Contents
1. Introduction.
2. What is Sociology?
3. History
4. Sociology and Other Social Sciences
5. Sociology Today
6. Technology and the Social Sciences
References
1. Introduction
What is sociology?
Socio = People
Logy = Knowledge
Sociology is the systematic study of human society and social interaction.
It involves
i. Understand interactions
ii. Understanding relationships
iii. Understanding the dynamics of relationships
Sociology is “understanding a group NOT an individual”.
The term sociology was coined by Auguste Comte (1798-1857) in 1838 from the Latin term socius (companion, associate) and the Greek term logia (study of, speech). Comte hoped to unify all the sciences under sociology; he believed sociology held the potential to improve society and direct human activity, including the other sciences.
Sociology is the study of human social life. Because human social life is so expansive, sociology has many sub-sections of study, ranging from the analysis of conversations to the development of theories to try to understand how the entire world works. This chapter will introduce you to sociology and explain why it is important, how it can change your perspective of the world around you, and give a brief history of the discipline.
http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/007240535x/student_view0/chapter1/chapter_summary.htm
2. Origin of Sociology
The social world is changing. Some argue it is growing; others say it is shrinking. The important point to grasp is: society does not remain unchanged over time. As will be discussed in more detail below, sociology has its roots in significant societal changes (e.g., the industrial revolution, the creation of empires, and the enlightenment of scientific reasoning). Early practitioners developed the discipline as an attempt to understand societal changes.
Sociology is the scientific study of human social life, groups and societies.
There was no sociology as a distinct discipline before the advent of 19th century. As a distinct discipline it emerged about the middle of the 19th century when European social observers began to use scientific methods to test their ideas. It looks that three factors led to the development of sociology.
The first was the Industrial revolution.
• By the mid 19th century Europe was changing from agriculture to factory production. There was the emergence of new occupations as well as new avenues of employment away from the land.
• Masses of people migrated to cities in search of jobs. Pull and push factors were instrumental in such migrations. In the countryside, due to the nature of agricultural society, there were no occupations that could be alternatives to agriculture. Hence people got pushed to look for new places whereas the urban/industrial places with new job opportunities provided a pull to the same population.
• At the new places there was anonymity, crowding, filth, and poverty. Ties to the land, to the generations that had lived there before them, and to the ways of their life were abruptly broken. Eventually the urban life brought radical changes in the lives of people.
• The city greeted them with horrible working conditions: low pay; long and exhausting working hours; dangerous work; foul smoke; and much noise. To survive the vagaries of life, families had to permit their children to work in these uncongenial conditions.
• People in these industrial cities developed new ideas about democracy and political rights. They did not want to remain tied to their rulers. Therefore the ideas about individual liberty, individual rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness emerged, which actually laid the foundation to future political revolution.
The second factor that stimulated the development of sociology was imperialism. Europeans successfully conquered many parts of the world. They were exposed to radically different cultures. Startled by these contrasting ways of life, they began to ask why cultures differed.
The third impetus for the development of sociology was the success of the natural sciences. People moved to question fundamental aspects of their social world. They started using the scientific method (systematic observation, objectivity) to the study of human behaviour.
Founder of Sociology
Auguste Comte
The idea of applying the scientific method to the social world, known as positivism, was apparently first proposed by Auguste Comte (1798-1857). He was French. He migrated from a small town to Paris. The changes he himself experienced, combined with those France underwent in the revolution, led Comte to become interested in the two interrelated issues: social order (social static) and social change (social dynamics).
What holds the society together (Why is there a social order)? And once the society is set then what causes it to change? Why its directions change?
Comte concluded that the right way to answer such questions was to apply the scientific method to social life. There must be laws that underlie the society. Therefore we should discover these principles by applying scientific method to social world. Once these principles discovered then we could apply these for social reform.
He advocated for building new societies on twin foundations of science and industry rather than on religion and landowner-serf relationship.
This will be a new science and Comte named it as Sociology (1838) – the study of society. Comte is credited with being the founder of sociology.
