CHAPTER 1

The Sociological Imagination:

An Introduction
What Is Sociology?

• Sociology is the study of human society.

• Thinking like a sociologist requires you to reconsider your assumptions

about society and question what you have taken for granted in order to

better understand the world around you.

1.1 The Sociological Imagination
The Sociological Imagination

• Sociological imagination: The ability to

connect the most basic, intimate aspects

of an individual’s life to seemingly

impersonal and remote historical forces.

• This term, coined by C. Wright Mills,

encourages questioning and “making the

familiar strange”.
What Are the True Costs and Returns of College?

• College graduates earn about $1,500,000 more

over their lifetimes than people with only a

high-school education.

• If the benefits of college are due to the learning

that takes place, why not learn on your own

free of charge?
Getting That “Piece of Paper”

• If higher education is really about getting a “piece

of paper,” then why not simply print out a fake

diploma?

• There are strong informal mechanisms, such as

networks of alumni, by which universities protect

their status.
Discussion Questions

• Why are you in college?

• Did the people around you, including your friends and family, expect you to

go to college?

• Do you think this is the same for everyone? Why or why not?
1.2 What Is a Social Institution?
What Is a Social Institution?

• Social institution: A complex group of interdependent positions that,

together, perform a social role and reproduce themselves over time

• The legal system

• The labor market

• The educational system

• The military

• The family
Social Structures That Make Up College

• The legal system

• The primary and secondary educational systems

• The Educational Testing Service and ACT

• The wage labor market

• The English language

1.3 The Sociology of Sociology
Auguste Comte

• Comte believed that the best way to understand society is by determining

the logic or scientific laws governing human behavior, which he called

“social physics.”

• Positivism: Initially called “social physics,” this approach to sociology

emphasizes the scientific method to study the objectively observable

behavior of individuals irrespective of the meanings those actions have for

the subjects themselves.

Karl Marx

• Marx proposed the theory of historical

materialism, which identifies class conflict

as the primary cause of social change.

• From his surname the term Marxism (an

ideological alternative to capitalism)

derives, and his writings provided the

theoretical basis for Communism.

Max Weber

• Weber emphasized subjectivity.

• To truly understand why people act the way they do, a sociologist must

understand the meanings they attach to their actions.

• Verstehen: German for “understanding”

• Interpretive sociology: A type of scholarship in which researchers imagine

themselves experiencing the life positions of the social actors they want to

understand rather than treating those people as objects to be examined

Émile Durkheim (1 of 2)

• Durkheim wished to understand how society holds together and how

modern capitalism and industrialization have transformed the ways people

relate to one another.

• He proposed that division of labor didn’t just affect work and productivity, it

also helped determine a society's form of social solidarity.

• He is famous for his study in which argues that anomie is a main social force

leading to suicide, and he is considered a founder of positivist sociology.

Émile Durkheim (2 of 2)

• Anomie: A sense of aimlessness or despair that arises when we can no

longer reasonably expect life to be predictable; inadequate social

regulation; normlessness.

• Positivist sociology: The approach to sociology that emphasizes the

scientific method as an approach to studying the objectively observable

behavior of individuals irrespective of the meanings of those actions for the

subjects themselves.
Georg Simmel

• Simmel proposed a formal sociology, or a sociology of pure numbers (for

instance, how a group of two is different than a group of three).

• His work was influential in the development of urban sociology and cultural

sociology, and his work with small-group interactions served as an

intellectual precedent for later sociologists who came to study

microinteractions.
American Sociology

• Early American sociology became prominent at the University of Chicago.

• The “Chicago School” perspective focused on empirical research built on a

central belief that people’s behaviors and personalities are shaped by their

social and physical environments.

• Robert Park

• Louis Wirth

• George Herbert Mead

• Charles Horton Cooley

W. E. B Du Bois

• Du Boise was the first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard and

the first sociologist to undertake ethnography in the African American

community.

• Double consciousness: A concept conceived by W. E. B. Du Bois to describe

the behavioral scripts, one for moving through the world and the other

incorporating the external opinions of prejudiced onlookers, that are

constantly maintained by African Americans.

Jane Addams

• Addams founded Hull House, where the ideas of the Chicago School were

put into practice and tested.

