Introduction to Sociology Lecture Comments

Last updated: April 5, 2004 2:03 PM

Dr. Brian Campbell

Here are some comments about lectures along with a list of terms that are important to look up in the dictionary. Some of the dictionary entries expand into areas not covered in the lectures. You are not responsible for the tangents in the dictionary definitions that have not been discussed.

Week 1 - January 7 to 9

The first part of the class was taken up with reviewing the syllabus. I said that I will be reviewing the syllabus and updating it for the following week.

I talked about two readings. The first was a discussion of university student subculture by Albas and Albas. These authors use interviews and direct observation to paint a picture of different types of students in relation to the importance of grades and studying. This type of work is typical of a style of sociology that looks at the immediate experience of people in various social settings. The work is very qualitative using lots of verbatim quotes and observations.

I showed a trailer for the last Lord of the Rings film. The point of this was to point out the enduring imagery from feudal society. There are many traditional and romantic notions of the past contained in this image. This fantasy past has elements of the real past embedded in it. In this fantasy world there are aristocrats who inherit their place in the world. Like the real feudal societies of Western Europe most of the types of people in this fantasy inherit their place in the world. I used this present familiar mythic fantasy feudalism as a springboard to talk about the reality of feudalism in Western history and to introduce the great changes from feudal society to the modern world. These changes were the backdrop for the development of sociology. Sociology developed as part of trying to understand the changes that have happened and continue to happen as part of the modern world.

We will be looking at this transition to modern society in a series of lectures on these changes from a variety of points of view. The point of looking at these changes is to develop an appreciation of different styles of doing sociology. The first perspective that I introduced both to understand this change and to see how the world can be interpreted in a particular way was Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. In this view all societies are characterized by class conflict and the shift from feudal society to modern capitalist society is a shift in the class structure. These social class structures are bound up with the economy and technology. In this sense Marx's ideas are know as materialist. The material conditions of society determine the rest.

I talked about the big philosophical movements of the enlightenment starting in the 18th century and the conservative reaction to the enlightenment and to modern society. These general reactions to the development of modern life form a backdrop to many of the ideas that end up crystallizing at the end of the 19th century as sociology.

Dictionary terms: feudal mode of production, symbolic interactionism, role, transition from feudalism to capitalism, conservatism, age of enlightenment, Erving Goffman

Week 2 - January 12 to 16

We looked at Auguste Comte and the origin of the term sociology. We covered Comte's law of societal stages and his ideas about the hierarchy of the sciences. In Comte we have a philosophical treatment of the idea of a science of society that is called sociology.

I talked about the rise of moral statistics. In the 19th century all of the governments of Western Europe started to more systematically collect statistics on their populations. This ranged from births and deaths to crime. Counting all of these things was a new practice that arose as part of modern society. One of the things that emerged from these statistics was that the rates for various social patterns remained fairly stable over time. They also varied widely from place to place. Some rates, like those for suicides seemed to creep steadily higher. We reviewed some of the key figures in Moral statistics (Quetelet, Guerry). Quetelet especially advocated the use of mathematics to understand society and thought of a developing social physics.

We considered Florence Nightingale and Harriet Martineau. Nightingale is well know as one of the founders of modern nursing, but she was also a health and social reformer who used statistics and developed graphic displays of trends. Nightingale was a wealthy upper class English woman who was very well connected politically. She became a media star because of her nursing in the Crimean war. She was part of the moral statistics movement and met Quetelet when he came for a conference in London in 1860. Nightingale wrote about Quetelet after his death and triumphed the idea of the development of social science to help create more rational social policy. Martineau was a popular writer and journalist. She was a successful career professional in an age when women found it difficult to obtain advancement in the work force. Martineau translated Comte and wrote her own social analytical works. Nightingale and Martineau corresponded and collaborated with Nightingale being the silent partner. There is no continuous tradition of paying attention to either of these women writers as early sociological writers.

