One of the toughest things to do when developing a sociological imagination, is trying to understand what sociology is for, and how it is structured. Without this sense of purpose and structure, sociology can become a confused mishmash of half-remembered ideas and prejudices.
Sociology is big. “You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is”
Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
The first thing to remember is that sociology is a vast topic, with hundreds of theorists and ideas, but they are just that- theories and ideas. Although many sociological concepts have empirical evidence to support them, they still remain theories. For example, the idea of Max Weber that the ‘protestant work ethic‘ (Weber, 1930)[the-protestant-ethic-and-the-spirit-of-capitalism: Read Section 2 of the Introduction written by, none other than, Anthony Giddens!] created capitalism is a helpful and useful theory. It tells us something about protestant Christianity and something about capitalism. But, capitalism covers the whole world now, and more than just protestant Christians, and not all Christians act or think like Weber’s study, because Weber was a sociologist and not a theologian. His descriptions of both Catholicism and Protestantism are substantially wrong, so he sets up a (false) distinction between the two to prove his model.
So, sociology can give us ideas and theories to apply to the world and to our work, but we don’t HAVE to apply them. The idea that there is no such thing as two genders, for example, is a theory, not a fact.
Sociology has a purpose.
It has two, in fact. Simply, the purpose is:
- Describe how society is made.
- Suggest how society can be made (better)
Sociology has a structure.
[the current way of describing this is ‘new institutionalism’. The idea for this goes way back to 1931: “An institution is a collective action in control, liberation, and expansion of individual action.” (Commons, 1931)
Sociology is made up of a tension between two things: control and resistance.
These relate to a massive debate into the connection between the ‘agency’ of individuals, and the ‘structure’ of society that makes and constrains those individuals.
Control and resistance are mediated by two ideas: power and solidarity.
Sociology is made up of groups of ideas: personal (mostly psychology), interpersonal, family, group, society. The interpersonal are often referred to as the ‘private sphere’ and the group and society, the ‘public sphere’.
These make up the institutions of social life, and have the following characteristics (from Goodin, 1998:19,20)
- Individual agents and groups pursue their respective projects in a context that is collectively constrained.
- Those constraints take the form of institutions – organized patterns of socially constructed norms and roles, and socially prescribed behaviors expected of occupants of those roles, which are created and re-created over time.
- Constraining though they are, those constraints nonetheless are in various other respects advantageous to individuals and groups in the pursuit of their own more particular projects.
- Individual and group action, contextually constrained and socially shaped though it may be, is the engine that drives social life.
My proposal is that all sociological theories and ideas can be mapped into this model.
Before I give you the tidy version, here is the messy conceptual model I developed when creating this module. It’s important to see this, as it is important to see where ideas and theories come from.
You don’t need to be able to read my handwriting, but you should notice that the axiom “How society is made.
How society can be made (better)” came last in my thinking, but is presented first in these notes.
Here is the conceptual model, tidied up
I will be explaining what each part of this model explains in detail in the classroom workshops, but you should be able to see that all of sociology is essentially an exercise in control and resistance, the attempts to control a person, family or group, by people, families and groups, and the consequent resistance to that control by people, families and groups. This tugging backwards and forwards between control and resistance is what makes society, and makes society better (if we get the balance right). The resources that are used in that tussle are solidarity and power.
All sociological ideas and research can be placed on to this model. So we can take the work of a sociologist and place their ideas and theories in each of the corners of the model.
So, above is the same model, with some of the key sociological ideas and theories mapped onto them. They’ve been scattered about rather randomly, but this next image shows the links between some of those ideas.
In this version of the model, you can see the term ‘meaning’ in the top left hand of the model. This relates to the ways in which a person makes meaning of their life. This meaning-making cannot be done outside the Beliefs of family of which they are a part (connecting to the Family in the bottom left), which too, in its own turn, is influenced and controlled by the Religion of the Group (in the top right of the model). We could even connect this to culture and values at a societal level! Working backwards through that chain we can also see the person resisting their family through rebellion, which also reforms and changes the group experience of religion, which also affects society and how it operates.
