cases to find patterns and create
hypotheses about how societies work now
or how they worked in the past.
• Sociology looks at how individuals interact
with one another as well as at how groups,
small and large, interact with one another.

Sociology and Its Cousins
• Distinctions are important, but a lot of overlap
exists between the work done in different
academic disciplines.
History and
anthropology –
cultural
anthropology in
particular – tend
to focus more on
particular
circumstances.
Political
science
focuses on one
aspect of
social relations
– power.
Psychology and
biology examine
things on a more
micro level than
sociology does,
and economics is
an entirely
quantitative
discipline.

Divisions within Sociology
• Microsociology understands
local interactional contexts,
focusing on face-to-face
encounters and gathering data
through participant
observations and in-depth
interviews.
• Macrosociology looks at social
dynamics across whole
societies or large parts of
them and often relies on
statistical analysis to do so.

Concept Quiz
1. Which of the following is an example of using one’s
sociological imagination?
a) being in unfamiliar surroundings and imagining being
in a more comfortable place
b) creating different hypotheses to explain an
individual’s behavior
c) creating a story to explain unfamiliar social customs
d) being puzzled by how people in another country greet
one another and then thinking about how people in
your own country greet one another and why they do it
the way they do

Concept Quiz
2. Social identity is _______.
a) a construct that no longer has meaning
in the postmodern era
b) a collection of social roles that a person
might fill
c) a way that individuals define themselves
in relation to groups they are a part of or
groups they choose not to be a part of
d) determined by the social group into
which a person is born

Concept Quiz
3. The Chicago School of American Sociology
emphasized the importance of ____________.
a) the social and moral consequences of the
division of labor
b) the environment in shaping people’s
behavior and personalities
c) heavy statistical research
d) none of the above

Concept Quiz
4. Sociology is distinct from other academic
disciplines in its attempt to _____.
a) embrace quantitative and qualitative
research
b) ask probing questions about how societies
function
c) detect patterns in how different societies
handle or respond to similar phenomena
d) examine human interaction on the micro
level

Concept Quiz
5. Which of the following is an example of a
study that might be undertaken by a
macrosociologist?
a) assessing how people choose where to sit on a
public bus
b) observing customers’ responses to being
greeted upon entering a store
c) conducting a statistical analysis of when
professional men and women choose to start
families
d) examining how men and women react to
riding in an elevator with an infant

Discussion Questions
1. Had you ever heard of sociology before?
a) Yes
b) No

Discussion Questions
2. Have you ever taken a sociology class before?
a) Yes
b) No

You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist, 3rd Edition Copyright ©2013 W.W. Norton, Inc. 21
Part opener I

Chapter opener

Sociologist C. Wright Mills commuting to Columbia University on his motorcycle.
How does Mills’s concept of the sociological imagination help us make the familiar strange?

Vincent Vega (John Travolta) describes his visit to a McDonald’s in Amsterdam
to Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson).

Figure 1.1 Returns to Schooling

Two famous college dropouts. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (left) attended Harvard but dropped
out before graduating. John Mackey (right) quit university before founding Whole Foods.

College-campus bulletin boards are covered with advertisements like this promoting Web sites that
generate diplomas. Why are these fake diplomas not worth it?

Tobacco company Philip Morris changed its name to Altria at a stockholders’ meeting in January 2003.

W. E. B. DuBois (second from right) at the office of the NAACP’s Crisis magazine.

Female textile workers struggle with a national guardsman during a 1929 strike in Gastonia,
North Carolina. How might a conflict theorist interpret labor unrest?

Las Vegas, the ultimate postmodern city, borrows from various regions, times, and cultures to shape
its constantly changing landscape.

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (on the left) and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler at a 1937 rally in Munich.
How do different disciplines provide various tools to analyze the rise of fascism under these leaders?

How does anthropologist Natasha Schull’s research on slot-machine gamblers challenge the
traditional boundaries between anthropology and sociology?

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You
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Core Third Edition
Dalton Conley
You
May Ask
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Third Edition
Dalton Conley
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Sociological Imagination:
An Introduction
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