• Addams was a prolific author on both the substance and methodology of

community studies and her work at Hull House was influential in the

development of the Chicago School’s theories, yet she was never afforded

the same respect as the majority of her male contemporaries.

Functionalism

• Functionalism: The theory that various social institutions and processes in

society exist to serve some important (or necessary) function to keep

society running.

• Talcott Parsons was a leading theorist of functionalism in the mid-20th

century.
Conflict Theory

• Conflict theory: The idea that conflict between competing interests is the

basic, animating force of social change and society in general.

• According to conflict theorists, inequality exists as a result of political

struggles among different groups (classes) in a particular society.

• Although functionalists theorize that inequality is a necessary and

beneficial aspect of society, conflict theorists argue that it is unfair and

exists at the expense of less powerful groups.

Symbolic Interactionism

• Symbolic interactionism: A micro-level theory in which shared meanings,

orientations, and assumptions form the basic motivations behind people’s

actions.

• The groundwork for symbolic interactionism was laid by Erving Goffman’s

dramaturgical theory of social interaction, which used the language of theater

to describe the social facade we create.

• According to Goffman, we make judgments about class and social status

based on details of how people present themselves to others.

Postmodernism

• Postmodernism: 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.

• Social construction: 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 widely agreed-on formal rules or informal norms of

behavior associated with that entity.

Midrange Theory

• Midrange theory: A theory that attempts to predict how certain social

institutions tend to function.

• Midrange theory is neither macrosociology nor microsociology.

• The key to midrange theory is that it generates falsifiable hypotheses—

predictions that can be tested by analyzing the real world.

Feminist Theory

• Feminist theory: A catchall term for many theories with an emphasis on

women’s experiences and a belief that sociology and society in general

subordinate women.

• Feminist theorists emphasize equality between men and women and want

to see women’s lives and experiences represented in sociological studies.

• Feminist sociologists remain interested in how power relationships are

defined, shaped, and reproduced on the basis of gender differences.

Discussion Questions

• Compare functionalism and conflict theory.

• How would the two differ in their understanding of inequality?

1.4 Sociology and Its Cousins
Differentiating Sociology from Other Fields

• History and anthropology tend to focus more on

particular circumstances.

• Psychology and biology examine things on a

more micro level than sociology does.

• Economics is an entirely quantitative discipline.

• Political science focuses on only one aspect of

social relations: power.

1.5 Divisions within Sociology
Microsociology and Macrosociology

• Microsociology understands local interactional contexts, focusing on face-

to-face encounters and gathering data through participant observations and

in-depth interviews.

• Macrosociology looks at social dynamics across whole societies or large

parts of them and often relies on statistical analysis to do so.

Review & Discuss
Review Question 1

Which of the following is an example of using one’s sociological imagination?

a. being in unfamiliar surroundings and imagining being in a more comfortable

place

b. creating different hypotheses to explain an individual’s behavior

c. creating a story to explain unfamiliar social customs

d. being puzzled by how people in another country greet one another and then

thinking about why they might do it that way

Review Question 2

Social identity is

a. a construct that no longer has meaning in the postmodern era.

b. a collection of social roles that a person might fill.

c. a way in which individuals define themselves in relation to groups.

d. determined by the social group into which a person is born.

Review Question 3

The Chicago School of American Sociology emphasized the importance of

a. the social and moral consequences of the division of labor.

b. the environment in shaping people’s behavior and personalities.

c. heavy statistical research.

d. none of the above

Review Question 4

Sociology is distinct from other academic disciplines in its attempt to

a. embrace quantitative and qualitative research.

b. ask probing questions about how societies function.

c. detect patterns in how different societies handle or respond to similar

phenomena.

d. examine human interaction on the micro level.

Review Question 5

Which of the following is an example of a study that might be undertaken by a

macrosociologist?

a. assessing how people choose where to sit on a public bus

b. observing customers’ responses to being greeted upon entering a store

c. conducting a statistical analysis of when professional men and women choose

to start families

d. examining how men and women react to riding in an elevator with an infant
Discussion Question

• Imagine that a historian and a sociologist are both studying the civil rights

movement in the United States. How might their approaches differ?