Riassunto esame Sociology, prof A. La Spina, libro consigliato "Sociology", Giddens and Sutton

What is sociology?

Sociology can be defined as the scientific study of human life, social groups, whole societies and the human world as such. The scope of sociology is extremely wide, ranging from the analysis of passing encounters between individuals on the street to the investigation of international relations and global forms of terrorism. Sociology demonstrates the need to take a much broader view of our own lives in order to explain why we act as we do. It teaches us that much of what we regard as natural or true may not be so, and things that we take for granted are actually shaped by historical events and social processes.

The sociological imagination

Doing sociological work depends on what C. Mills called the sociological imagination: this means cultivating our imagination. The sociological imagination requires us to 'think ourselves away' from our everyday life. For example, if we think of the act of drinking a coffee, we need to know that doing this, in a sociological way, is part of a social ritual. Two people who arrange to meet for coffee are probably more interested in getting together and chatting than in what they actually drink. In all societies, drinking and eating provide occasions for social interaction and the enactment of rituals - and these offer a rich subject matter for sociological study. Coffee contains caffeine, a drug which has a stimulating effect on the brain, and many people drink coffee for the 'extra lift' it provides. Coffee is a habit-forming substance, but coffee addicts are not regarded as 'drug users'. This is because coffee is a socially acceptable drug. Coffee links people in the wealthiest and the most impoverished parts of the world. Sipping coffee is not natural but presumes a long process of social, political, and economic development. So, we can say that for sociologists, the apparently trivial act of drinking coffee could hardly be more interesting.

Studying people and societies

When sociologists speak about society, they mean a group of people living in a bounded territory who share common features such as language, values, norms... We have to know that we are all influenced by the social contexts in which we find ourselves; none of us is completely determined in our behavior by those contexts. We possess, and create, our own individuality. It is the business of sociology to investigate the connections between what society makes of us and what we make of ourselves and society.

The concept of social structure is an important one in sociology. It refers to the fact that the social contexts of our lives do not consist of random assortments of events or actions; they are structured in distinct ways. There are regularities in the ways we behave and in the relationships we have with one another. But social structure is not like a physical structure which exists independently of human actions. Human societies are always in the process of structuration (= the two-way process by which we shape our social world through our individual actions but are ourselves reshaped by societies).

Theories and theoretical perspectives

Sociology has never been a discipline in which there is a body of ideas that everyone accepts as valid, though there have been times when some theories have been more widely accepted than others. Theories involve constructing abstract interpretations that can be used to explain a wide variety of empirical or 'factual' situations. A theory is an attempt to identify general properties that explain regularly observed events. While theories tend to be linked to broader theoretical approaches, they are also strongly influenced by the research results they help generate. Many sociologists do work primarily on factual research, but unless they are guided by some knowledge of theory, their work is unlikely to be able to explain the complexity of societies. This is true even of research carried out with strictly practical objectives in mind. Many 'practical people' tend to be suspicious of theorists and may like to see themselves as too 'down to earth' to have to pay any attention to more abstract ideas. Yet all practical decisions have some theoretical assumptions lying behind them. Without a theoretical approach, we would not know what to look for when beginning a study or when interpreting our results at the end of the research. However, the illumination of factual evidence is not the only reason for the prime position of theory in sociology. Theoretical thinking must respond to general problems posed by the study of human social life, including issues that are philosophical in nature.

Founders of sociology

The background to the origins of sociology lies in the series of sweeping changes ushered in by the French Revolution and the mid-eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution in Europe. The shattering of traditional ways of life wrought by these changes resulted in the attempts of thinkers to understand and explain how they had come about and what their consequences were likely to be. To do this, scholars were led to develop new understandings of both the social and the natural worlds. One key development was the use of science instead of religion to understand the world.

Auguste Comte

He actually invented the word 'sociology'. Comte had originally used the term 'social physics' to describe the new field, but some of his intellectual rivals at the time were also using that term. Comte wanted to distinguish his own ideas from theirs, so he coined the term 'sociology' to describe the subject he wished to establish. Comte sought to create a science of society that could explain the laws of the social world just as natural science explained the functioning of the physical world. Comte's vision for sociology was for it to become a 'positive science'. He wanted sociology to apply the same rigorous scientific methods to the study of society that physicists and chemists use to study the physical world. Positivism holds that science should be concerned only with observable entities that are known directly to experience. On the basis of careful observations, one can infer laws that explain the relationship between the observed phenomena. Comte's law of three stages claims that human efforts to understand the world have passed through theological, metaphysical, and positive stages. In the theological stage, thinking was guided by religious ideas and the belief that society was an expression of God's will. In the metaphysical stage, which came to the forefront around the time of the Renaissance, society came to be seen in natural, not supernatural, terms. The positive stage encouraged the application of scientific techniques to the social world. In keeping with this view, Comte regarded sociology as the last science to develop - following on from physics, chemistry, and biology - but also as the most significant and complex of all the sciences.

