ZIMSEC SOCIOLOGY

Objectives

1.1. What Is Sociology?

• Explain concepts central to sociology
• Describe the different levels of analysis in sociology: micro-sociology and macro-sociology
• Understand how different sociological perspectives have developed

1.2. The History of Sociology

• Explain why sociology emerged when it did

• Describe the central ideas of the founders of sociology
• Describe how sociology became a separate academic discipline

1.3. Theoretical Perspectives

• Explain what sociological theories are and how they are used
• Describe sociology as a multi-perspectival social science, which is divided into positivist,
interpretive and critical paradigms
• Understand the similarities and differences between structural functionalism, critical sociology,
and symbolic interactionism

1.4. Why Study Sociology?

• Explain why it is worthwhile to study sociology

• Identify ways sociology is applied in the real world

Introduction to Sociology
Concerts, sports games, and political rallies can have very large crowds. When you attend one of these
events, you may know only the people you came with. Yet you may experience a feeling of connection
to the group. You are one of the crowd. You cheer and applaud when everyone else does. You boo and
yell alongside them. You move out of the way when someone needs to get by, and you say “excuse me”
when you need to leave. You know how to behave in this kind of crowd.

It can be a very different experience if you are travelling in a foreign country and find yourself in a crowd
moving down the street. You may have trouble figuring out what is happening. Is the crowd just the
usual morning rush, or is it a political protest of some kind? Perhaps there was some sort of accident or
disaster. Is it safe in this crowd, or should you try to extract yourself? How can you find out what is going
on? Although you are in it, you may not feel like you are part of this crowd. You may not know what to
do or how to behave.

Even within one type of crowd, different groups exist and different behaviours are on display. At a rock
concert, for example, some may enjoy singing along, others may prefer to sit and observe, while still
others may join in a mosh pit or try crowd surfing. On February 28, 2010, Sydney Crosby scored the
winning goal against the United States team in the gold medal hockey game at the Vancouver Winter
Olympics. Two hundred thousand jubilant people filled the streets of downtown Vancouver to celebrate
and cap off two weeks of uncharacteristically vibrant, joyful street life in Vancouver. Just over a year
later, on June 15, 2011, the Vancouver Canucks lost the seventh hockey game of the Stanley Cup finals
against the Boston Bruins. One hundred thousand people had been watching the game on outdoor
screens. Eventually 155,000 people filled the downtown streets. Rioting and looting led to hundreds of
injuries, burnt cars, trashed storefronts and property damage totaling an estimated $4.2 million. Why
was the crowd response to the two events so different?

A key insight of sociology is that the simple fact of being in a group changes your behaviour. The group is
a phenomenon that is more than the sum of its parts. Why do we feel and act differently in different
types of social situations? Why might people of a single group exhibit different behaviours in the same
situation? Why might people acting similarly not feel connected to others exhibiting the same behaviour?
These are some of the many questions sociologists ask as they study people and societies.

1.1. What Is Sociology?

A dictionary defines sociology as the systematic study of society and social interaction. The word
“sociology” is derived from the Latin word socius (companion) and the Greek word logos (speech or
reason), which together mean “reasoned speech about companionship”. How can the experience of
companionship or togetherness be put into words or explained? While this is a starting point for the
discipline, sociology is actually much more complex. It uses many different methods to study a wide
range of subject matter and to apply these studies to the real world.

The sociologist Dorothy Smith (1926 – ) defines the social as the “ongoing concerting and coordinating
of individuals’ activities” (Smith 1999). Sociology is the systematic study of all those aspects of life
designated by the adjective “social.” These aspects of social life never simply occur; they are organized
processes. They can be the briefest of everyday interactions—moving to the right to let someone pass
on a busy sidewalk, for example—or the largest and most enduring interactions—such as the billions of
daily exchanges that constitute the circuits of global capitalism. If there are at least two people involved,
even in the seclusion of one’s mind, then there is a social interaction that entails the “ongoing
concerting and coordinating of activities.” Why does the person move to the right on the sidewalk?
What collective process lead to the decision that moving to the right rather than the left is normal?
Think about the T-shirts in your drawer at home. What are the sequences of linkages and social
relationships that link the T-shirts in your chest of drawers to the dangerous and hyper-exploitive
garment factories in rural China or Bangladesh? These are the type of questions that point to the unique
domain and puzzles of the social that sociology seeks to explore and understand.

What Are Society and Culture?

Sociologists study all aspects and levels of society. A society is a group of people whose members
interact, reside in a definable area, and share a culture. A culture includes the group’s shared practices,
values, beliefs, norms and artifacts. One sociologist might analyze video of people from different
societies as they carry on everyday conversations to study the rules of polite conversation from different
world cultures. Another sociologist might interview a representative sample of people to see how email
and instant messaging have changed the way organizations are run. Yet another sociologist might study
how migration determined the way in which language spread and changed over time. A fourth
sociologist might study the history of international agencies like the United Nations or the International
Monetary Fund to examine how the globe became divided into a First World and a Third World after the
end of the colonial era.

These examples illustrate the ways society and culture can be studied at different levels of analysis, from
the detailed study of face-to-face interactions to the examination of large-scale historical processes
affecting entire civilizations. It is common to divide these levels of analysis into different gradations
based on the scale of interaction involved. As discussed in later chapters, sociologists break the study of
society down into four separate levels of analysis: micro, meso, macro, and global. The basic distinction,
however, is between micro-sociology and macro-sociology.

The study of cultural rules of politeness in conversation is an example of micro-sociology. At the micro-
level of analysis, the focus is on the social dynamics of intimate, face-to-face interactions. Research is
conducted with a specific set of individuals such as conversational partners, family members, work
associates, or friendship groups. In the conversation study example, sociologists might try to determine
how people from different cultures interpret each other’s behaviour to see how different rules of
politeness lead to misunderstandings. If the same misunderstandings occur consistently in a number of
different interactions, the sociologists may be able to propose some generalizations about rules of
politeness that would be helpful in reducing tensions in mixed-group dynamics (e.g., during staff
meetings or international negotiations). Other examples of micro-level research include seeing how
informal networks become a key source of support and advancement in formal bureaucracies or how
loyalty to criminal gangs is established.

Macro-sociology focuses on the properties of large-scale, society-wide social interactions: the dynamics
of institutions, classes, or whole societies. The example above of the influence of migration on changing
patterns of language usage is a macro-level phenomenon because it refers to structures or processes of
social interaction that occur outside or beyond the intimate circle of individual social acquaintances.
These include the economic and other circumstances that lead to migration; the educational, media,
and other communication structures that help or hinder the spread of speech patterns; the class, racial,
or ethnic divisions that create different slangs or cultures of language use; the relative isolation or
integration of different communities within a population; and so on. Other examples of macro-level
research include examining why women are far less likely than men to reach positions of power in
society or why fundamentalist Christian religious movements play a more prominent role in American
politics than they do in Canadian politics. In each case, the site of the analysis shifts away from the
nuances and detail of micro-level interpersonal life to the broader, macro-level systematic patterns that
structure social change and social cohesion in society.

The relationship between the micro and the macro remains one of the key problems confronting
sociology. The German sociologist Georg Simmel pointed out that macro-level processes are in fact
nothing more than the sum of all the unique interactions between specific individuals at any one time
(1908), yet they have properties of their own which would be missed if sociologists only focused on the
interactions of specific individuals. Émile Durkheim’s classic study of suicide (1897) is a case in point.
While suicide is one of the most personal, individual, and intimate acts imaginable, Durkheim
demonstrated that rates of suicide differed between religious communities—Protestants, Catholics, and
Jews—in a way that could not be explained by the individual factors involved in each specific case. The
different rates of suicide had to be explained by macro-level variables associated with the different
religious beliefs and practices of the faith communities. We will return to this example in more detail
later. On the other hand, macro-level phenomena like class structures, institutional organizations, legal
systems, gender stereotypes, and urban ways of life provide the shared context for everyday life but do
not explain its nuances and micro-variations very well. Macro-level structures constrain the daily
interactions of the intimate circles in which we move, but they are also filtered through localized
perceptions and “lived” in a myriad of inventive and unpredictable ways.

The Sociological Imagination

Although the scale of sociological studies and the methods of carrying them out are different, the
sociologists involved in them all have something in common. Each of them looks at society using what
pioneer sociologist C. Wright Mills called the sociological imagination, sometimes also referred to as the
“sociological lens” or “sociological perspective.” In a sense, this was Mills’ way of addressing the
dilemmas of the macro/micro divide in sociology. Mills defined sociological imagination as how
individuals understand their own and others’ pasts in relation to history and social structure (1959). It is
the capacity to see an individual’s private troubles in the context of the broader social processes that
structure them. This enables the sociologist to examine what Mills called “personal troubles of milieu”
as “public issues of social structure,” and vice versa.

Mills reasoned that private troubles like being overweight, being unemployed, having marital difficulties,
or feeling purposeless or depressed can be purely personal in nature. It is possible for them to be
addressed and understood in terms of personal, psychological, or moral attributes, either one’s own or
those of the people in one’s immediate milieu. In an individualistic society like our own, this is in fact the
most likely way that people will regard the issues they confront: “I have an addictive personality;” “I
can’t get a break in the job market;” “My husband is unsupportive;” etc. However, if private troubles are
widely shared with others, they indicate that there is a common social problem that has its source in the
way social life is structured. At this level, the issues are not adequately understood as simply private
troubles. They are best addressed as public issues that require a collective response to resolve.

Obesity, for example, has been increasingly recognized as a growing problem for both children and
adults in North America. Michael Pollan cites statistics that three out of five Americans are overweight
and one out of five is obese (2006). In Canada in 2012, just under one in five adults (18.4 percent) were
obese, up from 16 percent of men and 14.5 percent of women in 2003 (Statistics Canada 2013). Obesity
is therefore not simply a private trouble concerning the medical issues, dietary practices, or exercise
habits of specific individuals. It is a widely shared social issue that puts people at risk for chronic diseases
like hypertension, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. It also creates significant social costs for the
medical system.

Pollan argues that obesity is in part a product of the increasingly sedentary and stressful lifestyle of
modern, capitalist society, but more importantly it is a product of the industrialization of the food chain,
which since the 1970s has produced increasingly cheap and abundant food with significantly more
calories due to processing. Additives like corn syrup, which are much cheaper to produce than natural
sugars, led to the trend of super-sized fast foods and soft drinks in the 1980s. As Pollan argues, trying to
find a processed food in the supermarket without a cheap, calorie-rich, corn-based additive is a
challenge. The sociological imagination in this example is the capacity to see the private troubles and
attitudes associated with being overweight as an issue of how the industrialization of the food chain has
altered the human/environment relationship, in particular with respect to the types of food we eat and
the way we eat them.

