1 Chapter 1: What is Sociology? – The Scientific Study of the Human-Shaped Structure
An Explosive Introduction
The fact that you are reading this is a miracle. I mean this in part compared to all the other things you could and would rather be doing, but mainly because you even exist. Sixty-six million years ago, an event would change the entire life course on Earth. It would spur you to end up where you are right now eventually: reading this sentence. To figure out why we need to travel back in time to a world ruled not by humans but by dinosaurs.
Way out on our solar system’s outer edge, past the planets, is something called the Oort cloud. Here it is believed to be where many frozen balls of dust, rock, and ice known as comets tend to hang out. Comets are leftovers from the solar system’s formation (which was billions of years ago). Occasionally, one of them breaks free. The gravitational force of our Sun pulls it into the inner solar system – where we are on Earth. Sometimes they crash into the Sun and explode. Others go into a big orbit around our solar system. You have probably heard of one of them, Halley’s Comet, which is due back to be seen by the naked eye from Earth in 2061 (every 75ish years). However, another option is one that happened sixty-six million years ago. A massive comet got bumped loose from its orbit by Jupiter’s gravitational field (Siraj & Loeb, 2021). The comet changed its trajectory, zipping through our inner solar system, increasing speed as it zoomed past the planets towards the Sun. As it neared the Sun, the forces on this comet were so strong that an at least 16-kilometer (10 miles) wide piece broke off. The problem is that this broken piece was now heading straight for Earth.
Piercing through the Earth’s atmosphere, this flaming chunk of history slammed into modern-day Mexico at a speed of 100,000 kilometers (62,000 miles) per hour. It released millions of times more explosive power and energy than if we detonated every single bomb ever made! The impact seared through the Earth’s surface in seconds, carving a hole 19 kilometers (12 miles) deep and leaving a crater 150 kilometers (93 miles) wide. The comet piece evaporated as it cut through the Earth, tossing the existing rocks and dirt in its way up into the air, creating molten hot and poisonous dust clouds. Within minutes of impact, the effects rippled across the world in the form of earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and forest fires that started through autoignition. The surrounding air is so hot, called flashover, that anything flammable will catch fire spontaneously without directly touching flames! Tsunami waves triggered by the powerful earthquakes blasted water from the Gulf of Mexico to near the Canadian border, flooding the entire United States (DePalma et al., 2019). Most life in Central, South, and North America would be gone within hours.
The life that did not get obliterated from the surface instantly was quickly killed off by the intense greenhouse effect that occurred. The atmosphere’s chemical makeup is altered to be unstainable and choking out life in the process. These toxic blackout clouds covered the planet within weeks, leaving Earth in total darkness for one to two years. Acid rain fell from the sky, killing most living things it coated. With no sunlight, photosynthesis was impossible, and plant life withered away. It would take thousands of years for the Earth to recover back to something resembling its pre-impact condition. However, something would forever be missing. This one day, where a fractured piece of a comet crashed into the third planet from the Sun, eventually made 75% of all plant and animal life on Earth vanish. Entire species never to be seen again.
How We Got Here
This mass extinction event is vital to us humans because one group of animals killed off were the dinosaurs. And if you did not notice, but we live on land, and so did some of them, and they were much bigger and stronger than us, so it probably would not work out too well trying to turn them into our pets. Not only that, but we did not even exist yet! Hundreds of millions of years before the surface of the Earth was broiling with destruction, our oldest known ancestor (named Saccorhytus) would have been floating around in the ocean (Han et al., 2017). However, our ancestor at the time (possibly the very cute Purgatorius; Mantilla et al., 2021) of the comet fragment impact had already worked its way out of the water and was climbing and crawling around on land. After giant life, like dinosaurs, were eliminated, it gave a chance to restart and for little lives, like our small mammal ancestor, to flourish on land (Brocklehurst et al., 2021). Throughout millions of years of evolution since that explosive day, “we” eventually became bigger mammals. Ultimately leading to who we are today – Homo sapiens – us, the most recent living species of humans. Our small mammal ancestor, who would have lived during the dinosaurs’ time, grew over those tens of millions of years in their absence and started splitting into new species. Primarily due to environmental changes and geographical isolation. For example, six to seven million years ago, a spilt occurred between our common ancestor at that time (named Pan Prior). This division would send eventual humans one way and chimpanzees another (Young et al., 2015).
Our human evolutionary ancestors did less climbing over the millions of years since that split and exclusively started walking on their feet. They evolved through various forms of hominids (the family of primates that includes us humans and gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans). Think of hominids the same way you would Equidae family: horses, zebras, and donkeys. You can tell they are related to each other just by looking at them. Some early hominids, like Australopithecus, looked like we do now and like our common ancestor but were not human. However, they would lead to the genus Homo, as in Homo sapiens. But before the sapiens part is added, which is us/you, there were other humans before. Yeah, other humans, and I do not mean that like other people, I mean it in the same way a zebra and a horse are related but different species. The same thing happened with humans. We lived at the same time together too!
The title of this book is The Human-Shaped Structure, so I should specify which humans. It would technically be more accurate to call it the Homo sapien-Shaped Structure. However, it still works because the only humans left anymore are Homo sapiens. Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis lived a few million years before Homo sapiens then died out. Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, and one of our relatives that you might have heard of before, Homo neanderthalensis (or Neanderthals), all overlapped in existence as recently as 40,000 years ago for Neanderthals (Higman et al., 2014). That is, at least four species of humans and relatives that mathematically could have all shook hands with each other (Grün et al., 2020). I am hypothetically romanticizing their overlapping timelines here. However, they did have sex with each other. 1 to 3% of our DNA, including myself, is inherited from Neanderthals (Vernot & Akey, 2014)! However, this number is lower for most current people from Africa. Why? Before we get to that, I mentioned earlier that Homo sapiens were humans’ most recent living species, but that does not mean humans’ most recent species. Homo floresiensis possibly developed after Homo sapiens in Indonesia, but this is still being investigated (Young, 2020). A good reminder that evolution does not stop with us even though we might believe it does.
The Original Globalization
Our human ancestors and eventually ourselves all originated in Africa, but during different times and places. This separation allowed for differing variations to evolve in each group independent of the other. The Earth goes through natural climate changes in addition to our human-influenced ones. Climate change will force groups to migrate, cross paths, and interbred and swap genetic material. This mingling brings us back to Neanderthal DNA being at low levels for present-day people from Africa. Neanderthals never lived in Africa, so how do they have any DNA? Even though all modern humans (Homo sapiens) originally evolved in Africa about 300,000 years ago, our ancestors existed for millions of years prior.
Given that amount of time, they eventually wandered out. Homo sapiens were already in modern-day Israel 180,000 years ago at the earliest (Callaway, 2018). Our ancestors and ourselves were spreading north into Europe and east into Asia (Eurasia), where Neanderthals developed and interbred with humans (outside of Africa). And we humans travelled back into Africa later, and you guessed it, had sex with the people there (Chen et al., 2020). All living people are a mixture of the various hominins that lived before us, just like whoever lives after us Homo sapiens will be too (if that happens). While we might look a little different from each other, we are all the same human race. The only humans left, the species Homo sapiens.
The last piece of the puzzle for why you exist is why you and I and everyone else exists where we do – every continent on Earth. The short answer is we explored. We moved out of Africa, along the Indian Ocean, into South Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and ultimately to the rest of the world (Rito et al., 2019). About 50,000 years ago, humans “sailed” (more than likely floated somehow) to Australia. About 13,000 years ago, they crossed an ice bridge (and potentially travelled via watercraft) to connect eastern Russia to Alaska. Upon arriving, they worked their way across North America and down South America. And now you know why you exist and where you do. I have skipped tens of millions of years of history because this is a sociology book, and we have yet to get to that. However, suppose you want a complete history from the beginning of the universe. In that case, I encourage you to check out Origin Story: A Big History of Everything or us, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
Homo sapiens (we will stick with humans from now on) have not existed for about 99.9% of Earth’s history. Our species has only been here for about the last 300,000 of Earth’s 4.6-billion-year life. That is a few billion missed birthdays. To shrink the timeline even more, everyone reading this right now, yes, you included, has the first two digits of their birth year as 19xx or 20xx. That is it. And depending on how it is going so far, everyone born before the 20th century either missed out not getting to read this or lucked out not having to. For us, the good thing is that fraction of a percent – our current existence – concerns sociology. That is not to say that history does not matter; it very much does because changes in the past shape our present. After all, sociology is the scientific study of the human-shaped structure.[1]
The Human-Shaped Structure: What is it?[2]
If sociology is the scientific study of the human-shaped structure, then who is doing the shaping? What are they shaping? Why are they shaping it that way? When did they shape it? How are they shaping it? Or maybe, you are still stuck in the last paragraph and wondering what the heck the “human-shaped structure” even means? This book aims to show you how to answer these questions – to serve as a guide. You do not need a guru, “expert,” or some master of sociology; it is not a magic trick where only the magician knows the secret. We are all capable of understanding how the world works, maybe not all of it, but I am no more of an authority at answering these questions as you can be. Anyone who claims otherwise, to use a technical sociology term, is called a “liar.” And they are probably also trying to sell you something. If we can demystify the universe, then we can undoubtedly decode the cultural significance of McDonald’s.
