SOC100H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1-3: George Herbert Mead, Symbolic Interactionism, Harriet Martineau

• School: UTM
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC100H5
• Professor: All

Document Summary

C. wright mills ability to see the connection between people"s personal troubles and the four social structures is called the sociological imagination . Way of looking at the world that links private individual problems with important social issues. Durkheim (functionalist): human behaviour influences by social factors, social relations in which people are embedded. Durkheim"s study of suicide: found that suicide is related to social forces, not personal issues suicide is connected to degrees of solidarity (degree of shared beliefs) Major theoretical paradigms: functionalism, conflict, symbolic interactionism, feminism, postmodernism. Human behaviour is governed by stable patterns of social relations. A functionalist believes that social relations shape human behaviour (social relations for ex = social solidarity, mainly interested in macrostructures) Functionalist theories show how social structures maintain or undermine social stability (industrial revolution eroded religious beliefs, caused population movement, social solidarity levels low = more suicide (human behaviour)) Durkheim believed that rising suicide was due to larger social ills.