Chapter One
Basics
-Sociological perspective
-stresses the social contexts in which people live
-Society: a group of people who share a culture and a territory
-Social Location: the corners in life that people occupy because of where they are located in a
society
Origins
-Emerged middle 1800s
-Industrial Revolution
-ties to land and culture—tradition and social life—were broken
-Comte (founder of sociology)
-positivism: applying the scientific method to the social world
-“Sociology”: the study of society
-Spencer
-second founder of sociology
-thought societies evolve from lower to higher forms
-Darwinian (“survival of the fittest”)
-social Darwinism
-Marx
-class conflict
-bourgeoisie vs. proletariat
-solution is a classless society
-Durkheim
-got sociology recognized as an academic discipline
-goal: to show how social forces affect people’s behavior
-suicide
-social integration: the degree to which people are tied to their social group
-people with weaker social ties are more likely to commit suicide
-Weber
-capitalism
-protestant work ethic: readiness to invest capital in order to make more money
Sexism in 1800s
-rigid roles
-minimal education for both genders
-writing was considered masculine
Sociology in N. America
-took root at the Univ. of Kansas in 1890
-George Mead developed the symbolic interactionist perspective
-Jane Addams
-Hull-House:open to people who needed refuge
-worked to pass 8-hr days and child labor laws
-W.E.B. Du Bois
-first African American to earn doctorate at Harvard
-race relations heighted by personal experiences
-C. Wright Mills
-power elite: the top leaders of business, politics, and the military
-Applied Sociology