By looking at individuals and societies and how they interact through this lens, sociologists are able to
examine what influences behaviour, attitudes, and culture. By applying systematic and scientific
methods to this process, they try to do so without letting their own biases and pre-conceived ideas
influence their conclusions.

Studying Patterns: How Sociologists View Society

All sociologists are interested in the experiences of individuals and how those experiences are shaped by
interactions with social groups and society as a whole. To a sociologist, the personal decisions an
individual makes do not exist in a vacuum. Cultural patterns and social forces put pressure on people to
select one choice over another. Sociologists try to identify these general patterns by examining the
behaviour of large groups of people living in the same society and experiencing the same societal
pressures.

Understanding the relationship between the individual and society is one of the most difficult
sociological problems, however. Partly this is because of the reified way these two terms are used in
everyday speech. Reification refers to the way in which abstract concepts, complex processes, or
mutable social relationships come to be thought of as “things.” A prime example of this is when people
say that “society” caused an individual to do something or to turn out in a particular way. In writing
essays, first-year sociology students sometimes refer to “society” as a cause of social behaviour or as an
entity with independent agency. On the other hand, the “individual” is a being that seems solid, tangible,
and independent of anything going on outside of the skin sack that contains its essence. This
conventional distinction between society and the individual is a product of reification in so far as both
society and the individual appear as independent objects. A concept of “the individual” and a concept of
“society” have been given the status of real, substantial, independent objects. As we will see in the
chapters to come, society and the individual are neither objects, nor are they independent of one
another. An “individual” is inconceivable without the relationships to others that define his or her
internal subjective life and his or her external socially defined roles.

The problem for sociologists is that these concepts of the individual and society and the relationship
between them are thought of in terms established by a very common moralframework in modern
democratic societies, namely that of individual responsibility and individual choice. Often in this
framework, any suggestion that an individual’s behaviour needs to be understood in terms of that
person’s social context is dismissed as “letting the individual off” of taking personal responsibility for
their actions.

Talking about society is akin to being morally soft or lenient. Sociology, as a social science, remains
neutral on these type of moral questions. The conceptualization of the individual and society is much
more complex. The sociological problem is to be able to see the individual as a thoroughly social being
and yet as a being who has agency and free choice. Individuals are beings who do take on individual
responsibilities in their everyday social roles and risk social consequences when they fail to live up to
them. The manner in which they take on responsibilities and sometimes the compulsion to do so are
socially defined however. The sociological problem is to be able to see society as a dimension of
experience characterized by regular and predictable patterns of behaviour that exist independently of
any specific individual’s desires or self-understanding. Yet at the same time a society is nothing but the
ongoing social relationships and activities of specific individuals.

A key basis of the sociological perspective is the concept that the individual and society are inseparable.
It is impossible to study one without the other. German sociologist Norbert Elias called the process of
simultaneously analyzing the behaviour of individuals and the society that shapes that
behaviour figuration. He described it through a metaphor of dancing. There can be no dance without
the dancers, but there can be no dancers without the dance. Without the dancers, a dance is just an
idea about motions in a choreographer’s head. Without a dance, there is just a group of people moving
around a floor. Similarly, there is no society without the individuals that make it up, and there are also
no individuals who are not affected by the society in which they live (Elias 1978).

Since ancient times, people have been fascinated by the relationship between individuals and the
societies to which they belong. The ancient Greeks might be said to have provided the foundations of
sociology through the distinction they drew between physis (nature) and nomos (law or custom).
Whereas nature or physis for the Greeks was “what emerges from itself” without human
intervention, nomos in the form of laws or customs, were human conventions designed to constrain
human behaviour. Histories by Herodotus (484–425 BCE) was a proto-anthropological work that
described the great variations in the nomos of different ancient societies around the Mediterranean,
indicating that human social life was not a product of nature but a product of human creation. If human
social life was the product of an invariable human or biological nature, all cultures would be the same.
The concerns of the later Greek philosophers Socrates (469–399 BCE), Plato (428–347 BCE), and
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) with the ideal form of human community (the polis or city-state) can be derived
from the ethical dilemmas of this difference between human nature and human norms. The modern
sociological term “norm” (i.e., a social rule that regulates human behaviour) comes from the Greek
term nomos.

In the 13th century, Ma Tuan-Lin, a Chinese historian, first recognized social dynamics as an underlying
component of historical development in his seminal encyclopedia, General Study of Literary Remains.
The study charted the historical development of Chinese state administration from antiquity in a
manner akin to contemporary institutional analyses. The next century saw the emergence of the
historian some consider to be the world’s first sociologist, the Berber scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406)
of Tunisia. His Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History is known for going beyond descriptive history to
an analysis of historical processes of change based on an understanding of “the nature of things which
are born of civilization” (Khaldun quoted in Becker and Barnes 1961). Key to his analysis was the
distinction between the sedentary life of cities and the nomadic life of pastoral peoples like the Bedouin
and Berbers. The nomads, who exist independent of external authority, developed a social bond based
on blood lineage and “esprit de corps” (‘Asabijja),” which enabled them to mobilize quickly and act in a
unified and concerted manner in response to the rugged circumstances of desert life. The sedentaries of
the city entered into a different cycle in which esprit de corp is subsumed to institutional power and
political factions and the need to be focused on subsistence is replaced by a trend toward increasing
luxury, ease and refinements of taste. The relationship between the two poles of existence, nomadism
and sedentary life, was at the basis of the development and decay of civilizations” (Becker and Barnes
1961).
However, it was not until the 19th century that the basis of the modern discipline of sociology can be
said to have been truly established. The impetus for the ideas that culminated in sociology can be found
in the three major transformations that defined modern society and the culture of modernity: the
development of modern science from the 16th century onward, the emergence of democratic forms of
government with the American and French Revolutions (1775–1783 and 1789–1799 respectively), and
the Industrial Revolution beginning in the 18th century. Not only was the framework for sociological
knowledge established in these events, but also the initial motivation for creating a science of society.
Early sociologists like Comte and Marx sought to formulate a rational, evidence-based response to the
experience of massive social dislocation and unprecedented social problems brought about by the
transition from the European feudal era to capitalism. Whether the intention was to restore order to the
chaotic disintegration of society, as in Comte’s case, or to provide the basis for a revolutionary
transformation in Marx’s, a rational and scientifically comprehensive knowledge of society and its
processes was required. It was in this context that “society” itself, in the modern sense of the word,
became visible as a phenomenon to early investigators of the social condition.

The development of modern science provided the model of knowledge needed for sociology to move
beyond earlier moral, philosophical, and religious types of reflection on the human condition. Key to the
development of science was the technological mindset that Max Weber termed the disenchantment of
the world: “principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather one
can, in principle, master all things by calculation” (1919). Modern science abandoned the medieval view
of the world in which God, “the unmoved mover,” defined the natural and social world as a changeless,
cyclical creation ordered and given purpose by divine will. Instead modern science combined two
philosophical traditions that had historically been at odds: Plato’s rationalism and Aristotle’s empiricism.
Rationalism sought the laws that governed the truth of reason and ideas, and in the hands of early
scientists like Galileo and Newton, found its highest form of expression in the logical formulations of
mathematics. Empiricism sought to discover the laws of the operation of the world through the careful,
methodical, and detailed observation of the world. The new scientific worldview therefore combined
the clear and logically coherent conceptual formulation of propositions from rationalism with an
empirical method of inquiry based on observation through the senses. Sociology adopted these core
principles to emphasize that claims about society had to be clearly formulated and based on evidence-
based procedures.

The emergence of democratic forms of government in the 18th century demonstrated that humans had
the capacity to change the world. The rigid hierarchy of medieval society was not a God-given eternal
order, but a human order that could be challenged and improved upon through human intervention.
Society came to be seen as both historical and the product of human endeavours. Age of Enlightenment
philosophers like Locke, Voltaire, Montaigne, and Rousseau developed general principles that could be
used to explain social life. Their emphasis shifted from the histories and exploits of the aristocracy to the
life of ordinary people. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) extended the
critical analysis of her male Enlightenment contemporaries to the situation of women. Significantly for
modern sociology they proposed that the use of reason could be applied to address social ills and to
emancipate humanity from servitude. Wollstonecraft for example argued that simply allowing women
to have a proper education would enable them to contribute to the improvement of society, especially
through their influence on children. On the other hand, the bloody experience of the democratic
revolutions, particularly the French Revolution, which resulted in the “Reign of Terror” and ultimately
Napoleon’s attempt to subjugate Europe, also provided a cautionary tale for the early sociologists about
the need for sober scientific assessment of society to address social problems.
The Industrial Revolution in a strict sense refers to the development of industrial methods of production,
the introduction of industrial machinery, and the organization of labour in new manufacturing systems.
These economic changes emblemize the massive transformation of human life brought about by the
creation of wage labour, capitalist competition, increased mobility, urbanization, individualism, and all
the social problems they wrought: poverty, exploitation, dangerous working conditions, crime, filth,
disease, and the loss of family and other traditional support networks, etc. It was a time of great social
and political upheaval with the rise of empires that exposed many people—for the first time—to
societies and cultures other than their own. Millions of people were moving into cities and many people
were turning away from their traditional religious beliefs. Wars, strikes, revolts, and revolutionary
actions were reactions to underlying social tensions that had never existed before and called for critical
examination. August Comte in particular envisioned the new science of sociology as the antidote to
conditions that he described as “moral anarchy.”

Sociology therefore emerged as an extension of the new worldview of science; as a part of the
Enlightenment project and its appreciation of historical change, social injustice, and the possibilities of
social reform; and as a crucial response to the new and unprecedented types of social problems that
appeared in the 19th century. It did not emerge as a unified science, however, as its founders brought
distinctly different perspectives to its early formulations.

August Comte: The Father of Sociology

The term sociology was first coined in 1780 by the French essayist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836)
in an unpublished manuscript (Fauré et al. 1999). In 1838, the term was reinvented by Auguste Comte
(1798–1857). The contradictions of Comte’s life and the times he lived through can be in large part read
into the concerns that led to his development of sociology. He was born in 1798, year 6 of the new
French Republic, to staunch monarchist and Catholic parents, who lived comfortably off the father’s
earnings as a minor bureaucrat in the tax office. Comte originally studied to be an engineer, but after
rejecting his parents’ conservative views and declaring himself a republican and free spirit at the age of
13, he got kicked out of school at 18 for leading a school riot, which ended his chances of getting a
formal education and a position as an academic or government official.

