A Brief Background of Sociology

Sociological Perspective
Multiple Views
Sociological View
On Social Order
C.W Mills' Illustration

Sociology is the scientific study of the relationship between human social organization and human behavioral processes.  It is one of several human-oriented sciences born out of the social, economic and political turmoil of the 19th century.  The developers of the field, witnesses to the transformation of work, massive urbanization, and the toppling of the ancient regimes of the time, believed they could make the study of humankind into a science just as natural scientists had done to the physical world before them.  Evident to these social science pioneers was that institutional frameworks of societies transform and are transformed by their citizenry over time and that specific societal groups (due to their class, gender, or race, for example) were effected differently by such changes.  Scientifically, that meant seeing the relationship between social organization and human behavior as being subject to law-like forces and processes that could be revealed through careful and systematic observation and study; it also meant subjecting these logical (theoretical) models of causality to empirical (observable) tests of validity.

Sociology in its beginnings had two impulses: one was to understand the larger social dynamics that  impinged on individual's choices and decisions; the other was the application of knowledge about social systems that often led to a critique and sometimes reform of the institutions of society.  Both of these impulses guided the work of the "honorable ancestors" of the discipline (Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, G.H. Mead, and Karl Marx among them) and characterize the development of American sociology from the late 19th century to the present.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

(Adapted from William C. Levin, 1991, Sociological Ideas, Wadsworth Publishing Company: Belmont, CA)
 

"Every person, every day, sees human social behavior but usually in a very casual, nonsystematic way.  The sociological perspective provides a way of looking at human behavior that is as different from everyday observation as a powerful microscope is from a casual glance.  Without the specific tools of inquiry and methods of analysis that the sociological perspective supplies, everyday observation misses a great deal." (W.C. Levin, 1991)

When we are being analytical we try to identify all the factors that contribute to our behavior.  What a complex tangle of causes we can pick apart for even the simplest events!  Take the rattlesnake encounter, for example.  We were there because we wanted to fish for trout in the Madison River.  But that oversimplifies it.  Other factors contributing to our presence at that precise spot include that we chose that path, had good weather, were able to start the truck that morning, were in good enough shape to trek in five miles, grew up in families in which we learned to like fishing, had the free time to go fishing because of our job schedules, could afford the air fare to Montana, and were able to stay with a friend who not only put us up but also guided us to that particular canyon (bless him).  The list of contributing causes could go on and on.  The trick is to think of as many really important ones as we can.  But how can we systematically do this?  One possible answer is to ask some experts for help.  Because everyone tends to see an issue from his or her own perspective, if we speak to people from enough fields, we may get the whole picture eventually.

Multiple Views

To illustrate how different perspectives offer different contributing causes and where the sociological perspective fits in, let's try to explain the fact that you are now enrolled in a sociology course.  How did you get here?  If a number of experts were asked to contribute explanations strictly from the perspectives of their own disciplines, a physicist might focus on the way gravity and friction allowed you to walk to registration or sit in a classroom seat; a biologist might talk about how your physical well-being influenced your ability to enroll in and attend classes (there is, you must admit, a strong relationship between being alive and ability to show up for class); a biochemist might discuss the biochemical properties of the brain that enabled you to think abstractly and learn, and how these properties evolved; an architect might talk about how the design of the building made access to the classroom more or less difficult; a historian might discuss how the school itself came into existence so that it could offer the course; an economist might focus on how you came to have the money to pay tuition and to forgo the earnings from a full-time job while you pursued your college degree; a political scientist might be interested in how the power of the teacher to distribute grades influenced your attendance (and acceptance of the teacher's ideas) or how your college education will increase your access to the power available to some members of society; and a psychologist would probably discuss how you became motivated to attend college, how attendance satisfies certain of your needs and desires, how rewards and punishments are associated with class performance, and whether your presence and performance in the class are influenced by factors such as your IQ, the authority of the teacher, and your personality.

Those are several interesting perspectives, and the more experts we import to help with the question, the more answers we get.  Everyone will have something to say.  But the problem is to find out which suggestions really help us answer the question and which ones, although true, either contribute minimally or are not central to the question.  For example, although it may be true that class attendance is strongly related to the fact that you are alive, so is any other activity in which you are engaged.  The contribution of the biologist is, in this case, true but not specific to the question asked.

Sociological View

We can see that certain approaches are more appropriate for certain questions.  If I were interested in understanding the survival of a species of animals, I would undoubtedly talk to a naturalist first.  But if I wanted to understand something about human social behavior, such as behavior in a college classroom, the sociological perspective would be most appropriate.

