Sociology

An Introductory Textbook and Reader

Daniel Nehring, Ken Plummer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317861737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This groundbreaking new introduction to sociology is an innovative hybrid textbook and reader. Combining seminal scholarly works, contextual narrative and in-text didactic materials, it presents a rich, layered and comprehensive introduction to the discipline. Its unique approach will help inspire a creative, critical, and analytically sophisticated sociological imagination, making sense of society and the many small and large problems it poses.

1

Sociology: A panorama

1.1 The world you live in

It is likely that you are reading this book as part of an undergraduate course in sociology or a related field. Studying for a degree can sometimes be a solitary experience, as you need to spend long periods of time reading and writing by yourself. But to what extent does your academic success actually depend only on yourself? On the one hand, dedication, an interest in your subjects, and intellectual abilities are certainly very important for you to do well. On the other hand, however, your achievements depend on a great many other people: lecturers who introduce you to different areas of study and offer advice on your writing, administrators who make sure that all your work is correctly processed and registered, librarians who obtain books and journals that are important for your studies, and friends and classmates with whom you can study and have a good time when you need to relax, just to name a few of the people you meet while at university. Your successes and failures at university, in this sense, do not only result from your own efforts; they are influenced by the actions of many others.

Some of these others you will meet in person every day, in lectures, seminars, and all the other activities you engage in. Significant events in your life, however, are also shaped by people you rarely encounter face-to-face. You are likely to have family members and friends who live far away from you, and you probably use things such as mobile phones, Facebook, MySpace, Skype, etc., to communicate with them as often as you can. While you are studying in London, they are in another part in the UK, or in Europe, or North America, or Brazil, or China, or Japan, and so forth. Nevertheless, they know a lot of what happens to you every day, and their views and ideas may be quite important to you.

Even more indirectly, you also depend on people and organisations you will perhaps never meet. Your ability to study, for instance, depends to a large degree on how much you need to pay in tuition fees every year. This is decided by government officials and policy makers of whose existence you may not even be aware. Nevertheless, their choices fundamentally determine your ability to pay for your studies. Even much simpler aspects of your life greatly depend on others. Being well clothed, for example, is, for most people, a very basic need, and dressing according to current fashion is quite important to many. You may know the brands of your clothes, and you may know the shops in which you like to buy them, but you are unlikely to know about the factories which actually produced them and the people who work in these factories. If you look at the labels of your trousers, shirts, or shoes, it is not improbable that you will find that they were made in countries that may be far away from you, like Indonesia or China or Bangladesh or Mexico. The low prices on which your ability to buy certain brands depends are, in turn, based on very low wage levels in these countries and, sometimes, highly exploitative working conditions, including excessive working hours, hazardous workplaces, and the use of child labour, just to name a few recurrent problems.¹ While you do not know the factory workers who made your clothes, your living conditions depend on theirs, and theirs on yours.

These examples show that the world today is a strikingly small place, in which our lives are connected to those of others both close and distant. They also show that our achievements are shaped by powerful social forces, which sometimes place us in highly unequal relationships with others. The study of these social forces is the subject matter of sociology. This book will introduce you to a variety of sociological perspectives that may fundamentally change your understanding of human social relationships.

1.2 The study of social facts

Two things are important when it comes to understanding what sociology is all about. On the one hand, sociology is characterised by a high level of diversity in the intellectual perspectives and views of the world that inform research. Sociology is practised by scholars in universities and other institutions in many places around the world. The understandings that these sociologists bring to their work may vary quite considerably, and controversies and disagreements about the best way to understand a social problem are quite common. This is to say that there is not one right way of doing sociology. As students of sociology, you will gradually familia-rise yourselves with different theoretical perspectives and ways of doing research, and you will likely find that some of these perspectives seem much more meaningful to you than others.

On the other hand, most sociological perspectives do share some common ground. First of all, sociology generally concerns the study of social facts. The term ‘social facts’ was introduced by Émile Durkheim, a French scholar who played a pivotal role in establishing sociology as an academic discipline in Western Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In his book The Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim 1895/1982), Durkheim presented the study of social facts as the proper subject matter of sociology. He argued that, in every society, individuals’ lives are shaped by powerful social forces that are beyond their direct control or influence. He gives the following, now famous, example to illustrate this point:

When I perform my duties as a brother, a husband or a citizen and carry out the commitments I have entered into, I fulfil obligations which are defined in law and custom and which are external to myself and my actions. Even when they conform to my own sentiments and when I feel their reality within me, that reality does not cease to be objective, for it is not I who have prescribed these duties; I have received them through education. (Durkheim 1895/1982: 50)

In other words, many of the things we do, or do not do, or cannot do in everyday life are not simply a matter of individual choice or preference. Rather, they are shaped by society’s laws, customs, and generalised expectations towards individuals. These laws, customs, and generalised expectations are what Durkheim understands as ‘social facts’.

