“we must be prepared to step back and examine afresh everything we hold dear, questioning not only the origins of our beliefs, but also what the consequences might be of holding such a view or position…Sociology ‘defamiliarizes’ things, it distances us from our comfortable common sense views and makes us more sensitive to the ways in which these opinions are formed and maintained.”
(Cree, 2010, p.21)
This section briefly presents a handful of key historical figures to illustrate the background of sociology, its development from ‘positivism’ to ‘interpretivism’, from ‘functionalism’ to ‘conflict theory’ and some of the contributions of those ‘dead white men’.
‘Social’ or ‘private problems?
C. Wright Mills coined the terms ‘public issues’ and ‘private troubles’ to illustrate the connection between the freely willed actions of the individual and the patterning effects of social structure. This distinguishes between ‘psychology’ and the pathologising of an individuals problems, blaming them for their problems, and sociology, which sees these individual behaviours as part of a social structure.
“What this means is that you must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work: continually to examine and interpret it. In this sense craftsmanship is the center of yourself and you are personally involved in every intellectual product upon which you work.” (Mills 1959: 196)
“Do not allow public issues as they are officially formulated, or troubles as they are privately felt, to determine the problems that you take up for study. Above all, do not give up your moral and political autonomy…….Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues – and in terms of the problems of history making.” (Mills 1959: 226)
Problems that are positively there
Auguste Comte is known for inventing the term ‘sociology’ and wanted the discipline to be scientific, concerned only with ‘observable entities that are known directly to experience’, an idea now associated with the term ‘positivism’.
Comte divided sociology into two main branches: social statics, which is the study of forces holding society together, and social dynamics, which is the study of forces causing social change. Comte’s observations and analyses were based on scientific principles.
Problems that are there but not ‘positively there’
Emile Durkheim refined the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, with his emphasis on social facts and the application of natural science methods to social inquiry. Durkheim saw that increasing complexity of the division of labour threatened social cohesion and produced feelings of deep uncertainty for individuals, which he termed ‘anomie’, or a condition of relative normlessness in a whole society or in some of its component groups. The agreed ‘norms’ between individuals, or between groups, collapse such that they have no ‘common discourse’ or social cohesion.
One of Durkheim’s key contributions was in his book Suicide (1897) in which he showed that suicide is not an individual act, as was previously thought by leading scientists of his time. Instead, his theory was that suicide was a social fact that was tied to social structures. He defined suicide as a social fact because it was something that happened driven by social causes; however hidden they were.
Durkheim’s concern was to create a positive well-functioning society out of the ruins of the French Revolution, making sociology ‘functionalist’.
Conflict makes the problems visible
Marx’s sociology is “a form of conflict theory associated with the relations between ‘capital’ [elites who own money and resources] and ‘labour’ [people who only own their bodies to sell as labour], to explain the complex dynamics of modern society.
Karl Marx’s main focus was on capitalist economies and the separation of society into capital owners and wage labourers – two groups whose interests were inherently in conflict. This analysis was grounded in his broader ‘materialist conception of history’ and the view that class struggle was the main motive force in history.
Problems arising in how we interpret social behaviour
Max Weber creates a reaction against positivism, arguing for the study of social action through interpretive (rather than purely empiricist) means, based on understanding the purpose and meaning that individuals attach to their own actions. He also proposed, unlike Durkheim, that for any outcome there can be multiple causes.
Max Weber’s work can also be seen as a debate with Marx, with a greater emphasis on the role of ideas and beliefs [rather than conflicts over money and resources] in producing social change and less reliance on class conflicts. In Weber’s work, capitalism was just one amongst many forces shaping social change. His primary concept is rationalization: a blend of science, technology and bureaucratic organization, all directed towards the achievement of greater efficiency in society. The role of sociology, like Durkheim, was to help make society function better- with less conflict.
Cohen. Moral Panics and Folk Devils
I love the ‘cut class’ accents in this film, even from the so-called hoodlums! As social workers working with clients and members of the community, they will come across dozens of opinions and perceptions about different sections of society. This is happening all the time, which is why I have selected this film of Stan Cohen’s original study rather than a more modern example- which one would I pick?
Cohen’s book Folk Devils and Moral Panics of 1972 began to help us step back from the sway of press and ordinary opinions and see that, in some cases, certain communities and subcultures are demonised and villified in the press out of all proportion to their actual threat to society. These problems are ‘socially constructed’ in order to create a basis for action, but are biased and express implicit prejudice and hatred.
Cohen died recently, but here is a great radio documentary about his influence https://youtu.be/daZOE8Ra1NA
The radio show is on BBC Radio Four called ‘Thinking Allowed’ by a sociologist Laurie Taylor which is well worth listening to regularly.
Subcultures
By the end of the 1970’s Dick Hebdige further helped us to understand how society works with his book on Subcultures, the meaning of style. This work helps us to understand how individuals and groups ‘signal’ their involvement in their community through their choices of clothes and bodily decoration. They sometimes do this by rejecting or appearing to reject people who represent a threat to themselves. Consider the Cohen film above, and the Mods- how smartly they dressed, with sharp collars and bowler hats, even though they were working class boys. They expressed their common identity through dress and through violence.
Chapter Five particularly shows how he uses, amongst others, Cohen’s insights into the mods and rockers and Cohen’s later work on deviance, to explore the class and race interrelations in style and fashion from the 1950s to the 1970s. He particularly notes how the punks parodied (and resisted) the ideas of rejection and alienation that society had imposed on young black ‘rudies’ and white ‘mods and rockers’.
This causes us to stop and think about the ways in which we might ‘read’ into someone’s clothes, music tastes, ways of speaking etc, a whole variety of assumptions and prejudices.
