What kind of sociologist are you

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.

Sociologists around the world are looking closely for signs of what would be an unprecedented event: the emergence of a global culture. In the past, empires such as those that existed in China, Europe, Africa, and Central and South America linked people from many different countries, but those people rarely became part of a common culture.

They lived too far from each other, spoke different languages, practised different religions, and traded few goods. Today, increases in communication, travel, and trade have made the world a much smaller place. More and more people are able to communicate with each other instantly—wherever they are located—by telephone, video, and text. They share movies, television shows, music, games, and information over the internet.

Students can study with teachers and pupils from the other side of the globe. Governments find it harder to hide conditions inside their countries from the rest of the world. Sociologists are researching many different aspects of this potential global culture. Some are exploring the dynamics involved in the social interactions of global online communities, such as when members feel a closer kinship to other group members than to people residing in their own country.

Other sociologists are studying the impact this growing international culture has on smaller, less-powerful local cultures. Yet other researchers are exploring how international markets and the outsourcing of labour impact social inequalities. The critical perspective in sociology has its origins in social activism, social justice movements, revolutionary struggles, and radical critique.

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. 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.

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.

What does the word critical mean in this context? 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.

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. 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 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. 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. 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.

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 :.

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, years Lerner 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 ideology toward sexual differences: the assumption that physiological sex differences between males and females are related to differences in their character, behaviour, and ability i.

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.

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 s to the s, and the third wave of feminism from the s onward. Despite the variations between different types of feminist approach, there are four characteristics that are common to the feminist perspective:. She recognized from the consciousness-raising exercises and encounter groups initiated by feminists in the s ands 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 the abstract concepts of sociology, at least in the way that it was taught at the time, only contributed to the problem.

Whereas critical sociologists often criticize positivist and interpretive sociology for their conservative biases, the reverse is also true. However, at a deeper level the criticism is often aimed at the radical nature of critical analyses. 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. The consumption of food is a commonplace, daily occurrence, yet it can also be associated with important moments in our lives.

Eating can be an individual or a group action, and eating habits and customs are influenced by our cultures. Any of these factors might become a topic of sociological study. Food production is a primary example of how human systems adapt to environmental systems. In many respects the concerns of environmentalists and others with respect to the destructive relationship between industrial agriculture and the ecosystem are the results of a dysfunctional system of adaptation.

The concept of sustainable agriculture points to the changes needed to return the interface between humans and the natural environment to a state of dynamic equilibrium. A sociologist viewing food consumption through a symbolic interactionist lens would be more interested in micro-level topics, such as the symbolic use of food in religious rituals, or the role it plays in the social interaction of a family dinner. The increasing concern that people have with their diets speaks to the way that the life of the biological body is as much a symbolic reality, interpreted within contemporary discourses on health risks and beauty, as it is a biological reality.

Or a critical sociologist might be interested in the power and powerlessness experienced by local farmers versus large farming conglomerates. In the documentary Food Inc. Another topic of study might be how nutrition varies between different social classes. When Bernard Blishen picked up the phone one day in , 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. 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 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. This is the point at which one begins to sense the excitement of sociology Berger 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. This prepares them to live and work in an increasingly diverse and integrated world.

Studying sociology can provide people with this wide knowledge and a skill set that can contribute to many workplaces, including:.

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. Even a small amount of training in sociology can be an asset in careers like sales, public relations, journalism, teaching, law, and criminal justice.

The phenomenon known as Facebook was designed specifically for students. Instead of having to meet up on campus, students can call, text, and Skype from their dorm rooms. Instead of a study group gathering weekly in the library, online forums and chat rooms help learners connect. The availability and immediacy of computer technology has forever changed the ways students engage with each other.

Now, after several social networks have vied for primacy, a few have established their place in the market and some have attracted niche audience. LinkedIn distinguished itself by focusing on professional connections, serving as a virtual world for workplace networking. Newer offshoots like Foursquare help people connect based on the real-world places they frequent, while Twitter has cornered the market on brevity.

These newer modes of social interaction have also spawned questionable consequences, such as cyberbullying and what some call FAD, or Facebook addiction disorder. Yet, in the international study cited above, two-thirds of to year-old smartphone users said they spend more time with friends online than they do in person.

All of these social networks demonstrate emerging ways that people interact, whether positive or negative. Sociologists ask whether there might be long-term effects of replacing face-to-face interaction with social media. Moreover, he argues, they do not allow people to be alone with their feelings.

What do you think? How do social media like Facebook and communication technologies like smartphones change the way we communicate? How could this question be studied? 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. 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. Those perspectives continue to be represented within sociology today. 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.

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. 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. Which of the following best describes sociology as a subject?

A sociologist defines society as a group of people who reside in a defined area, share a culture, and who:. The History of Sociology 5. Which of the following was a topic of study in early sociology? Weber believed humans could not be studied purely objectively because they were influenced by:. Theoretical Perspectives Which of these theories is most likely to look at the social world on a micro-level?

Studying Sociology helps people analyze data because they learn:. Sociology is a broad discipline. Different kinds of sociologists employ various methods for exploring the relationship between individuals and society. The History of Sociology Many sociologists helped shape the discipline.

Theoretical Perspectives People often think of all conflict as violent, but many conflicts can be resolved nonviolently. Social communication is rapidly evolving due to ever improving technologies. September Mills, C. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Office of the Correctional Investigator. Pollan, Michael.

