Lecture Notes:
Basic Ideas:
● Humans are inherently social
○ In evolutionary terms, it’s a unique characteristic
○ Social organization is fundamental to our species
● We inherit knowledge
○ And are shaped, constrained by the society we’re born into
● Society has somewhat stable organization
○ And therefore can be described and analyzed systematically
What is sociology?
Studying the ways in which individuals are shaped by communities
● And communities by individuals
● But what are communities
The study of social facts
● Objective forces that can be studied like physical facts
○ Evidence, theory
● Anything produced collectively by people that exerts a social force upon us
○ Aka social structure
■ Conformity: powerful characteristic to conformity that usually can not be
changed; conformity is highly incentivized and there is a cost to deviance
■ Law: set of social norms that contain a set of physical penalties; a form of
a social structure
○ Agency and social change
People behave in similar ways largely because they sacrificed some agencies(freedom, the ability
to act or make choices)
Agency is constrained by social structure
Individually you have no power to make change
Society changes through collective agencies, little power in the individual, a ton of power in the
collective
Social facts
● Produced by humans
○ Regular patterns that shape and constrain what we do
○ Can be studied and analyzed like other facts
○ Subject to change
● Powerful influences on individuals
● Larger than individuals
○ Tend to last longer than individual lifetimes
○ Tend to be difficult for individuals to escape or change
Institutions hand out agencies differently
● Money is a form of agency; highly unequally distributed (more money, more choices;
less money, less choices)
Socialization: the process by which individuals learn and acclimate to social facts; the process in
which individuals internalize social facts
● Social norms start to begin to be applied towards other people as well
Social reproduction: needed to explain the stability of society; why society stays relatively the
same/constant
● Enforcement of cultural norms contributes to social reproduction
Social change: collective action
Studying Social Facts
● Data
○ The search for patterns
● Methods
○ Quantitative
■ Claims to be objective
■ Correlations to explain patterns of behavior
○ Qualitative
■ Understanding ideas, feelings, behaviors and the patterns in these things
● Sociological sympathy: understanding where people are coming from
○ Essential for objective analysis
CH.1: THE SELF
Sociological view: the self is a “process” rather than an inherent object
● The self is shaped by outside forces that themselves change
● The self is a product of interaction, context-dependent
● E.g. the hermit in maine
○ The self disappears because it is based on social interactions with others
How to study the self?
● Interviews and observation
● Surveys and quantitative comparison
Summary: The self is an “accomplishment” and is “mutable”
Cooley: “the mind is social…and society is mental”
● The looking glass self
● Society is a shared idea of expectations of how people should act
● Sense of self emerges because we try to imagine how others see us
○ Powerful regulator of our behavior
■ Key: patterns in expectations leads to patterns of behavior
○ Specific others, “generalized others”
● Stable environments lead to stable personalities
○ The amnesia case
Summary: the self is a social fact because it’s established outside ourselves and through social
processes
