Social Science

An Introduction to the Study of Society

David Colander, Elgin Hunt, David C. Colander, Elgin F. Hunt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032150772
• eBook ISBN: 9781000512823
• Edition: 18
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Now in its eigthteenth edition, Social Science: An Introduction to the Study of Society approaches its study from a common sense perspective, rather than a formalistic perspective more common in social science texts. Readers will see how seemingly diverse disciplines intermingle and connect to one another—anthropology and economics, for example. The goal of the book is to teach students critical thinking and problem-solving skills that will allow them to approach social issues in an objective and informed way.

New to this edition are significant updates on:

• Debates about the limits of democracy, and the developing Chinese political alternative.
• Political, economic, and social implications of the Covid pandemic.
• Assessment of the Donald Trump presidency.
• Political, economic, and social implications of the movement from the Trump presidency to the Biden presidency.
• Implications of the multitrillion-dollar budget deficits the US government has been running.
• The emergence of populist movements throughout the world.
• The Chinese political and economic challenge to the United States.
• Recent developments in evolution theory.
• Examples, data, recommended readings, and Internet questions.
• Critical thinking questions.

Part I Introduction

chapter 1Social science and its Methods

DOI: 10.4324/9781003242390-1

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

• Define social science and explain why it is important
• List the various social sciences
• State the nine steps that make up the scientific method
• Discuss some reasonable approaches to problems in social science
• Differentiate the historical method from the case method and the comparative method
• Distinguish educated common sense from common sense
• Explain why a good scientist is always open to new ways of looking at issues

Theories should be as simple as possible, but not more so.

—Albert Einstein

On January 6,2021, a crowd of US citizens broke into the halls of the US Congress in an attempt to disrupt the ratification of the Electoral College formal election of President Joe Biden. Thus marked the end of the four-year term of Donald Trump as president of the United States. His years as president were fraught with turmoil. He was impeached twice by Congress, with votes reflecting party lines. The liberal elite never accepted him as a legitimate president, and his opponent in 2016 called his election illegitimate, even as she conceded defeat. Their belief was that a well-functioning democracy would never have elected him. Conservatives were mixed on Trump, but about 30 percent of the US population strongly agreed with him, and he lost the election in 2020 by only a small number of votes in a few swing states. The vote could have easily gone the other way, had things played out a little differently. The turmoil was predictable. Thus, in the last edition, I opened the book with the following description of election night when Trump was elected: On November 8, 2016, people gathered around the television at (insert just about any Eastern Seaboard College or University) expecting to cheer Hillary Clinton becoming the first woman president of the United States. The mood was happy; polls predicted a Clinton victory. As the night progressed, the mood changed. Donald Trump, her Republican opponent, who many establishment Republicans had opposed, was doing better than expected; Trump actually had a chance; Trump was leading; Trump had won! Shock and awe is about the only way to describe it. For many in that group, Trump’s victory was cataclysmic—they saw it as marking an end of American democracy as they knew it.

The Jan 6, 2021 Washington demonstration.

© Tyler Merbler/Wikipedia

That same evening people gathered around the television in (insert just about any southern, rural, mainly white, working-class, midwestern, non-university town) and had a reverse reaction. Finally, they had been heard. Someone was coming into office who would tell it like it is, drain the swamp, and stick the liberal Eastern establishment elite’s political correctness up their collective wazoo, where they felt it belongs. They were concerned about justice for all, but they wanted a justice for all that included justice for them. They were tired of being considered despicable; they were tired of wishy-washy politicians whose views were so filtered that they were at best pablum of the mind. They were tired of politicians who felt they had the right to force their values and worldviews on everyone.¹

¹ The phrasing is, I suspect, jarring for many readers—that’s not the way textbooks sound. I use the Trumpesque phrasing in the same way that Trump uses it (as explained in his Art of the Deal—to jar, and to set discussion agenda on his terms). I now return to normal textbookeze.

Other groups dispersed around the country had different reactions. For example, there were those who would be directly affected by the policies Trump had advocated in the campaign. These included black people, minorities, and immigrants, among others. Their concerns were not intellectual; their concerns were real and pragmatic. What would Trumps election mean for policy? Would immigration be ended? Would Dreamers (children who were brought to the United States illegally, but who had lived just about their entire life there) be deported? Would anti-discrimination policies be ended?. . . Welcome to social science.

Trump stayed in office for four years. His time in power was divisive. The Eastern liberal establishment never came to accept that he had won, and fought to push him out of office through impeachment and whatever other legal methods they could find. Trump saw such attempts as signs that a “deep state” existed that ruled the United States and that was unwilling to accept his election. He responded by challenging the fairness and legitimacy of the US election system.

Recent previous editions of this book began with a discussion of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and its effect on society and culture. September 11 served as a focal point for discussions of the interconnections among political, social, cultural, and economic aspects of life. It was an event that pulled the United States together. Trumps victory was a quite different event, but it also served as a focal point of the interconnections—only this time the focus, was on forces pulling US society apart, not pushing it together. The United States has become polarized politically, culturally, and economically. The animosity on both sides continued through Trump’s presidency, which is why the election of 2020 was equally divisive. In the 2020 election, for a variety of reasons, Trump had lost important elements of his supporters since 2016. His opponent, Joe Biden, advocated a more civil approach, but he was also interested in implementing his policies in whatever way he could. Neither side showed a willingness to understand the other side’s view and to compromise on policy to a degree that would lead to any bipartisan policy agreement. So whether the older civility can be brought back, or whether it has been permanently replaced by visceral infighting among elites and calls for illegitimacy on both sides, remains to be seen. Those questions will be key social questions that will be explored throughout the book. That’s because social science is the study of social, cultural, psychological, economic, and political forces that guide individuals in their actions— it is the analysis of those forces that push society apart and pull it together. In the election of 2020, you could see those forces are work. A politician who promised to pull the United States together, defeated Trump. Whether he can actually do so remains to be seen.