Think of the social sciences as a giant umbrella over the planet. Anything involving human activity is under their study. Which, as you might have just figured out, is a lot! However, do not feel overwhelmed. We have an entire book to unpack all this. Baby steps here. So, if sociology is the scientific study of the human-shaped structure, what is that exactly? The social sciences broadly study culture, which is the human-shaped world.[3] Culture is a word you have heard and probably said countless times, but rarely is it ever specified what it means – its definition assumed. However, to avoid miscommunication and give it boundaries, we need to clarify its meaning.
It is easier to define culture by everything it is not. Anything humans do not shape is not culture (e.g., the Sun). Anything that humans shape is culture (e.g., the clothes you wear). Culture can be material (i.e., physical, tangible) and nonmaterial (e.g., ideas, spoken language). For example, the Parker Solar Probe, launched from Earth in 2018, is scheduled to “touch” the Sun on Christmas Eve, 2024 (Guo et al., 2021). However, it will still be about 64,373,764 kilometers (4,000,000 miles) away from the surface, even at its closest. The Sun has nothing to do with us and is not culture. However, we can give the Sun meaning via religion (which we will discuss later in this chapter). For example, in Hinduism, Surya is the god of the Sun, a solar deity. It is unknown whether it exists without humans. Still, the meaning and relationship to Hinduism are crafted and shaped by humans (all religions change through time). Thus, it is culture. The Probe is also culture; it would not exist if we humans did not build it. Therefore, we shaped it into existence. It is effortless to differentiate culture from not. Whenever you are unsure about something, ask yourself if humans somehow shape it? Or to merge all of this for simplicities sake, to quote the famed anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973), “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun…” (p. 5). If made, influenced, impacted, or has a traceable connection to people, it is culture and human-shaped (see Figure 1.5 for more examples).
Culture, the human-shaped world, is the broad theme that will run through the rest of the book. As mentioned prior, the social sciences study culture. However, each tends to emphasize one aspect more than the others. For example, economics focuses more on the market, geography on place, political science the state, psychology the individual. Anthropology and sociology are closely related (sometimes even combined into one academic department). While both study culture, sociology tends to focus more on the role of structure than anthropology. However, they all overlap as each is looking at the relationship between people and their environments. For now, though, let us hold off on trying to process all this at once and briefly talk about how the book will proceed – this will help you wrap your head around everything. The title of this book, The Human-Shaped Structure: An Introduction to Sociology, gave away the big surprise already. After inspecting culture in more depth in the next chapter (2), we will take this information and slide into how we all learn culture through socialization (chapter 3). Then we will identify the social structures that determine a lot of culture for you (chapter 4). We are going to outline this in the following few pages, so sit tight. Much of this book is about you, so you will be able to use examples from your own life to quickly understand and move along with the topics as we progress. Social stratification in chapter 5 looks at the various cultural layers of inequality in the world. We close out the first part of the book in chapter 6, touring our home, Earth. Here, we will spend time digging into how we have shaped the planet on which we live.
In the second part of the book, we will observe significant cultural characteristics shaping who we are as individuals. The first chapter (7), deviance and crime, also serves as a mini-theme. We are looking at how culture shapes the people that are deemed good or bad in society. Societies are subcultures within a geographic area. For example, I was socialized in American society and internalized everything that entails. Keep this in mind as we will revisit human migration over the last 300,000 years, where we will view the cultural meaning of skin color in chapter 8. Next, a favorite of many is the cultural construction of gender and the diversity of sexuality (chapter 9). Chapter 10 looks at the role age and the ageing process plays in your life. Coupling this with chapter 11, we will explore the effects of mental and physical ability. Religion and its influence over the world follow this (chapter 12). Depending on these cultural characteristics ascribed to you, where you live in the world, and the time you live, they can make your life easier or harder.
The book’s third and final section explores what I call the Social Imaginative Process. Chapter 13 will examine the numerous cultural roles education plays, from socialization to learning, to serving as a credentialing system for social mobility. Chapter 14 takes all the content and examines where culture needs to be changed. How do we know the who, what, why, when, how, and where requiring the change? Through practicing sociology, the scientific study of the human-shaped structure. The final chapter (15) is on how to do sociology. The first chapter, the one you are reading right now, will introduce the sociological imagination. The last comes full circle and shows the social imaginative process of sociology. The purpose of sociology is to study the human-shaped structure.[4] Study is a verb, meaning you must take action to analyze and better understand culture. Sociology can explore these human-shaped topics, whether significant conflicts like wars, shopping patterns, and fashion trends. This chapter will guide you through that process. And relating to the previous chapter, you can apply what you have “discovered” to change your culture and world.
The Human-Shaped World: What is it not?
There is not much that is exempt from the human-shaped world. Material culture would not exist without us, but we have also shaped “invisible” aspects that you might not notice or ignore. For example, we can see that we have entirely transformed the Earth’s surface. We have also altered above into the atmosphere and deeper into the oceans, down to rocks and dirt itself. You could argue that humans shape almost everything; therefore, all social sciences should be just one academic discipline. Anthropology, business, law, geography, history, psychology, etc., all overlap with sociology. But remember, we arbitrarily shape these disciplinary boundaries; nothing is natural about them. However, what differentiates them is their approaches to the cultural topics they study. Sociology is distinct in its practice of looking at the human-shaped world in three ways. One is that it focuses more on the human-shaped structure (a part of the human-shaped world). Two, it does so by way of thinking called the sociological imagination. The third is a way of seeing the world called the sociological perspectives.
The sociological imagination and sociological perspectives demonstrate how thinking sociologically is a deliberate process. Not just “common sense.” Because of sociology’s subject matter and the fact that everyone interacts daily with culture, people make assumptions and claims about the human-shaped world based on their own experiences. For example, most people go to school growing up. Therefore, they may feel that this experience qualifies them to critique educational policy based on their individual experience (anecdotal evidence). However, this is not a problem, for example, with physics or chemistry (Bauman and May, 2019, p. 4). Start talking about advanced mathematics or orthopedic surgery. Suddenly, there is not much to say that is “common sense.” Because these topics do not fall within most people’s daily experiences. Even for physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and doctors – “common sense” does not apply to natural laws, mathematical formulas, or biology.
The sociological imagination is a way of thinking and book by the same name I mentioned in the preface, allowing you to understand your life within the larger historical, social structure. Before we demonstrate using the sociological imagination, we need to cover some of its basics first. Most importantly, the social structure. The social structure is the broader public, including the sustaining institutions you interact with personally and individually.[5] However, the social structure is shaped and created by humans. In other words, “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both” (Mills, 1959/2000). They are intertwined together. The social structure itself and the filling within is culture, the human-shaped world.
The Social Structure
To understand the social structure, we will interpret it from the view of having a pet. A dinosaur would be exciting, but having a pet Tyrannosaurus rex is impossible because they A) will eat you and B) are extinct. We will have to imagine having a much smaller dinosaur – a bird. Yes, all birds alive today are theropod dinosaurs, just like T. rex! Where does our dinosaur/bird live? In a birdcage, of course. The habitat you built for it. You include colorful ropes, bells, and other toys for it to interact with. You created this environment and its structure to rest, relax, eat, play, and live. However, your bird does not know this. To them, it is just their world. But you have a different view; you can see the habitat you built from outside the cage. You, too, interact with the environment, your structure, much like your bird. For example, you go into buildings such as restaurants, religious institutions, schools, movie theaters, apartments, etc. You and your bird are very much alike in that you are both interacting with your environment zoomed in on a micro-scale. When you look at your bird in its cage, you see its whole environment. You are viewing it zoomed out on a macro scale. Your bird would see its world from this viewpoint, too, if you took it out of the cage. If you were to look out the window of an airplane or a tall building, you would see your environment on a macro scale too. You would see that someone else built your environment for you also! However, a giant person did not create your environment as you did of your bird; many people collectively shaped your social structure throughout history.
