SOC 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Structural Functionalism, Social Inequality, Cooperativeness

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 1100
• Professor: Anneke Olthof

Document Summary

Sociology is the systematic study of human society: seeing the general in the particular (peter berger) sociologists identify general social patterns in the behaviour of particular individuals, seeing the strange in the familiar: Giving up the idea that human behaviour is simply a matter of what people decide to do. Understanding that society shapes our lives: seeing personal choice in social context. The power of society to shape even our most private choices. Suicide in a comparative perspective: the sociological perspective. People at the margins of social life are aware of social patterns that others rarely think about. Periods of change or crisis encourage us to use the sociological perspective. C mills (imaginary: mills (1959) believed that using what he called the sociological imagination helped people understand the connection between wider social issues and individual problems. Different theories (structural functionalism->consensus theory->micro theory, interdependent, inequality is natural, some people are smarter than others.