What makes something sociological




















Words nearby sociological sociogram , sociography , sociol. How to use sociological in a sentence Those who embark on this journey will face primordial sociological challenges involving matters related to both the individual and the collective well-being of the colony. Chadwick Matlin chadwick. What are the Best Novels on Music? The Women of Tomorrow William Hard. Students interested in continuing their education at the graduate level have successfully enrolled in law school, business school, social work and public policy graduate programs, as well as continuing on to pursue a Ph.

Find out which famous people received their degrees in Sociology. Participation in these programs is open to majors and non-majors alike. Walk-in advising is available during Fall and Spring semesters in Thompson or by appointment. Sociology Major. Certificate in Population Studies. Although the forms and ways in which it has been practised differ between cultures and change significantly through history, its persistence has led to the formulation of the concept of patriarchy.

Patriarchy refers to a set of institutional structures like property rights, access to positions of power, relationship to sources of income that are based on the belief that men and women are dichotomous and unequal categories.

Key to patriarchy is what might be called the dominant gender ideology toward sexual differences: the assumption that physiological sex differences between males and females are related to differences in their character, behaviour, and ability i.

These differences are used to justify a gendered division of social roles and inequality in access to rewards, positions of power, and privilege. The question that feminists ask therefore is: How does this distinction between male and female, and the attribution of different qualities to each, serve to organize our institutions e. Feminism is a distinct type of critical sociology. There are considerable differences between types of feminism, however; for example, the differences often attributed to the first wave of feminism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the second wave of feminism from the s to the s, and the third wave of feminism from the s onward.

Despite the variations between different types of feminist approach, there are four characteristics that are common to the feminist perspective:.

She recognized from the consciousness-raising exercises and encounter groups initiated by feminists in the s ands that many of the immediate concerns expressed by women about their personal lives had a commonality of themes. These themes were nevertheless difficult to articulate in sociological terms let alone in the language of politics or law.

Part of the issue was sociology itself. Smith argued that the abstract concepts of sociology, at least in the way that it was taught at the time, only contributed to the problem. Whereas critical sociologists often criticize positivist and interpretive sociology for their conservative biases, the reverse is also true. However, at a deeper level the criticism is often aimed at the radical nature of critical analyses.

Critical sociology is also criticized from the point of view of interpretive sociology for overstating the power of dominant groups to manipulate subordinate groups. For example, media representations of women are said to promote unobtainable standards of beauty or to reduce women to objects of male desire.

This type of critique suggests that individuals are controlled by media images rather than recognizing their independent ability to reject media influences or to interpret media images for themselves.

In a similar way, critical sociology is criticized for implying that people are purely the products of macro-level historical forces rather than individuals with a capacity for individual and collective agency.

The consumption of food is a commonplace, daily occurrence, yet it can also be associated with important moments in our lives. Eating can be an individual or a group action, and eating habits and customs are influenced by our cultures.

Any of these factors might become a topic of sociological study. Food production is a primary example of how human systems adapt to environmental systems. In many respects the concerns of environmentalists and others with respect to the destructive relationship between industrial agriculture and the ecosystem are the results of a dysfunctional system of adaptation. The concept of sustainable agriculture points to the changes needed to return the interface between humans and the natural environment to a state of dynamic equilibrium.

A sociologist viewing food consumption through a symbolic interactionist lens would be more interested in micro-level topics, such as the symbolic use of food in religious rituals, or the role it plays in the social interaction of a family dinner.

The increasing concern that people have with their diets speaks to the way that the life of the biological body is as much a symbolic reality, interpreted within contemporary discourses on health risks and beauty, as it is a biological reality. Or a critical sociologist might be interested in the power and powerlessness experienced by local farmers versus large farming conglomerates.

In the documentary Food Inc. Another topic of study might be how nutrition varies between different social classes. When Bernard Blishen picked up the phone one day in , he was surprised to hear Chief Justice Emmett Hall on the other end of the line asking him to be the research director for the newly established Royal Commission on Health Services. Publically funded health care had been introduced for the first time in Canada that year by a socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation CCF government in Saskatchewan amid bitter controversy.

Doctors in Saskatchewan went on strike and private health care insurers mounted an expensive anti-public health care campaign. Blishen went on to work in the field of medical sociology and also created a widely used index to measure socioeconomic status known as the Blishen scale. He received the Order of Canada in in recognition of his contributions to the creation of public health care in Canada. Since it was first founded, many people interested in sociology have been driven by the scholarly desire to contribute knowledge to this field, while others have seen it as way not only to study society, but also to improve it.

Besides the creation of public health care in Canada, sociology has played a crucial role in many important social reforms such as equal opportunity for women in the workplace, improved treatment for individuals with mental and learning disabilities, increased recognition and accommodation for people from different ethnic backgrounds, the creation of hate crime legislation, the right of aboriginal populations to preserve their land and culture, and prison system reforms.

The prominent sociologist Peter L. This is the point at which one begins to sense the excitement of sociology Berger Sociology can be exciting because it teaches people ways to recognize how they fit into the world and how others perceive them. Looking at themselves and society from a sociological perspective helps people see where they connect to different groups based on the many different ways they classify themselves and how society classifies them in turn. It raises awareness of how those classifications—such as economic and status levels, education, ethnicity, or sexual orientation—affect perceptions.