He became a secretary of the utopian socialist philosopher Claude Henri de Rouvroy Comte de Saint-
Simon (1760–1825) until they had a falling out in 1824 (after St. Simon perhaps purloined some of
Comte’s essays and signed his own name to them). Nevertheless, they both thought that society could
be studied using the same scientific methods utilized in the natural sciences. Comte also believed in the
potential of social scientists to work toward the betterment of society and coined the slogan “order and
progress” to reconcile the opposing progressive and conservative factions that had divided the crisis-
ridden, post-revolutionary French society. Comte proposed a renewed, organic spiritual order in which
the authority of science would be the means to reconcile the people in each social strata with their place
in the order. It is a testament to his influence that the phrase “order and progress” adorns the Brazilian
coat of arms (Collins and Makowsky 1989).

Comte named the scientific study of social patterns positivism. He described his philosophy in a well-
attended and popular series of lectures, which he published as The Course in Positive Philosophy (1830–
1842) and A General View of Positivism (1848). He believed that using scientific methods to reveal the
laws by which societies and individuals interact would usher in a new “positivist” age of history. His main
sociological theory was the law of three stages, which held that all human societies and all forms of
human knowledge evolve through three distinct stages from primitive to advanced: the theological, the
metaphysical, and the positive.The key variable in defining these stages was the way a people
understand the concept of causation or think about their place in the world.

In the theological stage, humans explain causes in terms of the will of anthropocentric gods (the gods
cause things to happen). In the metaphysical stage, humans explain causes in terms of abstract,
“speculative” ideas like nature, natural rights, or “self-evident” truths. This was the basis of his critique
of the Enlightenment philosophers whose ideas about natural rights and freedoms had led to the French
Revolution but also to the chaos of its aftermath. In his view, the “negative” or metaphysical knowledge
of the philosophers was based on dogmatic ideas that could not be reconciled when they were in
contraction. This lead to irreconcilable conflict and moral anarchy. Finally, in the positive stage,humans
explain causes in terms of scientific procedures and laws (i.e., “positive” knowledge based on
propositions limited to what can be empirically observed). Comte believed that this would be the final
stage of human social evolution because science would reconcile the division between political factions
of order and progress by eliminating the basis for moral and intellectual anarchy. The application of
positive philosophy would lead to the unification of society and of the sciences (Comte 1830).

Although Comte’s positivism is a little odd by today’s standards, it inaugurated the development of the
positivist tradition within sociology. In principle, positivism is the sociological perspective that attempts
to approach the study of society in the same way that the natural sciences approach the natural world.
In fact, Comte’s preferred term for this approach was “social physics”—the “sciences of observation”
applied to social phenomena, which he saw as the culmination of the historical development of the
sciences. More specifically, for Comte, positivism:

1. “Regards all phenomena as subjected to invariable natural laws”

2. Pursues “an accurate discovery of these laws, with a view of reducing them to the smallest
possible number”
 3. Limits itself to analyzing the observable circumstances of phenomena and to connecting them
by the “natural relations of succession and resemblance” instead of making metaphysical claims
about their essential or divine nature (Comte 1830)

While Comte never in fact conducted any social research and took, as the object of analysis, the laws
that governed what he called the general human “mind” of a society (difficult to observe empirically),
his notion of sociology as a positivist science that might effectively socially engineer a better society was
deeply influential. Where his influence waned was a result of the way in which he became increasingly
obsessive and hostile to all criticism as his ideas progressed beyond positivism as the “science of
society” to positivism as the basis of a new cult-like, technocratic “religion of humanity.” The new social
order he imagined was deeply conservative and hierarchical, a kind of a caste system with every level of
society obliged to reconcile itself with its “scientifically” allotted place. Comte imagined himself at the
pinnacle of society, taking the title of “Great Priest of Humanity.” The moral and intellectual anarchy he
decried would be resolved, but only because the rule of sociologists would eliminate the need for
unnecessary and divisive democratic dialogue. Social order “must ever be incompatible with a perpetual
discussion of the foundations of society” (Comte 1830).

Karl Marx: The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a German philosopher and economist. In 1848 he and Friedrich Engels
(1820–1895) co-authored the Communist Manifesto. This book is one of the most influential political
manuscripts in history. It also presents in a highly condensed form Marx’s theory of society, which
differed from what Comte proposed. Whereas Comte viewed the goal of sociology as recreating a
unified, post-feudal spiritual order that would help to institutionalize a new era of political and social
stability, Marx developed a critical analysis of capitalism that saw the material or economic basis of
inequality and power relations as the cause of social instability and conflict. The focus of sociology, or
what Marx called historical materialism (the “materialist conception of history”), should be the
“ruthless critique of everything existing,” as he said in a letter to his friend Arnold Ruge. In this way the
goal of sociology would not simply be to scientifically analyze or objectively describe society, but to use
a rigorous scientific analysis as a basis to change it. This framework became the foundation of
contemporary critical sociology.

Marx rejected Comte’s positivism with its emphasis on describing the logical laws of the general “mind.”
For Marx, Comte’s sociology was a form of idealism, a way of explaining the nature of society based
on the ideas that people hold. In an idealist perspective, people invent ideas of “freedom,” “morality,”
or “causality,” etc. and then change their lives and society’s institutions to conform to these ideas. This
type of understanding could only ever lead to a partial analysis of social life according to Marx. Instead
he believed that societies grew and changed as a result of the struggles of different social classes over
control of the means of production. Historical materialism is an approach to understanding society that
explains social change and human ideas in terms of underlying changes in the “mode of production” or
economy; i.e., the historical transformations in the way human societies act upon their material
world (the environment and its resources) in order to use it to meet their needs. Marx argues therefore
that the consciousness or ideas people have about the world develop from changes in this material,
economic basis. As such, the ideas of people in hunter-gatherer societies will be different than the ideas
of people in feudal societies, which in turn will be different from the ideas of people in capitalist
societies.

The source of historical change and transition between different historical types of society was class
struggle. At the time Marx was developing his theories, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of
capitalism had led to a massive increase in the wealth of society but also massive disparities in wealth
and power between the owners of the factories (the bourgeoisie) and workers (the
proletariat). Capitalism was still a relatively new economic system, an economic system characterized by
private or corporate ownership of goods and the means to produce them. It was also a system that was
inherently unstable and prone to crisis, yet increasingly global in its reach.

As Marx demonstrated in his masterpiece Capital (1867), capitalism’s instability is based on the
processes by which capitalists accumulate their capital or assets, namely by engaging in cold-blooded
competition with each other through the sale of commodities in the competitive market. There is a
continuous need to expand markets for goods and to reduce the costs of production in order to create
ever cheaper and more competitive products. This leads to a downward pressure on wages, the
introduction of labour-saving technologies that increase unemployment, the failure of non-competitive
businesses, periodic economic crises and recessions, and the global expansion of capitalism as
businesses seek markets to exploit and cheaper sources of labour. Yet as he pointed out, it was the
workers’ labour that actually produces wealth. The capitalists who owned the factories and means of
production were in a sense parasitic on workers’ labour. The injustice of the system was palpable. Marx
predicted that inequalities of capitalism would become so extreme that workers would eventually
recognize their common class interests, develop a common “class consciousness” or understanding of
their situation, and revolt. Class struggle would lead to the destruction of the institution of private
capital and to the final stage in human history, which he called “communism.”

Although Marx did not call his analysis sociology, his sociological innovation was to provide
a social analysis of the economic system. Whereas Adam Smith (1723–1790) and the political
economists of the 19th century tried to explain the economic laws of supply and demand solely as a
market mechanism (similar to the abstract discussions of stock market indices and investment returns in
business pages of newspapers today), Marx’s analysis showed the social relationships that had created
the market system and the social repercussions of their operation. As such, his analysis of modern
society was not static or simply descriptive. He was able to put his finger on the underlying dynamism
and continuous change that characterized capitalist society. In a famous passage from The Communist
Manifesto, he and Engels described the restless and destructive penchant for change inherent in the
capitalist mode of production:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and
thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old
modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier
industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social
conditions, everlasting uncertainty, and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are
swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into
air, all which is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition
of life and his relations with his kind (Marx and Engels 1848).

Marx was also able to create an effective basis for critical sociology in that what he aimed for in his
analysis was, as he put it in another letter to Arnold Ruge, “the self-clarification of the struggles and
wishes of the age.” While he took a clear and principled value position in his critique, he did not do so
dogmatically, based on an arbitrary moral position of what he personally thought was good and bad. He
felt rather that a critical social theory must engage in clarifying and supporting the issues of social justice
that were inherent within the existing struggles and wishes of the age. In his own work, he endeavoured
to show how the variety of specific work actions, strikes, and revolts by workers in different occupations
for better pay, safer working conditions, shorter hours, the right to unionize, etc. contained the seeds
for a vision of universal equality, collective justice, and ultimately the ideal of a classless society.

Émile Durkheim: The Pathologies of the Social Order

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) helped establish sociology as a formal academic discipline by establishing
the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895 and by publishing
his Rules of the Sociological Method in 1895. He was born to a Jewish family in the Lorraine province of
France (one of the two provinces along with Alsace that were lost to the Germans in the Franco-Prussian
War of 1870–1871). With the German occupation of Lorraine, the Jewish community suddenly became
subject to sporadic anti-Semitic violence, with the Jews often being blamed for the French defeat and
the economic/political instability that followed. Durkheim attributed this strange experience of anti-
Semitism and scapegoating to the lack of moral purpose in modern society.

As in Comte’s time, France in the late 19th century was the site of major upheavals and sharp political
divisions: the loss of the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune (1871) in which 20,000 workers died,
the fall and capture of Emperor Napoleon III (Napoleon I’s nephew), the creation of the Third Republic,
and the Dreyfus Affair. This undoubtedly led to the focus in Durkheim’s sociology on themes of moral
anarchy, decadence, disunity, and disorganization. For Durkheim, sociology was a scientific but also a
“moral calling” and one of the central tasks of the sociologist was to determine “the causes of the
general temporary malajustment being undergone by European societies and remedies which may
relieve it” (1897). In this respect, Durkheim represented the sociologist as a kind of medical doctor,
studying social pathologies of the moral order and proposing social remedies and cures. He saw healthy
societies as stable, while pathological societies experienced a breakdown in social norms between
individuals and society. The state of normlessness or anomie—the lack of norms that give clear direction
and purpose to individual actions—was the result of “society’s insufficient presence in individuals”
(1897).