Later in the 19th century Morselli, an Italian, continued in the tradition of moral statisticians with the publication of a book on suicide patterns. This work, although thorough, did not develop a basic sociological perspective. Society was said to be caused by the rise of civilization. At the end of the century Emile Durkheim came on the scene. He published a book on suicide that pulled together the moral statistical work of the 19th century but he did this using a general set of concepts about society and about how to do a science of society called sociology. With Durkheim we have a generation where academic sociology is born. In the United States we have the establishment of the first sociology department at the newly established University of Chicago. Sociology as an academic discipline is born.

The 19th century starts with a call for the development of a science of society by Comte but this does not happen in any organized way until the 1890's. Most of the early sociological writers in this time are social reformers. Most of their work ends up being forgotten. The exception is Karl Marx who did not present himself as a sociologist, but certainly stated that he was a scientist of society. Many of his general ideas about how society works and why it has changed have provided starting points for a large number of arguments made within sociology. The materialist idea that society is based on economics, technology, power, conflict, and social classes becomes a powerful one, although the details of how this works end up being hotly contested. With Durkheim and some other writers in his time another general perspective develops that we often refer to as functionalism. In this perspective conflict is not the norm, rather the concern is with how different parts of society function to maintain a society overall. Society is treated as an organic system. We did not explore this idea in any depth but left this to later in the course.

Dictionary terms: anomic suicide, altruistic suicide, egoistic suicide, Auguste Comte, Hierarchy of the sciences, moral statistics, Adolphe Quetelet, Emile Durkheim, functionalism (first paragraph), official statistics

Week 3 - January 19 to 23

We completed a discussion of Marx using the Inverarity reading and concentrated on the argument about the role of law in society. Inverarity outlines Marx's argument that laws in society help to justify existing social relationships. Under this view law never changes society, but rather laws change to support changes in society. This is worked out in the argument about the idea of formal legal equality.

In feudal societies, like Western Europe before modern times, there was not formal legal equality for all people. The nobility and the clergy and the commoners all were treated differently before the law. Women had very different legal rights than men. Ethnic and racial minorities had different legal rights than the dominant groups. There was slavery and indentured labour where these people had no rights. In fact it appears to be normal for large scale traditional societies to have formal legal inequality. With the advent of modern society this changes. In Western Europe formal legal distinctions disappear over time. Marx argues that the reason this happens is because of the legal requirement under capitalism that all labour is contracted labour. Workers sell their labour for a wage and thus must be free to sell it. This labour becomes a commodity that is bought and sold on the market. Over time the only really important thing about anybody from the point of view of capitalism becomes the value of labour. In this type of society formal legal differences between social classes, gender, race and ethnicity become increasingly irrelevant. Since legal equality is structurally important it becomes accepted and desired by the people in these societies. Over time social movements and activists lobby to extend legal equality. This process continues to this day. Of course, formal legal equality does not eliminate prejudice and inequality. Prejudice and unequal treatment will also diminish over the long haul but inequality of results will not. Some people will be a lot richer than others. We are only talking about formal legal equality and how people are treated as categories of people.

Inverarity develops this line of Marx's argument and applies it to the situation of African Americans in the United States. He links slavery to the plantation economy and argues that real equality is only started after that economy went into decline. I suggest that the same argument could be made about equal rights for other groups.

I reviewed five dimensions of sociology. Sociologists vary on these dimensions.

We reviewed the types of questions that would be on any of my tests. I explained the first essay assignment.

Dictionary terms: proletariat, Karl Marx

Week 4 - January 26 to 30

This week we concentrated on the work of Durkheim. We had discussed Durkheim before when we considered his arguments about the different types of suicide. Now we considered the more general aspects of Durkeim's view of sociology and society. Durkheim emphasized social order. He looked at society as an organism and considered the components of society in terms of how they functioned in the overall system. This approach in sociology has come to be called functionalism.

I outlined the idea of the dualism of human nature. This is the notion that humans have a higher/noble part and a lower/baser part. Durkheim had a dualistic view of human nature placed society in the role of providing the higher part.

I discussed at greater length the distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity and connected these forms of social organization to types of law. Mechanical solidarity has a strong connection to repressive law while organic solidarity is connected to restitutive law.