Other early pioneer names are:
Herbert Spenser (1820-1903)
He was an Englishman and is sometimes called second founder of sociology. He too believed that society operates under some fixed laws. He was evolutionary and considered that societies evolve from lower to higher forms. In this way he applied the ideas of Darwin to the development of human society, and hence this approach may be called as Social Darwinism.
By following the basic principle of Social Darwinism Spenser advocated that ‘let the fittest survive’. There should be no reform because it will help in the survival of lower order individuals. (Charity and helping the poor were considered to be wrong). Spenser was a social philosopher rather than a social researcher.
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Karl Marx was a German. According to him the key to human history is Class Conflict. Not really a sociologist but wrote widely about history, philosophy, economics, political science. Because of his insights into the relationship between the social classes, he is claimed to be an early sociologist. He introduced one of the major perspectives in sociology – conflict perspective.
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)
He was French. His primary goal was of getting sociology recognized as a separate academic discipline. His systematic study comparing suicide rates among several countries revealed an underlying social factor: People were more likely to commit suicide if their ties to others in their communities were weak. He identified the key role of social integration in social life.
Max Weber (1864-1920)
Max Weber was a German. He used cross-cultural and historical materials in order to determine how extensively social groups affect people’s orientations to life.
Sociology, then, is an attempt to understand the social world by situating social events in their corresponding environment (i.e., social structure, culture, history) and trying to understand social phenomena by collecting and analyzing empirical data.
3. History
Sociology is a relatively new academic discipline. It emerged in the early 19th century in response to the challenges of modernity. Increasing mobility and technological advances resulted in the increasing exposure of people to cultures and societies different from their own. The impact of this exposure was varied, but for some people included the breakdown of traditional norms and customs and warranted a revised understanding of how the world works. Sociologists responded to these changes by trying to understand what holds social groups together and also explore possible solutions to the breakdown of social solidarity.
Auguste Comte and Other Founders
Auguste Comte, who coined the term sociology
The term sociology was coined by Auguste Comte (1798-1857) in 1838 from the Latin term socius (companion, associate) and the Greek term logia (study of, speech). Comte hoped to unify all the sciences under sociology; he believed sociology held the potential to improve society and direct human activity, including the other sciences.
While it is no longer a theory employed in Sociology, Comte argued for an understanding of society he labeled The Law of Three Stages. Comte, not unlike other enlightenment thinkers, believed society developed in stages.
The first was the theological stage where people took a religious view of society.
The second was the metaphysical stage where people understood society as natural (not supernatural).
Comte's final stage was the scientific or positivist stage, which he believed to be the pinnacle of social development. In the scientific stage, society would be governed by reliable knowledge and would be understood in light of the knowledge produced by science, primarily sociology. While vague connections between Comte's Law and human history can be seen, it is generally understood in Sociology today that Comte's approach is a highly simplified and ill-founded approach to understand social development (see instead demographic transition theory and Ecological-Evolutionary Theory).
Other classical theorists of sociology from the late 19th and early 20th centuries include Karl Marx, Ferdinand Toennies, Emile Durkheim, Vilfredo Pareto, and Max Weber. As pioneers in Sociology, most of the early sociological thinkers were trained in other academic disciplines, including history, philosophy, and economics. The diversity of their trainings is reflected in the topics they researched, including religion, education, economics, psychology, ethics, philosophy, and theology. Perhaps with the exception of Marx, their most enduring influence has been on sociology, and it is in this field that their theories are still considered most applicable.
The Development of the Discipline
Max Weber
The first book with the term sociology in its title was written in the mid-19th century by the English philosopher Herbert Spencer. In the United States, the first Sociology course was taught at the University of Kansas, Lawrence in 1890 under the title Elements of Sociology (the oldest continuing sociology course in America). The first full fledged university department of sociology in the United States was established in 1892 at the University of Chicago by Albion W. Small, who in 1895 founded the American Journal of Sociology. The first European department of sociology was founded in 1895 at the University of Bordeaux by Emile Durkheim, founder of L'AnnÃ(c)e Sociologique (1896). In 1919 a sociology department was established in Germany at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich by Max Weber and in 1920 in Poland by Florian Znaniecki. The first sociology departments in the United Kingdom were founded after the Second World War.