Emile Durkheim

He saw sociology as a new science that could be used to elucidate traditional philosophical questions by examining them in an empirical manner. Like Comte before him, Durkheim argued that we must study social life with the same objectivity as scientists study the natural world. His famous first principle of sociology was 'Study social facts as things!' By this, he meant that social life could be analyzed as rigorously as objects or events in nature. For Durkheim, the main intellectual concern of sociology is the study of social facts. Rather than applying sociological methods to the study of individuals, sociologists should instead examine social facts - aspects of social life that shape our actions as individuals, such as the state of the economy or the influence of religion. Social facts can constrain human action in a variety of ways, ranging from outright punishment (in the case of a crime, for example) to social rejection (in the case of unacceptable behavior) to simple misunderstanding (in the case of the misuse of language). Durkheim conceded that social facts are difficult to study. Because they are invisible and intangible, social facts cannot be observed directly. Instead, their properties must be revealed indirectly by analyzing their effects or by considering attempts that have been made at their expression, such as laws, religious texts, or written rules of conduct. He was preoccupied with the changes transforming society in his own lifetime. He was particularly interested in social and moral solidarity - in other words, what holds society together and keeps it from descending into chaos. Solidarity is maintained when individuals are successfully integrated into social groups and are regulated by a set of shared values and customs. According to Durkheim, traditional cultures with a low division of labor are characterized by mechanical solidarity. Because most members of the society are involved in similar occupations, they are bound together by common experience and shared beliefs. The strength of these shared beliefs is repressive - the community swiftly punishes anyone who challenges conventional ways of life. In this way, there is little room for individual dissent. Mechanical solidarity, therefore, is grounded in consensus and similarity of belief. The forces of industrialization and urbanization, however, led to a growing division of labor that contributed to the breakdown of this form of solidarity. Durkheim argued that the specialization of tasks and the increasing social differentiation in advanced societies would lead to a new order featuring organic solidarity. Societies characterized by organic solidarity are held together by people's economic interdependence and their recognition of the importance of others' contributions. As the division of labor expands, people become increasingly dependent upon one another because each person needs goods and services that those in other occupations supply. Durkheim introduced the term anomie: feelings of aimlessness, dread, and despair provoked by modern social life. Traditional moral controls and standards, which used to be supplied by religion, are largely broken down by modern social development, and this leaves many individuals in modern societies feeling that their daily lives lack meaning. One of Durkheim's most famous studies was concerned with the analysis of suicide. Suicide seems to be a purely personal act, the outcome of extreme personal unhappiness. Durkheim showed, however, that social factors exert a fundamental influence on suicidal behavior, anomie being one of these influences. Suicide rates show regular patterns from year to year and these patterns must be explained sociologically.

• Egoistic suicides are marked by low integration in society and occur when an individual is isolated, or when his or her ties to a group are weakened or broken.
• Anomic suicide is caused by a lack of social regulation. By this, Durkheim was referring to the social conditions of anomie when people are rendered 'normless' as a result of rapid change or instability in society.
• Altruistic suicide occurs when an individual is 'over-integrated' - social bonds are too strong - and values society more than him- or herself. In such a case, suicide becomes a sacrifice for the 'greater good'.
• The final type of suicide is fatalistic suicide. Although Durkheim saw this as of little contemporary relevance, he believed that it results when an individual is over-regulated by society. The oppression of the individual results in a feeling of powerlessness before fate or society.