In considering the importance of norms and order to Durkheim we also discussed the distinction between folkways and mores made by Sumner.

Dictionary terms: mechanical and organic solidarity, mores, folkways, function, functionalism (first paragraph)

Week 5 - February 2 to 6

Weber made the argument that changes in the technical and economic infrastructure were not sufficient to explain the transition to modern capitalist society in Europe. In this sense Weber was a critic of Marx's materialism. Weber argued that there was a change in the religions of Western Europe that together with the economic and technological changes caused the rise of modern society. The religious change was the rise of rationalism in religion that ended up contributing to the rise of rational capitalism. This argument was found in Weber's book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

The religious change in Weber's argument was the shift from Catholic other-worldly asceticism where religious devotion was exemplified by the withdrawal from daily life to Protestant this-worldly asceticism where religious devotion was demonstrated by engagement in a disciplined daily life. The example discussed by Weber was Calvinism where individuals were charged with being methodical and unrelenting in their daily routines. This "puritanical" group and their like across Europe replaced a modest rural leisurely existence with one of unrelenting work. Under Protestantism everyone got to be a monk in their daily life. There was an added paradox in that since these Protestants could not flaunt and enjoy their gains, they reinvested and worked to rationalize and make methodical their business activities. This rational methodical business practice became the bases of modern capitalism.

Weber made the distinction between 3 types of authority. This diagram has the type of authority along the top and selected characteristics of these types along the side.

Weber argued that these types were "ideal types" and that the real world has societies and social organizations which are blends of the above trends. There is a general tendency for the decline of traditional authority and the rise of rational-legal-bureaucratic authority.

We also covered the different types of legal reasoning. These ideal types of legal reasoning varied in terms of the extent that they were governed by independent formal legal procedures and the extent to which they used legal rules to rationally decide cases. The general tendency in modern society is for a growth of formal rational decision making where legal rules are applied relatively consistently. The last type of law is functionally necessary for the maintenance and expansion of capitalism and bureaucracy.

Finally, we discussed Weber's view of social inequality and his distinctions between class, status and party. The important distinction in this idea is between class and status. This was another area where Weber was criticizing/improving on Marx by arguing that there are multidimensional aspects of inequality.

Dictionary Terms: bureaucracy, ascribed status, achieved status, ideal type, Max Weber, Protestant ethic, verstehen, "class, status and party

Week 6 - February 9 to 13

We discussed the idea of socialization. In doing this we used a variety of materials. Howard Becker analyzes becoming a marihuana user. He treats this as a learning experience where users have to accomplish a series of things (skill, recognition, and interpretation) in order for them to be successful users. Becker shifts the ground for this paper away from the traditional analysis of what he refers to as predispositional theories that try to explain why people do things. Becker is not interested in why people do things. He is interested in how they do things. He sees motives as built up in the course of behaviour. His users start for whatever reason but once they start they enter a way of thinking and talking about what they do. Becker's users become socialized into use and into motives.

I pointed out that it was interesting that he was not criticizing drug use or worried about why people take drugs. He is also not interested in whether his users have any problems because of drug use. He is taking the side of the marihuana users in the sense that he simply reports and validates their experience.

I then lectured on the work of Erving Goffman. Goffman was a symbolic interactionist who had his own distinctive way of dealing with interaction. He called his approach dramaturgy. What he meant by that is that he interpreted society and social action with a theatrical metaphor. For him all the world was a stage. The main task in social interaction is impression management. Actors have to manage the impressions that they give to others. For Goffman identity and self are part of interaction in an interaction order.

We also talked about the study by Haas and Shaffir on the socialization of medical students. Haas and Shaffir relate how medical students have to learn a professional attitude that seems impersonal to them at first. Haas and Shaffir were basing their study on an earlier study by Becker and Geer as well as some of the ideas put forward by Goffman. Becker and Geer made the argument that there was a death of idealism in medical school. Haas and Shaffir analyze this phenomenon and look at how aspiring doctors adopt a cloak of competence to manage their impressions in relation to their teachers and patients.