His father was the eighth in a line of father-son rabbis. Although Émile was the second son, he was
chosen to pursue his father’s vocation and was given a good religious and secular education. He
abandoned the idea of a religious or rabbinical career, however, and became very secular in his outlook.
His sociological analysis of religion in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) was an example
of this. In this work he was not interested in the theological questions of God’s existence or purpose, but
in developing a very secular, sociological question: Whether God exists or not, how does
religion functionsocially in a society? He argued that beneath the irrationalism and the “barbarous and
fantastic rites” of both the most primitive and the most modern religions is their ability to satisfy real
social and human needs. “There are no religions which are false” (Durkheim 1912) he said. Religion
performs the key function of providing social solidarity in a society. The rituals, the worship of icons,
and the belief in supernatural beings “excite, maintain or recreate certain mental states” (Durkheim
1912) that bring people together, provide a ritual and symbolic focus, and unify them. This type of
analysis became the basis of the functionalist perspective in sociology. He explained the existence and
persistence of religion on the basis of the necessary function it performed in unifying society.

Durkheim was also a key figure in the development of positivist sociology. He did not adopt the
term positivism, because of the connection it had with Comte’s quasi-religious sociological cult.
However, in Rules of the Sociological Method he defined sociology as the study of objective social facts.
Social facts are those things like law, custom, morality, religious beliefs and practices, language, systems
of money, credit and debt, business or professional practices, etc. that are defined externally to the
individual. Social facts:

 Precede the individual and will continue to exist after he or she is gone
 Consist of details and obligations of which individuals are frequently unaware
 Are endowed with an external coercive power by reason of which individuals are controlled
For Durkheim, social facts were like the facts of the natural sciences. They could be studied without
reference to the subjective experience of individuals. He argued that “social facts must be studied as
things, that is, as realities external to the individual” (Durkheim 1895). Individuals experience them as
obligations, duties, and restraints on their behaviour, operating independently of their will. They are
hardly noticeable when individuals consent to them but provoke reaction when individuals resist.

In this way, Durkheim was very influential in defining the subject matter of the new discipline of
sociology. For Durkheim, sociology was not about just any phenomena to do with the life of human
beings but only those phenomena which pertained exclusively to a social level of analysis. It was not
about the biological or psychological dynamics of human life, for example, but about the social
facts through which the lives of individuals were constrained. Moreover, the dimension of human
experience described by social facts had to be explained in its own terms. It could not be explained by
biological drives or psychological characteristics of individuals. It was a dimension of reality sui
generis (of its own kind, unique in its characteristics). It could not be explained by, or reduced to, its
individual components without missing its most important features. As Durkheim put it, “a social fact
can only be explained by another social fact” (Durkheim 1895).

This is the framework of Durkheim’s famous study of suicide. In Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897),
Durkheim attempted to demonstrate the effectiveness of his rules of social research by examining
suicide statistics in different police districts. Suicide is perhaps the most personal and most individual of
all acts. Its motives would seem to be absolutely unique to the individual and to individual
psychopathology. However, what Durkheim observed was that statistical rates of suicide remained fairly
constant year by year and region by region. There was no correlation between rates of suicide and rates
of psychopathology. Suicide rates did vary, however, according to the social context of the suicides:
namely the religious affiliation of suicides. Protestants had higher rates of suicide than Catholics,
whereas Catholics had higher rates of suicide than Jews. Durkheim argued that the key factor that
explained the difference in suicide rates (i.e., the statistical rates, not the purely individual motives for
the suicides) were the different degrees of social integration of the different religious communities,
measured by the amount of ritual and degree of mutual involvement in religious practice. The religious
groups had differing levels of anomie, or normlessness, which Durkheim associated with high rates of
suicide. Durkheim’s study was unique and insightful because he did not try to explain suicide rates in
terms of individual psychopathology. Instead, he regarded the regularity of the suicide rates as a factual
order, implying “the existence of collective tendencies exterior to the individual” (Durkheim 1897), and
explained their variation with respect to another social fact: “Suicide varies inversely with the degree of
integration of the social groups of which the individual forms a part” (Durkheim 1897).

Max Weber: Verstehende Soziologie

Prominent sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) established a sociology department in Germany at the
Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich in 1919. Weber wrote on many topics related to sociology
including political change in Russia, the condition of German farm workers, and the history of world
religions. He was also a prominent public figure, playing an important role in the German peace
delegation in Versailles and in drafting the ill-fated German (Weimar) constitution following the defeat
of Germany in World War I.

Weber is known best for his 1904 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. He noted that
in modern industrial societies, business leaders and owners of capital, the higher grades of skilled labour,
and the most technically and commercially trained personnel were overwhelmingly Protestant. He also
noted the uneven development of capitalism in Europe, and in particular how capitalism developed first
in those areas dominated by Protestant sects. He asked, “Why were the districts of highest economic
development at the same time particularly favourable to a revolution in the Church?” (i.e., the
Protestant Reformation (1517–1648)) (Weber 1904). His answer focused on the development of
the Protestant ethic—the duty to “work hard in one’s calling”—in particular Protestant sects such as
Calvinism, Pietism, and Baptism.

As opposed to the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church in which poverty was a virtue and labour
simply a means for maintaining the individual and community, the Protestant sects began to see hard,
continuous labour as a spiritual end in itself. Hard labour was firstly an ascetic technique of worldly
renunciation and a defence against temptations and distractions: the unclean life, sexual temptations,
and religious doubts. Secondly, the Protestant sects believed that God’s disposition toward the
individual was predetermined and could never be known or influenced by traditional Christian practices
like confession, penance, and buying indulgences. However, one’s chosen occupation was a “calling”
given by God, and the only sign of God’s favour or recognition in this world was to receive good fortune
in one’s calling. Thus material success and the steady accumulation of wealth through personal effort
and prudence was seen as a sign of an individual’s state of grace. Weber argued that the ethic, or way of
life, that developed around these beliefs was a key factor in creating the conditions for both the
accumulation of capital, as the goal of economic activity, and for the creation of an industrious and
disciplined labour force.

In this regard, Weber has often been seen as presenting an idealist explanation of the development of
capital, as opposed to Marx’s historical materialist explanation. It is an element of cultural belief that
leads to social change rather than the concrete organization and class struggles of the economic
structure. It might be more accurate, however, to see Weber’s work building on Marx’s and to see his
Protestant ethic thesis as part of a broader set of themes concerning the process of rationalization. Why
did the Western world modernize and develop modern science, industry, and democracy when, for
centuries, the Orient, the Indian subcontinent, and the Middle East were technically, scientifically, and
culturally more advanced than the West? Weber argued that the modern forms of society developed in
the West because of the process of rationalization: the general tendency of modern institutions and
most areas of life to be transformed by the application of instrumental reason—rational bureaucratic
organization, calculation, and technical reason—and the overcoming of “magical” thinking (which we
earlier referred to as the “disenchantment of the world”). As the impediments toward rationalization
were removed, organizations and institutions were restructured on the principle of maximum efficiency
and specialization, while older, traditional (inefficient) types of organization were gradually eliminated.

The irony of the Protestant ethic as one stage in this process was that the rationalization of capitalist
business practices and organization of labour eventually dispensed with the religious goals of the ethic.
At the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,Weber pessimistically describes the fate of
modern humanity as an “iron cage.” The iron cage is Weber’s metaphor for the condition of modern
humanity in a technical, rationally defined, and “efficiently” organized society. Having forgotten its
spiritual or other purposes of life, humanity succumbs to an order “now bound to the technical and
economic conditions of machine production” (Weber 1904). The modern subject in the iron cage is “only
a single cog in an ever-moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march”
(Weber 1922).
Weber also made a major contribution to the methodology of sociological research. Along with the
philosophers Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) and Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), Weber believed that it
was difficult if not impossible to apply natural science methods to accurately predict the behaviour of
groups as positivist sociology hoped to do. They argued that the influence of culture on human
behaviour had to be taken into account. What was distinct about human behaviour was that it is
essentially meaningful. Human behaviour could not be understood independently of the meanings that
individuals attributed to it. A Martian’s analysis of the activities in a skateboard park would be
hopelessly confused unless it understood that the skateboarders were motivated by the excitement of
risk taking and the pleasure in developing skills. This insight into the meaningful nature of human
behaviour even applied to the sociologists themselves, who, they believed, should be aware of how
their own cultural biases could influence their research. To deal with this problem, Weber and Dilthey
introduced the concept of Verstehen, a German word that means to understand in a deep way. In
seeking Verstehen, outside observers of a social world—an entire culture or a small setting—attempt to
understand it empathetically from an insider’s point of view.

In his essay “The Methodological Foundations of Sociology,” Weber described sociology as “a science
which attempts the interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal
explanation of its course and effects” (Weber 1922). In this way he delimited the field that sociology
studies in a manner almost opposite to that of Émile Durkheim. Rather than defining sociology as the
study of the unique dimension of external social facts, sociology was concerned with social action:
actions to which individuals attach subjective meanings. “Action is social in so far as, by virtue of the
subjective meaning attached to it by the acting individual (or individuals), it takes account of the
behaviour of others and is thereby oriented in its course” (Weber 1922). The actions of the young
skateboarders can be explained because they hold the experienced boarders in esteem and attempt to
emulate their skills even if it means scraping their bodies on hard concrete from time to time. Weber
and other like-minded sociologists founded interpretive sociology whereby social researchers strive to
find systematic means to interpret and describe the subjective meanings behind social processes,
cultural norms, and societal values. This approach led to research methods like ethnography, participant
observation, and phenomenological analysis whose aim was not to generalize or predict (as in
positivistic social science), but to systematically gain an in-depth understanding of social worlds. The
natural sciences may be precise, but from the interpretive sociology point of view their methods confine
them to study only the external characteristics of things.

Georg Simmel: A Sociology of Forms

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was one of the founding fathers of sociology, although his place in the
discipline is not always recognized. In part, this oversight may be explained by the fact that Simmel was
a Jewish scholar in Germany at the turn of 20th century, and until 1914 was unable to attain a proper
position as a professor due to anti-Semitism. Despite the brilliance of his sociological insights, the
quantity of his publications, and the popularity of his public lectures as Privatdozent at the University of
Berlin, his lack of a regular academic position prevented him from having the kind of student following
that would create a legacy around his ideas. It might also be explained by some of the unconventional
and varied topics that he wrote on: the structure of flirting, the sociology of adventure, the importance
of secrecy, the patterns of fashion, the social significance of money, etc. He was generally seen at the
time as not having a systematic or integrated theory of society. However, his insights into how
social forms emerge at the micro-level of interaction and how they relate to macro-level phenomena
remain valuable in contemporary sociology.