The time you live is the primary reason for the version of the social structure you inhabit. For example, you might be reading this right now on a tablet, phone, or computer. These electronic devices are necessities in your life. But why? Did you invent them from scratch because you needed them or because you could? Do you know how they work or how to build them? Or did you happen to be alive at a time in human history when these devices existed, and access to the Internet is so crucial to living, and you adopted them into your lifestyle? Think back to people in the 19th century, the 1800s – the same century sociology developed, and dinosaur fossils were identified! They had none of these technologies, and you might think, “I could not live without electricity, lighting gas lanterns and candles every night to see.” People in the 22nd century (the 2100s) will probably look back at us and think, “wow, they had to read and not just get the information automatically synched to their brain cloud? I could never live like that.” You see the pattern here? It does not matter when you live because we are individuals born into and living in the present shaped by those in the past. This is the social structure.
The social structure was not built instantly but gradually over time. In Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, he imagines a world where humans just disappeared. Snap your fingers, and almost 8 billion of us are gone. We would leave behind all the physical shaping we have done to the planet, like buildings, but our ideologies would die out too, as there would be no one left to proclaim them. Ideologies are the ideas that justify the social arrangements in the world (we will explore this in a bit). However, as exciting as this thought experiment is (and perhaps future reality), we will return to it later in chapter six. We need to rewind before any of the stuff we could leave behind is even built. We want to know when the first element of the structure was constructed. Or, for those of you keen enough to have picked up on it, what we are asking is when did culture start?
The Birth of Culture
Culture began with the first step that the first human ever took. Much like Neil Armstrong’s boot print embedded into the Moon’s surface in 1969, we initially shaped the world with one small step as well. Whatever dent made in the dirt or leaf that was crunched marks the beginning of the human-shaped world. While the lunar boot impression is still visible five decades later, our terrestrial print has been trampled over and eclipsed in memory by all the other far more exciting things we have done since. For all we know, there could be a McDonald’s restaurant on top of this historic site. The first identifiable or memorable element of culture was probably nonmaterial in symbolic language – like pointing and other simple gestures. This would later evolve into more complex oral and written language, including drawings on cave walls. We will focus more on language and its importance in the next chapter. Physical culture was probably some clothing (and I use that term loosely). Tools for hunting, building shelters, and starting fires appeared along the way.
Culture is a process of cumulative and collective learning. For example, when an animal dies, say our beloved pet bird/dinosaur takes everything it learned and acquired in its lifetime with it. However, being social animals, we humans can transcribe our knowledge and experiences via language and share this information. Years ago, someone ate a poisonous mushroom and died, but we could learn from that experience so that no one else does the same – we can teach each other. In other words, we are not reinventing the wheel with every new person born. We are building culture together, but also dependent on others and shaped by them too. This unintended vulnerability is known as a latent function. The fragmenting of the world and our roles within it means we are only responsible for a small part (the flip side being a lot of pressure is taken off us). As individuals, that means we rely on an awful lot of people and institutions out of our control to maintain the social structure. Get lost in the woods and see how long you last or how much stuff you can create. Did you recreate the tablet, phone, or computer that you might be using right now? My guess is no because the knowledge required and access to the necessary resources go beyond one person’s reasonable expectations and capabilities. We are helpless without the aid of others to support us.
Culture trickled into development rather than flooded. However, one significant innovation that occurred about 10,000 years ago would create the conditions for a surge in cultural creativity and the construction of our social structure. The most significant influencer of all future culture was a byproduct of nature, forcing us to adapt because of the ice age – agriculture. At least 12,000 years ago, three-fourths of all the land on Earth was occupied and being physically transformed by humans (Ellis et al., 2021). At the same time, most of the Earth was covered by glaciers. This has not ended (technically, we are in an interglacial period), as you can still see the glacial remains year-round in Greenland and Antarctica. However, by the end of the 21st century, more than 200 million people on land may be displaced from the accelerated melting of the Earth’s glaciers (Hugonnet et al., 2021). With scarce vegetation and a slowdown in migration due to the climate, we began to grow and harvest food in an organized way on a mass scale. Having a reliable energy source through farming and domestication of animals allowed us to settle down, be more sedentary, and another theme that keeps appearing, have sex. A sharp increase in the human population is an outgrowth of agriculture and this excess in spare time. This breakthrough long ago takes the pressure off you today from having to forge fruits and vegetables or raise livestock for slaughter. We rely on farmers to provide these necessities; this frees up your time to do other things. However, you were also born long after the crossing of this agricultural threshold. The leisure time that may have existed then has been filled with other time-consuming obligations developed into the social structure over that time.
Much of the significant institutions of the social structure were formed in prehistory. That is anything that happened before written language was developed to document their origins. For example, systems of numerical counting with clay tokens appeared simultaneously in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) and agriculture to keep track of things like grains produced and animals in a region. Trading with neighboring Egypt leads to pictographic languages as early as 5400 years ago (Fischer, 2018, p. 97-98). We know about the timeline for agriculture and written language because there is physical evidence. The rest requires us to engage in conjectural history and speculate. For example, the why part about how any of this came into existence is an educated guess. However, at the risk of sounding like I am throwing out some “grand theory,” most of the institutions of the social structure probably developed after the advent of agriculture. In other words, within the last 10,000 years.
Institutions of the Social Structure
The social structure consists of sustaining institutions in which you interact. A big one was the cultural conception we all know and love called money. No one knows for sure when money first originated or why, for that matter (Hansen, 2019). However, the idea of money probably developed with increasing trade. It was not an invention or discovery that had a use after the fact. Instead, it formed in unison as a necessity to simplify the trading process (Karimzadi, 2012, p. 54). The more objects or services available make it increasingly difficult to determine values. Are two bear furs equivalent to five clay pots? How many clay pots to dig a hole of a certain depth? At least 4,000 years ago, bronze rings and axe blades of similar weights were used as commodity money (Maikel & Popa, 2021).
Coins that resemble the kinds we are used to having clank in our pockets have been discovered in Turkey with mint dates as early as 2,600 years ago (Curtis, 1906). Whatever the origins, we eventually inherited the institution known as the economy, and now it dominates our lives. Now, much of the world must work to earn money. It is compulsory to purchase food, water, shelter, and other survival necessities (and recreation). There went your free time. The more money you have, the more freedom of choice and opportunities that you have. Less money equals fewer opportunities and less freedom of choice (Simmel, 1900/2004, p. 219). However, you are never free from the need for money. It is a requirement to exist in the current social structure.
Emerging possibly simultaneously during the rise of money is another institution, the state. The state is the organization of a society that enforces its ideologies through political control. Cities began to spring up, borderlines slowly drawn, and countries formed. Empires have come and gone; countries have disappeared, been renamed, merged, and split. Even the flags change over time. Throughout all this, measures to protect and maintain these ideologies and geographic territories have been implemented. For example, citizens’ taxation and violence or threat of violence through armies, militias, and police forces are two forms of social control. As one of the disciplinary founders, Max Weber, famously said, “a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (1918/2013, p. 78).
Governments serve the will of the state. For example, the War in Afghanistan has been ongoing through four different American Presidents. Even though the representatives of a government change, the state’s ideology prevails regardless of the people in charge. From 1817-2020, the United States has been engaged in a period of war 66% of the time (Torreon, 2020). America relies on military spending to fuel and support its economy, called the military-industrial complex. In other words, if you hypothetically got rid of the military overnight, it would create millions of unemployed people, and trillions of dollars would disappear. The state is a sustaining institution; it lives on longer than the individuals that uphold it. This reification is maintained because of ideology.
Religion, more preciously, religious artifacts appear at the same time as agriculture. What is believed to be the world’s first religious temple of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey was under construction when we experimented with the plow (Culotta, 2009). The existence of a god(s) or some other supernatural being is a long going debate, but religion itself is very much human-shaped. The ceremonies, places of worship, customs, and the values they hold and represent are all our own doing. Religion, spirituality, and the belief in some higher power probably go back hundreds of thousands of years as an explanatory force. To provide an answer to the question of why we are here (it brings people together). We were burying our dead as early as 78,000 years ago (Martinón-Torres et al., 2021). However, the theme with all these institutions is that they did not just appear overnight or were “constructed simply by force of thought” (Durkheim, 1915, p. 4). To quote another founder of sociology, Émile Durkheim, in his The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, “Like every human institution, religion did not commence anywhere” (p. 9). However, this is not to be confused as if we did not create these institutions. We very much did; without us humans, they would all disappear. Religion can serve as a governing system too, but so can governments via the state. Both can shape laws to form limits on what is acceptable in a particular society or group. Religion appears to have been around as long as we have.
