1.1 What is Sociology?

Introduction

Dictionaries define sociology as the systematic study of society and social interaction. The word “sociology” is derived from the Latin word socius (companion) and the Greek word logos (speech or reason), which together mean “reasoned speech or discourse about companionship.” How can the experience of companionship or togetherness be put into words and explained? While this is a starting point for the discipline, sociology is actually much more complex. It uses many different theories and methods to study a wide range of subject matter and applies these studies to the real world.

The sociologist Dorothy Smith (1926-2022) defines the social as the “ongoing concerting and coordinating of individuals’ activities” (Smith, 1999). Whenever there is more than one person in a situation there is coordination and mutual attunement of behaviours. Sociology is therefore the systematic study of all those aspects of life designated by the adjective “social.” They concern relationships, and they concern what happens when more than one person is involved. These aspects of social life never simply occur; they are organized processes. They can be the briefest and most unconscious of everyday interactions — moving to the right to let someone pass on a busy sidewalk, for example — or the largest and most enduring interactions — such as the billions of daily exchanges that constitute the circuits of global capitalism. If there are at least two people involved, even in the seclusion of one’s own mind, then there is a social interaction that entails the “ongoing concerting and coordinating of activities.” Why does the person move to the right on the sidewalk? What collective processes lead to the decision that moving to the right rather than the left is normal? Is it different in countries where people drive on the left? Think about the T-shirts in the chest of drawers at home. What are the sequences of linkages, exchanges, transportation conduits, and social relationships that connect one’s T-shirts to the dangerous and hyper-exploitative garment factories in rural China or Bangladesh? These are the type of questions that point to the unique domain and puzzles of the social that sociology seeks to explore and understand.

What are Society and Culture?  Micro, Macro and Global Perspectives

Sociologists study all aspects and levels of society. A society is a group of people whose members interact, reside in a definable area, and share a culture. A culture includes the group’s shared practices, values, beliefs, norms, and artifacts. One sociologist might analyze video of people from different societies as they carry on everyday conversations to study the rules of polite conversation from different world cultures. Another sociologist might interview a representative sample of people to see how email and instant messaging have changed the way organizations are run. Yet another sociologist might study how migration determined the way in which language spread and changed over time. A fourth sociologist might study the history of international agencies like the United Nations or the International Monetary Fund to examine how the globe became divided into a First World and a Third World after the end of the colonial era.

These examples illustrate the ways in which society and culture can be studied at different levels of analysis, from the detailed study of face-to-face interactions to the examination of large-scale historical processes affecting entire civilizations. It is common to divide these levels of analysis into different gradations based on the scale of interaction involved. As discussed in later chapters, sociologists break the study of society down into four separate levels of analysis: micro, meso, macro, and global.

The relationship between the micro, meso, macro, and global remains one of the key conceptual problems confronting sociology. What is the relationship between an individual’s life and social life? The early German sociologist Georg Simmel (1908/1971) pointed out that macro-level processes are in fact nothing more than the sum of all the unique interactions between specific individuals at any one time, yet they have properties of their own, which would be missed if sociologists only focused on the interactions of specific individuals. Émile Durkheim’s (1897/1951) classic study of suicide is a case in point. While suicide is one of the most personal, individual, and intimate acts imaginable, Durkheim demonstrated that rates of suicide differed between religious communities — Protestants, Catholics, and Jews — in a way that could not be explained by the individual factors involved in each specific case. The different rates of suicide had to be explained by macro-level variables associated with the different religious beliefs and practices of the faith communities; more specifically, the different degrees of social integration of these communities. On the other hand, macro-level phenomena like class structures, institutional organizations, legal systems, gender stereotypes, population growth, and urban ways of life provide the shared context for everyday life but do not explain its specific nuances and micro-variations very well. Macro-level structures constrain the daily interactions of the intimate circles in which people move, but they are also filtered through localized perceptions and “lived” in a myriad of inventive and unpredictable ways.