International cooperation in sociology began in 1893 when Rene Worms founded the small Institut International de Sociologie that was eclipsed by the much larger International Sociologist Association starting in 1949. In 1905 the American Sociological Association, the world's largest association of professional sociologists, was founded.
Karl Marx
Early Sociological Studies
Early sociological studies considered the field to be similar to the natural sciences like physics or biology. As a result, many researchers argued that the methodology used in the natural sciences were perfectly suited for use in the social sciences, including Sociology. The effect of employing the scientific method and stressing empiricism was the distinction of sociology from theology, philosophy, and metaphysics. This also resulted in sociology being recognized as an empirical science. This early sociological approach, supported by August Comte, led to positivism, a methodological approach based on sociological naturalism.
However, as early as the 19th century, positivist and naturalist approaches to studying social life were questioned by scientists like Wilhelm Dilthey and Heinrich Rickert, who argued that the natural world differs from the social world, as human society has culture, unlike the societies of other animals (e.g., ants, dolphins, etc. operate from nature or ecology as opposed to that of civilisation). This view was further developed by Max Weber, who introduced the concept of verstehen. Verstehen is a research approach in which outside observers of a culture relate to an indigenous people on the observer's own terms.
The positivist and verstehen approaches have modern counterparts in sociological methodologies: quantitative and qualitative sociology. Quantitative sociology focuses on measuring social phenomena using numbers and quantities while qualitative sociology focuses on understanding social phenomena. It is disingenuous to claim these two approaches must be or are generally distinct; many sociologists employ both methods in trying to understand the social world.
4. Sociology and Other Social Sciences
The social sciences comprise the application of scientific methods to the study of the human aspects of the world. Psychology studies the human mind and micro-level (or individual) behavior; sociology examines human society; political science studies the governing of groups and countries; communication studies the flow of discourse via various media; economics concerns itself with the production and allocation of wealth in society; and social work is the application of social scientific knowledge in society. Social sciences diverge from the humanities in that many in the social sciences emphasize the scientific method or other rigorous standards of evidence in the study of humanity.
The Development of Social Science
In ancient philosophy, there was no difference between the liberal arts of mathematics and the study of history, poetry or politics - only with the development of mathematical proof did there gradually arise a perceived difference between scientific disciplines and the humanities or liberal arts. Thus, Aristotle studied planetary motion and poetry with the same methods, and Plato mixed geometrical proofs with his demonstration on the state of intrinsic knowledge.
This unity of science as descriptive remained, for example, in the time of Thomas Hobbes who argued that deductive reasoning from axioms created a scientific framework; his book, Leviathan, was a scientific description of a political commonwealth. Within decades of Hobbes' work a revolution took place in what constituted science, particularly with the work of Isaac Newton in physics. Newton, by revolutionizing what was then called natural philosophy, changed the basic framework by which individuals understood what was scientific.
While Newton was merely the archetype of an accelerating trend, the important distinction is that for Newton the mathematical flowed from a presumed reality independent of the observer and it worked by its own rules. For philosophers of the same period, mathematical expression of philosophical ideals were taken to be symbolic of natural human relationships as well: the same laws moved physical and spiritual reality. For examples see Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Leibniz and Johannes Kepler, each of whom took mathematical examples as models for human behavior directly. In Pascal's case, the famous wager; for Leibniz, the invention of binary computation; and for Kepler, the intervention of angels to guide the planets.
In the realm of other disciplines, this created a pressure to express ideas in the form of mathematical relationships. Such relationships, called Laws after the usage of the time (see philosophy of science) became the model that other disciplines would emulate. In the late 19th century, attempts to apply equations to statements about human behavior became increasingly common. Among the first were the Laws of philology, which attempted to map the change overtime of sounds in a language. In the early 20th century, a wave of change came to science that saw statistical study sufficiently mathematical to be science.
The first thinkers to attempt to combine scientific inquiry with the exploration of human relationships were Sigmund Freud in Austria and William James in the United States. Freud's theory of the functioning of the mind and James' work on experimental psychology had an enormous impact on those who followed.
