SOCI 3692 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Verstehen, Class Consciousness, Ideal Type
9 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Theories of Society - 3692
• Sacred/profane
• Ordinary vs extraordinary
• Sacred: interests of the group
• Profane: mundane, individual concerns
• Social fact
• Values, cultural norms and social structures that transcend the individual
• Exercise social control
• Sociology should be the empirical study of social facts
• The social fact exists external to the individual
• It acts on the individual from the outside and is immediately extra of the individual
• These facts are constraining, limiting but don’t feel that way
• One may act in a way that is constraining without realizing it
• The social fact has to be general and must be a fact
• Observability has to be the indication that we are talking about something real
• They’re only visible through their effects
• Social facts can be treated as external constraining and observable
• We’re not dealing with a clear object domain
• We’re saying that when we are faced with something we want to study, then we
are going to treat it as a social fact
• If social facts involve an approach to society, then we’re faced with a substance
that has a contradictory nature
Weber:
• Asceticism
• A discipline where one refuses the enjoyments of life
• One engages in this to be close to god
• You move out of or away from everyday activities
• You would move into a monastery
• You would live a life of voluntary poverty
• Authority
• When one person willingly accepts and follows the direction of another individual
• Not limited to material, influence or ideal motives as a basis to continue
• Every system attempts to establish, prove and cultivate belief in its legitimacy
• Bureaucracy
• Administrative structure developed through rational-legal authority
• Evolved from traditional structures
• Clear, distributed official duties
• Official, trained and qualified personnel within a hierarchy
• The term bureaucracy means rules by offices and office holders
• It is in contrast to rule relative to the household
• Office holders hold their position on the basis of their education, it’s to be based on
either exams or seniority
• It’s to be based on methods that are abstract, its not a matter of personal favors
• With bureaucracy, you have general rules, which means that general rules are
applied as it were to the mass
• Particular cases are usually subsumed under the general rules
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
• Cases that are too particular don’t fall under the general rules, aren’t dealt with very
well
• Weber believed that bureaucracies were the more efficient form of organization
because bureaucrats acted without emotions or partisanship
• The were relatively neutral
• Bureaucracies worked with a precision that other forms of social organizations
didn’t not
• Weber prepared bureaucracies as forms of organization as machine technologies vs
technology had not yet encountered the industrial revolution
• At the same time, because of the efficiency of bureaucracies, Weber was appalled
by their prospect
• Bureaucracy was the iron cage
• He says that capitalism and democracy limit bureaucracy and that they are also
limited by bureaucracy
• Calvinism
• Religious ideas of some groups (such as calvinists) played a role in creating the
capitalist spirit
• Protestant ethic encouraged people to engage in work in the secular world
• Developing their own enterprises
• Accumulation of wealth for investment
• Class
• Class division is the most important source of social conflict
• An economic sphere of distribution
• Classes are understood as tied to markets
• Depending on your class, you have different life chances, different mortality rates,
differences in education, where you live
• His conception is different from Marx
• There can be classes without markets
• Weber says its class in itself
• A class is not a group, it doesn’t have class consciousness
• It can become a group but it may identify in other ways in terms of status
• Possession of property defines the main class difference
• Property-less class is defined by the kinds of services individual workers provide
in the labour market
• Property owners have the advantage
• Hold the monopoly on commodities and labor
• Access to the sources of wealth creation
• Ideal type
• The conduct of social science depends upon the construction of abstract,
hypothetical concepts
• A mental construct, like a model
• He used this as a standard of comparison, it would enable us to see aspects of the
real world in clearer, more systematic way
• Instrumental rational action
• Sociological inquiry should be grounded in the analysis of how individuals attach
meanings to their “social actions”
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Theories of society - 3692: sacred/profane, ordinary vs extraordinary, sacred: interests of the group, profane: mundane, individual concerns, social fact, values, cultural norms and social structures that transcend the individual, exercise social control. If social facts involve an approach to society, then we"re faced with a substance that has a contradictory nature. It is in contrast to rule relative to the household either exams or seniority. Interpretive sociology: study of society that concentrates on the meanings people associate to their social world, weber looks at what people thought and believe and why they were doing what they did. It supposes that you obey and consent to being rules because the ruler in some sense is relational and the law is rational because the rulers are acting in an effective manor. It was between the natural sciences and the sciences of the mind.