Simmel’s sociology focused on the key question, “How is society possible?” His answer led him to
develop what he called formal sociology, or the sociology of social forms. In his essay “The Problem of
Sociology,” Simmel reaches a strange conclusion for a sociologist: “There is no such thing as society ‘as
such.’” “Society” is just the name we give to the “extraordinary multitude and variety of interactions
[that] operate at any one moment” (Simmel 1908). This is a basic insight of micro-sociology. However
useful it is to talk about macro-level phenomena like capitalism, the moral order, or rationalization, in
the end what these phenomena refer to is a multitude of ongoing, unfinished processes of interaction
between specific individuals. Nevertheless, the phenomena of social life do have recognizable forms, and
the forms do guide the behaviour of individuals in a regularized way. A bureaucracy is a form of social
interaction that persists from day to day. One does not come into work one morning to discover that the
rules, job descriptions, paperwork, and hierarchical order of the bureaucracy have disappeared.
Simmel’s questions were: How do the forms of social life persist? How did they emerge in the first place?
What happens when they get fixed and permanent?
Simmel notes that “society exists where a number of individuals enter into interaction” (1908). What he
means is that whenever people gather, something happens that would not have happened if the
individuals had remained alone. People attune themselves to one another in a way that is very similar to
musicians tuning their instruments to one another. A pattern or form of interaction emerges that begins
to guide or coordinate the behaviour of the individuals. An example Simmel uses is of a cocktail party
where a subtle set of instructions begins to emerge which defines what can and cannot be said. In a
cocktail party where the conversation is light and witty, the effect would be jarring of someone suddenly
trying to sell you an insurance policy or talking about the spousal abuse they had suffered. The person
would be thought of as being crass or inappropriate. Similarly in the pleasant pastime of flirtation, if one
of the parties began to press the other to consummate the flirtation by having sex, the flirtation would
be over. Flirtation is a form of interaction in which the answer to the question of having sex—yes or
no—is perpetually suspended.

In both examples, Simmel argued that the social interaction had taken on a specific form. Both were
examples of what he called the play form of social interaction, or pure “sociability”: the pleasure people
experience from the mere fact of being together, regardless of the content of the interaction (Simmel
1910). If the cocktail party conversation suddenly turns to a business proposition or an overly personal
confession, it is no longer playful. The underlying form of the interaction has been violated, even if the
participants were not consciously aware that they had adopted a particular form of interaction. Simmel
proposed that sociology would be the study of the social forms that recur in different contexts and with
different social contents. The same play form governs the interaction in two different contexts with two
different contents of interaction: one is the free-ranging content of polite conversation; the other is
sexual desire. Among other common forms that Simmel studied were superiority and subordination,
cooperation, competition, division of labour, and money transactions. These forms can be applied in a
variety of different contexts to give social form to a variety of different contents or specific drives: erotic,
spiritual, acquisitive, defensive, playful, etc. The emphasis on forms is why Simmel called his approach to
the study of society “formal sociology.”

Simmel’s focus on how social forms emerge became very important for micro-sociology, symbolic
interactionism, and the studies of hotel lobbies, cigarette girls, and street-corner societies, etc.
popularized by the Chicago School in the mid-20th century. His analysis of the creation of new social
forms was particularly tuned in to capturing the fragmentary everyday experience of modern social life
that was bound up with the unprecedented nature and scale of the modern city. In his lifetime, the city
of Berlin where he lived and taught for most of his career had become a major European metropolis of 4
million people by 1900, after the unification of Germany in the 1870s. However, his work was not
confined to micro-level interactions. He developed an analysis of the tragedy of culture in which he
argued that the cultural creations of “subjective culture”—like the emergent social forms created by
people in their face-to-face interactions, as well as art, literature, political analyses, etc.—tended to
detach themselves from lived experience and become fixed and elaborated in the form of “objective
culture”—the accumulated products of human cultural creation. There are intrinsic limits to an
individual’s ability to organize, appreciate, and assimilate these forms. As the quantity of objective
culture increases and becomes more complex, it becomes progressively more alienating,
incomprehensible, and overwhelming. It takes on a life of its own and the individual can no longer see
him- or herself reflected in it. Music, for example, can be enriching, but going to an orchestral
performance of contemporary music can often be baffling, as if you need an advanced music degree just
to be able to understand that what you are hearing is music.
In his famous study “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Simmel described how the built environment and
the sheer size and anonymity of the city had become a social form, which he called the “metropolitan
way of life.” Although the metropolis, its architecture, and the variety of ways of life it contained were
products of human creation and expression, as an entity it confronted the individual as a kind of
overwhelming monstrosity that threatened to swallow him or her up in its “social-technological
mechanism” (Simmel 1903). As a means of self-protection against the city’s overpowering sensory input,
people cut themselves off from potentially enriching contact with others and become cold, callous,
indifferent, impatient, and blasé.

1.3. Theoretical Perspectives

Sociologists study social events, interactions, and patterns. They then develop theories to explain why
these occur and what can result from them. In sociology, a theory is a way to explain different aspects of
social interactions and create testable propositions about society (Allan 2006). For example, Durkheim’s
proposition that differences in suicide rate can be explained by differences in the degree of social
integration in different communities is a theory.

As this brief survey of the history of sociology suggests, however, there is considerable diversity in the
theoretical approaches sociology takes to studying society. Sociology is a multi-perspectival science: a
number of distinct perspectives or paradigms offer competing explanations of social
phenomena. Paradigms are philosophical and theoretical frameworks used within a discipline to
formulate theories, generalizations, and the research performed in support of them. They refer to the
underlying organizing principles that tie different constellations of concepts, theories, and ways of
formulating problems together (Drengson 1983). Talcott Parsons’ reformulation of Durkheim’s and
others work as structural functionalism in the 1950s is an example of a paradigm because it provided a
general model of analysis suited to an unlimited number of research topics. Parsons proposed that any
identifiable structure (e.g., roles, families, religions, or states) could be explained by the particular
function it performed in maintaining the operation of society as a whole. Critical sociology and symbolic
interactionism would formulate the explanatory framework and research problem differently.

The multi-perspectival approach of sociology can be confusing to the newcomer, especially given most
people’s familiarity with the more “unified perspective” of the natural sciences where divisions in
perspective are less visible. The natural sciences are largely able to dispense with issues of multiple
perspective and build cumulative explanations based on the “facts” because the objects they study are
indifferent to their observation. The chemical composition and behaviour of a protein can be assumed
to be the same wherever it is observed and by whomever it is observed. The same cannot be said of
social phenomena, which are mediated by meanings and interpretations, divided by politics and value
orientations, subject to historical change and human agency, characterized by contradictions and
reconciliations, and transfigured if they are observed at a micro or macro-level. Social reality is different,
depending on the historical moment, the perspective, and the criteria from which it is viewed.

Nevertheless, the different sociological paradigms do rest on a form of knowledge that is scientific, if
science is taken in the broad sense to mean the use of reasoned argument, the ability to see the general
in the particular, and the reliance on evidence from systematic observation of social reality. Within this
general scientific framework, however, sociology is broken into the same divisions that separate the
forms of modern knowledge more generally. By the time of the Enlightenment the unified perspective
of Christendom had broken into three distinct spheres of knowledge: the natural sciences, hermeneutics
(or interpretive sciences), and critique (Habermas 1972). Sociology is similarly divided into three types of
sociological knowledge, each with its own strengths, limitations, and practical uses: positivist
sociology, interpretive sociology, and critical sociology. Within these three types of sociological
knowledge, four paradigms have come to dominate sociological thinking: structural
functionalism, critical sociology, feminism, and symbolic interactionism.

Positivism
The positivist perspective in sociology—introduced above with regard to the pioneers of the discipline
August Comte and Émile Durkheim—is most closely aligned with the forms of knowledge associated
with the natural sciences. The emphasis is on empirical observation and measurement (i.e., observation
through the senses), value neutrality or objectivity, and the search for law-like statements about the
social world (analogous to Newton’s laws of gravity for the natural world). Since mathematics and
statistical operations are the main forms of logical demonstration in the natural scientific explanation,
positivism relies on translating human phenomena into quantifiable units of measurement. It regards
the social world as an objective or “positive” reality, in no essential respects different from the natural
world. Positivism is oriented to developing a knowledge useful for controlling or administering social life,
which explains its ties to the projects of social engineering going back to Comte’s original vision for
sociology. Two forms of positivism have been dominant in sociology since the 1940s: quantitative
sociology and structural functionalism.

Quantitative Sociology
In contemporary sociology, positivism is based on four main “rules” that define what constitutes valid
knowledge and what types of questions may be reasonably asked (Bryant 1985):

1. The rule of empiricism: We can only know about things that are actually given in experience. We
cannot validly make claims about things that are invisible, unobservable, or supersensible like
metaphysical, spiritual, or moral truths.
2. The rule of value neutrality: Scientists should remain value-neutral in their research because it
follows from the rule of empiricism that “values” have no empirical content that would allow
their validity to be scientifically tested.
3. The unity of the scientific method: All sciences have the same basic principles and practices
whether their object is natural or human.
4. Law-like statements: The type of explanation sought by scientific inquiry is the formulation of
general laws (like the law of gravity) to explain specific phenomena (like the falling of a stone).

Much of what is referred to today as quantitative sociology fits within this paradigm of positivism.
Quantitative sociology uses statistical methods such as surveys with large numbers of participants.
Researchers analyze data using statistical techniques to see if they can uncover patterns of human
behaviour. Law-like relationships between variables are often posed in the form of statistical
relationships or multiple linear regression formulas that quantify the degree of influence different causal
or independent variables have on a particular outcome (or dependent variable). For example, the
degree of religiosity of an individual in Canada, measured by the frequency of church attendance or
religious practice, can be predicted by a combination of different independent variables such as age,
gender, income, immigrant status, and region (Bibby 2012).
Structural Functionalism
Structural Functionalism also falls within the positivist tradition in sociology due to Durkheim’s early
efforts to describe the subject matter of sociology in terms of objective social facts—“social facts must
be studied as things, that is, as realities external to the individual” (Durkheim 1895)—and to explain
them in terms of their social functions. Durkheim argued that in order to study society, sociologists have
to look beyond individuals to social facts: the laws, morals, values, religious beliefs, customs, fashions,
rituals, and all of the cultural rules that govern social life (Durkheim 1895). Each of these social facts
serves one or more functions within a society. For example, one function of a society’s laws may be to
protect society from violence, while another is to punish criminal behaviour, while another is to
preserve public health.