The sociological perspective is a view of human behavior that focuses on the patterns of relationships among individuals rather than solely on the individuals themselves.  It alerts us to the fact that a great deal of our behavior is shaped by our membership in groups with other people.  Social forces, like physical forces, strongly influence our behavior.  The analogy with physical forces is helpful, because in both categories the forces may normally be invisible to us, but their existence can be made obvious if we know how to look at behavior or know what kinds of questions to ask.  Gravity is invisible until its effect on a dropped object is observed and measured.  Air becomes "visible" when we see its influence on leaves or we turn an empty glass over and push it into a bowl of water-the water can't get in because there is something already there.  In just this way social forces can be made visible by asking sociological questions, observing and measuring human social interactions, and then guessing about the nature of the underlying social forces that caused the observed behavior.
 
Just as there are physical facts that we learn when studying the workings of the physical world, so there are social facts that sociologists have discovered by studying human social behavior.  Emile Durkheim, a French sociologist, coined the term social fact (Durkheim, [1893] 1958) to describe the forces that constrain (or control) human behavior and that result from our membership in groups rather than from what we are like as individuals.  It is important to keep in mind that, when sociologists try to explain human behavior, the individual characteristics of the people involved are not of primary importance.
 
When I began studying sociology, I was interested in the things I read, but there seemed to be no common thread to it all.  The issues of poverty, discrimination, divorce, and other social problems seemed worth understanding, but they also seemed disjointed.  Was each really a separate problem, with separate causes?  Then I read C. Wright Mills's articulate, passionate little book, The Sociological Imagination (1959) (summarized in the illustration section of this discussion), and I began to understand the benefits of a sociological view.

My problem in those first courses was that I had not developed a sociological perspective.  Like most other people in American society, I had learned to think about the world in individual terms.  It made sense that whatever happens to people must be a result of what they are like.  This is a view that is built into our culture. Just as some people succeed because they are hard-working, clever, motivated, or lucky, so others fail because they lack these qualities.

Even when I read about widespread social problems, I focused narrowly, just as I had been taught.  In American society we are taught to put great emphasis on individual responsibility and achievement.  When we wish to control events in our everyday lives, we generally try to improve ourselves as individuals.  Look at all the self-help books on the best-seller list at any time.  This approach can be ineffective when social forces are at work.  The fact is that a large percentage of our everyday actions are simply not the result of what we are like as individuals, mentally, emotionally, financially, or otherwise.  These actions are due to our membership in groups and in the society at large.

For example, when you watch television at home you may not respond at all to what you see.  The jokes don't make you laugh, or the game isn't exciting enough to merit cheers or even comment.  But if you are part of the audience seeing the comedian in person or at the stadium watching the game, it is very likely that you will react much more strongly.  We seem to be swept along with others around us as they react to what is going on.  I can recall laughing loudly at a joke I didn't fully understand because everyone around me thought it was a riot.  Laughing is a very social behavior.

Or, if you have dealt with many bureaucracies you may sometimes have felt that they hire only cold, uncaring, lazy people to deal with the public.  The motor vehicle bureau clerk doesn't seem to care at all that you had to wait in line for two hours, only to find out that the bureau won't accept personal checks.  Yet she probably is not basically nasty.  After work hours she may be someone's sweet, doting grandmother.  It is the way bureaucracies are organized that makes her act that way, not her individual nature.  Bureaucracies are very large and complex social structures.  They formalize the rules of conduct by which their workers operate and, in the name of efficiency, reduce the workers' jobs to repetitive, non-challenging routines.  The very size and style of the organization of bureaucracies kills kindness and originality in its workers.  Some may actually be nasty underneath, but workers in complex organizations don't have to start out nasty to be made to act that way after a while.  So sociologists focus on the way social forces influence human behavior rather than on the individual characteristics of people.

Sociology and Social Order

Just as the natural sciences developed to deal with specific questions we have about the natural order, so sociology began when we started to ask questions about the forces underlying human social order.  Although there have been social thinkers at various times throughout history, sociology is a relatively new discipline.  Auguste Comte (1798-1857) did not coin the term sociology until the middle of the nineteenth century (Comte, [1848] 1957), and the thinkers who gave the new field its main theoretical direction, Karl Marx (1818-83), Max Weber (1864-1920), and Durkheim (1858-1917), produced their most influential work between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Why did we suddenly become aware of social forces, even though they had certainly existed for as long as thinking humans have lived in organized groups?  The answer to this question illustrates something about the way social science proceeds.  We generally do not notice orderliness.  It is taken to be normal or everyday, the way things "ought to be."  But occasional disruption of the normal order of events draws our attention and, strange as it may seem, points to the underlying rules of orderliness.  The greater the disruption, the more attention it draws.  Although the exception may not actually prove the rule, it certainly starts us thinking about what the rules might be.  Attempts at proof come later.
 
Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and others were reacting to the greatest disruption of all, world revolution.  For more than a century the Western world had been experiencing severe and rapid changes in its basic structures.  The feudal, aristocratic structure that had dominated for centuries in France, England, and the West in general was overthrown, replaced by national governments that were to be run, to varying degrees, according to the principles of representative republics.  The populations became increasingly urbanized and industrialized.  The Industrial Revolution was not just a matter of replacing hand work with machines or animal power with steam power; it was also a revolution in the way people evaluated their own worth.  To the extent that their living came to depend upon their labor, they could now be judged on the basis of what they did, rather than on the basis of the village, religion, or family into which they had been born.  The feudal order of things had been so stable for so long that questions about the forces that had created that order were unlikely to arise.  But in the turbulence of social and economic revolution, and in its aftermath, such questions had to be asked.  What was causing the changes?  Would a new stable form of social organization develop, or would the upheaval continue forever?  If a new order did arise, what would it be like?  How long could it be expected to last?  Would there be more monarchs and serfs in the new order?  And the most important question of all: How can we discover basic laws of social order that will allow us not only to predict social change but also to influence or even control it in the future?

So sociology really developed in response to a problem in the social order, and our understanding of some rules of social order was a consequence (Nisbet, 1966).  Sociology ever since has been a problem-oriented discipline.  It is not the stable and orderly segments of society that attract our attention, but the areas we define as problems.  Any catalog of the courses offered by a typical sociology department shows this orientation.  Courses on social problems, such as racism and sexism, are obviously aimed at understanding problems, but even courses on urban sociology and the sociology of the family are problem-oriented.  Urban sociology developed as a response to the apparent decay of social order in American cities around the 1920s.  Courses on marriage and the family began as part of the effort to understand and control the weakening of the family structure on small family farms in the early twentieth century.  Now family courses focus more on the problems of high divorce rates and the revolution in sex roles.

As a consequence of this problem orientation, sociology has developed a reputation as a critical discipline.  Sociologists tend to look beneath the official explanations of how things work to discover where problems may be hiding (Berger, 1971).  Why are there so many poor people, and why do they tend to share so many characteristics such as age, sex, race, ethnicity, educational level, geographical distribution, and so on?  Such questions focus on problems.  But they have the benefit of helping us try to make our social order live up to its highest goals.
 
Sociologists are not just critics of society's problems.  A major goal of the sociological perspective is to understand the basic principles of social order.  Our constant attention to disruptions of order gives us the most direct route to understanding order itself.  We want to test our ideas about how social order works.  We want to build general social theories that can explain in the simplest possible terms a wide variety of behaviors.

To do this, we try to be as insightful and as objective as possible.  Just as other disciplines -- medicine, psychology, and political science -- developed during and after the Industrial Revolution, sociology has tried, when appropriate, to emulate the methods of the natural sciences.  The objectivity of sociology depends on applying this method of inquiry.  Basically, sociological inquiry becomes more objective when it is taken from the personal control of subjective individuals and conducted according to publicly agreed-on methods for the objective testing of ideas.  By putting our ideas about the social world in the form of hypotheses that state clearly how everything is to be measured, we make it possible for anyone to verify (or contradict) our results by trying the same study (a process called replication).
 
Sociology as a scientific enterprise differs from other sciences in the types of forces on which it focuses and in the theories it attempts to build to explain them.  Social behavior is very complex.  Just trying to explain your presence in a sociology course clearly involves psychological, economic, and historical forces, to name just a few.  So sociology often requires an awareness of a number of other perspectives.
Sociology is multi-causal in its approach; that is, it alerts us to the fact that virtually any social behavior has many contributing causes, all of which must be included in our explanation.

The nature of social order may be quite different from the nature of other systems of order.  Humans, after all, are conscious actors who are capable of evaluating the meaning of their experiences and reacting in a variety of ways.  In some circumstances, therefore, it is misleading to apply the methods of the natural sciences to human social behavior.

Summary

 The sociological perspective is an attempt to understand human behavior by focusing on the influence of interactions among individuals rather than on the characteristics of individuals.  Sociology is multi-causal in its attention to the many kinds of factors that influence human behavior, but it emphasizes the social forces.  Social forces cannot be observed directly; they must be inferred from human behavior.  Often questions about the operation of social forces are raised when disruptions in everyday social order occur.  Because of this focus on social problems, sociology is seen as a critical discipline.  Sociologists attempt to build theories to explain a wide variety of behaviors with a relatively small number of general statements.  When possible, the ability of such theories to explain and predict behavior is tested in the real world using objective methods of research that allow others to confirm (or contradict) the results.
 