NY: Penguin Press. Simmel, Georg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Dorothy. Writing the Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Statistics Canada. Catalogue XWE. Becker, Howard and Harry Barnes. Social Thought from Lore to Science Volume 1. New York: Dover Publications. Collins, Randall and Michael Makowsky. The Discovery of Society. New York: Random House. Comte, August. NY: Harper and Row. The Rules of Sociological Method , 8th ed.

Mueller, E. George and E. Translated by S. New York: Free Press. Paris: Champion. Lengermann, Patricia and Jill Niebrugge. Longrove, Ill: Waveland Press. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Hamburg: Otto Meissner Verlag. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Applied, clinical, and professional programs prepare students to enter the workplace, teaching them the necessary analytical skills to perform sociological research in a professional setting.

Many programs also offer opportunities to gain experience through internships or by preparing reports for clients. These types of opportunities give students a chance to apply their academic knowledge in a professional setting and develop skills needed for the field. Sociologists typically have an interest in the Thinking, Creating and Helping interest areas, according to the Holland Code framework.

The Thinking interest area indicates a focus on researching, investigating, and increasing the understanding of natural laws. The Creating interest area indicates a focus on being original and imaginative, and working with artistic media. The Helping interest area indicates a focus on assisting, serving, counseling, or teaching other people.

If you are not sure whether you have a Thinking or Creating or Helping interest which might fit with a career as a sociologist, you can take a career test to measure your interests. Analytical skills. Sociologists must be able to carefully analyze data and other information, often utilizing statistical processes to test their theories.

Communication skills. Sociologists need strong communication skills when they conduct interviews, collaborate with colleagues, and present research results. Critical-thinking skills. Sociologists must be able to think critically when doing research.

They must design research projects and collect, process, and analyze information in order to draw logical conclusions about society and the groups it comprises. Problem-solving skills. Writing skills. Sociologists frequently write reports detailing their findings. The median wage is the wage at which half the workers in an occupation earned more than that amount and half earned less. It permits us to trace the connection between the patterns and events of our own and the patterns and events of our society.

Breadcrumb Home Sociology Sociological Perspective. The Sociological Perspective Adapted from I. After the Great Depression, this proportion fell as New Deal policies helped distribute income more evenly.

Increasingly, sociologists are turning their attention to the world at large and developing theories of global processes. Historically, sociologists have tended to focus their work on individual countries, studying the social processes and structures within a single country.

In addition, sociology has traditionally focused on Western societies, but has recently expanded its focus to non-Western societies. These shifts illustrate the fact that it is no longer possible to study social life without thinking globally. Contemporary societies have become so porous and interconnected a process that scholars have termed globalization that to ignore the global patterns would be to present an incomplete picture of any social situation. Globalization : Global processes touch all corners of the world, including this mall in Jakarta, Indonesia, where the fast-food business model originating in the United States is now a part of everyday life.

Thinking globally in sociology could entail a variety of different approaches. Some scholars use world systems theory. World systems theory stresses that the world system not nation states should be the basic unit of social analysis. The world-system refers to the international division of labor, which divides the world into core countries, semi-periphery countries, and the periphery countries. Core countries focus on higher-skill, capital-intensive production, and the rest of the world focuses on low-skill, labor-intensive production, and the extraction of raw materials.

This constantly reinforces the dominance of the core countries. Nonetheless, the system is dynamic, and individual states can gain or lose their core semi-periphery, periphery status over time. For a time, some countries become the world hegemon; throughout the last few centuries, this status has passed from the Netherlands to the United Kingdom and, most recently, to the United States.

The most well-known version of the world system approach has been developed by Immanuel Wallerstein in s and s. Wallerstein traces the rise of the world system from the 15 th century, when the European feudal economy suffered a crisis and was transformed into a capitalist one. Europe the West utilized its advantages and gained control over most of the world economy, presiding over the development and spread of industrialization and the capitalist economy, indirectly resulting in unequal development.

Other approaches that fall under world systems theory include dependency theory and neocolonialism. Dependency theory takes the idea of the international division of labor and states that peripheral countries are not poor because they have not adequately developed, but rather are poor because of the very nature of their relationship with core countries.

This relationship is exploitative, as the resources needed by peripheral countries to develop are funneled to core countries.

Poor countries are thus in a continual state of dependency to rich countries. Dependency Theory : According to dependency theory, unequal exchange results in the unequal status of countries. Core countries accumulate wealth by gathering resources from and selling goods back to the periphery and semi-periphery.

Neocolonialism also known as neoimperialism also argues that poor countries are poor not because of any inherent inadequacy. Neocolonialism emphasizes the unequal relationships between former colonizing countries and colonized regions. Domination not just economic, but also cultural and linguistic still continues to occur even though poor countries are no longer colonies. The top-down approach is not only used to study the global economy, but also social norms.

Sociologists who are interested in global social norms focus their attention on global institutions, such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund, or various other international organizations, such as human rights groups. John Meyer, a Stanford sociologist, is one of these. These norms form a global civil society that operates independently of individual nations and to which individual nations often strive to conform in order to be recognized by the international community.

Another approach to studying globalization sociologically is to examine on-the-ground processes. Some sociologists study grassroots social movements, such as non-governmental organizations which mobilize on behalf of equality, justice, and human rights. Others study global patterns of consumption, migration, and travel. Still others study local responses to globalization. Two ideas that have emerged from these studies are glocalization and hybridization.

Glocalization was a term coined by a Japanese businessman in the s and is a popular phrase in the transnational business world. It refers to the ability to make a global product fit a local market. Hybridization is a similar idea, emerging from the field of biology, which refers to the way that various sociocultural forms can mix and create a third form which draws from its sources, but is something entirely new.