Sociology

• 1. Introduction

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  Sociology is the scientific study of human society, of the patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and the aspects of culture that fill everyday life. The word itself was coined in 1780 by the French essayist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes, in a manuscript he never published. Decades later a different Frenchman would put the word on the map, and a German thinker who never called himself a sociologist would be named its true father. How did a single discipline come to stretch from the behavior of twin foetuses in the womb to the structure of a society as a whole? Why do its founders disagree so sharply about whether human society can be studied like the natural world at all? And how can a researcher claim to study a thing of which they themselves are a part? Those tensions sit at the center of everything that follows.

• 2. The Long Prehistory

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  The Domesday Book of 1086 is one of the oldest ancestors of the modern survey, a written reckoning of people and holdings long before anyone thought to call such work a science. Sociological reasoning predates the discipline that would claim it. Social and political criticism appears in old comic poetry, and the ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle weighed how people ought to live together. Confucius wrote about the importance of social roles. Some sources reach to Tunisia for the discipline's deepest root. Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century Muslim scholar, is considered by some to be the father of sociology, though the European founders of the modern field make no reference to his work. His Muqaddimah was among the first writings to advance social-scientific reasoning about social cohesion and social conflict. The word that would name this study borrows from two languages at once. It draws on the Latin socius, meaning companion or fellowship, and the Greek logos, meaning word or knowledge. By the late 18th century the term existed, but the field it described had not yet been built.

• 3. Three Architects Of Modernity

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  Auguste Comte, who lived from 1798 to 1857, defined sociology independently in 1838 as a new way of looking at society. He had first called it social physics, until the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet took that phrase for himself. Writing after the malaise of the French Revolution, Comte argued that social ills could be cured through what he called sociological positivism. He laid this out in his Course in Positive Philosophy, published between 1830 and 1842, and later in A General View of Positivism in 1848. He believed a positivist stage would be the final era of human understanding, following earlier theological and metaphysical phases. Karl Marx rejected Comte's positivism yet still set out to build a science of society. For the thinker Isaiah Berlin, Marx may be regarded as the true father of modern sociology, in so far as anyone can claim the title, even though Marx never considered himself a sociologist. Berlin credited him with giving clear answers to the theoretical questions that most occupied men's minds, and with deducing practical directives from them without forcing artificial links between the two. Herbert Spencer was one of the most popular and influential sociologists of the 19th century. It is estimated he sold one million books in his lifetime, far more than any other sociologist of the era. He coined the phrase survival of the fittest, opposed socialism, and championed a laissez-faire style of government watched closely by conservative circles in the United States and England. The German theorist Max Weber completes the trio. Durkheim, Marx, and Weber are typically named as the three principal architects of the field, each tied to a distinct view of how modern society came to be.

• 4. Building The Discipline

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  The first formal Department of Sociology in the world opened in 1892 at the University of Chicago, established by Albion Small at the invitation of William Rainey Harper. Small founded the American Journal of Sociology there in 1895 and published the first sociology textbook, An Introduction to the Study of Society. Emile Durkheim chiefly led the work of turning sociology into a true academic discipline. He set up the first European department at the University of Bordeaux in 1895 and published his Rules of the Sociological Method that same year. For Durkheim, sociology was the science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning. His 1897 monograph Suicide is considered a seminal work of statistical analysis. By examining suicide rates across police districts, he argued that Catholic communities showed lower rates than Protestant ones, and attributed the difference to social rather than psychological causes. He developed the notion of objective social facts as a distinct empirical object for the new science to study. The first college course titled Sociology was taught at Yale in 1875 by William Graham Sumner. In 1883 Lester F. Ward, who later became the first president of the American Sociological Association, published Dynamic Sociology, a 1,200-page attack on the laissez-faire sociology of Spencer and Sumner. George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley, who had met at the University of Michigan in 1891 alongside John Dewey, moved to Chicago in 1894 and gave rise to the symbolic interactionism of the modern Chicago School. The discipline spread across borders. The London School of Economics opened the first British department in 1904, and Harriet Martineau, an English translator of Comte, has been cited as the first female sociologist. The German Sociological Association was founded in 1909 by Ferdinand Tonnies, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel, and Weber established Germany's first department at LMU Munich in 1919. Florian Znaniecki set up the first Polish department in 1920, and the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt, later the Frankfurt School, was founded in 1923.