We started to discuss formal educational systems in industrial societies as another location for the analysis of socialization. I outlined that mass formal education arose as part of the development of modern industrial societies. This is a good illustration of the idea that we should not take institutions for granted. It is not the case that formal education has always been there. Brint's argument about the basic priorities between the elite preparation of the European model and the democratic uplift priority for the North American model was introduced.

Dictionary Terms: "Drug taking for pleasure", Howard Becker, Erving Goffman, dramaturgy, "Interaction, interaction ritual, and Interaction order", encounter, role distance, socialization

Week 7 - February 16 to 20

This week we concentrated on the analysis of the arguments that were made by Brint on education. I elaborated on some other main issues.

Brint does a comparison of the education systems in several modern industrial societies. He concentrates on the United States as his contrast. I provided some further comparison between Canada and the United States. The difference between the streaming of the European type of system as shown in both Germany and England as compared to the United States and Canada was highlighted. In the elite (and vocational) streaming systems young people are sorted into groups as they leave primary school with a small number of students going on to academic programs in specialized high schools for professional and elite training while the others go on to various technical and training schools. In the English case many students simply leave school without completing high school and enter directly into apprenticeship training and other employment. The American and Canadian examples are different in that students take largely general academic subjects throughout high school. Although there are certainly academic streams within high school, students do not have to make a choice as early as in Europe. I argued that the U.S. was more extreme than Canada in the direction of openness that extends into undergraduate education. I argued that in the US there is little streaming in undergraduate bachelor degrees. American graduate schools will accept students from a variety of fields and train them from the ground up. For example, students do not need to have undergraduate degrees in sociology or psychology to take graduate degrees in these areas. This is not the case in Canada where it is necessary to take the appropriate undergraduate degree before going on to graduate work in that field.

Brint recognizes that there is an elite stream within the American system. This is a small group of private high schools and "Ivy League" or "selective" universities. These schools are directed toward elite education and have very different standards than the rest of the largely open American system. Canada has no such two tiered educational system although it can be argued that there is some variation among our primarily publicly funded system. The uniformity of the Canadian university system is similar to many European societies.

Brint makes the argument that there is some evidence that all industrial societies are converging in not adopting an early streaming policy. Keeping student options open until the end of high school is now becoming an international norm. There still are variations in the streaming from that point on and in the extent to which apprenticeship systems are integrated with educational

Dictionary Terms: hidden curriculum, credentialism, screening, cultural capital, human capital, reference group, anticipatory socialization, functionalist theory of social stratification

Week 8 - March 1 to 5

We spent some time reading tables in the Guppy & Arai article on post-secondary participation. We considered the argument that there are several social background factors (gender, class, and ethnicity) that may affect post-secondary participation. We looked at how social class was indirectly measured using education and occupation.

We looked in a summary way at the many things that formal educational systems do in modern industrial societies. I suggested that if we were interested in why educational systems exist in their present form we would have to consider what they actually do in industrial societies. Their role is one of the most general characteristics of industrial societies.

We started to consider the sociological analysis of technology and society. We started with the work of William Ogburn. He was a technological determinist. He saw technology as evolving inevitably with society playing catch-up in adjusting culture to meet the new context created by technology. Society in advanced technological societies is characterized by a cultural lag where the values, beliefs, behaviours, and institutions within society are constantly adapting to technological change. We outlined his view of technological and societal evolution with the phases of accumulation, invention, diffusion and adjustment.

We briefly talked about the work of Gilfillin. He worked with Ogburn and emphasized the incremental small changes that technologies go through. Both of these writers saw technology as changing through small modifications. This aspect of their arguments has become the mainstream view among sociologists interested in technologies.

A contrast to Ogburn and Gilfillin is presented by Stern. Stern argued that major technologies and technological development is controlled by large corporations. These social interests direct technological development. In this sense society, or at least some segments of society, determine technology.

We started to look at the arguments by Volti on the development of technology. He agrees with the incremental social view of the development of technology. But for Volti, the world is more complex than it is for Ogburn, with society sometimes taking the initiative. We looked at the difference between the demand pull for some technologies and the belated demand for other technologies. In the latter case it is not so much that society has to catch up as it is unclear what is to be done with many new technologies. We considered the examples of the telephone and the automobile as technologies that took some time to find their niche.

