Sociology

John Farley, Michael Flota, John E. Farley, Michael W. Flota

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315527598
• Edition: 7
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This best-selling textbook returns for a seventh edition with material on the most fundamental and fascinating issues in sociology today. The authors continue their tradition of focusing on the big picture, with an emphasis on race, class, and gender in every chapter. The text continues to frame sociological debates around the major theoretical perspectives of sociology and focus on capturing students' imaginations with cutting-edge research and real-world events. The hallmark of the book continues to be clear writing that helps students understand the intricacies of the discipline like no other textbook on the market.

New to the seventh edition

• Expanded focus on new social movements such as Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and the Tea Party.
• Updates on both the 2012 and 2016 elections.
• New discussions of Donald Trump and the immigration debate; causes and consequences.
• New discussions of "patriot" movements, racism, and the reaction to the first African American president.
• Expanded coverage of sexual orientation and LGBT issues.
• Updates on gay rights and the historic legalization of same-sex marriage.
• New sections on cyber life discussion issues such as cyber bullying and public shaming; WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden, and NSA spying; sexting and youth culture; the Arab Spring; and social media activism.
• New coverage of the so-called "he-cession" and the rise of women managers (whom employers still see as risky but, increasingly, as highly talented).
• Updates on health-care reform, five years on and the efforts to repeal and replace "Obamacare".
• Expanded coverage of mass shootings and the corresponding policy debates.
• Expanded coverage and new focus on police-involved shootings and gun control in the "Deviance, Crime, and Social Control" chapter.
• New discussions of the sociology of finance, including the role of financial derivatives in the 2008 global financial crisis.
• New photos and updated figures and tables throughout the text.

Part I
Introduction

Chapter 1
Sociology: The Discipline

What Is Sociology?

Characteristics of Sociology

Sociology and Common Sense

Sociology as a Science

Science as a Way of Thinking

The Norms of Science

Sociology as a Social Science

Can Human Behavior Be Studied Scientifically?

An Analogy: Meteorology

Complications in the Study of Human Behavior

The Sociological Imagination

Sociology and the Other Social Sciences

Sociology

The Other Social Sciences

The Emergence and Development of Sociology

The Nineteenth Century

Early Sociologists

The Development of Sociology in the United States

The Chicago School

Symbolic-Interactionism

1940–1960: A Turn from Activism

The 1960s: Return to Activism

The 1970s into the New Millennium: Diversity in Sociological Perspectives

PUTTING SOCIOLOGY TO WORK

How Sociology Can Be Used to Solve Real-Life Problems

Summary

Key Terms

Exercises

Did education, race, and gender make any difference in how different Americans responded to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks?

Why did white people and black people react so differently to the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, an African American who was arrested after “breaking into” his own home?

Why is it that some people can’t wait to use the Internet, while others hardly know what it is?

Is it true that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer?

Does capital punishment deter murder?

What can we do to make work more enjoyable and more productive? Can we do both at the same time?

Have you wondered about the answers to any of these questions or others like them? If you have, sociology is a good place to look for the answers. What sociology does, first and foremost, is to study human groups and societal arrangements to find out the answers to questions like these. There is great diversity within sociology in terms of methods, theories, and the exact subject matter studied, but there are also two core commonalities. First, sociologists believe that questions like the ones above can be answered through systematic observation. Second, sociologists believe that in order to answer such questions adequately, we must examine the influences of human groups and societal arrangements on behavior. These two shared beliefs or viewpoints make up what sociologists often call the sociological perspective.

What Is Sociology?

Sociology is a systematic approach to thinking about, studying, and understanding society, human social behavior, and social groups. It is different from other approaches to understanding human behavior in two key ways. First, its major emphasis is on how social groups and the larger society influence behavior. In this regard, it is different from psychology, for example, which primarily looks within the individual for explanations of human behavior. Second, sociology does not focus on certain specific areas of human behavior (as, for example, do political science and economics), but rather seeks to explain the broad range of human behavior as it is influenced by social groups and society. The behavior studied by sociology includes the collective actions of groups and societies, not just the actions of individuals.

