QUESTION: What does C. Wright Mills mean when he describes sociology as “the intersection of biography and history”? What is the relationship between personal life and larger social structures? Are personal lives determined by social structures? This paper explores the very intelligent critical thought describing sociology through writing. These actions and words are expounded on C. Wright Mills thoughts.
Social policy is government principles and legislation designed to deal with social problems like crime and poverty. However opinions from sociologists all vary on this matter because some believe that their research should feed into policy; whereas others are in the opinion that sociologists must find out what is happening, why it is happening and what can be done to solve the problem. There are many things that influence sociology on policy for example globalisation and policy preferences of the government at the time. This essay is going to examine the relationship between sociology and social policy. Positivists and functionalists such as Durkheim and Comte view sociology as a science and they argue that sociology can discover all the social problems.
Structural theories such as functionalism and Marxism are macro (large scale), and deterministic: they see society as a real thing existing over and above us, shaping our ideas and behaviour – individuals are like puppets, manipulated by society. Social action theorists use qualitative research methods to gather an in-depth understanding of human behaviour and the reasons behind such behaviour. This method investigates the why and how of decision making, not just what, where and when, for example, covert or overt participant observations and unstructured interviews. Structural approaches use methods that are scientific, as they want quantitative data (e.g. questionnaires and surveys).
Marx believed that societies grew and changed due to struggles of different social classes. Durkheim believed in studying the “social facts,” which would help determine if a society was healthy or pathological. Weber’s focus on the structure of society included the elements of class, status and power. Each sociologist had a great influence in the field of sociology, but took different approaches to studying societies. Sociology enables us to understand how society functions and under which circumstances.
In this assignment, I am going to briefly explore the definitions of Functionalism and Feminism and how their ideologies affect our contemporary societies. In doing so I will give examples that expand upon the definitions and illustrate that such ideologies are evident and still have an impact on the society we live in. FUNCTIONALISM 1) The theory of design that the form of a thing should be determined by its use. 2) Any doctrine that stresses people. (Sourced form the Dictionary) Functionalism is a sociological paradigm that originally attempted to explain social institutions as collective means to fill individual biological needs.
Define the basic theoretical concepts used in the discipline of sociology. First, we need to define Theory itself: A Theory is a set of interrelated concepts used to describe, explain, and predict how society and its parts are related to each other. Next we’ll examine the basic theoretical concepts. Defining and understanding these theoretical concepts is essential to understanding the sociological structure within our diverse cultures that make up our civilization. Although it is difficult to understand these concepts and often times we misunderstand them, they are the bread and butter of how our cultures and their societal framework is configured.
Sarita Brown Chapter 1 Sociology explores and analyzes the ultimate issues of our personal lives, of society and the world. It's the science dealing with social forces that shape our lives, interests, and personalities. Sociologist dig deeper into the social life and the principles to explain human behavior as a whole. It also helps us to understand why we behave as we do. This is a necessary understanding because it brings about social change.
I looked at Goffman’s theory, he believes social order is produced through actions of individuals and their practises through living there lives. (Cited Goffman in Silva 2009) Foucault believes that social order is produced through discourse and the power of knowledge) in disciplining individuals. (Foucault cited in Silva 2009) These two theorist whilst asking the same question of how social order is made and remade, they drawn upon different ways of gathering evidence and the end outcome is two completely different theories that even though they are quite different ,both explain the connections between society and how individuals make and remake social order. The differences of these two theorists are very contrasting in that Foucault uses Macro social experiences in where large scale structures, patterns or systems and discourse affect the ordering of social life. He focuses with the historical side of social order and why, how and by who these interactions are authorized through power and knowledge.
In addition, the author will expand on the personal theoretical perspective of how she feels her knowledge will contribute to her psychological society. Influence of Diversity To completely understand human nature is to understand the psychological discipline, which evolved from the roots of philosophy. The complexity of this needed more than one specific perspective that later on led to various divisions of development within the discipline. There are 54 subdivisions in the psychological approach that are recognized through the America Psychological Association (APA) today (Cherry, 2012). Some subdivisions include other branches of perspectives of an individual’s behavior; such as environmental psychology, developmental psychology, educational psychology, psychodynamic, and cognitive behavior influence the perceptions of human behavior.
These big ideas can be categorized under social thinking, social influence, or social relations. The idea that we construct our social reality falls under social thinking, it describes the natural human urge to explain behavior, by attempting to attribute it to a cause, in order to make it seem orderly, predictable, and controllable (Myers, 2010). According to social psychology our social intuitions are powerful and sometimes perilous, suggesting that the human ability to understand something immediately, molds or influences behavior because it also shapes fears, attitudes, impressions, and relationships (Myers, 2010). It is also believed that social influences shape behavior as does behavior shape social influences. Myers (2010) provides an example as to how behavior is shaped by social influences making humans social creatures, “We speak and think in words we learned from others (Social psychology, p. 7).