Your task will be to utilise the issues and challenges that you will be encountering in your groups with respect to the Mogadishu radio play, doing some research on the sociological theories and ideas that apply, and demonstrating how you would use those theories in your work context.
Habitus: Bordieu
Habitus is a system of attitudes and tendencies that organize the ways in which we perceive the social world around us and react to it. Bordieu argues that these are not just mental disposition, but also physical [embodied] tendencies. This about the way in which the lecturers ’embody’ their status in class, which might be very different from the way they act at home. For Bordieu, habitus consists of both the hexis (the tendency to hold and use one’s body in a certain ways, such as posture and accent) and more abstract mental habits, schemes of perception, classification, appreciation, feeling, and action. Deeper than that [almost like Marxist or Giddens’ idea of structure] doxa refers to the learned, fundamental, deep-founded, unconscious beliefs, and values, taken as self-evident universals, that inform our actions and thoughts within a particular field.
These dispositions are usually shared by people with similar background (in terms of social class, religion, nationality, ethnicity, education, profession etc.), as the habitus is acquired through mimesis [a process of intutive observation and copying] and reflects the lived reality to which individuals are socialized, their individual experience and objective opportunities.
Bourdieu’s work was primarily concerned with the dynamics of power in society, and especially the diverse and subtle ways in which power is transferred and social order maintained within and across generations.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1984). Distinction. Routledge.
Structure and Agency: several theorists.
There are two very different perspectives in social theory. One begins with the obvious fact that no matter how hard one looks, one never sees “society”: One sees only individuals. For this view, then, society is but an aggregation of individuals engaged in various interactions, some voluntary and some coerced.
The second approach thinks of social structures as independent of individuals and as “determining” what people do. Thus, advocates of this view suggest, for example, people are what they only because of what “society” has made them, that society gives people roles to play and that, accordingly, the psychology and choices of individuals are largely irrelevant to social process and social change. Everything is the result of “social forces.”
These are some of the key theorists who debate this dichotomy: Georg Simmel, Norbert Elias, Talcott Parsons, Pierre Bourdieu, Berger and Luckmann, James Coleman, Anthony Giddens, Klaus Hurrelmann, Roberto Unger, Margaret Archer. [note, Anthony Giddens again! His theory of ‘structuration’ is an attempt to overcome the two views.
In this approach, a person may act “voluntarily,” but not only are his or her desires and beliefs “structured” (by his or her social learning), but so too are the available alternatives and opportunities. That is, agents always can and do make choices, but their choices are both enabled and constrained by who they are and by their situation at the time of the choice.
Solidarity v power: Durkheim and Kropotkin
Solidarity produces or is based on, unities of interests, objectives, standards, and sympathies within a group of people. It refers to the ties in a society that bind people together as one. It is a set of horizontal relationships.
On the other hand, societies are also bound together by power, and status differentiation. Here is a paper on the use of the pronouns ‘Tu’ and ‘Vu’ in continental languages. T is used as a familiar pronoun, representing equality, whereas V is a formal pronoun, used to refer to someone more powerful or with more authority. English not longer uses such a distinction, but it used to. ‘Thou’ used to be the familiar term, and ‘You’ the formal. it is interesting that we only use the ‘Thou’ to refer to God these days, and think it a formal, rather than familial, term!
Durkheim introduced the terms “mechanical” and “organic solidarity” as part of his theory of the development of societies in The Division of Labour in Society (1893). For the former Russian prince Peter Kropotkin, solidarity is essential for mutual aid; supportive activity towards other people does not result from the expectation of reward, but rather from instinctive feelings of solidarity.
Commons, John R. (1931). Institutional economics. American Economic Review, 21, 648-57. Reprinted in Samuels 1988, vol. 1, pp. 18-27.
Durkheim, Emile. (1997) The Division of Labor in Society. Trans. W. D. Halls, intro. Lewis A. Coser. New York: Free Press.
Goodin, R (1998) The Theory of Institutional Design. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Goodin 1998 Institutions-and-their-design
Kropotkin, P. (1998) Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. – L.: Freedom press,
Now browse the following additional pages as background knowledge