Following Durkheim’s insight, structural functionalism sees society as a structure with interrelated parts
designed to meet the biological and social needs of individuals who make up that society. In this respect,
society is like a body that relies on different organs to perform crucial functions. In fact the English
philosopher and biologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) likened society to a human body. He argued
that just as the various organs in the body work together to keep the entire system functioning and
regulated, the various parts of society work together to keep the entire society functioning and
regulated (Spencer 1898). By parts of society, Spencer was referring to such social institutions as the
economy, political systems, health care, education, media, and religion. Spencer continued the analogy
by pointing out that societies evolve just as the bodies of humans and other animals do (Maryanski and
Turner 1992).

As we have seen, Émile Durkheim developed a similar analogy to explain the structure of societies and
how they change and survive over time. Durkheim believed that earlier, more primitive societies were
held together because most people performed similar tasks and shared values, language, and symbols.
There was a low division of labour, a common religious system of social beliefs, and a low degree of
individual autonomy. Society was held together on the basis of mechanical solidarity: a shared
collective consciousness with harsh punishment for deviation from the norms. Modern societies,
according to Durkheim, were more complex. People served many different functions in society and their
ability to carry out their function depended upon others being able to carry out theirs. Modern society
was held together on the basis of a division of labour or organic solidarity: a complex system of
interrelated parts, working together to maintain stability, i.e., an organism (Durkheim 1893). According
to this sociological paradigm, the parts of society are interdependent. The academic relies on the
mechanic for the specialized skills required to fix his or her car, the mechanic sends his or her children to
university to learn from the academic, and both rely on the baker to provide them with bread for their
morning toast. Each part influences and relies on the others.

According to American sociologist Talcott Parsons (1881–1955), in a healthy society, all of these parts
work together to produce a stable state called dynamic equilibrium(Parsons 1961). Parsons was a key
figure in systematizing Durkheim’s views in the 1940s and 1950s. He argued that a sociological approach
to social phenomena must emphasize the systematic nature of society at all levels of social existence:
the relation of definable “structures” to their “functions” in relation to the needs or “maintenance” of
the system. His AGIL schema provided a useful analytical grid for sociological theory in which an
individual, an institution, or an entire society could be seen as a system composed of structures that
satisfied four primary functions:

 Adaptation (A): how the system adapts to its environment

  Goal attainment (G): how the system determines what its goals are and how it will attain them
 Integration (I): how the system integrates its members into harmonious participation and social
cohesion
 (Latent) Pattern Maintenance (L): how basic cultural patterns, values, belief systems, etc. are
regulated and maintained

So for example, the social system as a whole relied on the economy to distribute goods and services as
its means of adaptation to the natural environment; on the political system to make decisions as it
means of goal attainment; on roles and norms to regulate social behaviour as its means of
social integration; and on culture to institutionalize and reproduce common values as its means of latent
pattern maintenance. Following Durkheim, he argued that these explanations of social functions had to
be made at the level of systems and not involve the specific wants and needs of individuals. In a system,
there is an interrelation of component parts where a change in one component affects the
others regardless of the perspectives of individuals.

Another noted structural functionalist, Robert Merton (1910–2003), pointed out that social processes
often have many functions. Manifest functions are the consequences of a social process that are sought
or anticipated, while latent functions are the unsought consequences of a social process. A manifest
function of college education, for example, includes gaining knowledge, preparing for a career, and
finding a good job that utilizes that education. Latent functions of your college years include meeting
new people, participating in extracurricular activities, or even finding a spouse or partner. Another
latent function of education is creating a hierarchy of employment based on the level of education
attained. Latent functions can be beneficial, neutral, or harmful. Social processes that have undesirable
consequences for the operation of society are called dysfunctions. In education, examples of
dysfunction include getting bad grades, truancy, dropping out, not graduating, and not finding suitable
employment.

Criticism
The main criticisms of both quantitative positivism and structural functionalism have to do with the way
in which social phenomena are turned into objective social facts. On one hand, interpretive sociology
suggests that the quantification of variables in quantitative sociology reduces the rich complexity and
ambiguity of social life to an abstract set of numbers and statistical relationships that cannot capture the
meaning it holds for individuals. Measuring someone’s depth of religious belief or “religiosity” by the
number of times they attend church in a week explains very little about the religious experience.
Similarly, interpretive sociology argues that structural functionalism, with its emphasis on systems of
structures and functions tends to reduce the individual to the status of a sociological dupe, assuming
pre-assigned roles and functions without any individual agency or capacity for self-creation.

On the other hand, critical sociology challenges the conservative tendencies of quantitative sociology
and structural functionalism. Both types of positivist analysis represent themselves as being objective, or
value-neutral, which is a problem in the context of critical sociology’s advocacy for social justice.
However, both types of positivism also have conservative assumptions built into their basic approach to
social facts. The focus in quantitative sociology on observable facts and law-like statements presents a
historical and deterministic picture of the world that cannot account for the underlying historical
dynamics of power relationships and class or other contradictions. One can empirically observe the trees
but not the forest so to speak. Similarly, the focus on the needs and the smooth functioning of social
systems in structural functionalism supports a conservative viewpoint because it tends to see the
functioning and dynamic equilibrium of society as good or normal, whereas change is pathological. In
Davis and Moore’s famous essay “Some Principles of Stratification” (1944) for example, the authos
argued that social inequality was essentially “good” because it functioned to preserve the motivation of
individuals to work hard to get ahead. Critical sociology challenges both the justice and practical
consequences of social inequality.

Table 1.1. Sociological Theories or Perspectives. Different sociological perspectives enable sociologists to
view social issues through a variety of useful lenses.

Sociological Level of
Paradigm Analysis Focus

Structural How each part of society functions together to contribute to

Macro
Functionalism the whole

Symbolic
Micro One-to-one interactions and communications
Interactionism

How inequalities contribute to social differences and

Critical Sociology Macro
perpetuate differences in power

Interpretive Sociology
The interpretive perspective in sociology is aligned with the hermeneutic traditions of the humanities
like literature, philosophy, and history. The focus is on understanding or interpreting human activity in
terms of the meanings that humans attribute to it. Max Weber’s Verstehende (understanding) sociology
is often cited as the origin of this perspective in sociology because of his emphasis on the centrality of
meaning and intention in social action:

Sociology… is a science which attempts the interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to
arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects. In “action” is included all human behaviour when
and in so far as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to it…. [Social action is] action
mutually oriented to that of each other (Weber 1922).

This emphasis on the meaningfulness of social action is taken up later by phenomenology,

ethnomethodology, and symbolic interactionism. The interpretive perspective is concerned with
developing a knowledge of social interaction as a meaning-oriented practice. It promotes the goal of
greater mutual understanding and the possibility of consensus among members of society.

Symbolic Interactionism
Symbolic interactionism provides a theoretical perspective that helps scholars examine the relationship
of individuals within their society. This perspective is centred on the notion that communication—or the
exchange of meaning through language and symbols—is how people make sense of their social worlds.
As pointed out by Herman and Reynolds (1994), this viewpoint sees people as active in shaping their
world, rather than as entities who are acted upon by society (Herman and Reynolds 1994). This
approach looks at society and people from a micro-level perspective.

George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) is considered one of the founders of symbolic interactionism. His
work in Mind, Self and Society (1934) on the “self” as a social structure and on the stages of child
development as a sequence of role-playing capacities provides the classic analyses of the perspective.

His student Herbert Blumer (1900–1987) synthesized Mead’s work and popularized the theory. Blumer
coined the term “symbolic interactionism” and identified its three basic premises:

 Humans act toward things on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to those things.
 The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has
with others and the society.
 These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the
person in dealing with the things he or she encounters (Blumer 1969).

In other words, human interaction is not determined in the same manner as natural events. Nor do
people directly react to each other as forces acting upon forces or as stimuli provoking automatic
responses. Rather people interact indirectly, by interpreting the meaning of each other’s actions,
gestures, or words. Interaction is symbolic in the sense that it occurs through the mediation, exchange,
and interpretation of symbols. One person’s action refers beyond itself to a meaning that calls out for
the response of the other: it indicates what the receiver is supposed to do; it indicates what the actor
intends to do; and together they form a mutual definition of the situation, which enables joint action to
take place. Social life can be seen as the stringing together or aligning of multiple joint actions.

Social scientists who apply symbolic-interactionist thinking look for patterns of interaction between
individuals. Their studies often involve observation of one-on-one interactions. For example, while a
structural functionalist studying a political protest might focus on the function protest plays in realigning
the priorities of the political system, a symbolic interactionist would be more interested in seeing the
ways in which individuals in the protesting group interact, or how the signs and symbols protesters use
enable a common definition of the situation—e.g., an environmental or social justice “issue”—to get
established.

The focus on the importance of symbols in building a society led sociologists like Erving Goffman (1922–
1982) to develop a framework called dramaturgical analysis. Goffman used theatre as an analogy for
social interaction and recognized that people’s interactions showed patterns of cultural “scripts.” In
social encounters, individuals make a claim for a positive social status within the group—they present a
“face”—but it is never certain that their audience will accept their claim. There is always the possibility
that individuals will make a gaff that prevents them from successfully maintaining face. They have
to manage the impression they are making in the same way and often using the same type of “props” as
an actor. Moreover, because it can be unclear what part a person may play in a given situation, he or
she has to improvise his or her role as the situation unfolds. This led to Goffman’s focus on the ritual
nature of social interaction—the way in which the “scripts” of social encounters become routine,
repetitive, and unconscious. Nevertheless, the emphasis in Goffman’s analysis, as in symbolic
interactionism as a whole, is that the social encounter, and social reality itself, is open and unpredictable.
Social reality is not predetermined by structures, functions, roles, or history (Goffman 1958).
Symbolic interactionism has also been important in bringing to light the experiences and worlds of
individuals who are typically excluded from official accounts of the world. Howard
Becker’s Outsiders (1963) for example described the process of labelling in which individuals come to be
characterized or labelled as deviants by authorities. The sequence of events in which a young person is
picked up by police for an offence, defined as a “young offender,” processed by the criminal justice
system, and then introduced to the criminal subculture through contact with experienced convicts is
told from the subjective point of view of the young person. The significance of labelling theory is to
show that individuals are not born deviant or criminal, but become criminal through an institutionalized
symbolic interaction with authorities. As Becker says:

…social groups create deviance by making rules whose infraction creates deviance, and by applying those
roles to particular people and labelling them as outsiders. From this point of view, deviance is not a
quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by other of rules and
sanctions to an “offender.” The deviant is one to whom that label has been successfully applied; deviant
behavior is behaviour that people so label (1963).