• 5. The Quarrel Over Method

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  Positivism holds that the only authentic knowledge is scientific, gained through positive affirmation by scientific method, and that sociology should be conducted broadly as natural science is. Loic Wacquant distinguishes three major strains of it: Durkheimian, Logical, and Instrumental. The variety dominant today is instrumental positivism, which sets aside questions about the nature of social facts in favor of replicability, reliability, and validity. It is more or less synonymous with quantitative research and is often credited to Paul Lazarsfeld, who pioneered large-scale survey studies. Robert K. Merton called the resulting work middle-range theory, abstract statements that generalize from empirical regularities rather than from an idea of the social whole. Against this stood a German tradition that refused to treat society like nature. The philosopher Hegel had criticized empiricist epistemology as uncritical and determinism as too mechanistic. Marx borrowed Hegelian dialectics, insisting that appearances must be critiqued rather than merely documented. Early hermeneuticians such as Wilhelm Dilthey drew a line between natural science and Geisteswissenschaft, the science of the human spirit. Max Weber argued that sociology could be loosely called a science because it identifies causal relationships of social action, especially among ideal types, his term for hypothetical simplifications of complex phenomena. He defined the field as the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of how the action proceeds and the effects it produces. Weber and Simmel pioneered the Verstehen, or interpretative, method, by which an outside observer tries to relate to a cultural group on its own terms. Simmel, relatively isolated from the academy in his lifetime, asked the direct question what is society, in deliberate echo of Kant's question what is nature.

• 6. Four Lenses On The Social World

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  Randall Collins, in a well-cited survey, sorts sociological theory into four traditions: Functionalism, Conflict, Symbolic Interactionism, and Utilitarianism. Functionalism treats the parts of society the way one might treat organs of a body, an analogy popularized by Herbert Spencer, with each norm and institution working toward the functioning of the whole. It descends chiefly from Durkheim and carries an anthropological basis in Marcel Mauss, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown, in whose usage the prefix structural emerged. Conflict theory turns that picture inside out. Where functionalists see cohesive systems, conflict theorists emphasize inequality between groups, captured in Marx's claim that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Symbolic interactionism works at the smallest scale, viewing society as the shared reality people construct as they interact, a complex and ever-changing mosaic of subjective meanings. It emerged from the Chicago School of the 1920s and 1930s, and its associated figures include Weber, Mead, Erving Goffman, George Homans, and Peter Blau. Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology grew from this same soil. Utilitarianism, also called exchange or rational choice theory, assumes individuals always seek to maximize their own self-interest. It is attributed to George C. Homans, Peter Blau, and Richard Emerson, and was revitalized late in the 20th century by the former association president James Coleman. Raewyn Connell points to a fifth, often forgotten tradition, Social Darwinism, which applied Darwinian evolution to societies and once dominated American sociology from about 1881.

• 7. How Sociologists Actually Work

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  Sociological research splits into two broad camps that often supplement each other. Qualitative designs reach for understanding through direct observation, conversation with participants, or the analysis of texts, prizing contextual accuracy over generality. Quantitative designs approach social phenomena through quantifiable evidence and statistical analysis of many cases. In the discipline's two most cited journals, quantitative articles have historically outnumbered qualitative ones by a factor of two, and the word methodology is often used synonymously with statistics. Sampling is the quiet engine of the quantitative side. When a full census of a population is infeasible, a sample forms a manageable subset, and statistics draw inferences from it about the whole. Random sampling is usually best, though stratified sampling addresses differences between subpopulations, and nonprobability methods such as convenience or snowball sampling step in when random selection is impossible. The toolkit runs wider still. It includes archival research drawing on biographies and memoirs, content analysis coded with software such as Atlas.ti or NVivo, experimental research that isolates a single social process in a laboratory, longitudinal study over long periods, participant observation in the field, program evaluation, and survey research with open-ended or closed-ended items. Computers have opened a newer frontier. Computational sociology uses simulation, text mining, and social network analysis to model complex social processes from the bottom up, and some of its tools, such as measures of network centrality, have been imported back into the natural sciences.

• 8. The Reach Of A Discipline

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  Social pre-wiring asks whether the urge toward social action exists before birth, and the evidence comes from the womb. Researchers analyzed 10 foetuses over time using ultrasound and kinematic analysis, and found that twin foetuses interacted with each other more often and for longer as the pregnancies progressed. The movements were not accidental but specifically aimed at the co-twin. Starting from the 14th week of gestation, the study reported, twin foetuses plan and execute movements aimed at the other, with other-directed actions predominating over self-directed ones. Education offered a different kind of proof about social life. A classic 1966 study by James Coleman, the Coleman Report, analyzed the performance of over 150,000 students and found that a student's background and socioeconomic status mattered far more to educational outcomes than measured differences in school resources. It also found that socially disadvantaged black students profited from racially mixed classrooms, and so became a catalyst for desegregation busing in American public schools. Economic sociology traces its own long lineage. The term was first used by William Stanley Jevons in 1879, and the field was shaped by Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel between 1890 and 1920, with Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism of 1905 and Simmel's The Philosophy of Money of 1900 among its landmarks. Mark Granovetter's 1985 work on embeddedness argued that economic relations take place within existing social relations, and his theory of the strength of weak ties remains one of the field's best-known contributions. The discipline keeps expanding into new territory. The internet has reshaped social networks and power relations, and digital sociology, examining the impact of technologies that emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century, marks the newest line of a study that now stretches from the second trimester of pregnancy to the informational society Manuel Castells described in The Internet Galaxy.