What is sociology? The sociological imagination

Most people answer "mine" first. Losing a job feels personal, because it is personal: the rent is still due, and the worry keeps you up at night. Sociology asks a second question that most people skip. How many other people lost their jobs the same month, and what were those people caught up in together? Sociology is the systematic study of society and social interaction: the groups people belong to, the patterns those groups follow, and the way those patterns shape individual lives (Conerly et al., 2021).

This first lesson gives you three tools. The first is a habit of mind, the sociological imagination. The second is a short history: the six thinkers who built the field. The third is a set of three lenses that sociologists still use to look at almost anything.

The groups people live inside. Psychology mostly asks what goes on within one person: perception, memory, emotion. Social psychology asks how other people and situations change what that one person thinks and does. Sociology steps back further and studies the groups themselves: families, congregations, schools, companies, cities, and whole nations (Conerly et al., 2021).

Two words come up constantly. A society is a group of people who live in a defined territory and share a culture. A culture is that group's shared beliefs, values, practices, and objects. Lesson 3 takes up culture in depth.

Sociologists also work at two scales. Micro-level sociology studies small groups and face-to-face interaction, such as a conversation or a family dinner. Macro-level sociology studies large structures, such as an economy or a system of government. Figure 1.1 lines the scales up from small to large.

The American sociologist C. Wright Mills answered that question in his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination. He argued that ordinary people often feel trapped by forces they cannot see. They experience those forces one life at a time, so they read them as private failures. Mills called the habit of connecting the two the sociological imagination: the ability to see how an individual life (biography) and the history of a society shape each other (Mills, 1959).

Mills drew a line between two kinds of problems:

• A personal trouble is a problem located in one person's character and immediate relationships. The explanation and the remedy lie mostly within that person's own life.
• A public issue is a problem that goes beyond any one person's life. The explanation lies in the structure of the society: its economy, its institutions, its history.

His most famous example is unemployment. In a city of 100,000, if only one man is out of work, that is his personal trouble, and it makes sense to look at his skills and his choices. In a nation of 50 million workers, if 15 million are out of work, that is a public issue. No amount of individual effort explains why 15 million people lost work at once; the answer lies in the economy (Mills, 1959). Figure 1.2 draws that contrast.

The sociological imagination does not erase personal responsibility. The one unemployed person in Mills's small city may well need to change something. The tool simply asks you to check the pattern before you settle on an explanation. Mills also applied the idea to marriage and divorce: one couple's divorce is a personal trouble, but when a large share of marriages in a country end in divorce, the institution of marriage and the forces pressing on it become a public issue (Mills, 1959).

Because society suddenly stopped looking permanent. People had always thought about community and power. But in the late 1700s and the 1800s, two revolutions shook Europe at the same time. The French Revolution of 1789 overturned a monarchy and an aristocracy that had seemed fixed for centuries. The Industrial Revolution pulled millions of people off farms and into factories and crowded cities, where they lived among strangers, worked by the clock, and faced new kinds of poverty (Conerly et al., 2021).

When the social world changes that fast, people start asking how it holds together at all. The first sociologists hoped that the careful methods of the natural sciences could answer that question. Figure 1.3 places the six founders on one timeline.

Auguste Comte (1798-1857): a science of society

The French thinker Auguste Comte gave the field its name and its first program. He argued for positivism, the view that society should be studied with the same observation and reasoning used in physics or biology, and that such knowledge could be used to improve society (Conerly et al., 2021).

Harriet Martineau (1802-1876): how to observe

The English writer Harriet Martineau is often called the first woman sociologist. After traveling across the United States from 1834 to 1836, she published Society in America (1837), which criticized slavery and the limited rights of women. Her How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838) is one of the earliest books on sociological method, and in 1853 she translated and condensed Comte's major work into English (Conerly et al., 2021).