Dictionary Terms: cultural lag, technological determinism, technology

Week 9 and 10

I reviewed Volti's argument about the rise of printing and its effects on society. This is one of the most common examples when the effects of technology on society is discussed. I outlined a broader analysis of the relationship between communication cultures and societal structure. All small societies have been oral cultures where all of the knowledge and language has been passed down orally, often with the aid of stories. Elders have the knowledge of a society and pass this on. In scribal societies we have the invention of writing. All large agricultural societies have had some sort of writing, but those who could write remained a small group of scribes. Modern industrial societies saw the invention of the printing press, and the great expansion of knowledge and of the number of people in these societies who could read and write. We know that the invention of printing happens at the very beginning of this change to industrial capitalist society. Some argue that it may have been a cause of this change. Others argue that it was simply part of the change and required the support of the expanding middle class (who could read) to buy and eventually write the books produced by the presses. No matter how it started, printing became essential for the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge. It was associated with the development of criticism. It was associated with individualism because reading was a solitary experience that could be out of step with the experiences of others. I discussed how there is a view of modern television based culture that argues that we are returning to a form of oral culture. The argument is that we are no longer require to read to get much information. We can watch TV. We also do this together and are not as isolated as readers. TV watchers can share the experience of the game or the sitcom. This recreation of an oral/visual culture is part of what we have sometimes heard of as the global village. We collectively hear and see things that happen around the world and get the impression that they are close.

The Goyder piece on "The D&D of R&D" is from a recent book on the sociology of technology in Canada. Goyder summarizes the position of Braverman, which updates and develops the ideas in Karl Marx on the relationship between skill and capitalism. He contrasts this with another view by such writers as Daniel Bell where the argument is made that modern technologies require higher levels of skill. Examples can be found of all of these processes going on in modern societies. Goyder is critical of what he sees as a simple model advocated by Braverman. He suggests we have to look at all of the contending forces.

One point that Goyder clearly makes is that new technologies have destabilized many people's lives since they are concerned about job displacement. Displacement has a clearer role than deskilling for Goyder. Goyder rejects the deskilling hypothesis with evidence from the Canadian General Social Survey where the vast majority of Canadians say that the skill levels for their jobs has increased. Goyder uses this quantitative survey data of the experiences from the Canadian population instead of relying on case studies that can show any number of things to be happening. We can always find examples of skilling and deskilling. The point is to understand what is going on overall. We could debate the value of particular questions on the surveys that he uses. The point for our purposes is to highlight some issues and show how a sociologist has addressed them.

The research methods used in Goyder are primarily quantitative. I emphasized the distinction between quantitative and qualitative research as major differences within sociology.

I discussed the argument made by Ruth Schwartz Cowan on the changes to housework. Schwartz Cowan is critical of the idea that less work is being done in the home after industrialization. She argues that many of the traditional tasks have left the home, but that there has been new work develop along with the industrialization of the home with new technologies. One of the easiest examples of this is laundry where the advent of running hot water and the washing machine makes it easier to do laundry. But the ease of doing laundry leads to the escalation of the demands and expectations to do laundry. Cleaning technologies go along with new demands to use them. Another set of technologies that have conspired to increase work are cooking technologies. The rise of fine white flour and ovens and egg beaters has resulted in the need to make cake and cookies. The pioneer families that she uses as the start of the settler technology story ate very simply. New technologies helped to create more complex meals. Cowan concentrates on the work of women. Although men's work moved out of the traditional household this does not mean that men's work has decreased. I speculated that all forms of work have at least stayed the same and that modern work studies have shown that both men and women are working longer hours than ever before.

I generalized the escalation of work with technology with some illustrations from computer technology. Computers create new forms of work just as they make some tasks easier. I speculated that there is no such thing as a labour saving device from the point of view of the amount of work that needs to be done. Technology changes can affect the type of work that is done but not the total amount of work that needs to be done. At least we do not have evidence for the labour saved by technology being taken out as a form of leisure. We could make the argument that displacement is a form of labour saving, but that is not a form of saving that brings profit to the worker involved.