Characteristics of Sociology

As previously stated, the sociological perspective holds that questions about human behavior can be answered through systematic observation. Because it uses systematic observation as its way of answering such questions, sociology is regarded as a science by most sociologists. Science is an approach to understanding reality that asks and answers questions based on systematic observation, generalization, and interpretation. In the next section, we shall contrast science with another way of understanding reality, common sense. But first there are two other characteristics of sociology we need to mention. One is that sociology is one of a group of sciences known as the social sciences. The social sciences use the methods of science in order to understand human social behavior. The other characteristic is that, as stated in our opening description of the sociological perspective, sociology focuses primarily on the influences of human groups and of the larger society on behavior. By human groups, we mean collectivities of people who share something in common, such as race, educational level, gender, or profession. Because of its interest in the influences of human groups and of society on behavior, sociology often studies human behavior on a relatively large scale. It is more interested in explaining how most people in a given situation or group will behave than in predicting how a particular individual will behave. For example, a sociologist who studies race relations would not have been at all surprised at the different reactions of black and white Americans to the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Lewis Gates: The two groups looked at it from very different sets of shared experiences, concerns, and viewpoints. These shared characteristics, which are different for whites and African Americans, led to very different patterns of reaction to the incident among the two groups. Whites saw a black man who had become belligerent and uncooperative with a police officer, whereas African Americans saw a white police officer arresting a black man in his own home. When asked if the police officer acted “stupidly” only 29 percent of whites said yes, compared with 59 percent of blacks (Steinhauser, 2009). The collective experiences and fears of both groups conditioned them to see the case in these different ways, and thus to come to different conclusions about who was in the wrong. Thus, while sociology could not necessarily predict with certainty how a particular white person or African American would react to the incident, the overall pattern of reactions among the two groups was quite predictable if you knew enough about the sociology of race relations.

Sociology and Common Sense

As noted previously, sociology, or any science, differs from common sense in its approach toward understanding the world. The main difference is that common sense takes things for granted, while science does not: In a science such as sociology, any assump tion is up for question; nothing is taken for granted. This is not to dispute the value of common sense. Years ago, a man in Minneapolis fell off his roof trying to get a better look at a tornado passing through the city. Clearly, common sense tells us that it is stupid to stand on a roof during a tornado! But there are other things it may not be able to tell us. Try using common sense to answer the true/false questions that appear in the box “A Common Sense Quiz.”

Common sense probably suggested an answer to many of these questions. But was it the right answer? Turn ahead now to the box “A Common Sense Quiz: The Answers” to find out.

How did you do? If you are like most students, you got several answers wrong. In fact, based on similar quizzes we’ve given in our introductory classes, we are sure that some of you got half or more of the answers wrong. The point? Common sense is great for some things (like telling you to stay off a roof during tornadoes), but in many other situations, it is totally inadequate, and we must use other means of understanding the world. Sociology is one such way.

In fact, one recent president of the American Sociological Association has argued that this is the greatest benefit of sociology: It reveals the often unexpected consequences of things that we do (Portes, 2000). For example, it makes perfect sense that the 1986 immigration reforms, which penalized employers for hiring illegal aliens and increased funding for the border patrol, might reduce illegal immigration. However, actual sociological research on the consequences of the immigration law showed that this was not the case; if anything, illegal immigration increased, because both would-be immigrants and would-be employers of illegal immigrants found new, more clever ways to get around the new law (Portes, 2000).

Immigration and conflict over it continue to be a subject of interest to sociologists. Opposition to immigration played a role in the election of President Donald Trump. (© JStone/Shutterstock.com)

SOCIOLOGICAL INSIGHTS
A Common Sense Quiz

Like everything else, common sense is good for some things and not for others. Try using common sense to decide whether the following statements are true or false:

1. Making contraceptives available to teenagers through school clinics will push them to be more sexually active, because they won’t have to worry about pregnancy.
2. People who live in the southern part of the United States drink less alcohol than people who live in the North.
3. When exiting a “burning theater” or some similar emergency in a confined space, people are often trampled when trying to escape, because everyone thinks only of themselves in such a life or death situation and will trample others to save themselves.
4. When a disaster is forecast, the best predictor of whether people will plan and take actions to protect themselves is whether or not they believe the forecast.
5. The higher the percentage of people in a population who drink, the higher the percentage of alcoholics there will be in that population.
6. During the days immediately following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Americans were unified in their confidence that a military response to the attacks would be effective.
7. Now that we have civil rights laws, the gap between black and white family incomes in the United States has considerably narrowed.
8. Juvenile delinquents generally commit the same kinds of crime as adult criminals.
9. Overcrowding in American cities is an important reason for the much higher urban crime rates in the last three decades as compared with earlier decades.
10. The incidence of homosexuality in the United States today is no greater relative to the population than it was 40 or 50 years ago.

Sociology as a Science

Science as a Way of Thinking

We have said that most sociologists view their discipline as a science. Science is one of several possible ways of understanding reality. As we have already seen, common sense is another way of understanding reality, and faith and tradition are yet others. Each of these ways is useful for understanding certain kinds of things. However, as the previous commonsense example illustrated, each also has its limitations.

Science is based on systematic observation or measurement, called research. While this enables us to answer questions that can’t be reliably answered by common sense or faith and tradition, it has its limitations, as does any way of understanding reality. For one, it can only answer questions about things that can be observed, such as human behavior. It cannot answer questions, for example, about the existence of heaven and hell or about the meaning of life. In addition, the meaning or significance of what is observed is almost always open to some debate, particularly in the social sciences, which study human behavior. In spite of these limitations, science has become the most widely used way of understanding reality in modern industrial societies.

Through research, scientists look for regular and systematic patterns, a process called generalization. They try to find relationships in which the presence of one condition often or usually leads to some other condition. When they find such regularities, scientists try to explain them by developing a theory—a set of interrelated arguments that seek to describe and explain cause-effect relationships. Good theory offers new explanations for patterns that have been observed through research, or predicts findings that might be expected based upon the theory’s argument. Good research may test a relationship proposed in a theory, or it may identify new patterns or relationships in need of explanation by a theory. Thus, science—including sociology—becomes an ongoing cycle of observation, which leads to generalization that describes regular patterns based upon what has been observed. The next step is explanation of these patterns through theories, which in turn engage in prediction regarding relationships to be found in other situations or about new relationships that logically follow from the explanations offered by the theory. After this, the cycle begins again with a new round of research (observation) to see whether the theory’s predictions can be confirmed. This basic method, used in sociology and all other sciences, is called the scientific method. Its use in sociology is more fully discussed in Chapter 2.

The Norms of Science

Organized Skepticism

The basic approach described previously—a cycle of inquiry consisting of observation, generalization, explanation, and prediction—is shared by both the natural sciences, such as physics, chemistry, astronomy, and biology, which study natural phenomena, and the social sciences, such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, and political science, which study human behavior. Certain norms or expectations are shared in all of the sciences (Merton, 1973). The most important of these is organized skepticism, which states that science accepts nothing on the basis of faith, common sense, or because someone claims it is true. Rather, it must be demonstrated by systematic observation. While science is often marked by several competing theories, each purporting to offer the true explanation for something, scientists will not believe any of the theories until the things predicted by the theory have been consistently shown by research to be true. If scientists observe patterns that are not consistent with the theory, it will be either modified or rejected.

Sociology as a Social Science

Can Human Behavior Be Studied Scientifically?

As noted earlier, sociology is one of the social sciences, which are concerned with the study of human thought and behavior and human social institutions. All of the social sciences share the common assumption that human social behavior can be studied scientifically, although there are great debates concerning how best to accomplish this. Social scientists believe that certain patterns and regularities in human behavior enable them to predict and explain human behavior to a substantial extent. Is this assumption true? Can human behavior be studied scientifically?

Many people would argue that it cannot. Because each person is an individual, capable of making free choices about an almost infinite number of things, how can we view human behavior as r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Brief Contents
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Photographs
• List of Tables
• List of Boxes
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Society and Human Interaction
• Part III Social Structure and Inequality
• Part IV Social Institutions
• Part V Social Change
• Glossary
• Index