Other significant institutions include education and the family. Early systems of education taught religion. Whether the temple schools of ancient Egypt, priests were teaching students in India. Buddhist doctrines from India spread east into Asia. Students in ancient China learned about Confucius and Lao-tzu (“Education, History of,” 2018). Education serves to pass on knowledge, but also a society’s culture. The family, as we will see in chapter 3, serves as the primary agent of socialization. Whether through blood relations or external relationships (e.g., marriage), families allow individuals to be a part of a group. Economic institutions, the state, religion, education, and families exist in every society on Earth. Healthcare, mass media, legal, and other institutions are also prevalent around the globe. Chapter 4 will look at different components such as roles and groups that shape how we interact with these institutions, the social structure. However, the thing to remember is that these institutions, which you spend so much of your life interacting with, predate your existence and will continue after your presence on Earth (sorry to break it to you). We are living during the growth of possibly the newest major institution, the Internet. It was in a little over 50% of households in the United States by 2003 (A Nation online, 2004, p. 5). By the end of 2019, that same percentage applied to the rest of the world (Measuring Digital Development, 2020, p. 7). It is growing in influence, but will it become a sustaining institution? Only the future will know.
A Different Social Structure?
The social structure is a product of history, but it is not “historical fate” (Mills, 1959/2000). You might have noticed how often the word shape and its derivatives keep appearing, but this is intentional to remind you that the world is malleable and changeable. What if that chunk of the comet never hit Earth? What if it hit a different part of Earth? What if the dinosaurs never disappeared because of it? It is estimated that over 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rex had lived by the time the Earth blew up on that fateful day (Marshall, 2021). Would we humans have survived amongst all these dinosaurs? Would we have even evolved into existence if that never happened? Our pathway to today, much of the natural world, and even the universe’s history is full of randomness, errors, and just the right thing happening at the right time. Sometimes referred to as the Goldilocks principle or conditions. It would be arrogant to think that we humans are the exception to the rule. None of this was predetermined, in outer space or on Earth. It was shaped by us (the on-Earth part), which means our world can differ from the one that exists now.
The social structure that exists today could have and can be shaped differently. Much like you could have built your pet bird/dinosaur’s habitat in another way too. There is no finite, linear path of culture – it is all changeable. For example, the assumption that robots will eventually take over the jobs of people is incorrect. The prediction might be correct, but the actual replacement is because people decide to implement these changes. Why does the economy function the way it does now and not like a barter system? Where goods and services are earned through the repayment of other goods and services? There is no reason it cannot. However, as Mills (1959/2000) points out, “institutions have taken a long time to evolve, and accordingly, they are not to be tampered with hastily.” Culture tends to change incrementally (but not for everyone, as we will see later). The economy or any other institution could have been shaped differently early on. Now though, they are so firmly established that drastic change would be rather challenging to get everyone on the same page. But why?
Influences of Power and Authority
Humans are responsible for everything related to culture. That includes the social structure. We shape all of it, including the harmful elements of culture (e.g., poverty, world hunger, racism, sexism, etc.). However, we do not all have the same level of influence in shaping it. Those with more power and authority generally have more ability to shape culture and the social structure. We can borrow the definition of power from Max Weber’s often cited book, Economy and Society. He says power “is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance” (1922/1978, p. 53). For example, parents exert a lot of power over their children. When they tell them it is time to go to bed, even though they protest, the children still go to sleep (or at least pretend to). But power can also be wielded not just by individuals but by the social structure too. For example, no one person is forcing you to earn money. Still, you also have to because the institution of the economy dictates that you need it to survive. However, since humans shaped this social arrangement, that means humans must be maintaining this ideology. To continue this arrangement, we need to look at the dance partner of power, authority.
It takes two to tango, and with power is authority: “power justified by the beliefs of the voluntarily obedient” (Mills, 1959/2000). In a famous experiment involving humans, social psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to know how killing millions of people in the Holocaust could have happened. In his book about the experiment, Obedience to Authority, he says this “could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders” (1974, p. 1). In the experiment, he leveraged the persuasive powers of authority. For example, 65% of participants administered a seemingly lethal shock of electricity to a stranger in another room simply because a man in a white lab coat was ordering them to do so. People need to see authority as legitimate, a scientist, a position of high prestige and social status compared to other occupations, in this case, to obey the commands. Power says to do this, and the authority says because I know better. Again, authority can be from an individual(s) or structural, institutional. Any government agency qualifies. For example, those who collect your tax money and you accept this rule because they have the power to penalize you (e.g., fines, imprisonment) if you disobey. Go against your parent’s demands, and they might temporarily take away some of your privileges, like seeing friends or your video games.
Culture stays static because those with the power to change it choose not to (or only in their favor). This is usually because the current social arrangements are benefiting them, so why change. Those with more power are a minority of the population (e.g., the wealthiest people on Earth) not acting to change the culture for a majority (e.g., most of the world is poor). For example, the richest 2,153 people or 0.00003% of the world population of 7.7 billion, have more wealth than 4.6 billion people or 60% of the population (Coffey et al., 2020)! Those with little power are a majority (e.g., poor people) not acting to change the culture for a majority (e.g., the same poor people). This inaction leads to no change in culture or their situation (i.e., they stay poor). This passivity helps maintain the existing structure and continues to be shaped and controlled by those with more power. However, several reasons can explain this inaction. Having little power also means a lack of resources like available time, money, the ability to organize, domination (through punishment or its threat), coercion, and manipulation tricks people into not doing anything. For example, X person is wealthy (power). However, you are not wealthy and work hard to try to be but cannot, and you know from firsthand experience how hard it is to become rich. That must mean that wealthy people know what they are talking about and should listen to them (authority) because they are wealthy and successful. However, you are unaware of how they acquired this wealth in the first place if they even did (e.g., they could just have inherited it).
Sometimes those with little power, a majority, act to change the culture for a majority. This can be categorized as collective behavior or even a social movement. These actively seek to change the culture and the social structure (we will expand on this in chapter 14). However, even then, this “majority” is usually just an oppressed minority of a specific group of people (like any of the cultural characteristics in part two of the book will cover). Hopefully, your brain has warmed up and shifted in thinking since this section started. Suppose I explained things as well as I hope I have. In that case, you should be dreaming up alternatives, different versions of the social structure and how you are affected by it. If so, congratulations. You are using your sociological imagination.
The Sociological Imagination
We cannot separate our individual lives from the world around us.[6] Many personal troubles an individual might go through requires looking beyond them at the more significant public issues affecting an individual. For example, if you are unemployed, that might be an individual problem. Still, suppose there are lots of people unemployed. In that case, this hints at something more prominent than the individual causing this problem of unemployment. Does an individual soldier start a war, or does the larger structure of the state in the country they live start the war, and they are sent into battle? Does a marriage that ends in divorce mean a failure of two people, or do many divorces happening in society point towards more significant issues with the institution of marriage? If you get a bad grade in a school course, does it mean that you are stupid, or could external forces affect your performance (e.g., problems at home, distractions in your social life, etc.)? To further explore this intersection of the individual and society, we will look at the intentional causing of death in suicide and the influence the social structure has on this decision.
There are a variety of reasons why someone would commit suicide. Suicide is seen as a highly personal, individual, private act. However, certain types of suicide might be aided by some force in their social environment putting pressure on them (Durkheim, 1897/2002, p. 269). In his book, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, Émile Durkheim investigated these types, and found rates of suicide varied among demographic groups (e.g., men commit suicide at a higher rate than women, differences between religions, people in and out of relationships, etc.). In other words, there are external forces related to their “social condition” that vary the rates of suicide. Meaning there is more than just a problem of “personal temperament” at work here. That means a significant disruption to the social structure; for example, a global pandemic like the current COVID crisis would predict a massive increase in suicides. However, the opposite has happened (Wise, 2021; Pirkis et al., 2021). Most of the world, whether they knew it or not, was using their sociological imagination. They recognized the pressures that would be put on people, not of their own doing. They (e.g., governments, employers) increased the social safety net. They offered more mental health support, financial subsidies, and the “all in this together” mantra helped unite everyone under the same struggle. As a result, suicide rates are essentially the same as in the pre-pandemic world, and some countries have even seen a decrease. However, there are variations in different demographic groups, a lack of information from poorer countries, pandemic fatigue kicking in, and other reasons leading to increases in certain countries (Tanaka & Okamoto, 2021).