Sociology teaches people not to accept easy explanations. It teaches them a way to organize their thinking so that they can ask better questions and formulate better answers. It makes people more aware that there are many different kinds of people in the world who do not necessarily think the way they do. This prepares them to live and work in an increasingly diverse and integrated world.

Studying sociology can provide people with this wide knowledge and a skill set that can contribute to many workplaces, including:. Sociology prepares people for a wide variety of careers. Besides actually conducting social research or training others in the field, people who graduate from college with a degree in sociology are hired by government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations in fields such as social services, counselling e.

Even a small amount of training in sociology can be an asset in careers like sales, public relations, journalism, teaching, law, and criminal justice. The phenomenon known as Facebook was designed specifically for students. Instead of having to meet up on campus, students can call, text, and Skype from their dorm rooms. Instead of a study group gathering weekly in the library, online forums and chat rooms help learners connect.

The availability and immediacy of computer technology has forever changed the ways students engage with each other. Now, after several social networks have vied for primacy, a few have established their place in the market and some have attracted niche audience.

LinkedIn distinguished itself by focusing on professional connections, serving as a virtual world for workplace networking. Newer offshoots like Foursquare help people connect based on the real-world places they frequent, while Twitter has cornered the market on brevity. These newer modes of social interaction have also spawned questionable consequences, such as cyberbullying and what some call FAD, or Facebook addiction disorder. Yet, in the international study cited above, two-thirds of to year-old smartphone users said they spend more time with friends online than they do in person.

All of these social networks demonstrate emerging ways that people interact, whether positive or negative. Sociologists ask whether there might be long-term effects of replacing face-to-face interaction with social media. Moreover, he argues, they do not allow people to be alone with their feelings.

What do you think? How do social media like Facebook and communication technologies like smartphones change the way we communicate?

How could this question be studied? What Is Sociology? Sociology is the systematic study of society and social interaction. In order to carry out their studies, sociologists identify cultural patterns and social forces and determine how they affect individuals and groups. They also develop ways to apply their findings to the real world. The History of Sociology Sociology was developed as a way to study and try to understand the changes to society brought on by the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Those perspectives continue to be represented within sociology today. Theoretical Perspectives Sociologists develop theories to explain social events, interactions, and patterns. A theory is a proposed explanation of those patterns. Theories have different scales. Macro-level theories, such as structural functionalism and conflict theory, attempt to explain how societies operate as a whole.

Micro-level theories, such as symbolic interactionism, focus on interactions between individuals. Why Study Sociology? Studying sociology is beneficial both for the individual and for society.

By studying sociology people learn how to think critically about social issues and problems that confront our society. Society benefits because people with sociological training are better prepared to make informed decisions about social issues and take effective action to deal with them. Which of the following best describes sociology as a subject? A sociologist defines society as a group of people who reside in a defined area, share a culture, and who:. The History of Sociology 5. Which of the following was a topic of study in early sociology?

Weber believed humans could not be studied purely objectively because they were influenced by:. Theoretical Perspectives Which of these theories is most likely to look at the social world on a micro-level? Studying Sociology helps people analyze data because they learn:. Sociology is a broad discipline.

Different kinds of sociologists employ various methods for exploring the relationship between individuals and society. The History of Sociology Many sociologists helped shape the discipline.

Theoretical Perspectives People often think of all conflict as violent, but many conflicts can be resolved nonviolently. Social communication is rapidly evolving due to ever improving technologies. September Mills, C. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.

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New York: Random House. Comte, August. NY: Harper and Row. The Rules of Sociological Method , 8th ed. Mueller, E. George and E. Translated by S. New York: Free Press. Paris: Champion. Lengermann, Patricia and Jill Niebrugge.

Longrove, Ill: Waveland Press. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Hamburg: Otto Meissner Verlag. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Toronto: Oxford University Press. McDonald, Lynn. Women Theorists on Society and Politics.

Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Catalogue no. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Gerth and C. NY: Oxford University Press. Wollstonecraft, Mary. London: Joseph Johnson.

Zeitlin, Irving. Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory. Allan, Kenneth. Becker, Howard. Outsiders : Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Macmillan. Bibby, Reginald. Lethbridge: Project Canada Books.

Blumer, H. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Bryant, Christopher. Positivism in Social Theory and Research. New York: St. Davis, Kingsley and Wilbert Moore. Drengson, Alan. The Rules of Sociological Method , edited by J. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Herman, Nancy J. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press. LaRossa, R. Boss, W. Doherty, R. LaRossa, W. Schumm, and S. New York: Springer.

Marcuse, Herbert. Boston: Beacon Press. Martineau, Harriet. Society in America. New York: Saunders and Otley. Maryanski, Alexandra and Jonathan Turner.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: W. Naiman, Joanne. How Societies Work, 5th ed. Parsons, T. Vancouver: New Star Books. Berger, Peter L. Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective. New York: Anchor Books.

Sociologists emphasize the careful gathering and analysis of evidence about social life to develop and enrich our understanding of key social processes. The research methods sociologists use are varied. Sociologists observe the everyday life of groups, conduct large-scale surveys, interpret historical documents, analyze census data, study video-taped interactions, interview participants of groups, and conduct laboratory experiments.

The research methods and theories of sociology yield powerful insights into the social processes shaping human lives and social problems and prospects in the contemporary world. By better understanding those social processes, we also come to understand more clearly the forces shaping the personal experiences and outcomes of our own lives.



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