1 >) what Is Sociology? LEARNING OBJECTIVES * Developing a Sociological Perspective Learn what sociology encompasses and how everyday topics like love and romance are shaped by social and. historical forces. Recognize that sociology involves not only acquiring knowledge ut also developing a sociological imagination. Learn that we construct society through our actions and are constructed by it. Understand that two key components of the sociological imagination are developinga global perspective and understanding social change. + The Development of Sociological Thinking Learn how sociology originated and developed. Think about the theoretical issues that frame thestudy of sociology: Be able to identify some leading social, theorists and their contributions to sociology. Learn the different theoretical approaches of modern sociologists. * How Can Sociology Help Us? ‘See the practical implications of sociology.college of your choice? Probably not. Colleges are not supposed to consider such things, right? As you sat down to apply to college, you might have wondered how ‘your grades or SAT scores could impact your chanees of getting in, but you probably didn’t ‘worry about your height orthesize of your ears. Inthe early twentieth century, college admissions began toundergo aseries of major trans~ formations for reasons that were kept discreetly outof the public eye (Karabel 2005; Gladwell 2008). In 1905, the SAT was instituted, and for the first time people started getting into college : ‘on the basis of standardized tests, Within a few years, the Harvard class became 15% Jewish, ; as Jews (notunlike Asians today) excelled in disproportionate numbers at the standardized test. Sociologists to this day disagree about whether this suocess can be explained by cultural characteristies or economic advantages that even relatively poor ethnic and religious minori- ties experience in comparison to other minority groups that don’t do as well. ‘Nevertheless, reflecting wider anti-Semitism of the era, the people who were running Harvard looked at this as a very undesirable turn of events. The administrators drew an anal- ‘gy between the university and hotels in upstate New York—first the Jews will arrive, then the Gentiles will leave, and then the Jews will leave and nobody will be here or want to comehere anymore (Zimmerman 2010). So Harvard determined that it needed to come up with another way of doing admissions, Rather than putting quotas on Jews, they decided to change toasys- tem of admissions very much like the one that we know today. They decided that they would start tolook at “the whole person,” rather than give advantages to people simply because they i did well ona standardized test. ‘Today, it seems natural that a college would want : to get to know you as a whole person. In your applica~ | tion, you had to write essays that helped define you as H ave you ever wondered if you were tall enough or pretty enough to get into the total human being. You may have tried to show what an interesting person you are—the clubs that you were apart of, the sports that you were participatingin, and your academics. You also had to get letters of recom- mendation. In the early 1900s, as a way of trying to figure out the kind of human being you are, elite col- leges instituted the recommendation system. When Ivy League schools switched to the new system, they ‘would also send representatives to various schools around the country to interview prospective students. ‘They didn't want too many “nerds.” They wanted well- rounded, good-looking people; future leaders who ‘would have an impact on the country, and who would make these schools look good in return, And so, they ‘would conduct interviews and keep notes on whether an applicant was tall, handsome, or pretty (by what- ever standard that was determined). ‘There were things that the admissions office sim- plydidn’tlike—-people with bigears, for example. Short people were also undesirable, as reeommendation files, from that time indicate, In the mid-1950s, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale were actually keeping records 01 ow does the sociological imagination help you the numbers of men that entered the freshmen class understand college admissions policies? ‘What Is Sociology? 3cal imagination « The application of imaginative thought to the asking and answering of who were over six feet tall. Today, all schools release re- cords about their incoming freshman classes, but they sociological questions. Someone using the sociological are more likely to keep track of race, class, and gender Imagination “thinks himself away" from the familiar variables than height or ear size. Indeed, when people routines of daily life. hear statistics about incoming college freshman class- soctal structure + The underlying regularities or es, they frequently ask about affirmative action, Some patterns in how people behave and in their relation- whites might wonder, Is it true that I can’t get into some ships with one another. competitive schools because so many of the spaces now goto minorities?” It’s interesting how frequently this question is asked. The average person who wants to know is actually using what C. Wright Mills called the sociological imagination, aphrase he coined in 1959 in a now classic book (Mills 2000; orig. 1959). He tried to understand how the average person in the United States understood his or her everyday life. According to Mills, each of us lives in a very small orbit, and our worldview is limited by the social situations that ‘we encounter on a daily basis. These include the family and small groups that we are a part of, the school that we attend, and even the dorm in which we live. All of these things give rise toa certain limited perspective and point of view. ‘The average person, according to Mills, doesn''t really understand his or her personal prob- Jems as part of any kind of larger framework or series of goings-on. He argued that we all need toovercome our limited perspective. What is necessary isa certain quality of mind that makes it possible to understand the larger meaning of our experiences, This quality of mind is the sociological imagination. ‘When some white college applicants wonder if they are not getting into competitive schools, because so many of the spaces go to minorities, they are connecting their individual experience up with a conception of the larger social structure. This conception about col- lege admissions is perpetuated as a valid idea by cable television news, certain newspapers, magazines, Web sites, and everyday conversation. But is it true? One thing that Mills did not discuss is that having a sociological imagina- tion