Theories and Perspectives in Sociology

Comte and Positivism

• Comte coined the term ‘sociology’• Positivism seeks reliable knowledge to be able

to predict and intervene in social life• Aim of sociology – to improve society • BUT, can people’s meaningful actions really be

studied in this way? • Would socially powerful groups ‘intervene’ in

lives of the population? • Much mistrust of ‘social engineering’

August Comte (1798-1857)

• Development Stages of Human Societies (European)

• Theological- Medieval- Theology queen of all knowledge.

• Metaphysical: Earth and Human centred Renaissance Italy, Revival of Greek Knowledge /Arts

• Positivist-- Scientific Revolution-Basis of knowledge : sensory perceptions - quantifiable and verifiable and expressible in mathematical relations. ( Copernicus, Galileo, Newton; Royal society)

Spencer and Social Evolution

• Societies evolve, just like natural world• Structural differentiation – move from

simple to complex forms• Functional adaptation – societies adapt to

their environments• Principle of ‘survival of the fittest’ • Spencer was not in favour of state

intervention in support of vulnerable groups

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

(Evolutionary Change)• Committed to economic individualism

and the free market.

• Defining principle: struggle for existence, survival-survival of the fittest leading to justification for imperialism, colonialism, domination of strong over the weak.

• Period marked by great social upheavals- wars of conquests, land enclosures, urbanization Revolutions in Germany, France (Paris Commune)

Marx – The Capitalist Revolution

• Materialist conception of history – societies develop via successive modes of production (e.g. capitalism, communism)

• Capitalism was revolutionary breakthrough, but rooted in naked exploitation of workers

• Later Marxism had to deal with lack of a communist revolution

• Frankfurt School critical theory looked to mass consumerism and ‘false needs’ to explain the seduction of workers into the system

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Marx (1818-1883) How history is made? Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they

please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. ... In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond

definite forms of social consciousness.

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-----In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to

which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

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The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of

social, political and intellectual life.

It is not the consciousness of men that determines

their existence, but their social existence that

determines their consciousness.

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The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.

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All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his, real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Durkheim – Establishing Sociology

• Society has a reality sui generis – can’t be reduced to an aggregate of individuals

• Focus on groups / collectivities – explanations involve social facts

• Functionalist approach based on studying interconnections between institutions

Parsons’s structural functionalism tried to solve the ‘problem of social order’

His AGIL scheme facilitated study of the social system

Critics see this as too abstract and lacking concrete empirical reference

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)• Social Facts as things: Durkheim argued that society must

be studied in terms of social facts, that are “ a category of facts” with distinct characteristics,“ consisting of ways of

acting, thinking, and feeling external to the individual and have their own existence reality outside the lives and perceptions of individual people; they exercise a power of coercion on individual from outright punishment to social rejection in the case of unacceptable behaviour, to simple misunderstanding in the case of misuse of language; to control him”. E.g.,Social Institutions and Social forms: (family, social solidarity, religion etc., ( Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, 1895).

Social Fact• "A social fact is every way of

acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations."

Social Solidarity• Mechanical solidarity : prevalent in pre-

industrial societies. Individualism is minimized and the individual is subsumed within the collectivity

• Organic Solidarity : Characteristic of large scale, modern, industrial / urban societies. Is generated by the extensive division of labour within industrial societies, which tends to produce differences rather than similarities. Strong bonds of mutual interdependence generate organic solidarity.Important studies: The Divison of

Labour in Society, 1893; Suicide: A Study in Sociology, 1897

Religion- Durkheim’s viewDurkheim saw totemism as the most basic form of religion. It is in this belief

system that the fundamental separation between the sacred and the profane

is most clear. All other religions, he said, are outgrowths of this distinction,

adding to it myths, images, and traditions. The totemic animal, Durkheim

believed, was the expression of the sacred and the original focus of religious

activity because it was the emblem for a social group, the clan. Religion is

thus an inevitable, just as society is inevitable when

individuals live together as a group.Durkheim presented five elementary forms of religious life to be found in all

religions, from the more "primitive" to judeo/ Christian / Moslem. These are: 1. Sacred/Profane division of the world; 2. Belief in souls, spirits, mythical personalities 3. Belief in divinity, either local or multi-local 4. a negative or ascetic cult within the religion 5. Rites of oblation, communion, imitation, commemoration or expiation.

