CC100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Positivism, Social Fact, Youth Subculture
Document Summary
Sociological positivism shares many of the same philosophical and political foundations as those we explored in last chapter. Think of this as social structuralism + foundational to this structuralism approach is the concept of strain. Strain = generated by and within actual structure of society. 3 key periods in which the social context for strain theory emerged: middle of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century. Influenced by the rise of sociology as a discipline: approaches and concepts of the natural world can be applied to the social world, relied on the belief in a consensus of values and norms across society. Criminal behavior was considered a reflection of something wrong within the structure + values of a society: the early 1920s to wwii. The economic position of the individual in society was seen as an important factor in the commission of crime (where ppl began to link crime w poor ppl: the post-war period to the 1950s.