Studies that use the symbolic interactionist perspective are more likely to use qualitative research
methods, such as in-depth interviews or participant observation, because they seek to understand the
symbolic worlds in which research subjects live.

Criticism
Research done from this perspective is often scrutinized because of the difficulty of remaining objective.
Others criticize the extremely narrow focus on symbolic interaction. Proponents, of course, consider this
one of its greatest strengths.

One of the problems of sociology that focuses on micro-level interactions is that it is difficult to
generalize from very specific situations, involving very few individuals, to make social scientific claims
about the nature of society as a whole. The danger is that, while the rich texture of face-to-face social
life can be examined in detail, the results will remain purely descriptive without any explanatory or
analytical strength. In a similar fashion, it is very difficult to get at the historical context or relations of
power that structure or condition face-to-face symbolic interactions. The perspective on social life as an
unstructured and unconstrained domain of agency and subjective meanings has difficulty accounting for
the ways that social life does become structured and constrained.

Critical Sociology
The critical perspective in sociology has its origins in social activism, social justice movements,
revolutionary struggles, and radical critique. As Karl Marx put it, its focus was the “ruthless critique of
everything existing” (Marx 1843). The key elements of this analysis are the emphases on power relations
and the understanding of society as historical—subject to change, struggle, contradiction, instability,
social movement and radical transformation. Rather than objectivity and value neutrality, the tradition
of critical sociology promotes practices of liberation and social change in order to achieve universal
social justice. As Marx stated, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the
point is to change it” (1845). This is why it is misleading to call critical sociology “conflict theory” as some
introductory textbooks do. While conflict is certainly central to the critical analyses of power and
domination, the focus of critical sociology is on developing types of knowledge and political action that
enable emancipation from power relations (i.e., from the conditions of conflict in society). Historical
materialism, feminism, environmentalism, anti-racism, queer studies, and poststructuralism are all
examples of the critical perspective in sociology.

One of the outcomes of a systematic analysis such as these is that it generates questions about the
relationship between our everyday life and issues concerning social justice and environmental
sustainability. In line with the philosophical traditions of the Enlightenment, critical sociology is
sociology with an “emancipatory interest” (Habermas 1972); that is, a sociology that seeks not simply to
understand or describe the world, but to use sociological knowledge to change and improve the world,
to emancipate people from conditions of servitude. What does the word critical mean in this context?
Critical sociologists argue that it is important to understand that the critical tradition in sociology is not
about complaining or being “negative.” Nor is it about adopting a moral position from which to judge
people or society. It is not about being “subjective” or “biased” as opposed to “objective.” As Herbert
Marcuse put it in One Dimensional Man (1964), critical sociology involves two value judgments:

1. The judgment that human life is worth living, or rather that it can be and ought to be made
worth living
2. The judgment that, in a given society, specific possibilities exist for the amelioration of human
life and specific ways and means of realizing these possibilities

Critical sociology therefore rejects the notion of a value-free social science, but does not thereby
become a moral exercise or an individual “subjective” value preference as a result. Being critical in the
context of sociology is about using objective, empirical knowledge to assess the possibilities and barriers
to improving or “ameliorating” human life.

Historical Materialism
The tradition of historical materialism that developed from Karl Marx’s work is one of the central
frameworks of critical sociology. As we noted in the discussion of Marx above, historical materialism
concentrates on the study of how our everyday lives are structured by the connection between relations
of power and economic processes. The basis of this approach begins with the macro-level question of
how specific relations of power and specific economic formations have developed historically. These
form the context in which the institutions, practices, beliefs, and social rules (norms) of everyday life are
situated. The elements that make up a culture—a society’s shared practices, values, beliefs, and
artifacts—are structured by the society’s economic mode of production: the way human societies act
upon their environment and its resources in order to use them to meet their needs. Hunter-gatherer,
agrarian, feudal, and capitalist modes of production have been the economic basis for very different
types of society throughout world history.
It is not as if this relationship is always clear to the people living in these different periods of history,
however. Often the mechanisms and structures of social life are obscure. For example, it might not have
been clear to the Scots who were expelled from their ancestral lands in Scotland during the Highland
clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries and who emigrated to the Red River settlements in Rupert’s
Land (now Manitoba) that they were living through the epochal transformation from feudalism to
capitalism. This transition was nevertheless the context for the decisions individuals and families made
to emigrate from Scotland and attempt to found the Red River Colony. It might also not have been clear
to them that they were participating in the development of colonial power relationships between the
indigenous people of North America and the Europeans that persist up until today. Through contact with
the Scots and the French fur traders, the Cree and Anishinabe were gradually drawn out of their own
indigenous modes of production and into the developing global capitalist economy as fur trappers and
provisioners for the early European settlements. It was a process that eventually led to the loss of
control over their lands, the destruction of their way of life, the devastating spread of European diseases,
the imposition of the Indian Act, the establishment of the residential school system, institutional and
everyday racism, and an enduring legacy of intractable social problems.

In a similar way, historical materialism analyzes the constraints that define the way individuals review
their options and make their decisions in present-day society. From the types of career to pursue to the
number of children to have, the decisions and practices of everyday life must be understood in terms of
the 20th century shift to corporate ownership and the 21st century context of globalization in which
corporate decisions about investments are made.

The historical materialist approach emphasizes three components (Naiman 2012). The first is that
everything in society is related—it is not possible to study social processes in isolation. The second is
that everything in society is dynamic (i.e., in a process of continuous social change). It is not possible to
study social processes as if they existed outside of history. The third is that the tensions that form
around relationships of power and inequality in society are the key drivers of social change. In the
language of Marx, these tensions are based on “contradictions” built into the organization of the
economic or material relationships that structure our livelihoods, our relationships to each other, our
relationship to the environment, and our place within the global community. It is not possible to study
social processes as if they were independent of the historical formations of power that both structure
them and destabilize them.

Feminism
Another major school of critical sociology is feminism. From the early work of women sociologists like
Harriet Martineau, feminist sociology has focused on the power relationships and inequalities between
women and men. How can the conditions of inequality faced by women be addressed? As Harriet
Martineau put it in Society in America (1837):

All women should inform themselves of the condition of their sex, and of their own position. It must
necessarily follow that the noblest of them will, sooner or later, put forth a moral power which shall
prostrate cant [hypocracy], and burst asunder the bonds (silken to some but cold iron to others) of feudal
prejudice and usages. In the meantime is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of
Independence bear no relation to half of the human race? If so, what is the ground of this limitation?

Feminist sociology focuses on analyzing the grounds of the limitations faced by women when they claim
the right to equality with men.

Inequality between the genders is a phenomenon that goes back at least 4,000 years (Lerner 1986).
Although the forms and ways in which it has been practised differ between cultures and change
significantly through history, its persistence has led to the formulation of the concept of
patriarchy. Patriarchy refers to a set of institutional structures (like property rights, access to positions
of power, relationship to sources of income) that are based on the belief that men and women are
dichotomous and unequal categories. Key to patriarchy is what might be called the dominant gender
ideologytoward sexual differences: the assumption that physiological sex differences between males
and females are related to differences in their character, behaviour, and ability (i.e., their gender). These
differences are used to justify a gendered division of social roles and inequality in access to rewards,
positions of power, and privilege. The question that feminists ask therefore is: How does this distinction
between male and female, and the attribution of different qualities to each, serve to organize our
institutions (e.g., the family, law, the occupational structure, religious institutions, the division between
public and private) and to perpetuate inequality between the sexes?

Feminism is a distinct type of critical sociology. There are considerable differences between types of
feminism, however; for example, the differences often attributed to the first wave of feminism in the
19th and early 20th centuries, the second wave of feminism from the 1950s to the 1970s, and the third
wave of feminism from the 1980s onward. Despite the variations between different types of feminist
approach, there are four characteristics that are common to the feminist perspective:

1. Gender is a central focus or subject matter of the perspective.

2. Gender relations are viewed as a problem: the site of social inequities, strains, and
contradictions.
3. Gender relations are not immutable: they are sociological and historical in nature, subject to
change and progress.
4. Feminism is about an emancipatory commitment to change: the conditions of life that are
oppressive for women need to be transformed.
One of the keen sociological insights that emerged with the feminist perspective in sociology is that “the
personal is political.” Many of the most immediate and fundamental experiences of social life—from
childbirth to who washes the dishes to the experience of sexual violence—had simply been invisible or
regarded as unimportant politically or socially. Dorothy Smith’s development of standpoint theory was a
key innovation in sociology that enabled these issues to be seen and addressed in a systematic way
(Smith 1977). She recognized from the consciousness-raising exercises and encounter groups initiated
by feminists in the 1960s and1970s that many of the immediate concerns expressed by women about
their personal lives had a commonality of themes. These themes were nevertheless difficult to articulate
in sociological terms let alone in the language of politics or law.

Part of the issue was sociology itself. Smith argued that instead of beginning sociological analysis from
the abstract point of view of institutions or systems, women’s lives could be more effectively examined
if one began from the “actualities” of their lived experience in the immediate local settings of
“everyday/everynight” life. She asked, What are the common features of women’s everyday lives? From
this standpoint, Smith observed that women’s position in modern society is acutely divided by the
experience of dual consciousness. Every day women crossed a tangible dividing line when they went
from the “particularizing work in relation to children, spouse, and household” to the institutional world
of text-mediated, abstract concerns at work, or in their dealings with schools, medical systems, or
government bureaucracies. In the abstract world of institutional life, the actualities of local
consciousness and lived life are “obliterated” (Smith 1977). While the standpoint of women is grounded
in bodily, localized, “here and now” relationships between people, due to their obligations in the
domestic sphere, society is organized through “relations of ruling,” which translate the substance of
actual lived experiences into abstract bureaucratic categories. Power and rule in society, especially the
power and rule that constrain and coordinate the lives of women, operate through a problematic “move
into transcendence” that provides accounts of social life as if it were possible to stand outside of it.
Smith argued that the abstract concepts of sociology, at least in the way that it was taught at the time,
only contributed to the problem.

Criticism
Whereas critical sociologists often criticize positivist and interpretive sociology for their conservative
biases, the reverse is also true. In part the issue is about whether sociology can be “objective,” or value-
neutral, or not. However, at a deeper level the criticism is often aimed at the radical nature of critical
analyses. Marx’s critique of capitalism and the feminist critique of patriarchy for example led to very
interesting insights into how structures of power and inequality work, but from a point of view that sees
only the most revolutionary transformation of society as a solution.