He argued that these five forms were communal experiences, thereby distinguishing religion from magic.

• Durkheim presented five elementary forms of religious life to be found in all religions, from the more "primitive" to judeo/ Christian / Moslem. These are: 1. Sacred/Profane division of the world; 2. Belief in souls, spirits, mythical personalities 3. Belief in divinity, either local or multi-local 4. a negative or ascetic cult within the religion 5. Rites of oblation, communion, imitation, commemoration or expiation. He argued that these five forms were communal experiences, thereby distinguishing religion from magic.

Functionalism• Along with Herbert Spencer , Durkheim held

that society is a complex system whose various parts work together to produce stability and solidarity. This is referred to as Functionalism . ‘Society’ and ‘Culture’ to be studied as social facts existing independent of individuals.

• Men are shaped and influenced by their groups and group heritage.

• Academic sociology’s emphasis on the potency of society and the subordination of men to it is itself an historical product that contains an historical truth. (Berger)

Weber – Capitalism and Religion

• Origins of Western capitalism are linked to religious belief and practice

• Protestant sects (Calvinism) believed in predestination – only elect few make it to heaven

• Creates ‘salvation anxiety’ and people look for signs of election, e.g. success in business

• BUT – profits reinvested, frugal lifestyles and beginnings of capitalist accumulation

• Weber’s thesis widely seen as ‘good sociology’ – counter-intuitive, new insights, generated much later research activity and theory

----• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

• Weber showed that certaintypes of Protestantism – notably Calvinism – were supportive of rational pursuit of economic gain and worldly activities dedicated to it, seeing them as endowed with moral and spiritual significance. Weber argued that there were many reasons to look for the origins of modern capitalism in the religious ideas of the Reformation. Weber argued that ascetic Protestantism was one of the major "elective affinities" in determining the rise of capitalism, bureaucracy and the rational-legal nation-state. This theory is often viewed as a reversal of Marx's thesis that the economic "base" of society determines all other aspects of it.

----• In Politics as a Vocation, Weber defined the state as an entity which claims a "monopoly on the legitimate use of violence",

• His analysis of bureaucracy in his Economy and Society is still central to the modern study of organizations.

• Weber was the first to recognize several diverse aspects of social authority, which he respectively categorized according to their charismatic, traditional, and legal forms. His analysis of bureaucracy thus noted that modern state institutions are based on a form of rational-legal authority.

• Weber's thought regarding the rationalizing and secularizing tendencies of modern Western society (sometimes described as the "Weber Thesis") has been a recurring theme in Western social sciences.

---• Weber presented sociology as the science of human social action; action which he differentiated into traditional, affectional, value-rational and instrumental. [Sociology is ] ... the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces.

• – Max Weber The Nature of Social Action 1922

Rationality• Weber maintained that Calvinist (and

more widely, Protestant) religious ideas had had a major impact on the social innovation and development of the economic system of Europe and the United States, along with other notable factors included the rationalism of scientific pursuit, merging observation with mathematics, rational systematization of government administration, and economic enterprise.

----• Weber outlines a description, of rationalization (of which bureaucratization is a part) as a shift from a value-oriented organization and action (traditional authority and charismatic authority) to a goal-oriented organization and action (legal-rational authority).

• Weber identifies bureaucracy with rationality, and the process of rationalization with mechanism, depersonalization and oppressive routine. (C. Wright Mills in The man and His Work, From Max Weber)

• The result, according to Weber, is a "polar night of icy darkness", in which increasing rationalization of human life traps individuals in an "iron cage" of rule-based, rational control

---• What Weber depicted was not only the secularization of Western culture, but also and especially the development of modern societies from the viewpoint of rationalization. The new structures of society were marked by the differentiation of the two functionally intermeshing systems that had taken shape around the organizational cores of the capitalist enterprise and the bureaucratic state apparatus. Weber understood this process as the institituionalization of purposive-rational economic and administrative action. To the degree that everyday life was affected by this cultural and societal rationalization, traditional forms of life - which in the early modern period were differentated primarily according to one's trade - were dissolved.