An example may serve to clarify this point. In virtually all societies, there is a generalised expectation for individuals not to behave in an overly aggressive or violent manner. Public displays of aggression, such as shouting or arguing loudly in public, will likely affect our reputation with others, who may even ask us to act in a more acceptable manner. Physical violence, however, will provoke severe punishments. Practically all forms of violence elicit punishments of some sort, from brawling schoolchildren being sent home by their teacher, to violent adults being incarcerated for attacking others. Consequently, overly hard-tackling football players face expulsion from a match by the referee, and football hooligans may be detained by the police.

Moreover, it is important to note that most people seek to avoid confrontations and violence. Unlike hooligans, we generally know that violence is not accepted anywhere in our everyday lives, and we often feel uneasy, anxious, or worried at the mere thought of being involved in a violent confrontation. Such negative feelings are social in so far as they are a result of our education; throughout the early stages of our lives, parents, teachers and others will shame us and reprimand us for unruly or aggressive behaviour until their command not to be violent has become an important part of the way we feel about and judge our own behaviour. According to Émile Durkheim, non-violence, therefore, is a social fact: it is a standard of behaviour which is generally held in society, acts as an external force upon individuals’ consciousness, persists above and beyond particular individuals’ control, and compels individuals to act in particular ways.

Reading

Durkheim, Émile (1895/1982) The Rules of Sociological Method, London: The Macmillan Press, pp. 50–55

What is a Social Fact?

Before beginning the search for the method appropriate to the study of social facts it is important to know what are the facts termed ‘social’.

The question is all the more necessary because the term is used without much precision. It is commonly used to designate almost all the phenomena that occur within society, however little social interest of some generality they present. Yet under this heading there is, so to speak, no human occurrence that cannot be called social. Every individual drinks, sleeps, eats, or employs his reason, and society has every interest in seeing that these functions are regularly exercised. If therefore these facts were social ones, sociology would possess no subject matter peculiarly its own, and its domain would be confused with that of biology and psychology.

However, in reality there is in every society a clearly determined group of phenomena separable, because of their distinct characteristics, from those that form the subject matter of other sciences of nature.

When I perform my duties as a brother, a husband or a citizen and carry out the commitments I have entered into, I fulfil obligations which are defined in law and custom and which are external to myself and my actions. Even when they conform to my own sentiments and when I feel their reality within me, that reality does not cease to be objective, for it is not I who have prescribed these duties; I have received them through education. Moreover, how often does it happen that we are ignorant of the details of the obligations that we must assume, and that, to know them, we must consult the legal code and its authorised interpreters! Similarly the believer has discovered from birth, ready fashioned, the beliefs and practices of his religious life; if they existed before he did, it follows that they exist outside him. The system of signs that I employ to express my thoughts, the monetary system I use to pay my debts, the credit instruments I utilise in my commercial relationships, the practices I follow in my profession, etc., all function independently of the use I make of them. Considering in turn each member of society, the foregoing remarks can be repeated for each single one of them. Thus there are ways of acting, thinking and feeling which possess the remarkable property of existing outside the consciousness of the individual.

Not only are these types of behaviour and thinking external to the individual, but they are endued with a compelling and coercive power by virtue of which, whether he wishes it or not, they impose themselves upon him. Undoubtedly when I conform to them of my own free will, this coercion is not felt or felt hardly at all, since it is unnecessary. None the less it is intrinsically a characteristic of these facts; the proof of this is that it asserts itself as soon as I try to resist. If I attempt to violate the rules of law they react against me so as to forestall my action, if there is still time. Alternatively, they annul it or make my action conform to the norm if it is already accomplished but capable of being reversed; or they cause me to pay the penalty for it if it is irreparable. If purely moral rules are at stake, the public conscience restricts any act which infringes them by the surveillance it exercises over the conduct of citizens and by the special punishments it has at its disposal. In other cases the constraint is less violent; nevertheless, it does not cease to exist. If I do not conform to ordinary conventions, if in my mode of dress I pay no heed to what is customary in my country and in my social class, the laughter I provoke, the social distance at which I am kept, produce, although in a more mitigated form, the same results as any real penalty. In other cases, although it may be indirect, constraint is no less effective. I am not forced to speak French with my compatriots, nor to use the legal currency, but it is impossible for me to do otherwise. If I tried to escape the necessity, my attempt would fail miserably. As an industrialist nothing prevents me from working with the processes and methods of the previous century, but if I do I will most certainly ruin myself. Even when in fact I can struggle free from these rules and successfully break them, it is never without being forced to fight against them. Even if in the end they are overcome, they make their constraining power sufficiently felt in the resistance that they afford. There is no innovator, even a fortunate one, whose ventures do not encounter opposition of this kind.