One of the most persuasive advocates for the view of scientific treatment of philosophy is John Dewey (1859-1952). He began, as Marx did, in an attempt to weld Hegelian idealism and logic to experimental science, for example in his Psychology of 1887. However, it is when he abandoned Hegelian constructs and joined the movement in America called Pragmatism that he began to formulate his basic doctrine on the three phases of the process of inquiry:
1. problematic Situation, where the typical response is inadequate
2. isolation of Data or subject matter
3. reflective, which is tested empirically
With the rise of the idea of quantitative measurement in the physical sciences (see, for example Lord Rutherford's famous maxim that any knowledge that one cannot measure numerically "is a poor sort of knowledge"), the stage was set for the conception of the humanities as being precursors to social science.
5. Sociology Today
Although sociology emerged in Comte's vision of sociology eventually subsuming all other areas of scientific inquiry, sociology did not replace the other sciences. Instead, sociology has developed a particular niche in the study of social life.
In the past, sociological research focused on the organization of complex, industrial societies and their influence on individuals. Today, sociologists study a broad range of topics. For instance, some sociologists research macro-structures that organize society, such as race or ethnicity, social class, gender roles, and institutions such as the family. Other sociologists study social processes that represent the breakdown of macro-structures, including deviance, crime, and divorce. Additionally, some sociologists study micro-processes such as interpersonal interactions and the socialization of individuals. It should also be noted that recent sociologists, taking cues from anthropologists, have realized the Western emphasis of the discipline. In response, many sociology departments around the world are now encouraging multi-cultural research.
The next two chapters in this book will introduce the reader to more extensive discussions of the methods and theory employed in sociology. The remaining chapters are examinations of current areas of research in the discipline
6. Technology and the Social Sciences
The Social Sciences are also known pejoratively as the soft sciences (in contrast to the hard sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology). However, there is a recent move to integrate and include considerations from the social sciences to the development of technology derived from the hard sciences. On the other hand, a sub-topic of organisational behaviour, business process, may now be patented in some countries.
References
•John J. Macionis, Sociology (10th Edition), Prentice Hall, 2004, ISBN 0131849182
•C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, Oxford University Press, 1961, ISBN 0195133730
•Peter L. Berger, Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, Anchor, 1963, ISBN 0385065299
1. Introduction.
2. What is Sociology?
3. History
4. Sociology and Other Social Sciences
5. Sociology Today
6. Technology and the Social Sciences
References
1. Introduction
What is sociology?
Socio = People
Logy = Knowledge
Sociology is the systematic study of human society and social interaction.
It involves
i. Understand interactions
ii. Understanding relationships
iii. Understanding the dynamics of relationships
Sociology is “understanding a group NOT an individual”.
The term sociology was coined by Auguste Comte (1798-1857) in 1838 from the Latin term socius (companion, associate) and the Greek term logia (study of, speech). Comte hoped to unify all the sciences under sociology; he believed sociology held the potential to improve society and direct human activity, including the other sciences.
Sociology is the study of human social life. Because human social life is so expansive, sociology has many sub-sections of study, ranging from the analysis of conversations to the development of theories to try to understand how the entire world works. This chapter will introduce you to sociology and explain why it is important, how it can change your perspective of the world around you, and give a brief history of the discipline.
http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/007240535x/student_view0/chapter1/chapter_summary.htm
2. Origin of Sociology
The social world is changing. Some argue it is growing; others say it is shrinking. The important point to grasp is: society does not remain unchanged over time. As will be discussed in more detail below, sociology has its roots in significant societal changes (e.g., the industrial revolution, the creation of empires, and the enlightenment of scientific reasoning). Early practitioners developed the discipline as an attempt to understand societal changes.
Sociology is the scientific study of human social life, groups and societies.
There was no sociology as a distinct discipline before the advent of 19th century. As a distinct discipline it emerged about the middle of the 19th century when European social observers began to use scientific methods to test their ideas. It looks that three factors led to the development of sociology.
The first was the Industrial revolution.
• By the mid 19th century Europe was changing from agriculture to factory production. There was the emergence of new occupations as well as new avenues of employment away from the land.
• Masses of people migrated to cities in search of jobs. Pull and push factors were instrumental in such migrations. In the countryside, due to the nature of agricultural society, there were no occupations that could be alternatives to agriculture. Hence people got pushed to look for new places whereas the urban/industrial places with new job opportunities provided a pull to the same population.
