Sociology Chapter 1 - Your Social Identity

Sociology is the study of human society.

What Is Sociology?

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Thinking like a sociologist means looking at the worldaround you in a new way.

Challenge conventional wisdomand question what most people take for granted.

You May Ask Yourself, 2nd EditionCopyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company

Coined by C. Wright Mills, this tool helps us to:• connect our personal experiences to society at large and greater historical forces.

• “make the familiar strange,” or to question habits or customs that seem “natural” to us.

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The Sociological Imagination

My brother and country rock……..

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUEGHdQO7WA

http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_in_empathy.html

Social institutions are networks of structures in society that work to socialize the groups of people within them. Examples include: the legal systemthe labor marketthe educational systemthe militarythe family

What Is a Social Institution?

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The way individuals define themselves in relationship to groups they are a part of (or in relationship to groups they choose not to be a part of).

What groups are you in? Or not in? Write down a list of groups that you define you.

What Is Social Identity?

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Think about you own backgrounds, including their race, gender, religion, and economic class.

How larger social forces—the economy, civil rights, religious movements, and so on—have shaped what it

means to be a person "like yousomeone with the same list of traits—in society today. 8

Auguste Comte — society is better understood by determining the logic or scientific laws governing human behavior, called social physics or positivism.

The History of Sociology

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Karl Marx — theory of historical materialism, which identifies class conflict as the primary cause of social change

Functionalism, conflict theory, feminist theory, symbolic interactionism, postmodernism, and

midrange theory are all

modern sociological theories.

The History of Sociology

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The Chicago School is best known for its urban sociology and for the development of the symbolic

interactionist approach.

Symbolic Interactionism

Sociology focuses on making comparisons across cases to find patterns and create hypotheses about how societies work now or how they worked in the past.

Sociology looks at how individuals interact with one another as well as at how groups, small and large, interact with one another.

Sociology and Its Cousins

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Microsociology understands local interactional contexts, focusing on face-to-face encounters and gathering data through participant observations and in-depth interviews.

Macrosociology looks at social dynamics across whole societies or large parts of them and often relies on statistical analysis to do so.

Divisions within Sociology

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Guys: Are you normal? Take this quiz..

http://www.esquire.com/features/normal-interactive-quiz?