The Sociological

Perspective
What Is Sociology?
 Systematic
 Scientific discipline; patterns of behavior

 At the “heart of sociology”

 Sociological perspective; unique societal view

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
 The Sociological Perspective Peter
Berger
 Seeing the general in the particular

 Sociologists look for general social patterns in the

behavior of particular people.

We begin to see the world sociologically by realizing

how the general categories into which we fall
shape our particular life experiences.

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
  Seeing the strange in the familiar

 Giving up the idea that human behavior is simply a

matter of what people decide to do
 Understanding that society shapes our lives
 The number of children a woman has in diff
countries…

In India, the average is about 3; in Guatemala, about

4; in Ethiopia, about 5; in Yemen, about 6; and in
Niger, the average woman has 7 children.

poor countries provide women with less schooling

and fewer economic opportunities, women’s lives
are centered in the home, and they are less likely
to use contraception.

Clearly, society has much to do with the decisions

women and men make about childbearing.
© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights
reserved.
 For example, we may think that marriage
results simply from the personal feelings of
love.
 Yet the sociological perspective shows us
that factors such as
 age sex
 Race social class
 guide our selection of a partner.

 It might be more accurate to think of love as a

feeling we have for others who match up with
what society teaches us we want in a mate.
© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights
reserved.
 Consider how you might react if someone
were to say to you, “You fit all the right
categories, which means you would make a
wonderful spouse!”

 We are used to thinking that people fall in

love and decide to marry based on personal
feelings of love. But the sociological
perspective reveals the initially strange idea
that society shapes what we think and do

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
Durkheim’s Study of Suicide

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
 to end your own life
Durkeim showed that even here, social forces are
at work.
 Emile Durkheim’s research showed that society
affects our most personal choices
 Examining official records in France, Durkheim
found that some categories of people were more
likely to take their own lives:
 Men, Protestants, wealthy people, and the
unmarried had much higher rates than
women, Catholics and Jews, the poor, and
married people.
© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights
reserved.
 One of the basic findings: Why?

 The differences between these groups had to do

with “social integration”

 Those with strong social ties had less of a chance

of committing suicide
 Categories of people with strong social ties had low
rates of suicide rates, and more individualistic
categories of people had high rates of suicide.

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
 In Durkeim’s time, men had much more
freedom than women.
 But despite its advantages, freedom weakens
social ties and thus increases the risk of
suicide.
 Likewise, more individualistic Protestants were
more likely to commit suicide than more
tradition-bound Catholics and Jews, whose
rituals encourage stronger social ties.
 The wealthy have much more freedom than the
poor, but once again, their money continued
stretch for more of it has a way of alienating
them from other people.
© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights
reserved.
 Social Marginality
 But two situations help people see clearly how
society shapes individual lives:
living on the margins of society(2b African American)
living through a social crisis (Great Depression of the
1930s)
From time to time, everyone feels like an
outsider. For some categories of people,
however, being and outsider is an everyday
experience.
The greater people’s social marginality, the better
they are able to use the sociological perspective.
© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights
reserved.
 C. Wright Mills’ Sociological
Imagination
 Sociological perspective lies in changing
individual lives & in transforming society
 Society, not people’s personal failings, is
the cause of social problems.
 The sociological imagination transforms
personal problems into public issues.

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
 As the unemployment rate scored to 25%,
people who were out of work could not help but
see general social forces at work in their
particular lives.
 Rather than saying, “Something must be wrong
with me, I can’t find a job.” They took a
sociological approach and realized, “The
economy has collapsed; there are no jobs to be
found.” Mills believed that using what he called
the sociological imagination in this way helps
people understand not only their society but also
their own lives, because the two are closely
related.
 Just as social change encourages sociological
thinking, sociological thinking can bring about
social change.

 Becoming aware of the power of gender, for

example, has caused many women and men to try
to reduce gender inequality in our society.

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
 Macro and Micro levels

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
Sociological Theory

 Theoretical paradigm: fundamental

assumptions that guides thinking
 Structural-functional
 Social-conflict
 Symbolic-interaction

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
Structural-Functional
Paradigm
 The basics
 A macro-level orientation, concerned with
broad patterns that shape society as a
whole
 Society as a complex system; parts work
together to promote stability

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
Structural-Functional
Paradigm
 Key elements
 Social structure: any relatively stable
patterns of social behavior found in social
institutions
 Social function refers to the consequences
for the operation of society as a whole

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
Who’s Who in the Structural-
Functional Paradigm
 Auguste Comte
 Importance of social integration during times
of rapid change
 Emile Durkheim
 Helped establish sociology as a discipline
 Herbert Spencer
 Compared society to the human body

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
Who’s Who in the Structural-
Functional Paradigm
 Robert K. Merton

 Manifest functions are recognized and

intended consequences

 Latent functions are unrecognized and

unintended consequences
 Social dysfunctions are undesirable
consequences

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
Who’s Who in the Social-
Conflict Paradigm
 Karl Marx
 The importance of social class in inequality
and social conflict

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
Feminism and the Gender-
Conflict Approach
 A point of view that focuses on inequality
and conflict between women and men

 Closely linked to feminism:

the advocacy of social equality for women
and men

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
The Race-Conflict Approach
 Point of view; focuses on inequality &
conflict between people :
Of different racial and ethnic categories

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
Symbolic-Interaction
Paradigm
 The basics
 A micro-level orientation, a close-up focus
on social interactions in specific situations
 Views society as the product of everyday
interactions of individuals.
 Social experiences
 We create reality,
 We define our surrounding,
 We decide what we think of others
 We shape our own identities
© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights
reserved.
 Seeing from the point of the view of the
people in the society.
 Society is a shared reality that people
construct as they interact with one another
 Society is a complex, ever-changing mosaic
of subjective meanings

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
 For example, why would young people smoke
cigarettes even when all objective medical
evidence points to the dangers of doing so?
The answer is in the definition of the situation
that people create. Studies find that teenagers
are well informed about the risks of tobacco, but
they also think that smoking is cool, that they
will be safe from harm, and that smoking
projects a positive image to their peers. So, the
symbolic meaning of smoking overrides the
facts regarding smoking and risk.

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
 Concerning Race
 One shocking example of how this theoretical
concept plays out within the social construct
of race is manifested in the fact that many
people, regardless of race, believe that lighter
skinned blacks and Latinos are smarter than
their darker skinned counterparts.
 This phenomenon, called colorism, occurs
because of the racist stereotype that has
been encoded in skin color over centuries.

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
 Concerning gender
 we see the problematic way in which
meaning is attached to the symbols
"man" and "woman" in the sexist trend of
college students routinely rating male
professors more highly than female ones.
 Or, in pay inequality based on gender.

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights
reserved.
Applying the Approaches: The
Sociology of Sports
 The Functions of Sports
 A structural-functional approach directs our
attention to ways sports help society operate
 Sports have functional and dysfunctional
consequences

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
Sports and Conflict
 Social-conflict analysis points out games
people play reflect their social standing

 Sports have been oriented mostly

toward males

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
Sports and Conflict
 Big league sports excluded people of
color for decades

 Sports in the United States are bound

up with inequalities based on
 Gender, race, and economic power

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
Sports as Interaction
 Following symbolic-interaction
approach:
 Sports are less a system than an ongoing
process

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.
 Structural-functional, social-conflict, and
symbolic-interaction:
 Provide different insights into sports.
 No one is more correct than the others

© 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights

reserved.