Social Imagination - Intro

The study of human society

The ability to connect the most basic, intimate aspects of an individual's life to seemingly impersonal and remote historical forces

A complex group of interdependent positions that perform a social role and reproduce themselves over time; also defined in a narrow sense as any institution in a society that works to shape the behavior of the groups or people within it.

• German; understanding. The concept of Verstehen forms the object of inquiry for interpretive sociology—to study how social actors understand their actions and the social world through experience.
• (by Max Weber)

• a sense of aimlessness or despair that arises when we can no longer reasonably expect life to be predictable; too little social regulation; normlessness.
• by Emile Durkheim

• a strain within sociology that believes the social world can be described and predicted by certain describable relationships (akin to a social physics).
• by Emile Durkheim

• a concept conceived by W. E. B. DuBois to describe the two behavioral scripts, one for moving through the world and the other incorporating the external opinions of prejudiced onlookers, which are constantly maintained by African Americans.
• by W.E.B Dubois

• the theory that various social institutions and processes in society exist to server some important (or necessary) function to keep society running.
• Talcott Parsons, drawing on the ideas of Durkheim
• organicism - society is like a living organism, each part is important for the wholesocial harmony(consensus)
• critic: reinforcing the status quo and the dominant economic system with its class structures and inequalities (by Mills)

• the idea that conflicts between competing interests is the basic, animating force of social change and society in general.
• aka Marxist Theory (drawing on ideas of Marx)
• the other extreme end (comparing to funtionalism)

equality between men and women

a micro-level theory in which shared meanings, orientations, and assumptions form the basic motivations behind people's actions.

• a condition characterized by a questioning of the notion of progress and history, the replacement of narrative within pastiche, and multiple, perhaps even conflicting, identities resulting from disjointed affiliations.
• deconstruct social phenomena

• (social phenomena)
• an entity that exists because people behave as if it exists and whose existence is perpetuated as people and social institutions act in accordance with the widely agreed upon formal rules or informal norms of behavior associated with that entity.

• a theory that attempts to predict how certain social institutions tend to function.
• generates falsifiable hypotheses - predictions that can be tested by analyzing the real world

seeks to understand local interactional contexts; its methods of choice are ethnographic, generally including participant observation and in-depth interviews.

generally concerned with social dynamics at a higher level of analysis—that is, across the breadth of a society.

• Social Physics or positivism
• we could better understand society by determining the logic or scientific laws governing human behavior

• one of the earliest feminist social scientists
• first to translate Auguste Comte's work

• developed by Karl Marx
• identifies social conflict as the primary cause of social change

• culture, politics, and economic were important influences on society
• foundation of interpretive sociology
• verstehen

• founding practitioner of positive sociology
• the division of labor in a given society helps to determine how social cohesion is maintained, or not maintained in that society
• anomie

• formal sociology, sociology of pure numbers
• urban sociology and cultural sociology

empirical research with the belief that people's behaviors and personalities are shaped by their social and physical environment

• double consciousness
• intersted in criminology