CAS SO 100 Study Guide - Fall 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - Sociology, Symbolic Interactionism, Social Forces
CAS SO 100
MIDTERM EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Fall 2018
Sociology — Lecture 1
Reading Prior to Lecture
C. Weight Mills, “the promise of sociology”
Thesis: Mills distinguishes history and biography and between individual troubles and public
issues.
Men often feel that their private lives are a serious of troubles, and this is correct. However, to
understand the life of an individual you need to understand also the history of society. Neither
these two can be understood without understanding both.
Yet, men do not usually define the troubles they encounter in terms of historical change and
institutional contradiction. They do not associate their private lives to the ups and downs of the
society in which they live.
What men need is a quality of mind that will help them use information and develop reason in
order to achieve clear understanding of what is going on in the world and of what may be
happening within themselves. This is the sociological imagination.
-it is the awareness of the relationship between personal experience and wider society
-it involves an individual developing deep understanding of how their biography is a result of
historical processes which occur within a larger social context.
-it is the understanding that social outcomes are based on what we do, as well.
-it enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for
the inner life.
-it enables men to take into account how individuals often become falsely conscious of their
social positions
-it is the capacity to range form the most impersonal and remote transformation to the most
intimate features of the human self and to see the relations between the two.
Thanks to this imagination, the individual can understand his own experience by locating himself
within his period. The individual will also understand that he contributes to the shaping of his
society and to the course of history, even as he is made by society.
The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations
between the two within society.
Those who have been imaginative aware acquire a new way of thinking and they have had
three questions:
1. what is the structure of this particular society as a whole?
2. where does this society stand in human history?
3. what varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period?
Troubles occur within the character of the individual. Troubles have to do with his self and with
those limited areas of social life of which he is directly and personally aware. A trouble is a
private matter.
Issues have to do with the organization, with the historical society as a whole, with the way the
various milieux overlap and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of the social and historical
life. An issue is a public matter: some value in society is felt to be threatened. There is a debate
about what the value really is and about what it is that really threatens it. An issue involves a
crisis in institutional arrangements.
Consider war. The personal problem (trouble) may be how to survive it or to die in it with honor.
The issue has to do with its causes, with its effects upon economic and political…
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What we experience is often caused by structural changes in society and to understand the
changes of personal milieux we have to look beyond them. Being capable of tracing such
linkages among a great variety of milieu is to possess the sociological imagination.
Book: Pages 2 to 17
Sociology is the study of human society.
Thinking like a sociologist means applying analytical tools to something you have always done
without much conscious thought. It requires you to question what you have taken for granted in
order to better understand the word. You need to make the familiar strange.
Sociological imagination is a term coined by C. Wright Mills. He argued that in order to think
critically about the social world we need to use our sociological imagination: the ability to see
connections between our personal experience and the larger forces of history.
According to Mills, the individual can understand his own experience only by locating himself in
his period. This is both a terrible lesson, as it makes our personal life something impersonal and
ordinary, as well as a magnificent one, as it serves for comfort that we are not alone in our
experiences.
By shifting your social environment, you are forced to see the connections between particular
historical paths taken and how you live your daily life.
Once you have truly adopted the sociological imagination, you can start questioning the links
between your personal experience and the particulars of a given society.
What does education mean in our society?
Imagine the process to become a professional would be more practical.
Sociologist Collins argues that the expansion of higher education has merely resulted in a
ratcheting up of credentialism and expenditures on formal education rather than focusing on the
true societal needs.
A social institution is a complex group of interdependent social positions that, together, perform
a social role and reproduce themselves over time. It can also be defined in a narrow sense as
any institution in a society that works to shape the behavior of the groups or people within it.
These social institutions are constructed within a dense network of other social institutions and
meanings.
College is a social institution. Other than the informal ties of people who have a relationship in a
college, a number of social structures exist that make colleges, such as the legal system, the
labor market or language itself.
Social institutions shape every aspect of our behavior but they are not monolithic. Every day we
construct and change social institutions through ordinary interactions and the meanings we
ascribe to them.
FROM LECTURE
Mills was a professor at Columbia for Sociology. He created the concept of sociological
imagination. He was very influential in the New Left Movement emerging from college
campuses and he led a lot of protests in the 1960s/1970s.
Berkley Free Speech movement in the 1960s — college had prohibited student union recruits.
This led to a protest to demand free speech. A bunch of students got arrested and expelled.
Mario Savio’s speech at Berkley uses the Social Imagination set of mind.
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Document Summary
Reading prior to lecture: weight mills, the promise of sociology . Thesis: mills distinguishes history and biography and between individual troubles and public issues. Men often feel that their private lives are a serious of troubles, and this is correct. However, to understand the life of an individual you need to understand also the history of society. Neither these two can be understood without understanding both. Yet, men do not usually de ne the troubles they encounter in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction. They do not associate their private lives to the ups and downs of the society in which they live. What men need is a quality of mind that will help them use information and develop reason in order to achieve clear understanding of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It is the awareness of the relationship between personal experience and wider society.