Dictionary Terms: Technology, deskilling

Week 11 - March 22 to 26

This week saw us engage in an analysis of the digital divide argument. Since computer and Internet technologies allow people to access some information more easily it could be argued that this will help to level the inequalities in society. In relation to education we could say that educational access is potentially increased and thus the potential mobility of some people is enhanced. The digital divide argument makes the case that like many other technologies and skills in society, digital technologies and skills are accessed more readily and easily by those who already have more. Those who have end up with another dimension, digital technologies, that they can have more of than others.

We looked at a report by Sciadas that was released by Statistics Canada on the existence and extent of the digital divide. Table 1 from this report is produced below.

This table uses income quintiles to distinguish the population. For each of the categories, such as rural and urban, the population in that category is broken down into 5 equal groups (or quintiles). The top group is the top 20% of earners while the bottom is the lowest 20% of earners. The table above shows that 11.6% of the bottom quintile of the rural population have regular Internet use from home. This contrasts with 68.2% of the top quintile rural households and the 70.1% Internet access from home for the top income quintile urban households. If you work through this table it shows that high income households are much more likely to have Internet access from home or from anywhere for all categories of households. Educational level is also important. Households with university educated adults are much more likely to use the Internet. The Sciadas article measures this "digital divide" a variety of ways. One of the trends that is noticed is a slight narrowing of the divide between the middle and the highest income households. The poorest households have not changed their relative position over time.

Sciadas shows that all communication technologies have been adopted by the higher income groups first. Computers and the Internet are slower in adoption (penetration) than some technologies, most notably television.

In lectures I worked through the clearest tables and charts in the Sciadas article. The main trends are evident in these tables while the more sophisticated measures simply show the same things in different ways.

The other digital divide article that we examined was written by Looker and Thiessan. This article is also published by Statistics Canada. Looker and Thiessan examine a different mix of data. They look at young people and see whether social categories such as gender and father's education and the rural/urban dimension make a difference to patterns of use and to attitudes. They show that there are some differences, although the differences they find are not as large as those examined by Sciadas.

Week 12 - March 29 to April 2

As a contrast to the digital divide and to the Goyder piece on deskilling and displacement I have ended the course by referring to two qualitative sociology articles. The first is a classic study by LaPierre about prejudice attitudes and behaviour. LaPierre argues that attitudes as they are shown on surveys do not give a true picture of how people will behave. He shows how a Chinese couple are accepted and served in a variety of restaurants and hotels over a two year period in the early 1930's. The remarkable thing is that 6 months after his experience in accompanying the couple to these establishments he sends a survey out to the same places that he went to (and to a sample of similar places) asking them whether they would serve Chinese people. Almost all of them said that they would not. His moral for this story is that the attitude surveys are useless. The surprising finding that people are more intolerant on surveys than in person is not explored in depth by LaPierre. This is certainly not always the case, but we do not have time to explore this type of issue. LaPierre was more interested in the fact that there was little relationship between attitudes as measured by the survey and behaviour. He expresses a methodological commitment to qualitative research. He is dismissive of the new surveys as easy and cheap and not worth much. In his time the survey was only starting to be used. It really didn't start to have a major impact until the 1950's when computers became available to be able to analyze the data.

Another qualitative researcher that we have come across before is Howard Becker. In the second article Becker relates how he discovered what a "crock" was. He relates the story of how some medical students, who he was studying, used the term "crock" to refer to some of the patients. He unpacks the meaning of the term over a period of time by asking the students to explain it to him. He finds that medical students are interested in definite diseases that they will be tested on. Crocks have vague symptoms that cannot be pinned down to a specific malady. Because of this they are not interesting to learn from. Becker demonstrate the complex and contextual nature of meaning. The way to discover this complexity would of course be through qualitative analysis.

These two examples of qualitative sociology help to round out the variety of forms of doing sociology.

Dictionary Terms: attitude,qualitative research techniques