Here, then, is a category of facts which present very special characteristics: they consist of manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him. Consequently, since they consist of representations and actions, they cannot be confused with organic phenomena, nor with psychical phenomena, which have no existence save in and through the individual consciousness. Thus they constitute a new species and to them must be exclusively assigned the term social. It is appropriate, since it is clear that, not having the individual as their substratum, they can have none other than society, either political society in its entirety or one of the partial groups that it includes – religious denominations, political and literary schools, occupational corporations, etc. Moreover, it is for such as these alone that the term is fitting, for the word ‘social’ has the sole meaning of designating those phenomena which fall into none of the categories of facts already constituted and labelled. They are consequently the proper field of sociology. It is true that this word ‘constraint’, in terms of which we define them, is in danger of infuriating those who zealously uphold out-and-out individualism. Since they maintain that the individual is completely autonomous, it seems to them that he is diminished every time he is made aware that he is not dependent on himself alone. Yet since it is indisputable today that most of our ideas and tendencies are not developed by ourselves, but come to us from outside, they can only penetrate us by imposing themselves upon us. This is all that our definition implies. Moreover, we know that all social constraints do not necessarily exclude the individual personality.

Yet since the examples just cited (legal and moral rules, religious dogmas, financial systems, etc.) consist wholly of beliefs and practices already well established, in view of what has been said it might be maintained that no social fact can exist except where there is a well defined social organisation. But there are other facts which do not present themselves in this already crystallised form but which also possess the same objectivity and ascendancy over the individual. These are what are called social ‘currents’. Thus in a public gathering the great waves of enthusiasm, indignation and pity that are produced have their seat in no one individual consciousness. They come to each one of us from outside and can sweep us along in spite of ourselves. If perhaps I abandon myself to them I may not be conscious of the pressure that they are exerting upon me, but that pressure makes its presence felt immediately I attempt to struggle against them. If an individual tries to pit himself against one of these collective manifestations, the sentiments that he is rejecting will be turned against him. Now if this external coercive power asserts itself so acutely in cases of resistance, it must be because it exists in the other instances cited above without our being conscious of it. Hence we are the victims of an illusion which leads us to believe we have ourselves produced what has been imposed upon us externally. But if the willingness with which we let ourselves be carried along disguises the pressure we have undergone, it does not eradicate it. Thus air does not cease to have weight, although we no longer feel that weight. Even when we have individually and spontaneously shared in the common emotion, the impression we have experienced is utterly different from what we would have felt if we had been alone. Once the assembly has broken up and these social influences have ceased to act upon us, and we are once more on our own, the emotions we have felt seem an alien phenomenon, one in which we no longer recognise ourselves. It is then we perceive that we have undergone the emotions much more than generated them. These emotions may even perhaps fill us with horror, so much do they go against the grain. Thus individuals who are normally perfectly harmless may, when gathered together in a crowd, let themselves be drawn into acts of atrocity. And what we assert about these transitory outbreaks likewise applies to those more lasting movements of opinion which relate to religious, political, literary and artistic matters, etc., and which are constantly being produced around us, whether throughout society or in a more limited sphere.

Moreover, this definition of a social fact can be verified by examining an experience that is characteristic. It is sufficient to observe how children are brought up. If one views the facts as they are and indeed as they have always been, it is patently obvious that all education consists of a continual effort to impose upon the child ways of seeing, thinking and acting which he himself would not have arrived at spontaneously. From his earliest years we oblige him to eat, drink and sleep at regular hours, and to observe cleanliness, calm and obedience; later we force him to learn how to be mindful of others, to respect customs and conv...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of readings
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Sociology: A panorama
• 2 Doing sociology
• 3 Classical Western sociology
• 4 Individual and social process
• 5 Globalisation and the modern world
• 6 Social inequalities and globalisation
• 7 Why sociology? Some concluding remarks
• Epilogue
• Index