Karl Marx (1818-1883): class and conflict

The German philosopher and economist Karl Marx did not call himself a sociologist, but his ideas shaped the field. He argued that history is driven by conflict between classes. In industrial capitalism, he wrote, the bourgeoisie, who own the factories and other means of production, profit from the labor of the proletariat, who own only their ability to work. With Friedrich Engels he wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848); the first volume of Capital followed in 1867. The workers' revolutions Marx predicted for industrial nations did not unfold as he expected, and twentieth-century governments that claimed his name imprisoned and killed millions of people. Sociologists still use his central question, who benefits, without adopting his politics.

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917): social facts

The French sociologist Emile Durkheim helped make sociology a university discipline. He insisted that society is real in its own right: laws, customs, and shared beliefs are social facts that exist outside any one person and constrain how people act. His study Suicide (1897) chose the most private act imaginable and showed that its rates varied in steady patterns between groups. Groups whose members were less tightly bound together, such as unmarried people compared with married people, and Protestants compared with Catholics in his data, had higher rates. Durkheim concluded that social integration, how strongly people are tied into groups, shapes even the most personal choices (Durkheim, 1897/1951).

Max Weber (1864-1920): meaning and bureaucracy

The German sociologist Max Weber (pronounced VAY-ber) argued that sociologists must also understand what actions mean to the people doing them. He called that interpretive understanding Verstehen. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905), he proposed that religious beliefs, especially Calvinist ideas about work as a calling, helped produce the disciplined habits of modern capitalism. Weber also traced rationalization, the spread of efficiency, rules, and calculation into more and more of life, which he saw most clearly in bureaucracy (Weber, 1905/2002).

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963): data against prejudice

The American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois was the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard, in 1895. For The Philadelphia Negro (1899), he went door to door through the city's Seventh Ward, surveying thousands of residents, and he used the data to show that the problems blamed on Black residents grew out of discrimination, poor housing, and blocked opportunity. At Atlanta University he led years of empirical studies of Black life. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) he described double consciousness, the experience of always seeing oneself through the eyes of a society that looks down on you. The historian of sociology Aldon Morris (2015) argues that Du Bois built the first scientific school of sociology in the United States, though the field ignored him for decades.

Yes, because each one is asking a different question. A theoretical perspective is a set of assumptions that tells a researcher which questions to ask and which facts to notice. Sociology has three classic perspectives (Conerly et al., 2021):

• Functionalism sees society as a system of parts that work together, like the organs of a body. It asks what each part does to keep the whole stable. Robert Merton (1949) added that a social pattern has manifest functions, the intended and recognized results, and latent functions, the unintended ones.
• Conflict theory sees society as an arena of competition over scarce resources such as money, power, and prestige. It asks who benefits from an arrangement and who pays. It grows from Marx and includes later work on race and gender.
• Symbolic interactionism sees society as built from everyday interaction. People act toward things based on the meanings those things hold for them, and those meanings are created and changed in interaction. It grows from George Herbert Mead; Herbert Blumer coined the name in 1937 and set out its principles in a 1969 book (Blumer, 1969).

Figure 1.5 runs all three lenses over one familiar scene: a high school graduation. Choose a lens to see what it notices.

Two more ideas round out the lenses. The sociologists W. I. Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas observed that "if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences" (Thomas & Thomas, 1928, p. 572). That sentence, now called the Thomas theorem, is a core insight of symbolic interactionism: a rumor that a bank will fail can make people withdraw their money and cause the failure. And Erving Goffman, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), compared social life to a stage on which people perform roles for each other, an approach called dramaturgy.

Four habits carry through the rest of the course:

• Check the pattern before you judge the person. Ask how many others share the same problem.
• Hold both sides. Structures shape choices, and people still make choices. Mills asked for both biography and history, not one instead of the other.
• Switch lenses on purpose. Ask what something does, who benefits, and what it means to the people involved.
• Separate describing from deciding. Sociology describes how groups shape beliefs and behavior. Its methods cannot, by themselves, settle whether a belief is true or a practice is right. Lesson 14 studies religion in exactly that spirit: with respect for believers and with honest data.