SOC 3332 Lecture 10: (10) & (11) What Spreads - Gabriel Tarde and the Laws of Imitation
10 Mar 2017
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Gabriel tarde: he believed that society is made up of individuals who are involved in some sort of social-psychological interaction which brings about social structures and change. His focus was on the interaction between individuals. We, as humans, are two-tiered and society is in us due to the fact that norms are the products of interaction: according to tarde, the main element of social cohesion is imitation. Society is not defined by the economic criterion of utility and division of labour but rather by the criterion (or law) of imitation. Socially, everything is just inventions and imitations": counter imitation is doing the opposition of what others are doing. However, this is still a form of imitation. Innovations and inventions are considered to be counter-imitations. We should be able to repeat this experiment and obtain the same results. This repetition may take particular forms like growth or increase.