Karl Marx

His ideas explain the changes associated with the Industrial Revolution. Marx's primary focus was on the development of capitalism: a system of production that contrasts radically with all previous economies. He identified two main elements of capitalism. The first is capital - that is, any asset, including money, machines, or even factories, that can be used or invested to make future assets. The second is wage-labour. It refers to the pool of workers who do not own any means of production themselves but must find employment provided by the owners of capital. Marx argued that those who own capital - capitalists - form a ruling class, while the mass of the population make up a class of waged workers - the working class - which Marx also called the proletariat. For Marx, this means that capitalism is a class system in which relations between the two main classes are characterized by an underlying conflict. He saw conflicts between classes as the motivation for historical development (motor of history). According to him, there have been a series of historical stages, beginning with 'primitive communists' societies of hunters and gatherers and passing through ancient slave-owning systems and feudal systems with landowners and peasant farmers. Marx theorized that a workers’ revolution would bring about a new society in which there would be no large-scale division between owners and workers. He called this historical stage communism. In this way, society would no longer be split into a small class that monopolizes economic and political power and a mass of people who benefit little from their labour.

Max Weber

He set out some of the basic characteristics of modern industrial societies and identified key sociological debates that remain central for sociologists today. Weber recognized class conflict but saw it as less significant than Marx did. In Weber's view, economic factors are important, but ideas and values can also bring about social change. He proposed that religious values - especially those associated with Puritanism - were of fundamental importance in creating a capitalistic outlook. Unlike other sociologists, Weber argued that they should study social actions - the subjectively meaningful actions of people that are oriented towards others. It is the job of sociology to understand the meanings behind all of those individual actions. An important element in Weber's sociological perspective was the idea of the ideal type. Ideal types are conceptual or analytical models that can be used to understand the world. In the real world, ideal types rarely, if ever, exist; often only some of their attributes will be present. These hypothetical constructions can be very useful, however, as any situation in the real world can be understood by comparing it to an ideal type. In this way, ideal types serve as a fixed point of reference. It is important to point out that by 'ideal' type Weber did not mean that the conception was a perfect or desirable goal. Instead, he meant that it was a 'pure' form of a certain phenomenon. In Weber's view, the emergence of modern society was accompanied by important shifts in patterns of social action. The development of science, modern technology, and bureaucracy was described by Weber collectively as rationalization - the organization of social and economic life according to the principles of efficiency and on the basis of technical knowledge. Weber was not entirely optimistic about the outcome of rationalization, however. He was fearful that the spread of modern bureaucracy to all areas of life would imprison us in a 'steel-hard cage' from which there would be little chance of escape. The seemingly progressive agenda of the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment, of scientific progress, increasing wealth, and happiness produced by rejecting traditional customs and superstitions, also had a dark side with new dangers.

Neglected founders of sociology?

Harriet Martineau has been called the 'first woman sociologist’, but, like Marx and Weber, cannot be thought of simply as a sociologist. She was born and educated in England and was the author of more than 50 books, as well as numerous essays. Martineau is now credited with introducing sociology to Britain through her translation of Comte's founding treatise of the field, Positive Philosophy. In addition, Martineau conducted a first-hand, systematic study of American society during her extensive travels throughout the United States in the 1830s, which is the subject of her book Society in America. Martineau is significant to sociologists today for several reasons. First, she argued that when one studies a society, one must focus on all its aspects, including key political, religious, and social institutions. Second, she insisted that an analysis of a society must include an understanding of women's lives. Third, she was the first to turn a sociological eye on previously ignored issues, including marriage, children, domestic and religious life, and race relations. As she once wrote: 'The nursery, the boudoir, and the kitchen are all excellent schools in which to learn the morals and manners of a people'. Finally, she argued that sociologists should do more than just observe; they should also act in ways to benefit a society. As a result, Martineau was an active proponent of both women's rights and the emancipation of slaves.

The Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun was born in what is today Tunisia and is famous for his historical, sociological, and political economic studies. Ibn Khaldun wrote many books, the most widely known of which is a six-volume work, the Muqaddimah ('Introduction'), completed in 1378. This is viewed by some scholars today as essentially an early foundational work of sociology. This book criticized existing historical approaches and methods as dealing only with description, claiming instead the discovery of a new 'science of social organization' or 'science of society', capable of getting at the underlying meaning of events. Ibn Khaldun devised a theory of social conflict based on understanding the central characteristics of the 'nomadic' and 'sedentary' societies of his time. Central to this theory was the concept of 'group feeling' or solidarity. Groups and societies with a strong group feeling were able to dominate and control those with weaker forms of internal solidarity. Ibn Khaldun developed these ideas in an attempt to explain the rise and decline of Maghribian and Arab states, and in this sense, he may be seen as studying the process of state formation - itself a main concern of modern, Western historical sociology. Nomadic Bedouin tribes tended towards a very strong group feeling, which enabled them to overrun and dominate the weaker sedentary town-dwellers and establish new dynasties.