• At the new places there was anonymity, crowding, filth, and poverty. Ties to the land, to the generations that had lived there before them, and to the ways of their life were abruptly broken. Eventually the urban life brought radical changes in the lives of people.
• The city greeted them with horrible working conditions: low pay; long and exhausting working hours; dangerous work; foul smoke; and much noise. To survive the vagaries of life, families had to permit their children to work in these uncongenial conditions.
• People in these industrial cities developed new ideas about democracy and political rights. They did not want to remain tied to their rulers. Therefore the ideas about individual liberty, individual rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness emerged, which actually laid the foundation to future political revolution.
The second factor that stimulated the development of sociology was imperialism. Europeans successfully conquered many parts of the world. They were exposed to radically different cultures. Startled by these contrasting ways of life, they began to ask why cultures differed.
The third impetus for the development of sociology was the success of the natural sciences. People moved to question fundamental aspects of their social world. They started using the scientific method (systematic observation, objectivity) to the study of human behaviour.
Founder of Sociology
Auguste Comte
The idea of applying the scientific method to the social world, known as positivism, was apparently first proposed by Auguste Comte (1798-1857). He was French. He migrated from a small town to Paris. The changes he himself experienced, combined with those France underwent in the revolution, led Comte to become interested in the two interrelated issues: social order (social static) and social change (social dynamics).
What holds the society together (Why is there a social order)? And once the society is set then what causes it to change? Why its directions change?
Comte concluded that the right way to answer such questions was to apply the scientific method to social life. There must be laws that underlie the society. Therefore we should discover these principles by applying scientific method to social world. Once these principles discovered then we could apply these for social reform.
He advocated for building new societies on twin foundations of science and industry rather than on religion and landowner-serf relationship.
This will be a new science and Comte named it as Sociology (1838) – the study of society. Comte is credited with being the founder of sociology.
Other early pioneer names are:
Herbert Spenser (1820-1903)
He was an Englishman and is sometimes called second founder of sociology. He too believed that society operates under some fixed laws. He was evolutionary and considered that societies evolve from lower to higher forms. In this way he applied the ideas of Darwin to the development of human society, and hence this approach may be called as Social Darwinism.
By following the basic principle of Social Darwinism Spenser advocated that ‘let the fittest survive’. There should be no reform because it will help in the survival of lower order individuals. (Charity and helping the poor were considered to be wrong). Spenser was a social philosopher rather than a social researcher.
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Karl Marx was a German. According to him the key to human history is Class Conflict. Not really a sociologist but wrote widely about history, philosophy, economics, political science. Because of his insights into the relationship between the social classes, he is claimed to be an early sociologist. He introduced one of the major perspectives in sociology – conflict perspective.
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)
He was French. His primary goal was of getting sociology recognized as a separate academic discipline. His systematic study comparing suicide rates among several countries revealed an underlying social factor: People were more likely to commit suicide if their ties to others in their communities were weak. He identified the key role of social integration in social life.
Max Weber (1864-1920)
Max Weber was a German. He used cross-cultural and historical materials in order to determine how extensively social groups affect people’s orientations to life.
Sociology, then, is an attempt to understand the social world by situating social events in their corresponding environment (i.e., social structure, culture, history) and trying to understand social phenomena by collecting and analyzing empirical data.
3. History
Sociology is a relatively new academic discipline. It emerged in the early 19th century in response to the challenges of modernity. Increasing mobility and technological advances resulted in the increasing exposure of people to cultures and societies different from their own. The impact of this exposure was varied, but for some people included the breakdown of traditional norms and customs and warranted a revised understanding of how the world works. Sociologists responded to these changes by trying to understand what holds social groups together and also explore possible solutions to the breakdown of social solidarity.
Auguste Comte and Other Founders
Auguste Comte, who coined the term sociology
The term sociology was coined by Auguste Comte (1798-1857) in 1838 from the Latin term socius (companion, associate) and the Greek term logia (study of, speech). Comte hoped to unify all the sciences under sociology; he believed sociology held the potential to improve society and direct human activity, including the other sciences.