The sociological imagination is a way of thinking about the intersections between the individual, history, and the social structure that allows you to understand better how the world works and how they shape your life. In effect, you should continually be translating any personal troubles you might be having into public issues. Often social problems masquerade as individual problems. For example, if you are stressed or having self-esteem issues because you think you are unattractive or not attractive enough. Is that a problem, or are the expectations of beauty in society so high and unrealistically achievable thanks to plastic surgery and photo editing that you feel bad about yourself by comparison. If you are underweight, is it because of a societal obsession with thinness? If you are overweight, is it because of the prevalence of cheap, unhealthy foods versus plentiful, nutritious, calorie-conscious options? Do you work at a sedentary job that provides little exercise or one with so little fulfillment or is so exhausting that you eat as an enjoyable reward to look forward to? Or perhaps a global pandemic has led to weight gain because of the stress of being isolated and unsure of the future? The list of examples can go on and on but remember these personal troubles are fueled by structural, public issues beyond the control of the individual. Culture is collective, meaning we are only responsible for a fraction of its shaping and maintaining. Ease the pressure off yourself by constantly using your sociological imagination to decode this interplay between your biography (personal troubles), history (public issues), the social structure, and the culture maintaining it.
Sociological Perspectives
The sociological perspectives are ways of viewing interactions from a specific point of view. Remember your pet bird/dinosaur cage that you built earlier? Using different perspectives of looking at the habitat you made, we might come to different conclusions. For example, why you included the stuff that you did. One perspective is called structural functionalism or often just functionalism. The name hints at what structures exist in society and their functions – in this case, for stability. Like the organs of the human body, functionalism looks at the world with the idea that everything must be serving a purpose. As you might think and use your sociological imagination to deduce, then how do societies change? Or why would they then? Or that something like poverty must serve a purpose? These questions open functionalism to criticism that there must be a “benefit” to poverty that would justify its existence (Gans, 1971, 1972, 1995). Of course, your bird does not live in a world of advanced culture, so it does not need to worry about poverty-sustaining ideologies. Still, all the stuff, like the toys and other objects it interacts with, serves a purpose. They have a specific function; otherwise, why include them? A functionalist perspective looks at society in the same way. Why would something exist if it did not have a specific function too? Or you might flip it and look at the world through the conflict perspective.
The conflict perspective looks at the world from the eyes of competition for resources. Functionalism is positive; conflict perspective is negative. Why does your cage have lavish accessories, and another does not? Many of the works by Karl Marx, most famously The Communist Manifesto, sought to illuminate the exploitation of workers (“the proletariat”) by the owners (“the bourgeoisie”). Marx was German but used these Latin words to describe the two classes. This short booklet ended with a call to action in its final words. Insisting a need to overthrow this system by saying, “WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!” (Engels & Marx, 1848/2017, p. 33). Economics and the resources money entails, from this perspective, is the driving force behind much of our interactions and conflict in society. This can overlap and even expand with issues such as “race” (e.g., critical race theory), gender (e.g., queer theory), or even ideas (e.g., postmodernism) to name a few. Wherever there is a power imbalance and inequality, conflict theory can provide a lens to observe the struggle. This constant conflict explains why societies change, unlike functionalism. Still, since it is always looking for conflict, it tends to overlook stabilizing factors in society. For example, religion can both be a source of conflict and uniting factor. Another area of contention is sex, so much so that there is an entire perspective devoted to it.
The feminist perspective seeks to analyze the world from a female standpoint. Most of the world is patriarchal, meaning men are in most power, authority, and prestigious positions. With that said, most medical research has primarily been conducted by men, on men, and for men. For example, in the United States, women were not required to be included as participants in nationally funded medical trials until 1993 (Liu & Dipietro Mager, 2016, p. 3)! More recently, this discrepancy of sex and gender is still an ongoing problem globally in research (Hankivsky et al., 2018). Perhaps usurpingly then that this lack of representation is seen in the current rollout of COVID vaccines worldwide. Only one study so far has looked at the adverse effect infection from COVID-19 had on women’s hormones and menstruation (Li et al., 2021). And surveys are just now being created to ask women if they have had menstrual cycle changes since receiving vaccines. After one billion vaccines have already been administered worldwide (Kreier, 2021)! A feminist perspective looks for these blind spots (intentional or not) in society. Inequality exists for women in numerous facets of life like education, the workplace, and politics compared to men. However, not all women experience this unequal treatment the same. Intersectionality looks at the multiple layers of being a woman and how these cultural characteristics might open them up to more or less the possibility of discrimination. For example, in American society, while penalized for being a woman, a rich white woman has more privilege than a poor black woman. But what if we want specifics of what it is like to be a woman or an intimate look at an individual’s experience? For that, we need to leave these big picture macro perspectives and go micro.
The symbolic interactionist perspective looks at how we communicate through symbols like language and the objects we interact with. This perspective gets into the detailed interpretations of the people behind the statistics or quantitative data that you see reported daily. Even down to one-on-one interactions, which the more prominent macro perspectives do not touch upon. For example, your nation’s flag is a symbol. This symbol represents pride, patriotism, and a sense of home to you and the people from your country. Or it might express resentment with someone dissatisfied from living there or even labelled as the enemy by another nation. All those sustaining institutions of the social structure change a little over time. Still, you are making changes, sometimes significant, daily, based on the experiences you have. You change a lot over your lifetime. For example, your attitude, hobbies, relationships, hairstyles, jobs, and places you live. These are fluid, not static. We are demonstrating agency here or making decisions in our “little” world (micro), even though the larger world (macro) does not change. For example, no individual has that much power in the world that not buying a cup of coffee stops the economy from functioning or existing. There is even an influential sociology book called The Social Construction of Reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1967) about how everything is constructed to reflect your interactions with your environment. Even the very idea of gender and its expression is something we “do,” perform, to identify (or not) with a particular biological sex. This perspective will get more attention in chapter 3, socialization.
Sometimes these perspectives are referred to as sociological approaches or theories. In any case, they are all reductionists, looking at the world through one particular lens or aspect. None can explain all. The reality is that we are trying to apply arbitrary boundaries to view some human-shaped phenomenon to help us see things differently or for the first time. There is great potential for overlap with all these perspectives and even more alternative viewing methods (e.g., rational choice theory). All of these are tools you can adopt to help “see the strange in the familiar.” Suppose you can grasp the essential topics discussed in this chapter. In that case, I can promise you that the hard part (although I hope I made it easy and enjoyable for you) is over. The information here will flow through the rest of the book through the theme of culture. As long as you keep these significant points in mind throughout (summarized on the following pages), you are fully equipped to handle understanding the rest of this book. Sociology, and more importantly, the reality of the human-shaped world in which you live.
Chapter Summary
Sociology is the scientific study of the human-shaped structure. The human-shaped world is culture, and the structure is the specific aspect sociology focuses on. Individuals both shape and are shaped by the structure. People are a product of the structure in which they live, determined mainly by the time in which they live. This is the social structure. Elements of the social structure (e.g., institutions) can outlast an individual’s life and endure into the future (e.g., religion). Those with more power and the persuasive abilities that accompany power (e.g., authority) influence culture and thus people to a greater extent than those with less power. Using the sociological imagination, you can see the effect that the social structure and associated elements of culture have in shaping you. The sociological perspectives are a tool to see how culture is functioning, why it is functioning in a particular way. And when paired with the sociological imagination, opportunities to think about where changes in culture might be needed.
Major Points of the Chapter
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
- Explain what sociology is.
- Contrast what culture is and is not.
- Identify the sustaining institutions of the social structure.
- Recognize the varying influences of power.
- Describe and practice using the sociological imagination.
- Distinguish how the sociological perspectives interpret culture.
Study Questions
- What is sociology? Think about this concerning the social sciences. What makes sociology stand out from the others?
- What is culture? What is culture not? Can you think of some examples of nonmaterial and material culture?
- Identify some of the significant sustaining institutions of the social structure? Why do you think they are called sustaining institutions? What are they sustaining? (This is a bit of a trick question).
- What are some of the influences of power? What about not having power? Imagine two people, one with a lot of power, one with very little. How are their lives different?
- What is the sociological imagination? Think of how your life relates to the social structure. What is one positive and negative thing that has occurred in your life beyond your influence and control?