requires more than making connections between individual lives and ideas about social structure. Since Mills's time, sociologists have come to focus even more strongly than before on the careful assessment of evidence. When you look at the data, you will realize that it is ab- ‘solutely impossible for most college rejections to be due to affirmative action. In acurrenten- teringclass at an Ivy League school, for example, outof 1,000 students there maybe 100blacks and 75 Latinos. The 1,000 students were selected from about 20,000 applicants. A significant portion of the 19,000 who were rejected may think that they didn't get in because a black ora Latino got in instead of them. But we know from the data that this is impossible: There is no ‘way that 175 people could be keeping 19,000 people out of any school ‘So, it's not enough to have a sociological imagination in the way that Mills intended it. We ‘want you to learn how to sort through the evidence in a way that begins with imagination but insists on the kind of methods that can give us firmer and better answers to important socio- logical questions. How to do this in a rigorous way will be the subject of Chapter 2. DEVELOPING A SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE: FOUR QUESTIONS The scope of sociological study is extremely wide, but in general, sociologists ask themselves certain questions that help to focus the sociological imagination and provide them with the 4 CHAPTER 1 + Whats Sociology?‘concepts that motivate research. These questions that orient the discipline include: How are {he things that we take to be natural socially constructed? How is social order possible? Does {the individual matter? How are the times in which we are living different from the times that ‘came before? How Are the Things that We Take to Be Natural Socially Constructed? ‘There is abasic law in human reasoning that goes somethinglike this: the things that we see before us are inevitable. They are natural and cannot be changed. What sociology teaches us {sthat in many ways we are freer than we think—that the things that we think are natural are actually created by human beings. ‘One example comes from everyday experiences with sex and gender. A baby is born witha penis or avagina. By way of that characteristic, the baby begins a process of being assigned to the category of “boy” or “girl” Thisis extremely important because itis almost always the first thingyouwant to knowabout before you can interact with thebaby. Ifyou can’t figure that out, you may ask the parents. Is this true of any other characteristic? You usually don’t need to know the race ofthe baby before you start interacting. You don't need to know the economic class of the baby. Most babies today are dressed in mass-produced clothes from stores like Baby Gap or Old Navy regardless of their economic standing, Most parents in general do not try to signal the class of the baby with their garments. The same principle applies to race and ethnicity. There are certain parents who will dress the baby in order to affiliate with a certain race or ethnic group, but-exeept on holidays—such parents are the exceptions. Not as many people feel they need to know the race of a baby in order to interact with it. Sex is different. If you are a parent, you do not want someone coming up to your baby boy and asking, “Is it a boy or a gitl?" So what do you do to avoid this scenario? You dress a baby inblue if itis a boy, or in pink ifit is agirl. Some parents donot do this at the beginning—until they start getting those questions, Then they start dressing the baby in a certain way so that people will stop asking them those questions. Of course, even if you do dress your baby inthe traditional blue or pink, there may still be people who come up and ask, “Is ita boy ora girl?” Butit is not something that will happen often because most people are pretty good at reading social eues—such asa blue or pink cap. ‘Now, the fact that many people need to know the sex of the baby suggests that we interact differently depending on whether we think itis a boy or a gir]. If it’s a boy, aperson might walk up to the baby and say something in a traditional masculine style, like “Hey Bud! How you doin?” If its a gir] the person might say something that is more indicative of a little girl or the norms of traditional femininity. Eventually, we get to the point where these interactions about whether a baby is a boy or a girl start to mold the kind of person that the baby becomes. Children come to see themselves as being boy or a girl. They start to move their bodies like a little boy or alittle girl. They know that this ishow they are seen by others and they know that they oceupy the role of boy or git] when they go out onto the street, This happens through a process of interaction, Even though itisnot simply a natural occurrence that a person starts tobehave and act asa boy ora girl, many of us are raised to believe that the differences between men and women are purely biological. Does this mean that sociologists want to eliminate a role for biology’? No: the goal of sociology is not to try to teach you that the biological realm is a residual catego- ry with a minor role in explaining human behavior, A purpose of sociology is to disentangle Developing # Sociological Perspective: Four Questions 5BEHIND THE BEST SELLERS ee RICHARD NIS| Ent | Intelligence and How to Get It If you ask the average American who has not studied sociology, “Why is it that blacks in the United States are do- ing ‘worse’ than whites?" many would answer that it is because of differences in IQ; blacks have lower IQ scores than whites and that helps explain why their life outcomes are different from whites (Nisbett 2009). According to this theo- ry, “They're not as smart so they don't do as well” It is true that in the Uni ed States blacks have lower IQ scores than whites, and people who argue ~ this point will tend to believe that this difference in IQ is based on genetics, that lower IQs are inherited. In 2009, Richard Nisbett, a so- cial scientist at the University of Michigan, tried to tackle this question in the much talked about book Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count. Nisbett’s book provided an example of what can be learned when we ask how the things that people take to be natural are socially construct- ed. He summarized a vast number of studies that have demonstrated the ways in which IQ is not genetically based but rather based upon what we call environmental influences—the social context in which people live. One fascinating study shows that the IQ for the average person in the United States—black and white—has gone up about 15 to 20 