While it is no longer a theory employed in Sociology, Comte argued for an understanding of society he labeled The Law of Three Stages. Comte, not unlike other enlightenment thinkers, believed society developed in stages.
The first was the theological stage where people took a religious view of society.
The second was the metaphysical stage where people understood society as natural (not supernatural).
Comte's final stage was the scientific or positivist stage, which he believed to be the pinnacle of social development. In the scientific stage, society would be governed by reliable knowledge and would be understood in light of the knowledge produced by science, primarily sociology. While vague connections between Comte's Law and human history can be seen, it is generally understood in Sociology today that Comte's approach is a highly simplified and ill-founded approach to understand social development (see instead demographic transition theory and Ecological-Evolutionary Theory).
Other classical theorists of sociology from the late 19th and early 20th centuries include Karl Marx, Ferdinand Toennies, Emile Durkheim, Vilfredo Pareto, and Max Weber. As pioneers in Sociology, most of the early sociological thinkers were trained in other academic disciplines, including history, philosophy, and economics. The diversity of their trainings is reflected in the topics they researched, including religion, education, economics, psychology, ethics, philosophy, and theology. Perhaps with the exception of Marx, their most enduring influence has been on sociology, and it is in this field that their theories are still considered most applicable.
The Development of the Discipline
Max Weber
The first book with the term sociology in its title was written in the mid-19th century by the English philosopher Herbert Spencer. In the United States, the first Sociology course was taught at the University of Kansas, Lawrence in 1890 under the title Elements of Sociology (the oldest continuing sociology course in America). The first full fledged university department of sociology in the United States was established in 1892 at the University of Chicago by Albion W. Small, who in 1895 founded the American Journal of Sociology. The first European department of sociology was founded in 1895 at the University of Bordeaux by Emile Durkheim, founder of L'AnnÃ(c)e Sociologique (1896). In 1919 a sociology department was established in Germany at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich by Max Weber and in 1920 in Poland by Florian Znaniecki. The first sociology departments in the United Kingdom were founded after the Second World War.
International cooperation in sociology began in 1893 when Rene Worms founded the small Institut International de Sociologie that was eclipsed by the much larger International Sociologist Association starting in 1949. In 1905 the American Sociological Association, the world's largest association of professional sociologists, was founded.
Karl Marx
Early Sociological Studies
Early sociological studies considered the field to be similar to the natural sciences like physics or biology. As a result, many researchers argued that the methodology used in the natural sciences were perfectly suited for use in the social sciences, including Sociology. The effect of employing the scientific method and stressing empiricism was the distinction of sociology from theology, philosophy, and metaphysics. This also resulted in sociology being recognized as an empirical science. This early sociological approach, supported by August Comte, led to positivism, a methodological approach based on sociological naturalism.
However, as early as the 19th century, positivist and naturalist approaches to studying social life were questioned by scientists like Wilhelm Dilthey and Heinrich Rickert, who argued that the natural world differs from the social world, as human society has culture, unlike the societies of other animals (e.g., ants, dolphins, etc. operate from nature or ecology as opposed to that of civilisation). This view was further developed by Max Weber, who introduced the concept of verstehen. Verstehen is a research approach in which outside observers of a culture relate to an indigenous people on the observer's own terms.
The positivist and verstehen approaches have modern counterparts in sociological methodologies: quantitative and qualitative sociology. Quantitative sociology focuses on measuring social phenomena using numbers and quantities while qualitative sociology focuses on understanding social phenomena. It is disingenuous to claim these two approaches must be or are generally distinct; many sociologists employ both methods in trying to understand the social world.
4. Sociology and Other Social Sciences
The social sciences comprise the application of scientific methods to the study of the human aspects of the world. Psychology studies the human mind and micro-level (or individual) behavior; sociology examines human society; political science studies the governing of groups and countries; communication studies the flow of discourse via various media; economics concerns itself with the production and allocation of wealth in society; and social work is the application of social scientific knowledge in society. Social sciences diverge from the humanities in that many in the social sciences emphasize the scientific method or other rigorous standards of evidence in the study of humanity.