The Sociological Imagination

Although the scale of sociological studies and the methods of carrying them out are different, the sociologists involved in them all have something in common. Each of them looks at society using what pioneer sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) called the sociological imagination, sometimes also referred to as the “sociological lens” or “sociological perspective.” In a sense, this was Mills’ way of addressing the dilemmas of the macro/micro divide in sociology. Mills (1959) defined sociological imagination as how individuals understand their own and others’ lives in relation to history and social structure. It is the capacity to see an individual’s private troubles in the context of the broader social processes that structure them. This enables the sociologist to examine what Mills called “personal troubles of milieu” as “public issues of social structure,” and vice versa.

Mills reasoned that private troubles like being overweight, being unemployed, having marital difficulties, or feeling purposeless or depressed can be purely personal in nature. It is possible for them to be addressed and understood in terms of individualistic, personal, psychological, or moral attributes — either one’s own or those of the people in one’s immediate milieu. In an individualistic society like North American society, this is in fact the most likely way that people will regard the issues they confront: “I have an addictive personality;” “I can’t get a break in the job market;” “My husband is unsupportive,” etc. However, if private troubles are widely shared with others, they indicate that there is a common social problem that has its source in the way social life is structured at a macro or global level. At this level, the issues are not adequately understood as simply private troubles. They are best addressed as public issues of social structure that require a collective response to resolve.

Obesity, for example, has been increasingly recognized as a growing problem for both children and adults in North America. Michael Pollan (2006) cites statistics that three out of five Americans are overweight and one out of five is obese. In Canada in 2018, just over one quarter adults (26.8%) were obese, up from 16% of men and 14.5% of women in 2003, and 36.3% were overweight (Statistics Canada, 2019). Obesity is therefore not simply a private concern related to the medical issues, dietary practices, or exercise habits of specific individuals. It is a widely shared social issue that puts people at risk for chronic diseases like hypertension, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. It also creates significant costs for the medical system.

Pollan argues that obesity is in part a product of the increasingly sedentary and stressful lifestyle of modern, capitalist society. More importantly, however, it is a product of the industrialization of the food chain, which since the 1970s has produced increasingly cheap and abundant food with significantly more calories due to processing. Additives like corn syrup, which are much cheaper and therefore more profitable to produce than natural sugars, led to the trend of super-sized fast foods and soft drinks in the 1980s. As Pollan argues, trying to find a processed food in the supermarket without a cheap, calorie-rich, corn-based additive is a challenge. The sociological imagination in this example is the capacity to see the private troubles and attitudes associated with being overweight as an issue of how the industrialization of the food chain has altered the human/environment relationship — in particular, with respect to the types of food people eat and the way they eat them.

By looking at individuals and societies, and how they interact through this lens, sociologists are able to examine what influences behaviour, attitudes, and culture. By applying systematic and scientific methods to this process, they try to do so without letting their own biases and preconceived ideas influence their conclusions (see Chapter 2. Sociological Research).

Studying Patterns: How Sociologists View the Relationship between Society and the Individual

All sociologists are interested in the experiences of individuals and how those experiences are shaped by interactions with social groups and society as a whole. To a sociologist, the personal decisions an individual makes do not exist in a vacuum. Cultural patterns and social forces put pressure on people to select one choice over another. Sociologists try to identify these general patterns by examining the behavior of large groups of people living in the same society and experiencing the same societal pressures.

Changes in the Canadian family structure offer an example of patterns that sociologists are interested in studying. A “typical” family now is vastly different than in past decades when most Canadian families consisted of married parents living in a home with their unmarried children. The percent of unmarried couples, same-sex couples, single-parent and single-adult households is increasing, as well as is the number of expanded households, in which extended family members such as grandparents, cousins, or adult children live together in the family home (Statistics Canada, 2021). While mothers still make up the majority of single parents, over 330,0000 single fathers are raising their children alone (Lancet Public Health, 2018). Increasingly, single men and women and cohabitating opposite-sex or same-sex couples are choosing to raise children outside of marriage through surrogates or adoption.