- How do the sociological perspectives interpret culture? Think of an essential holiday in your country. How might each of the four perspectives covered interpret the role this holiday plays?
Attributions
Figure 1.1 “solar system and Oort Cloud with distances (Sun …. α-Centauri) painted in decadic logarithmic units.” by quapan is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Figure 1.2 “File:Purgatorius BW.jpg” by Nobu Tamura is licensed under CC BY 3.0
Figure 1.3 “Fossil Hominid Skull Display at The Museum of Osteology” by Sklmsta is licensed under CC0 1.0
Figure 1.4 “File:Human migration out of Africa.png” by Ephert is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
Figure 1.5 Original from author.
Figure 1.6 “The bird cage” by Toufik Medjahed is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Figure 1.7 “T-Rex Dinosaur” by Scott Kinmartin is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Figure 1.8 “Desert agriculture – outside Zagora, Morocco” by Richard Allaway is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Figure 1.9 “Dollars & Rupees” by Wen-Yan King is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Figure 1.10 “Mausoleum of Mao Zedong” by Jorge Lascar is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Figure 1.11 “Göbekli Tepe” by tonynetone is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Figure 1.12 “Man and Shopping Cart” by lavocado@sbcglobal.net is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Figure 1.13 “File:Milgram experiment v2.svg” by is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
Figure 1.14 “Stop Looking! Fashion Runway 2011” by henryjose is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Figure 1.15 “Meridian Charts (detail), Office, Wu Hsing Tao School, Traditional Five Element Acupuncture & Psychology, Seattle, Washington, USA” by Wonderlane is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Figure 1.16 “People on streets, Beijing” by Yoshimai is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
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- *The information here is not an exhaustive review of the literature, but simply to show a diversity of answers to these questions throughout the history of sociology. And perhaps more concerning, no consensus. Geology is not confused and debating what they do after hundreds of years (geologists are scientists who study the Earth). Sociologists are scientists who study the human-shaped structure. What is Sociology? If you ask ten sociologists for the definition of sociology, you will get ten different meanings. While a few books that could be considered introductory textbooks were released in America in the last quarter of the 1800s (e.g., Herbert Spencer's The Study of Sociology in 1872, Lester Ward's Dynamic Sociology in 1883) and schools from coast to coast offered a wide variety of courses in sociology as early as 1901 (Tolman, 1902, pgs. 832-838), it wasn't until around 1915 that at least one sociology course was offered in nearly all colleges and universities in America (House, 1936, p. 249). However, these earlier texts were often more concerned with broader definitions via classifying sociology as a science and differentiating it from other disciplines than providing concise definitions of the term in its infant stage, using "social sciences" more frequently than the term sociology. With that said, here a few scattered definitions over the decades from intro textbooks for comparison: "Sociology is the study of groups, institutions which coordinate the efforts of group members, and the personalities and attitudes which are defined in connection with such collective behavior" (Dawson, 1935, p. 2); "Sociology, therefore, is the science of the structure, functions, operations, processes and changes in the field of human relationships. Its objective is to determine the WHAT-in form and process. Basically sociology has two general areas—the Static, or the structural part of society, and the Dynamic, or the changes which occur" (Bossard & Siward, 1952, p. 6); "Sociology is the study of human beings in their group relationships" (Rouček, 1957, p. 3); "Sociology is the science that deals with social groups: their internal forms or modes of organization, the processes that tend to maintain or change these forms of organization, and the relations between groups" (Johnson, 1960, p. 2); "Sociology is an organized endeavour to increase human self-knowledge and self-understanding through the systematic study of our social life" (Goldthorpe, 1985, p. 3); "Sociology is the systematic study of the ways in which people are affected by, and affect, the social structures and social processes that are associated with the groups, organizations, cultures, societies, and the world in which they exist" (Ritzer, 2013, p. 3); "Sociology is the scientific study of human society and social behaviour" (Cumming, 2020, p.4). Some recent textbooks do not appear even to define sociology (Quan-Haase & Tepperman, 2018; Van Tubergen, 2020). Others (Steckley, 2020), offer explanations for not, by saying, "giving a precise, all-encompassing explanation of what sociology is would be much more difficult (and probably less useful) than explaining what sociology does" (p. 8). To their credit, they are trying to write about a subject that has never been clearly defined, so why should the responsibility be placed on them? This brings us to the next question, does the definition of sociology matter? In The Sociological Imagination, Mills (1959/2000) would say yes, as "the purpose of definition is to focus argument upon fact, and that the proper result of good definition is to transform argument over terms into disagreements about fact, and thus open arguments to further inquiry." Or as Swedberg (2021) said more recently in an article on method: "Instead sociology has its own distinct object of study, like any science. This object of study is determined by the way that sociology is defined (p. 110)." With that said, the evolution of my definition stems from a few other similar definitions. Richard Jenkins (2002) calls sociology the study of the "human world" or "world of humans" and relates this to Bauman and May's (2001) definition of the study of the "human-made" world in Thinking Sociologically. However, suppose we stick with either of these similar definitions. In that case, climate change is eliminated from under the umbrella of sociology as climate change is a natural process. Still, humans are altering and accelerating the effects faster than the earth's natural scale (Lynas et al., 2021). So, either climate change does not count under the study of sociology, which others (Koehrsen et al., 2020) have noted is practically nonexistent in the literature anyways, or we modify the definition to include it, as others have argued should be done in intro courses (Liu & Szasz, 2019). Sociology should include climate change because our altering is cultural: human-shaped climate change is distinct from natural climate change. Therefore, tweak "human-made" because we do not make climate change and "made" sounds finite and passive, to "shaped," which is active and malleable, changeable. Bauman and May (2019) agree with this definitional change whether they know it or not, as they say, human-shaped climate change is a part of culture, "The first we might call culture and the second nature. Thus, when we think of something as being a matter of culture, rather than nature, we are implying that the thing in question is subject to manipulation and our influence and, further, that there is a desirable, "proper" end‐state from which to judge its effectiveness" (p. 123). All these small changes are designed to clarify already good definitions. These definitional adjustments are made to synch the meaning of culture to sociology. ↵
- What Goes in the Textbook? There is no "correct" way to write an introductory sociology textbook, their content ebbs and flows like waves through time. Older textbooks (anything up to the 1950s) were usually massive endeavors, in the 700-1000 plus page range, often meeting or exceeding thirty chapters. Most modern textbooks (last twenty years or so) appear to be rarely over 500 words, with a chapter range of around fifteen to match the average length of a term (one chapter per week). However, do not mistake quantity for quality; many earlier writers do not seem to have ever heard the word succinct. Although this does not mean that more modern textbooks have cut things out, they have just become dense and congested. It is like they are challenging each other to overwhelm the reader with as much content as possible. How many charts, graphs, captioned pictures, sidebars of key terms, etc. can we fit on one page? This must be their starting question. The pages are weighed down with so much ink that it is a workout to turn to the next. The topics of those chapters vary as expected. For example, Herrick (1980) shows a consensus of the issues covered in selecting textbooks published in 1978-1979, with unanimous coverage of theory and socialization and a complete lack of content on medicine/health and ecology. In a survey of textbooks from the 1920s-1970s, Wells (1979) shows how sociological perspectives and sociologists themselves rise and fall out of fashion, with conflict theory rising to equal ranks of coverage to functionalism around 1970 and that "the alternative approaches of Goffman, Berger, Homans, and Lenski are strongly represented" (p. 436), which I assume later to be “officially” classified as the interactionist perspective by Herbert Blumer. In a meta-analysis of introductory textbooks from 1958-1977, Perrucci (1980) found that earlier books (1958-1962) stressed sociology as objective science, "society, closely aligned with the natural science model" (p. 42). In an article called "Was There A "Golden Past" for the Introductory Sociology Textbook?" Wright (1995) notes several reasons for the quality of textbooks and the cookie-cutter-like nature, especially more modern ones. Perrucci concludes that one of the main goals of all the introductory sociology books analyzed and one that they fail at doing so is preparing students to use sociology in their everyday life: "Student centered goals frequently are mentioned in the first chapter of textbooks, or in a special preface to students about "why this book was written, and how it should be used." Unfortunately, these purposes rarely find their way into the remaining chapters" (p. 48). Furthermore, "In conclusion, I hope that sociologists who write introductory textbooks in the next decade (if there are any) will attempt to break away from the image of the textbook created by market research, which makes for increasing standardization of content. Some textbooks should be addressed to the overwhelming majority of students who never will become "majors," and who never may take a second course despite our efforts. The first course for such students should be more substantive than at present, more akin to a social problems course. And it should be more of an introduction to the sociological way of looking at the world than a survey of the field" (p. 48-49). This survey of the field is the de facto style of modern textbooks. In a fantastic analysis of content in introductory courses and breakdown of how he teaches them by the most successful textbook author and translated American sociologist prior to World War II (LoConto, 2011, p. 113), Charles Ellwood (1907), it is somewhat comforting to see how similar I teach my own compared to someone doing the same over a century earlier. However, he also warns that "I must disclaim, at the outset any intention of laying down dogmatic rules as to, how sociology and allied subjects should be taught. I have not sufficiently reflected upon the matter, nor is my experience sufficiently wide, to warrant my laying down such rules. Again, I do, not believe that one teacher can make rigid rules for the guidance of another, even in the same field; the most that can be done is that a certain order and method can be indicated, and suggestions as to' details given" (p. 589). The content of what constitutes an intro sociology textbook can best be summed up with an attempt to come to a consensus of concepts that should be covered in books in the late 1930s. It is quicker to mention the quote that Foreman (1938) is reminded of, "Sociology is whatever is taught under that name" (p. 211). Everyone seems to have their interpretation of what should be taught. ↵