points since World War Il (Nisbett 2009), It clientes UN a Keys var) — NISBETT is biologically impossible that the ge- netics of a population have changed that much in 65 years. So sociologists know there is something about the en= vironment of the United States that is affecting the group as a whole. By examining data on 1G, Nisbett found that since World War Il the av- erage difference in IQ between blacks and whites has decreased significantly, In 1945 there was a difference of about 15 points. Today, the difference is nine points. This decrease corresponds to a certain level of improvement of the standard of living for the black population rela- tive to the white population. The difference in 1 corresponds to a difference in social conditions, Another interesting fact about IQ is that the aver- age black American today has a higher I@ than the average white American in 1950, Sociologists ‘and other social scientists are still trying to get to the root of the relationship between race, in- telligence, and inequality, but one of the great achievements of social science in thinking about IG has been to be able to figure out some of the ways in which the things we take to be natural are socially constructed. Differences in IQ score are affected by more than large-scale changes in environmental fac- tors like standard of living. Sociologists have also studied the environmental influences that RICHARD E, what is biological from what is socially constructed. It isin part to try to figure out how social phenomena relate to biological phenomena. Most sociologists admit that there is a place for the biological. There are many fascinating studies of ways in which the things that the average human being thinks are biological, and thus natural, are actually socially constructed. ‘The more you start to think about trying to disentangle what is natural from what is socially constructed, the more rigorously you will begin to thinkas a sociologist. How Is Social Order Possible? Aprofessor looks out into a lecture hall and sees a room full of students sitting quietly in their chairs, taking notes, and exhibiting self-control and discipline. There must be somebody in the room who wishes that she was doing yoga or who would like to turn around to a friend in the back and say something to him, But the fact of the matter is that almost everyone appears 6 CHAPTER 1 » What IsSociology?exist at the familial level in order to explain low IQ scores—especialy for the poorest parts of the population. What they have found is that much of the difference has to do with what goes on within the family at the level of everyday inter- action. For example, poor children learn many fewer words than do children from middle~ and upper-middle-class. backgrounds. The average child in a welfare or working-class family hears something on the order of 1,500 to 2,000 words 2 day, whereas the average child in an upper- middle-class family hears something like 3,000 to 4,000 words a day. By the time those children reach the age of 5 years old, the upper-middle- Class child will have heard something lke S million words, while the child in a family on welfare will have heard something like 2 milion. Those are ap- proximations, but they correspond to something very real—and vocabulary is a very significant de~ terminant of how well people do om 1G tests. According to Nisbett, people who believe that intelligence is mainly based on genetics think that you will only be as smart as your genes allow. Thus nothing your parents do for you, nothing the schools do, will have much impact on intelligence. ‘Those who believe in such genetic explanations answer the question “Do individuals make a dif- ference?" with ambivalence: there is a sense that hard work will have little payoff for improving in- telligence. However, in arguing that 1@ is socially con- structed, he also suggests that individuals can indeed make a difference. He ends his book with concrete suggestions for things that parents can do to improve the IQs of their children. Interest ingly, all of the things he suggests are the things that middle-class people tend to do anyway. These include talking and reading a lot to chil- dren and including them in adult conversations, but also encouraging children to express their opinions and therefore developing that part of in- telligence which is associated with the ability to make evaluative judgments. Nisbett's book has an encouraging tone, and its message is delivered ina way that makes the average reader feel that individuals can indeed make a difference in their ‘own lives and those of their children. But because ‘so many of the behaviors that Nisbett encourages are those associated with middle-class lifestyles, it is not at all clear that the poor who are disad- vantaged by I@ scores can easily change their behaviors. It may be that for the poor, Nisbett’s brilliant analysis suggesting that so-called natural inteligence is socially constructed holds out little hope for the most disadvantaged, whose IQs are brought about by their social class. QUESTIONS 1. What is the difference between saying that I is natural vs. saying that it is socially con- structed? 2. How is I@ influenced by what takes place at the familial level? 3, Why is Nisbett’s diagnosis of the problem depressing for poor people? 4. Why do you think Nisbett’s ideas might be popular with the kinds of people who read and buy books? Source: Richard Nisbett, Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009. to be doing the same thing: sitting quietly, listening, taking notes (or at least pretending to). ‘How can we explain this orderly behavior? How can we explain the existence of social order inalecture hallor in asociety? We certainly need social order to get through the day, but how can we understand it? Sociologists have used many different explanations to try to answer such questions. One explanation is that it is rational for individuals to act this way. Students know itis in their self-interest to sit quietly and to pretend to be paying attention. Perhaps a student hopes to apply to graduate school and wantsto get aletter of recommendation from the professor. This foal motivates her to respond to the classroom environment: The professor's ability to write aletteris an incentive for good behavior. The recommendation acts as an incentive, stimulat- {ng the response of the student who wants it. The student tries to make a good impression, all the while keeping in mind that if she turns around and talks to her friend week after week instead of listening, the professor might write an unflattering letter or refuse to write at all. Developing a Sociological Perspective: Four Questions 7