Sociologists study social facts – aspects of society that are internal to the individual yet impose constraints and shape (or regulate) behaviours and attitudes. These include laws, morals, values, religious beliefs, customs, fashions, rituals, and all of the cultural rules that govern social life. Do people in Canada view marriage and family differently than before? Do employment and economic conditions play a role? How has culture influenced the choices that individuals make in living arrangements? Sociologists are also studying the consequences of these new patterns, such as the ways children are affected by them or changing needs for education, housing, and healthcare.

When general patterns persist through time and become habitual or routinized at micro-levels of interaction as social scripts, or institutionalized at macro or global levels of interaction as rules, laws, or power relations, they are referred to as social structures. Social structures are repeated patterns of behaviour and social coordination that persist through time. They have three general properties:

Often the collective effects of social structures are referred to as “society.”

Understanding the relationship between the individual and society is one of the most difficult sociological problems. Partly, this is because of the reified way the two terms are used in everyday speech. Reification refers to the way in which abstract concepts, complex processes, or fluid social relationships come to be thought of as “things.” A prime example of reification is when people say that “society” caused an individual to do something, or to turn out in a particular way. In writing essays, first-year sociology students sometimes refer to “society” as a cause of social behaviour or as an entity with independent agency — “Society did something to somebody” — but society is not an agent or an object. On the other hand, the “individual” is a being that seems solid, tangible, and independent of anything going on outside of the skin sack that contains its essence. But the individual is a social being through and through.

This conventional distinction between society and the individual is a product of reification, as both society and the individual appear as independent objects acting upon each other. A concept of “the individual” and a concept of “society” are given the status of real, substantial, independent objects, like pool balls on a pool table. As discussed in the chapters to come, society and the individual are not objects, nor are they independent of one another. An “individual” is inconceivable without the social relationships to others that define their internal, subjective life and their external, socially defined roles. “Society” is inconceivable without the living, breathing, desiring, interacting individuals that compose it.

One problem for sociologists in grasping the individual/society relationship is that the concepts of the individual and society, and their relationship, get reified in terms established by a very common moral framework in modern democratic societies — namely, that of individual responsibility and individual choice. Individual responsibility and individual choice are components of the idea of individual agency: the capacity of individuals to act and make decisions independently. The individual is morally responsible for their behaviours and decisions. They are “good persons” or “bad seeds.” Often in this framework, any suggestion that an individual’s behaviour needs to be understood in terms of that person’s social context is dismissed as “letting the individual off” from taking personal responsibility for their actions. Talking about societal forces and structures is akin to being morally soft or lenient.

Sociology, as a social science, remains neutral on these types of moral questions. For sociologists, the conceptualization of the individual and society is much more complex than the moral framework suggests and needs to be examined through evidence-based, rather than morality-based, research. The sociological problem is to be able to see the individual as a thoroughly social being and, yet, as a being who has agency and free choice. Individuals are beings who do take on individual responsibilities in their everyday social roles, and risk social consequences when they fail to live up to them. However, the manner in which individuals take on responsibilities, and sometimes the compulsion to do so, are socially defined. Individuals do often have “the freedom to do ‘what they want’; yet seemingly, what they want often falls into predictable patterns” (Tepperman, 2010). The sociological problem is to be able to see society as a dimension of experience characterized by regular and predictable patterns of behaviour that exist independently of any specific individual’s desires or self-understanding. At the same time, a society is nothing but the ongoing social relationships and activities of specific individuals.

Studying Part and Whole: How Sociologists View Social Structures

A key basis of the sociological perspective is the concept that the individual and society are inseparable. It is impossible to study one without the other. German sociologist Norbert Elias called the process of simultaneously analyzing the behavior of individuals and the society that shapes that behavior figuration.

An application that makes this concept understandable is the practice of religion. While people experience their religions in a distinctly individual manner, religion exists in a larger social context. For instance, an individual’s religious practice may be influenced by what government dictates, holidays, teachers, places of worship, rituals, and so on. These influences underscore the important relationship between individual practices of religion and social pressures that influence that religious experience (Elias 1978).