Critical sociology is also criticized from the point of view of interpretive sociology for overstating the
power of dominant groups to manipulate subordinate groups. For example, media representations of
women are said to promote unobtainable standards of beauty or to reduce women to objects of male
desire. This type of critique suggests that individuals are controlled by media images rather than
recognizing their independent ability to reject media influences or to interpret media images for
themselves. In a similar way, critical sociology is criticized for implying that people are purely the
products of macro-level historical forces rather than individuals with a capacity for individual and
collective agency. To be fair, Marx did argue that “Men make their own history;” it is just that they “do
not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but
under circumstances encountered, given, and transmitted from the past” (Marx 1851).
1.4. Why Study Sociology?
Bernard Blishen (1919 – ) was the research director for the Royal Commission on Health Services which
drew up the plan for Canada’s national medicare program in 1964. (Photo National Archives of Canada,
C-036222)

When Bernard Blishen picked up the phone one day in 1961, he was surprised to hear Chief Justice
Emmett Hall on the other end of the line asking him to be the research director for the newly
established Royal Commission on Health Services. Publically funded health care had been introduced for
the first time in Canada that year by a socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF)
government in Saskatchewan amid bitter controversy. Doctors in Saskatchewan went on strike and
private health care insurers mounted an expensive anti-public health care campaign. Because it was a
Conservative government commission, appointed by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, Blishen’s
colleagues advised him that it was going to be a whitewash document to defend the interests of private
medical care. However, Blishen took on the project as a challenge, and when the commission’s report
was published it advocated that the Saskatchewan plan be adopted nationally (Vaughan 2004).

Blishen went on to work in the field of medical sociology and also created a widely used index to
measure socioeconomic status known as the Blishen scale. He received the Order of Canada in 2011 in
recognition of his contributions to the creation of public health care in Canada.

Since it was first founded, many people interested in sociology have been driven by the scholarly desire
to contribute knowledge to this field, while others have seen it as way not only to study society, but also
to improve it. Besides the creation of public health care in Canada, sociology has played a crucial role in
many important social reforms such as equal opportunity for women in the workplace, improved
treatment for individuals with mental and learning disabilities, increased recognition and
accommodation for people from different ethnic backgrounds, the creation of hate crime legislation, the
right of aboriginal populations to preserve their land and culture, and prison system reforms.

The prominent sociologist Peter L. Berger (1929– ), in his 1963 book Invitation to Sociology: A
Humanistic Perspective, describes a sociologist as “someone concerned with understanding society in a
disciplined way.” He asserts that sociologists have a natural interest in the monumental moments of
people’s lives, as well as a fascination with banal, everyday occurrences. Berger also describes the “aha”
moment when a sociological theory becomes applicable and understood:

[T]here is a deceptive simplicity and obviousness about some sociological investigations. One reads them,
nods at the familiar scene, remarks that one has heard all this before and don’t people have better
things to do than to waste their time on truisms—until one is suddenly brought up against an insight that
radically questions everything one had previously assumed about this familiar scene. This is the point at
which one begins to sense the excitement of sociology (Berger 1963).

Sociology can be exciting because it teaches people ways to recognize how they fit into the world and
how others perceive them. Looking at themselves and society from a sociological perspective helps
people see where they connect to different groups based on the many different ways they classify
themselves and how society classifies them in turn. It raises awareness of how those classifications—
such as economic and status levels, education, ethnicity, or sexual orientation—affect perceptions.
Sociology teaches people not to accept easy explanations. It teaches them a way to organize their
thinking so that they can ask better questions and formulate better answers. It makes people more
aware that there are many different kinds of people in the world who do not necessarily think the way
they do. It increases their willingness and ability to try to see the world from other people’s perspectives.
This prepares them to live and work in an increasingly diverse and integrated world.

Sociology in the Workplace

Employers continue to seek people with what are called “transferable skills.” This means that they want
to hire people whose knowledge and education can be applied in a variety of settings and whose skills
will contribute to various tasks. Studying sociology can provide people with this wide knowledge and a
skill set that can contribute to many workplaces, including:

 An understanding of social systems and large bureaucracies

 The ability to devise and carry out research projects to assess whether a program or policy is
working
 The ability to collect, read, and analyze statistical information from polls or surveys
 The ability to recognize important differences in people’s social, cultural, and economic
backgrounds
 Skills in preparing reports and communicating complex ideas
 The capacity for critical thinking about social issues and problems that confront modern society
(Department of Sociology, University of Alabama)

Sociology prepares people for a wide variety of careers. Besides actually conducting social research or
training others in the field, people who graduate from college with a degree in sociology are hired by
government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations in fields such as social services,
counselling (e.g., family planning, career, substance abuse), designing and evaluating social policies and
programs, health services, polling and independent research, market research, and human resources
management. Even a small amount of training in sociology can be an asset in careers like sales, public

Key Terms

Section Summary

1.1. What Is Sociology?

Sociology is the systematic study of society and social interaction. In order to carry out their studies,
sociologists identify cultural patterns and social forces and determine how they affect individuals and
groups. They also develop ways to apply their findings to the real world.
1.2. The History of Sociology
Sociology was developed as a way to study and try to understand the changes to society brought on by
the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some of the earliest sociologists thought that
societies and individuals’ roles in society could be studied using the same scientific methodologies that
were used in the natural sciences, while others believed that is was impossible to predict human
behaviour scientifically, and still others debated the value of such predictions. Those perspectives
continue to be represented within sociology today.

1.3. Theoretical Perspectives

Sociologists develop theories to explain social events, interactions, and patterns. A theory is a proposed
explanation of those patterns. Theories have different scales. Macro-level theories, such as structural
functionalism and conflict theory, attempt to explain how societies operate as a whole. Micro-level
theories, such as symbolic interactionism, focus on interactions between individuals.

1.4. Why Study Sociology?

Studying sociology is beneficial both for the individual and for society. By studying sociology people
learn how to think critically about social issues and problems that confront our society. The study of
sociology enriches students’ lives and prepares them for careers in an increasingly diverse world. Society
benefits because people with sociological training are better prepared to make informed decisions
about social issues and take effective action to deal with them.

Key terms

AGIL schema Talcott Parsons’ division of society into four functional requisites: Adaptation, Goal
attainment, Integration, and Latent pattern maintenance

anomie a social condition or normlessness in which a lack of clear norms fails to give direction and
purpose to individual actions

capitalism an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership and production of

goods and their sale in a competitive market

content the specific reasons or drives that motivate individuals to interact

critical sociology a theoretical perspective that focuses on inequality and power relations in society in
order to achieve social justice and emancipation through their transformation

culture includes the group’s shared practices, values, beliefs, norms and artifacts
disenchantment of the world the replacement of magical thinking by technological rationality and
calculation

dominant gender ideology the belief that physiological sex differences between males and females are
related to differences in their character, behaviour, and ability

dramaturgical analysis a technique sociologists use in which they view society through the metaphor of
theatrical performance

dual consciousness the experience of a fissure or dividing point in everyday life where one crosses a line
between irreconcilable forms of consciousness or perspective

dynamic equilibrium a stable state in which all parts of a healthy society are working together properly

dysfunctions- social patterns that have undesirable consequences for the operation of society

feminism the critical analysis of the way gender differences in society structure social inequality

figuration the process of simultaneously analyzing the behaviour of an individual and the society that
shapes that behaviour

formal sociology a sociology that analytically separates the contents from the forms of social interaction
to study the common forms that guide human behaviour

function the part a recurrent activity plays in the social life as a whole and the contribution it makes to
structural continuity

functionalism (functionalist perspective) a theoretical approach that sees society as a structure with
interrelated parts designed to meet the biological and social needs of individuals that make up that
society

historical materialism an approach to understanding society that explains social change, human ideas,
and social organization in terms of underlying changes in the economic (or material) structure of society

idealism an approach to understanding society that emphasizes that the nature of society and social
change is determined by a society’s ideas, knowledge, and beliefs

idealist one who believes in idealism

interpretive sociology a perspective that explains human behaviour in terms of the meanings individuals
attribute to it

labelling a social process in which an individual’s social identity is established through the imposition of
a definition by authorities

latent functions the unrecognized or unintended consequences of a social process

law of three stages the three stages of evolution that societies develop through: theological,
metaphysical, and positive
macro-sociology a wide-scale view of the role of social structures within a society

manifest functions sought consequences of a social process

mechanical solidarity social solidarity or cohesion through a shared collective consciousness with harsh
punishment for deviation from the norms

metaphysical stage a stage of social evolution in which people explain events in terms of abstract or
speculative ideas

micro-sociology the study of specific relationships between individuals or small groups

mode of production the way human societies act upon their environment and its resources in order to
use them to meet their needs

multi-perspectival science a science that is divided into competing or diverse paradigms

organic solidarity social solidarity or cohesion through a complex division of labour and restitutive law

paradigms philosophical and theoretical frameworks used within a discipline to formulate theories,
generalizations, and the experiments performed in support of them

patriarchy institutions of male power in society

positive stage a stage of social evolution in which people explain events in terms of scientific principles
and laws

positivism (positivist perspective or positivist sociology) the scientific study of social patterns based on
methodological principles of the natural sciences

Protestant ethic the duty to work hard in one’s calling

quantitative sociology statistical methods such as surveys with large numbers of participants

rationalization the general tendency of modern institutions and most areas of life to be transformed by
the application of instrumental reason

reification referring to abstract concepts, complex processes or mutable social relationships as “things”

social action actions to which individuals attach subjective meanings

social facts the external laws, morals, values, religious beliefs, customs, fashions, rituals, and cultural
rules that govern social life

social reform an approach to social change that advocates slow, incremental improvements in social
institutions rather than rapid, revolutionary change of society as a whole

social solidarity the social ties that bind a group of people together such as kinship, shared location, and
religion
society is a group of people whose members interact, reside in a definable area, and share a culture

sociological imagination the ability to understand how your own unique circumstances relate to that of
other people, as well as to history in general and societal structures in particular

sociology the systematic study of society and social interaction

standpoint theory the examination of how society is organized and coordinated from the perspective of
a particular social location or perspective in society

structural functionalism see functionalism

symbolic interactionism a theoretical perspective through which scholars examine the relationship of
individuals within their society by studying their communication (language and symbols)

theological stage a stage of social evolution in which people explain events with respect to the will of
God or gods

theory a proposed explanation about social interactions or society

tragedy of culture the tendency for the products of human cultural creation to accumulate and become
increasingly complex, specialized, alienating, or oppressive

Verstehen German for “understanding”; in sociology it refers to the use of empathy, or putting oneself
in another’s place, to understand the motives and logic of another’s action