1. Sociology: the scientific study of society and human behavior
Sociological perspective: understanding human behavior by placing it within its broader social contexts – the relationship between what people do and the social settings that shape their behavior.
Society: people who share a culture and territory.
2. Science: the application of systematic methods to obtain knowledge and the knowledge obtained by those methods.
3. Sociology emerged about in the middle of the 1800s.
3 historical stages that lead up to the emergence of sociology:
1. Industrial Revolution
2. Social upheaval of revolution
3. Imperialism
Auguste Comte first proposed the idea of Sociology.
4. Herbert Spencer believed that sociologists should keep their hands off society because societies go through a natural evolution. He believed that the people who evolve from lower, barbaric classes to higher classes. Those who survived in the society would pave a way for a more advanced society while the weaker ones died out. Did not favor helping out the poor.
Same thing as social Darwinism.
5. Karl Marx believed that class conflict was the engine of human history. Two classes: the bourgeoisie (people who owned shit. Capitalists.) and proletariat (workers) would all fight because proletariat were being exploited. Chaotic revolution; however, it will usher a classless society.
6. Durkheim identified the concept of social integration as the degree to which people are tied to their social group, as a key social factor in suicide.
Weber said that religion is the central force to social change. Protestants began to be frugal and save money to invest in it later. Protestant ethic.
7. Durkheim believed in the concept of social facts: patterns of behavior that characterizes a social group, We must use social facts to interpret social facts.
Weber’s idea of verstehen (to understand) which emphasized the importance of subjective meanings.
8. Women were expected to be involved in church, clean, children, and clothes. Much didn’t pursue high education. Harriet Martineau’s works were ignored because of those social customs. She was known to analyze U.S. customs and translate Comte’s works into English.
9. Skip 9 because I seriously do not know the answer.
10. Use all three.
11. Macro level: the large scale patterns of society
Micro level: an examintation of small scale patterns of society, such as how the members of a group interact.
12. Globalization: the growing interconnections among nations due to the expansion of capitalism. Globalization happens due to advances in communications, trade, and travel. Chapter 2
1. Culture: the language, beliefs, values, norms, behaviors, and even material objects that characterize a group and are passes from one generation to the next.
Culture Shock: the disorientation that people experience when they come in contact with a fundamentally different culture and can no longer depend on their taken-for-granted assumptions about life.
Cultural relativism: not judging a culture but trying to understand it on its own terms.
Ethnocentrism: the use of one’s own culture as a yardstick for judging the ways of other individuals or societies, generally leading to a negative evaluation of their values, norms, and behaviors.
2. Gestures: movements of the body to communicate with others, are shorthand ways to convey messages without using words.
Language: a system of symbols that can be combined in an infinite number of ways and