- *This again is not an exhaustive search of the literature. However, for a word so commonplace in sociology, its definition should be as easy to find, well-known, and agreed upon as teeth are to dentistry. What is Culture? Culture is such a ubiquitous term that its definition is indefinite. People know what it means without knowing what it means. Most of the time, it is not even defined. While the definition of sociology and the method(s) used to study it are, dare I say, contested, as I talked about in the notes above (and later chapter 15), no one seems to care about defining culture; this is problematic. Even from the very beginning, "The concept of "culture" was implicit in the social theories of Comte, as it had been in the theories of Vico and Montesquieu before him, but it was scarcely made explicit. In short, as long as sociology remained primarily social philosophy, it achieved little more than the incomplete determination of one or two point-of-view concepts, which served to indicate the direction of attention which sociological inquiry would have to take or to designate, vaguely, the objects of attention with which a science of sociology would have to be concerned. To define a point of view for a science is much the same thing as to define its objects of attention; the one aim is accomplished in about the same measure as the other" (House, 1936, p. 378). In its earliest days, sociology tasked itself with finding a method but never precisely defined what that method was to measure. This has been a never-ending story. T.S. Eliot (1948/1988) points to this problem at the outset of Notes towards the Definition of Culture regarding a policy document by the United Nations, "I only quote them to call attention to the word culture, and to suggest that before acting on such resolutions we should try to find out what this one word means. This is only one of innumerable instances which might be cited, of the use of a word which nobody bothers to examine" (p. 14). Elliot notes that people generally use culture as shorthand for two things: art or as an "emotional stimulant." Raymond Williams (1976/2011) extensively traces the history of the word. He expands this to three options in his Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society: a process of development, a way of life, and art – "often now the most widespread use" (p. 80). Pierre Bourdieu (1984) picks up on this option in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. However, even though he mentions the word culture hundreds of times and is famously associated with sub-concepts of culture (e.g., cultural capital), he never actually defines the root version of it (to be fair, Bourdieu (1977, p.2) did lay out some grand theory on the term earlier, "It is significant that "culture" is sometimes described as a map; it is the analogy which occurs to an outsider who has to find his way around in a foreign landscape and who compensates for his lack of practical mastery, the prerogative of the native, by the use of a model of all possible routes"). This theme continues with another work in the top ten Books of the XX Century by the International Sociological Association (ISA). Others anointed to the top of the cultural mountain of sociology, such as Berger & Luckmann's (1967) The Social Construction of Reality, is erroneously associated with "culture," even though they make passing reference to the term a handful of times (eight to be exact) and do not define or attempt to in any of those mentions (ironically Peter Berger was Director of the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at the time). Entire books on the subject do not appear to define culture (e.g., Iyall Smith, 2013; Stewart, 2013; Inglis & Almila, 2016). Spillman (2020) says, "What is needed is a sociological concept of culture which offers coherence in complexity. Since the seventies, cultural sociologists have been working with just such a concept." From what I can glean, cultural sociology is more focused on the interactionist approach, "analyzing cultural forms, interaction, and the organization of production" through the "meaning-making process" (I both understand what they are saying and do not at the same time, the social structure is included sometimes, but others not? Speaking of social structures, I will not so subtly leave this quote from The Sociological Imagination here: "Any writing - perhaps apart from that of certain truly great stylists – that is not imaginable as human speech is bad writing"). Rather than go through historical definitions of culture from introductory textbooks, I will supply a few of the recent ones for sampling and comparison: "Culture encompasses the ideas, values, practices, and material objects that allow a group of people, even an entire society, to carry out their collective lives in relative order and harmony" (Ritzer, 2013, p. 116); Quan-Haase & Tepperman (2018), are consistent with their lack of definition for sociology and culture; "Culture is a system of behaviour, beliefs, knowledge, practices, values, and concrete materials including buildings, tools, and sacred items" (Steckley, 2020, p. 72); "Culture is the shared set of influences (including beliefs, values, rules, behaviours, objects, media, and language) that we use to make sense of the world around us – they are passed on from one generation to the next, shaping us, and in turn we shape them as we pass them on to the future" (Cumming, 2020, p. 44). There appears to be commonality with these definitions, but they list examples of culture that could be extended indefinitely, shotgun definitions – throwing out everything and hoping something hits. Even the fantastic resource, The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology, reluctantly states regarding the concept of culture, “There has not unfortunately been much precision in its use” (Abercrombie et al., 2006, p. 92). To get to the pièce de resistance, measuring culture. In Measuring Culture (Mohr etc. al, 2020), a book authored by nine people, they point out the elephant in the room early on: "One perennial issue is the ambiguity of the very term culture, which resists a consensual, unitary definition. This perceived lack of conceptual clarity and analytic specification opens up the field to methodological criticism from social scientists that expect more clearly delimited concepts" (p. 15). They would be correct; you cannot measure something you have not defined. The first chapter opens with another disclaimer, which does nothing to stop them from proceeding regardless, "As we have already discussed, culture is a hard concept to define. Yet most-if not all-sociologists would agree that the study of culture and meaning-making centers on how social life is structured by extra-individual forces" (p. 21). I am starting to think there is some hip, avant-garde, postmodern club, where everyone seems to know what culture is but for me, and therefore not cool enough to join. However, this is less a slight of them, although it is a bit concerning that they do not attempt to solve this issue, and more of the massive problem of a lack of precision just being acceptable practice in sociology – which is unacceptable in any “scientific” field. Although, in their conclusion, they say/stumble upon something I like, "In short, we simultaneously shape and are shaped by our collective categories and narratives" (p. 158). My definition of culture is similar to this, but I give mine in the first few pages of the book, not sixteen pages from the end of it. Oddly enough, we must go back a century ago to find some conviction in sociology and its relation to culture. In the beautifully written one thousand plus page tome from 1924 by Clarence Marsh Case, Outlines of Introductory Sociology: A Textbook of Readings in Social Science, this compilation of sociological arguments up to that point argues that the social sciences "deal primarily with culture… Culture itself is a phenomenon which has no existence for any of the sciences devoted to the strictly physical, organic, or mental orders of fact; nor can the comprehension of it be reached by combining the viewpoints of the physical, biological, and psychological sciences, which deal with the first three orders of phenomena. The superorganic constitutes a distinct, but of course not an isolated or detached, order of facts in the phenomenal, objective world, and it has to be studied by analyzing it on its own ground and in its own terms, and not by extending over it the notions and terms arrived at in the sciences which study the lower, if not simpler, orders of phenomena. This recognition of the distinctive nature of culture, and of the necessity for comprehending it as a distinct order of facts which must suggest its own method of study, is one of the most significant aspects of social science today" (Case, 1924, p. xvii-xviii). I am interpreting this as sociology is culture, needs to study culture because it is the only one that can, and it must do so with its own method. The hurdle that has been dodged since day one is creating an overarching, umbrella definition of culture. Bauman and May (2019) have said it is the "human-made elements" (p. 125), Jenkins (2002) reflects a similar notion as "Culture is definitively artificial, the product and achievement of human beings" (p. 53). Thousands of examples could be listed, but guess what? They would all be correct definitions! It is easier to define culture by everything it is not. Anything that humans do not shape is not culture. Anything that humans shape is culture. By making the broadest definition possible, it paradoxically makes it concise. Lastly, this definition explicitly allows for the inclusion of human-shaped climate change. Bauman and May's does not, and the positive qualifier of "achievement" Jenkins uses is potentially troublesome (do we want to say that we achieved slavery?). Artificial product is better, but who made the product, humans. In other words, culture is artificial because humans made it, so we created it. Culture is the artificial creation of humans. Even better definition, but we did not create climate change, and it is not artificial. Thus, culture is the human-shaped world. ↵