• – Jürgen Habermas Modernity's Consciousness of Time,

Middle-Range Theories: The Protestant Ethic

• Merton coined term to mean that which is specific enough to be tested by empirical research, yet sufficiently general to cover a range of different phenomena

• Affinity between religious values and capitalist enterprise

• Meets four criteria to be ‘good theory’:– Counterintuitive– Solves a puzzle– Illuminates issues beyond the immediate context– Not just valid but potentially cumulative

Interactionism in Sociology

• Weber’s and Mead’s ideas underpin much interactionism

• Symbolic interactionism – focus on micro-interactions, meaning construction and formation and changes in self-identities

• Phenomenology – focus is on the experience of social life. Schutz explored the taken-for-granted lifeworld.

• Ethnomethodology - studies ‘native’ methods for understanding the social world. Garfinkel’s experiments aimed to disrupt social order to uncover the creation of Durkheim’s ‘social facts’

Four theoretical dilemmas

1. Human action and social structure

2. Consensus and conflict

3. Incorporating gender into social analysis

4. The direction of social change and development of human societies

Structure and action

• Which has primacy: the social constraint exercised by societies or the wishes of individuals?

• Social structure is external to us: systems exist and function independently of the use we make of them

• Critique: what is society if not the sum of all our individual actions?

• Important not to over-emphasise the contrast• Structuration – active making and remaking of

social structures

Consensus and Conflict

• Durkheim sees society as set of interdependent parts, i.e. an integrated whole

• Organic analogy: parts are organs and they operate in harmony out of necessity

• Marx and followers emphasis ongoing conflict built into the system: from time to time these break out into active change

• Possible to see inter-relations of conflict and consensus, e.g. through role of ideologies

Issues of Gender

• Durkheim: man is product of society, woman more product of nature

• Women in private sphere, men in public• Marx: gender differences mainly reflect other

divisions, such as class• Feminist perspectives: knowledge is related to

sex and gender• Not necessarily fixed category, but fluid• Challenge remains: bringing study of women into

sociology not the same as coping with problems of gender

Shaping of the Modern World

Broadly Marxist ideas Broadly Weberian ideas

Capitalist economic growth Rationalization of production

Class inequalities are basic to nature of modern societies

Class just one type of inequality among many

Power derives ultimately from economic inequalities

Power is separable from other sources, e.g. gender

Capitalist societies are transitory on road to socialism

Rationalization will go further in future in all spheres

Western dominance is a result of expansionist logic of capital

Western dominance comes from command over industrial resources

and military power

Feminist Theories

• Knowledge is related to questions of gender and male domination in society

• 1960s / 70s: concern with sources of gender inequality – since 1980s, new concerns with gender identity and culture

• e.g. Faludi on the ‘crisis of masculinity’• Butler on the ‘performativity’ of gender: no

fixed form of gender identity separate from its performance in society

Poststructuralism / Postmodernism

• Foucault sees discourse and discursive practices as shaping social life – knowledge and power are inextricably intertwined in surveillance and disciplinary strategies

• Postmodern thinkers reject the type of theory advanced by Marx and Weber – no ‘meta-narratives’ (Lyotard 1984)

• Baudrillard – reality / representation distinction has merged into hyperreality (‘the Gulf War did not happen’)

• Habermas opposes postmodernism – the Enlightenment project must be defended, not jettisoned prematurely

Globalization, Risk and Environment

• Manuel Castells:– An information society marked by network economy– Flavour of Weber’s iron cage – the ‘automaton’

• Anthony Giddens:– ‘runaway world’ requires trust in abstract systems– Increase in ‘social reflexivity’ among individuals

• Ulrich Beck:– ‘the second modernity’, extension globally– Risk society, manufactured risks (e.g. global warming)

– nature becomes political– Displacement of the nation-state opens the door for

real cosmopolitanism – a global form of citizenship and human rights

Conclusion

• A new phase of sociological theory?• Marx, Weber and Durkheim formed their

ideas during time of rapid social and economic change

• Current global changes are comparable to great transformation of nineteenth century

• Now, as then, existence of a diversity of approaches is neither surprising nor worrying