Week 1 introduction to Sociology WCCC 2015
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Introduction to Sociology
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Week 1 introduction to Sociology WCCC 2015
- 1. Introduction to Sociology Ray Brannon
- 2. A long time ago in a distant galaxy ……I began to program with IBM cards on very big computers that didn’t have the power of your smart phone.
- 4. Trapped!! Psycho –Social Interweave • Personal destinies are linked to societal structures • PA Study of Care for the Elderly • Blinding pace of transformational change
- 5. Retired President & CEO ofRetired President & CEO of Choice TechnologiesChoice Technologies
- 6. The Challenge: To become a critical thinker on sociologic issues because ….. your personal history matters!!
- 7. • Locating yourself in the period in which you live- how you are shaped by society and how you can shape society • Link history and biography – three generations • My grandfather, father, me, son, grandson
- 8. What is Epistemology? What is a Paradigm?
- 9. Paradigm Shift: The destruction an old theory by new facts and its replacement as a new theory that fits the new facts. Thomas Kuhn
- 10. What is a Paradigm Shift?
- 14. Trapped by Self Deception and Assumptions
- 15. Developing Self and Social Consciousness • Distinguishing personal problems from public issues resulting from social structure • Troubles versus issues: personal/ societal • One mans death is a tragedy 45 people killed by a terrorist blast is a statistic.
- 16. Did You Know? We Are a Piece of the Social Puzzle
- 17. Sociology is the study of human society. What Is Sociology? 17
- 18. Thinking like a sociologist means looking at the worldlooking at the world around you in a new way.around you in a new way. Challenge conventional wisdom and question what most people take for granted.
- 19. 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. The Sociological Imagination
- 20. Imagine – John Lennon Imagine there's no heaven It's easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people Living for today... Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace... You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the world will be as one Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man Imagine all the people Sharing all the world... You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the world will live as one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRhq-yO1KN8
- 23. 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). What groups are you in? Or not in? Write down a list of groups that you define you. What Is Social Identity? 23
- 24. 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 a Social Institution? 24
- 25. 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. Divisions within Sociology 25
- 26. Think about you own backgrounds, including their race, gender, religion, and economic class. How larger social forces—the economy, civil rights, religious movements, and so on—have shaped what it means to be a person “like you” someone with the same list of traits—in society today.
- 27. Functionalism, conflict theory, feminist theory, symbolic interactionism, postmodernism, and midrange theory are all modern sociological theories. Theories of Sociology 27 Macro Theories
- 29. 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
- 30. • Macro-sociology: Where You meet society at large. • Micro-sociology: Where the YOU meet the Group What bothers you? 30
Editor's Notes
- What is knowledge? How do we acquire it? How do we know what we know.
- Society is a very broad field, so while sociologists are interested in society at large, many sociologists study just a small segment of society. Some examples of subfields within this discipline include the sociology of sports, religion, music, medicine, pop culture, and so on. If you are interested in seeing more examples, you can visit www.asanet.org, the American Sociological Association’s website, and look at their chapters. There you’ll get an idea of the kinds of things that interest contemporary sociologists! Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Times_Square_Panorama.jpg
- C. Wright Mills wrote The Sociological Imagination in 1959. In Mills’s opinion, we can’t begin to understand our personal lives without thinking about the social context.
- The different groups that you belong to help you tell others about your identity. You might say you are a daughter or son or a parent (your family is one of your groups). You might say you are a student (your school could be another group). You might also identify yourself by saying which groups you are not in (you’re not a college drop-out, for instance).
- We generally think of institutions as stable entities that “just are,” but the reality is that these institutions are purposefully structured. Additionally, when we think of institutions, we tend to think that they “have always been this way,” but in fact, institutions change over time, reflecting the values of a society.
- For example, a sociologist might be interested in knowing how an individual makes the decision to go to college. It would be helpful to sit down with that person and talk. This would be a micro-level analysis, or an example of microsociology. On the other hand, if a sociologist wanted to know how a number of people made the decision to go to college last year, it would be impossible to sit down with each person and ask, so looking at statistical data would be more efficient. This would be an example of a macro-level study, or macrosociology.
- Each of these theories might look at the same kinds of social phenomena, but they might look for different things (for example, we could ask what the function of education is; if education is the result of conflict or if it causes conflict; what symbolic relationships are present in education, etc.) Having different theories is like having different pairs of glasses – you have one pair for reading, one for driving, one for seeing in the distance, sunglasses, safety glasses, and so on. Looking through the different pairs will help you see the same thing in different ways!
- Sociology is a field within the social sciences, which are interested in different aspects of societies and social life. However, sociology is a very unique field.