The illustration that follows discusses a work by C. Wright Mills, one of the most passionate and earnest statements yet made on the value of the sociological perspective.  Mills not only explains what the sociological imagination is but also makes a plea for its usefulness in understanding the difficulties we face in modern life.
 

Illustration

C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (London: Oxford University Press, 1959)

At a time when American society stressed individual characteristics and achievements as the prime factors in a person's life, Mills provided an alternative way of thinking.  He began by pointing out that people usually do not make a connection between their own troubles and the larger social forces surrounding them.  Take, for example, the problem of divorce.  Virtually all the divorced people I know talk about their divorces in personal terms.  They ask, "Where did I go wrong?" Or they say, "What a rat he [or she] turned out to be."  They blame their lack of money or the time spent apart, the demands of work or their lack of communication, the annoying habits of the other person or the need to "find my true self."  Out of explanations like these come solutions that focus on individual adjustments: to put less emphasis on money, to work fewer hours, to talk more, to be more tolerant, and so on.
 
I almost never hear a divorced person talk about the fact that the divorce rate in the United States is about 50 percent.  Something is happening to the society that is influencing marriage itself as an institution.  Divorce is not just happening to this couple on the block and to that one in another town.  Divorces are not unconnected events.  But people get no satisfaction from looking at broader social trends, because they are taught to think in individual terms and because they experience problems as individuals. (No one can "see" problems happening to categories of people, except in tables or lists of data.)
 
Mills focused on this difficulty by distinguishing between troubles and issues.  "Troubles occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his immediate relations with others: they have to do with his self and with those limited areas of social life of which he is directly and personally aware."  Troubles raise private concerns.  By contrast, "Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of his inner life."  Issues raise public concerns.  So your divorce or mine is trouble.  The rate of divorce in America is an issue.

Having grasped this distinction, you may reasonably ask what good it does to recognize that divorce is an issue.  How does it help a person who is trying to cope with the trouble of a divorce to realize that he or she is caught up in the issue of divorce as well?  Part of the answer is that it is comforting to learn that not all our difficulties are the fault of our personal flaws, or those of others.  But more than that, Mills pointed out, troubles are largely the manifestation of issues.  To reduce troubles, we must deal with issues.  If we ignore issues, then, we doom ourselves to continuing troubles.

For Mills, the key to understanding issues is adoption of the sociological imagination.  It "enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life, and the external career of a variety of individuals."  For example, the possessor of the sociological imagination can use an understanding of the causes of the high divorce rate in the United States to make sense of his or her own experiences in marriage.  The broader understanding of social forces is the first step on the road to "doing something" about both troubles and issues.

The sociological imagination leads us to ask the following kinds of questions:
 

(1) How is the overall society organized?  What are its various elements, and how are they related to one another?  How does one society differ in these qualities from others?  These types of questions focus on describing social structure at a specific time in its history.

(2) How does the current structure of the society compare with its past structure?  Is it changing?  If so, how?  In what segments of society are the rates of change greatest?  These are questions dealing with changes in the social structure over time.

(3) What are the characteristics of the members of the society?  Which categories tend to be advantaged, and which disadvantaged?  What is the process by which these advantages are distributed?  How are the inequalities evaluated by the society?  These are questions focusing on the way the society operates.
 

If it is so important to focus our sociological imaginations on the great issues of our time, why have we not already done so?  Mills claimed that the difficulty lies in the relationship between our values and the extent to which we think they are threatened.  When people hold values deeply and perceive no threat to them, they experience a feeling of well-being.  When they hold values deeply but perceive them to be threatened, they experience crisis or even panic.  When values are not deeply held and there is no perception of threat, the response is indifference.  And when a threat is perceived, even though the values are not deeply held, a feeling that something is wrong, a response of uneasiness, or anxiety, sets in.

Mills believed that "ours is a time of uneasiness and indifference -- not yet formulated in such ways as to permit the work of reason and the play of sensibility."  Lacking clear and deeply held values, we modern Americans are incapable of recognizing in concrete terms the difficulties we suffer.  We can only struggle with a vague sense of unease or a maddening indifference.  And while we seek help through self- improvement or seek escape in the selfish "good life," the issues of social life go begging for attention.  Mills' book is a call to social scientists to take up the task of focusing on issues and to pass on the awareness of the sociological imagination to others.

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