Formal social science is relatively new. Nevertheless, a vast amount of information has been accumulated concerning the social life of human beings. This information has been used in building a system of knowledge about the nature, growth, and functioning of human societies. Social science is the name given to that system of knowledge.

All knowledge is (1) knowledge of human beings, including their culture and products, and (2) knowledge of the natural environment. Human culture has been changing, and knowledge about it has been gradually accumulating ever since the far distant time when humans first assumed their distinctively human character. But until rather recent times, this knowledge was not scientific in the modern sense. Scientific knowledge is knowledge that has been systematically gathered, classified, related, and interpreted. Science is concerned with learning the concepts and applying those concepts to particulars, rather than just learning a vast amount of information.

Primitive peoples acquired much of their knowledge unconsciously, just as we today still begin the use of our native language and acquire many of the basic elements in our culture unconsciously. For the most part, they accepted the world as they found it, and if any explanations seemed called for, they invented supernatural ones. Some primitive peoples believed that every stream, tree, and rock contained a spirit that controlled its behavior.

In modern times, our emphasis is on the search for scientific knowledge. We have divided human knowledge into a number of areas and fields, and every science represents the systematic collection and study of data in one of these areas, which can be grouped roughly into two major fields—social science and natural science. Each of these fields is subdivided into a number of specialized sciences or disciplines to facilitate more intensive study and deeper understanding. Social science is the field of human knowledge that deals with all aspects of the group life of human beings. Natural science is concerned with the natural environment in which human beings exist. It includes such sciences as physics and chemistry, which deal with the laws of matter, motion, space, mass, and energy; it also includes the biological sciences, which deal with living things. There is more to knowledge than scientific knowledge. There is also phronesis, or wisdom, which is a combination of knowledge acquired through philosophical reflection and inquiry and practical knowledge that one acquires through learning by doing. Whereas scientific knowledge relies on logic, rationality, and empirical proofs, phronesis relies on all those plus an instinctual feel for something, and understanding acquired through careful reflection and discussion with others. Some aspects of phronesis are instinctual; for example a bird that instinctually knows to migrate south for the winter, or a mother who knows instinctually how to comfort her baby, has knowledge, but it is not scientific knowledge. How that knowledge is learned and how one “knows” it is difficult to determine, but it is knowledge.

_{Street smarts and Book smarts}

Many of you are taking this course because you have to as part of your degree requirements. A number of you will be somewhat skeptical about the value of the course, and more broadly, the value of the degree. We are sympathetic to your concerns. There is not a lot in this course that will be directly applicable to finding a job, or increasing your pay. Much of it is simply educated common sense. So why is it required?

The answer is that it provides you with the beginning of "book smarts." What are "book smarts"? They are the equivalent to "street smarts"—the instinctual knowledge you get about how to operate successfully in your environment. If you put someone in a new environment, he or she will often flounder—say the wrong thing, miss a joke, interpret an action incorrectly. Over time, one gains street smarts by osmosis—by being in the street; you just know this is how you should act. This is how you can push for something.

There is a similar type of business smarts. Kids who grow up in families in business—where parents have good jobs, and come home and talk about what happened at work— absorb business smarts by osmosis. They become part of their interactions. Depending on the nature of the job, business smarts include street smarts, but they also include knowing when to dump the attitude and fit in—to do what the boss thinks needs to be done, even when the boss is, shall we say, stupid. Business smarts also include what might be called book smarts—a knowledge of how to discuss issues and how to make people realize you are smart. This course involves teaching you book smarts. It conveys to you the thinking of individuals who have been most successful in college and who advise governments and businesses. Learning the individual facts is less important than learning the reasoning approach that these people use—in a way, it is like learning a foreign language. Making it through the course conveys to employers that you understand the process; and when you get an associate or college degree, this signals employers that you have achieved sufficient book smarts to operate in their world, which you have to do if you want a job.

You probably do not want too much book smarts. Business requires a combination of book and street smarts. People with PhDs in some fields, such as English or humanities, are as problematic for many business management jobs as are those with no degree at all. Those with PhDs analyze things too much for most businesses. In business, what is wanted is people who understand book smarts, but who can integrate those book smarts with street smarts.

How important is such a signal? That depends. If your name is Kareem, Tamika, Rashid, Ebony, Aisha, or Tyrone, you probably need it more than if your name is Kristen, Greg, Neil, Emily, Brett, Anne, or Jill. How do we know that? Because social scientists have shown it through experiments in which they sent out resumes that were identical except for the names. Resumes with "black-sounding" names had only a 6.7 percent chance of receiving a response, while resumes with "white-sounding” names had a 10.1 percent chance. These researchers found the same amount of built-in "name" discrimination in less-skilled jobs, such as cashier and mailroom attendant, as in more heavily skiiIs-based jobs. How do you get around this? By taking a course such as social science and getting a degree, which signals to the employer that you have "book smarts." We will talk more about these issues in later chapters, but here we just want to point out that it is issues such as these that make up the subject matter of social science.

These alternative types of knowledge are important for social science since social policy is built on a blend of scientific, philosophical, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• New to This Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Culture and the Individual
• Part III Institutions and Society
• Part IV Politics and Society
• Part V Economics and Society
• Part VI Global Issues
• Index