- What is the Purpose of Sociology? There has never been a consensus on what sociology's purpose is. Sociology has evolved ever since Comte defined the (his) purpose in the 1830s in Course in Positive Philosophy. Not long after, luminaries such as Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim criticized Comte's approach to sociology. Support for highly political topics from far-right eugenics and sterilization to being against the "far-left ideological views of many critical sociologists" (Turner, 2019) has, in some form, or another always spanned the timeline of the discipline. In a discussion after a presentation by Francis Galton (1904) on the definition, scope, and aim of eugenics in sociology, the response was less than unanimous. Household names from the literary world such as H.G. Wells, referred to Galton as "one of the great founders of sociology," was skeptical, but "impressed by the idea" of a test that would make it so that "superior persons must mate with superior persons, inferior persons must not have offspring at all." George Bernard Shaw agreed that eugenics was the only thing that could "save our civilization," while the chair of the meeting Karl Pearson, skewered and laughed Galton out of the room. In his rebuttal after the debate, Galton chose not to acknowledge the comments of Pearson. In an intro textbook by former President of the American Sociological Association (ASA - originally the American Sociological Society until renamed in 1959), Emory Bogardus (1917), he closes the book with the following paragraph: "A person with a sociological point of view would not engage in any business which is destructive and socially non-productive. If a lawyer, he would not assist clients to violate the laws of the land. If a citizen, he would place his interest in the government ahead of his own private interests for gain. He would encourage everywhere and always the human standard of values as opposed to the cash standard. It is only upon the basis of the sociological point of view that the welfare of mankind can be speedily and rationally increased" (325-326). Similar improvement themes are advocated in the closing chapter of a textbook by Walter Beach and William Ogburn (1925), another ASA President, stating progress is measured by the removal of social evils in society, "Social evils are those conditions and aspects of the organization of society itself which build poor life rather than full or abundant life" (p. 356). However, this "activist" purpose has come under fire in “recent years”. Turner's proposed project, the Theoretical Principles of Sociological Practice to deal with the many types of approaches to sociology (e.g., applied, professional, policy, critical, and public), is not unlike that pitched in Lewis's (1919) closing chapter of his introductory textbook one hundred years earlier on the purpose of sociology. In it, he too is trying to maintain an objective aspect of sociology but use this knowledge to improve society from a scientific perspective, not a predisposed activist one, outlining that: "Pure Sociology" relates to the science which seeks the laws of the social process, while "Applied Sociology" seeks the social arts by which the social process may be modified for human betterment. Applied sociology must build itself upon the knowledge obtained by pure sociology, as applied mechanics proceeds upon the information obtained from theoretical mechanics (p. 210)." The theme, if you have not picked up on it already, is that the "current" debates of sociology's purpose were happening before the people debating it now were even born. In that closing chapter by Lewis, he is referencing the work of Lester Ward, the first President of what would become the American Sociological Association. In the preface of the first edition of Dynamic Sociology, Ward (1883) states that "The real object of science is to benefit man. A science which fails to do this, however agreeable its study, is lifeless. Sociology, which of all sciences should benefit man most, is in danger of falling into the class of polite amusements, or dead sciences. It is the object of this work to point out a method by which the breath of life may be breathed into its nostrils" (p. xxvii). This danger of sociology becoming a "dead science" was still being issued almost 50 years later by other ASA Presidents (e.g., Ellwood, 1931, p. 15). If there is any consensus in sociology, it appears to be that sociology's general purpose is to improve society in the liberal sense of the term (no one is saying the opposite) but that a proper method is used in doing so. I appreciate the passion of people who see the discipline going in what they see as a wrong direction and propose solutions to rectify it or reluctantly see splitting it into "two sociologies" (Turner, 2019). Allow me to join that list by going to what I see as the root of the problem. From what I have gathered, sociology lacks a clear purpose, topic of study (see chapter 2), and method of doing so (see chapter 15). If sociology is to be a legitimate science and not an "activist" discipline to be hijacked or a pseudoscience, which it is much closer to than sociologists would like to believe, it must resolve these problems that have plagued the discipline since the start. I have provided my answers/proposed solutions in this book. I understand that people will disagree with what I say in this book; I expect that because I know that I am not the dictator over sociology. However, we must start somewhere or to quote James Baldwin, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." This is less a decree of what I am saying sociology is and more of a suggested starting point for defining what it is to be, to be shaped into consensus. It is frustrating when people say the topic of sociology is "complex" or definitions are "difficult" but make no effort to clarify or define these terms. I teach sociology. I do not stand behind a podium and lecture on it. If a student asks me what culture is, I cannot just ramble off examples and expect them to understand this or assume they will not prod with follow-up questions. They will, and I better have an answer aside from it is "complex" or "difficult" to describe. If they answered these questions in a paper in this manner, they would get an F, but somehow, we are giving ourselves an A? I sought a career in a diverse field in sociology; I am not shocked to find that it is not simplified. In other words, I am very aware of what David Lee (1983) said in the preface to his introductory text in sociology: a Nobody has ever written a decent sociology textbook. b Nobody ever will. ↵
- Mills (1959/2000) says the concept of 'social structure' is "the combination of institutions classified according to the functions each performs." ↵
- Mills (2000) uses the terms of biography and history, but also uses the phrase “self and world” (p. 9) interchangeably. Mills referred to the individual with multiple synonyms like man, biography, or self. And the general idea of the social structure as society, history, or world throughout the book. ↵
The scientific study of the human-shaped structure. Sociology is one of several social sciences that study elements of culture. For sociology, the focus is on the structure.
Is the human-shaped world. See Figure 1.5 in the text for what does and does not qualify as culture (hint: almost everything does). The social sciences all study culture, but each focuses on a specific element. For sociology, the focus is on the structure.
This is a way of thinking about an individual's life related to the social structure. It is about the interplay between one's personal troubles (individual) and public issues (society) and the relationship between the two.
This is a way of seeing the human-shaped world. This is done by using different "lens" or perspectives. By doing so, we can analyze social phenomena from outside our point of view and incorporate the lives of others into understanding social issues.
This is the cultural focus that sociology studies. We can visualize the structure like an eggshell; everything inside is culture (and outside and even the shell itself!). If it helps, picture yourself inside of a giant egg right now. There's a bunch of stuff inside, and you see the inner walls of the shell. Sociology is mainly concerned with how everything relates to the shell (the structure). Notice how the shell limits you; it is putting pressure on you, your freedom of movement. In our case, our human-shaped structure is the sustaining institutions that we have culturally constructed and maintained (through ideology). In other words, it is the world you inhabit at the time you are alive. Do you think the world you live in places limits on you like inside the egg?
These are the established elements that sustain the social structure and thus society. The interaction with these institutions (e.g., economies, the state, religion, etc.) leads to structured behavior patterns. Think about how often you interact with these institutions in your life, how much they shape your behavior, and the choices you can and cannot make because of them.
Is the ability to control others despite resistance. Related to authority. In the example given in the authority definition with the police, those with more power (e.g., government officials, wealthy people) can summon the police for their own doing. You and I can call the police because someone broke into our car and they will eventually arrive. But politicians and wealthy people do not have that risk because they can have the police escorting them around and dispatch anyone causing problems or otherwise bothering them. You and I do not have that kind of power.
Is the power of influence through convincing force. A police officer has authority, for example, the threat of arresting you. They do not need to arrest you to get you to obey, but the fact that you know it is a possibility influences you to do as you are told.
Is the beliefs and system of ideas that uphold the social structure (and, to a further extent culture). For example, capitalism is the dominant economic system in the world. There are other alternatives, but those with the power and authority to change the system do not (mainly because the existing structure benefits them). There is nothing natural about ideology; they are choices.
This is our ability to move about and make choices in the social structure. For example, when you're in your home, you do lots of activities, like making food, decorating, or just lounging around. You are demonstrating agency within the walls of your home. However, this freedom of movement is reduced outside of it. There are pressures placed upon you via the larger structure (e.g., having to go to school, work, make appointments, follow social norms, etc.) that limit your agency. In other words, you never really have "free will" to do whatever you want.