The Development of Social Science
In ancient philosophy, there was no difference between the liberal arts of mathematics and the study of history, poetry or politics - only with the development of mathematical proof did there gradually arise a perceived difference between scientific disciplines and the humanities or liberal arts. Thus, Aristotle studied planetary motion and poetry with the same methods, and Plato mixed geometrical proofs with his demonstration on the state of intrinsic knowledge.
This unity of science as descriptive remained, for example, in the time of Thomas Hobbes who argued that deductive reasoning from axioms created a scientific framework; his book, Leviathan, was a scientific description of a political commonwealth. Within decades of Hobbes' work a revolution took place in what constituted science, particularly with the work of Isaac Newton in physics. Newton, by revolutionizing what was then called natural philosophy, changed the basic framework by which individuals understood what was scientific.
While Newton was merely the archetype of an accelerating trend, the important distinction is that for Newton the mathematical flowed from a presumed reality independent of the observer and it worked by its own rules. For philosophers of the same period, mathematical expression of philosophical ideals were taken to be symbolic of natural human relationships as well: the same laws moved physical and spiritual reality. For examples see Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Leibniz and Johannes Kepler, each of whom took mathematical examples as models for human behavior directly. In Pascal's case, the famous wager; for Leibniz, the invention of binary computation; and for Kepler, the intervention of angels to guide the planets.
In the realm of other disciplines, this created a pressure to express ideas in the form of mathematical relationships. Such relationships, called Laws after the usage of the time (see philosophy of science) became the model that other disciplines would emulate. In the late 19th century, attempts to apply equations to statements about human behavior became increasingly common. Among the first were the Laws of philology, which attempted to map the change overtime of sounds in a language. In the early 20th century, a wave of change came to science that saw statistical study sufficiently mathematical to be science.
The first thinkers to attempt to combine scientific inquiry with the exploration of human relationships were Sigmund Freud in Austria and William James in the United States. Freud's theory of the functioning of the mind and James' work on experimental psychology had an enormous impact on those who followed.
One of the most persuasive advocates for the view of scientific treatment of philosophy is John Dewey (1859-1952). He began, as Marx did, in an attempt to weld Hegelian idealism and logic to experimental science, for example in his Psychology of 1887. However, it is when he abandoned Hegelian constructs and joined the movement in America called Pragmatism that he began to formulate his basic doctrine on the three phases of the process of inquiry:
1. problematic Situation, where the typical response is inadequate
2. isolation of Data or subject matter
3. reflective, which is tested empirically
With the rise of the idea of quantitative measurement in the physical sciences (see, for example Lord Rutherford's famous maxim that any knowledge that one cannot measure numerically "is a poor sort of knowledge"), the stage was set for the conception of the humanities as being precursors to social science.
5. Sociology Today
Although sociology emerged in Comte's vision of sociology eventually subsuming all other areas of scientific inquiry, sociology did not replace the other sciences. Instead, sociology has developed a particular niche in the study of social life.
In the past, sociological research focused on the organization of complex, industrial societies and their influence on individuals. Today, sociologists study a broad range of topics. For instance, some sociologists research macro-structures that organize society, such as race or ethnicity, social class, gender roles, and institutions such as the family. Other sociologists study social processes that represent the breakdown of macro-structures, including deviance, crime, and divorce. Additionally, some sociologists study micro-processes such as interpersonal interactions and the socialization of individuals. It should also be noted that recent sociologists, taking cues from anthropologists, have realized the Western emphasis of the discipline. In response, many sociology departments around the world are now encouraging multi-cultural research.
The next two chapters in this book will introduce the reader to more extensive discussions of the methods and theory employed in sociology. The remaining chapters are examinations of current areas of research in the discipline
6. Technology and the Social Sciences
The Social Sciences are also known pejoratively as the soft sciences (in contrast to the hard sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology). However, there is a recent move to integrate and include considerations from the social sciences to the development of technology derived from the hard sciences. On the other hand, a sub-topic of organisational behaviour, business process, may now be patented in some countries.
References
•John J. Macionis, Sociology (10th Edition), Prentice Hall, 2004, ISBN 0131849182
•C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, Oxford University Press, 1961, ISBN 0195133730
•Peter L. Berger, Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, Anchor, 1963, ISBN 0385065299
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