Sociological Thinkerds

Hey Faye! Let me say, that I checked your office hours and you have bloody awful ones (no offense!). There is no way (unless by magic) I'll ever get to see you which makes me sad. :c

A) Compare and contrast the functionalist, conflict, and interactionist theoretical approaches to the study of society. How does each approach view society, the individual, social order, and social change? Your textbook analyzes sports in terms of various perspectives. Using the analysis of sports as a model, analyze the role of television from the functional, conflict, and interactionist approaches.

For Mills, religion had lost its sacred substance and its ability to inspire current members. As an outcome of this, Mills offered the “immanent critique,” which is the involvement of a group’s own principles against them, and the inspiration for them to have their own individualized ideas. “Immanent critique…entails using a group’s own principles against them and encouraging them to live up to their own cherished ideals…” (Dandaneau, 159).

In sociology, there are three main perspectives that most sociologists take when examining the world around them. The perspectives are meant to help people understand the world better through different outlooks on the way people live. The three main perspectives are Functionalist, Conflict, and Interactionist.

In our society today, there are three theoretical perspectives that act as ways to view our lives. Symbolic Interactionism , Functional Analysis, and Conflict Theory. All of which are centered around the people they derived from who are : George Herbert Mead, Charles Horton Cooley, Robert Merton and Karl Marx. With these theories being a major part of sociology, the research that is collected to study the people in these societies should be looked at as a whole ,for, sociology comes in many forms.

The “situation” between the individual and society is not as simple as many people believe. There are three sociological theorists: George Herbert Mead, Karl Marx, and Emile Durkheim; who analyze the connections between the two. As a warning these theories can be quite confusing at times, but fear not I will be translating them into Jersey terms for better understanding. That being said, first we will be discussing Mead’s theory on the development of our “self”. Mead heavily focused on social problems and social reform in his research, his most notable work being Mind, Self, and Society that describes that the “self” is a product of social interaction. He explains that “the body can be there and can operate in a very intelligent fashion without there being self-involved in the experience. The self has the

Coming from AJP, I needed to cross Fifth Avenue to start my walk, and like what I had to do every day when I had class at that building, I found myself once again waiting for the walk sign to appear across the street. This Sociological Perspective of seeing society in our everyday lives showed how the smallest personal choices, even the action of walking, is affected and shaped by society and how it functions. As I was walking through Fifth Avenue, I noticed that there were buildings at every corner of this long street. Students, some wearing Carlow gear while others wore Pitt gear, populated the sidewalks, conversing with other students. As I got farther into Fifth Avenue, I could see UPMC hospitals and signs with directions of entrances and parking lots. People populated the end of the sidewalk in this street, waiting at the Bus Stop sign. In the area of Forbes Avenue, there were a lot of restaurants, and I noticed many students walking to get in and eat.

Mills’ s definition of the idea of sociological imagination is “the quality of mind that will help people to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve simple summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within them.” (Mills, pg, 9, paragraph 7) Mills explains that through sociological imagination, people are able to learn about society throughout their lives and apply it to their every day life. Sociological imagination is the ability to see certain situations in a wide social framework and observe how these interactions and other people’s actions are influential upon other individuals and situations. As people live their lives, they get to learn from daily situations that teach them how to live each and every day. For example, drinking tea. Drinking tea is a very common example of sociological imagination. Drinking tea can be seen as a means of maintaining good health in the way that one might take daily vitamins. It could be considered a tradition or ritual as many people choose to drink tea ritualistically each day at a certain time. It could be considered a type of drug because it contains caffeine, and therefore the drinker of the tea may have a type of an addiction. Or it can even be seen from the perspective of being a social activity such as “meeting for tea,” an activity that actually focuses less on the beverage and more on the actual activity of meeting with another person.

Compare and contrast the views of three appropriate sociological perspectives to an area of social life of your choosing.

When most people think about sociology they generally think of the study of sociology. However, sociology is much deeper than just the study of sociology. It displays a plethora of sub topics such as: crime, deviance, bureaucracy, culture, criminality, socialization, economy, politics, religion, education, social class and many more. Throughout this fall semester this sociology course has taught me things that I could never imagine. To be more specific there were actually ten topics that I learned in this course that was very important to me. Those topics were: crime, deviance, bureaucracy, nature of science, philosophy, religion, common sense, scientific

The concept of sociology had been recognized by independent philosophers since the dawn of organized civilization. Philosophers such as Confucius and Xenophanes in their works had hinted at the clash of cultures and social hierarchy. Later, in the 14th century, Arab scholars such as Al Jahiz and Ibn Khaldun's compliled books on the history of society itself. These works are known to be forerunners of sociology. In fact, books written by Ibn Khaldun on social cohesion and conflict were translated into Latin in the 15th century. However, Sociology as a discipline has only been around since the late 17th century. Sociology then was very much the product of a rapidly changing world, from the violent revolutions in France to the subtle

Throughout the course, I have acquired a number of different ideas that will contribute to my knowledge and understanding of sociology. First, I was able to learn about what a social problem was in general. What defines a social problem, how they are constructed, and the four stages of a social problem. It may be obvious to many, but an important note about social problems is that they are socially constructed. This means that people decide if societal condition is a social problem. Natural things like earthquakes and hurricanes are not social problems. I was also able to learn about the three sociological perspectives theories: Functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism. These three theories make up a large part of how these social problems are viewed and why they occur. Functionalist compare society to a self-adjusting machine and each part of the machine has a function. When parts of the machine are working accordingly, it contributes to the well-being of the society. The conflict theory states that everyone is competing with one another for a limited amount of resources. There are only so many resources to go around, and the competition for them is so severe that conflict is barley kept in check. Symbolic interactionism is the theory that focuses on how we make sense out of life. It states that we see the world through symbols that we attach meaning to and that we use to communicate with one another. With this better understanding of what a social

This is the second week of our sociology course. Now that I am familiar with the structure of the class, I felt that learning the material and discussing it with classmates was smooth. This week, I took a lot of information from our course and was able to connect it with my life.

Sociological theorists have always disagreed in method, hence the three paradigms that compose the sociological theory as a whole. But it’s the fact that none of them have the one defined answer to society’s quirky nature. Conflict theory, symbolic interactionism, and functionalism must coexist in order to provide the best encompassing view of societal anomalies. Specifically looking at crime rates as an example, one would take each theory into consideration as to demonstrate their contribution to the crime rate. In the following paragraphs I’ll be referencing Karl Marx (conflict theorist), Lewis Coser (functionalist), and Charles Horton Cooley (symbolic interactionist).

There are many different sociological theories that sociologists have come up with in organizing today’s society. Three being Functionalism, Symbolic Interactionism and Conflict theory. Functionalism has to do with an organizing set or a set of rules that are organized in an institution. Symbolic interactionism has to do with developing a perspective focus and relying on the process of social interaction. Conflict theory emphasizes a higher power producing social order.