SOCY 275 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Slum, Positivism, Mechanical And Organic Solidarity

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Social Sci, Edu and Soc Work - Sociology
• Course: SOCY 275
• Professor: Stephen Baron

Document Summary

The idea that pathology can exist at the social level is characteristic of the socialdisorganization perspective. This view dominated the sociology of deviance from the 1890s to the mid-1930s and later formed the basis for integrationist, social learning, and control theories. Sociological positivism emerged when thinkers from various backgrounds (philosophy, theology, political science, and natural science) began to look for regularities in social life, just as natural science had sought regularities in plant and animal life. A variety of people took up the challenge to understand the sources of urban squalor and to do something about them. Religious do-gooder who saw the moral uplift of the lower classes as a spiritual duty. Humanitarian philanthropists from the industrial middle class who felt that impulsive and unsystematic charity was ineffective, even counterproductive, in that it maintained rather than relieved poverty and dependency.