Sociological Perspective: Discussion and Meaning of Thinking Sociologically

What do we mean by saying thinking sociologically? One has to understand the term sociology first in order to think sociologically. Allan Johnson in his text talks about how he came across sociology and how he practice sociology in his everyday life. Later on he add that he practice sociology in many ways, he practice it when he think about how social life work, when he write books, when he work with people trying to see what’s going on in the world and their lives in it. We are always participating in something larger then ourselves, and if we want to understand social life and what happens to people in it, we have to understand what it is that we’re participating in and how we participate in it. Sociology winds up meaning pretty much whatever you want it to mean, which gets close to meaning nothing. In simple word sociology is the systematic study of the development, structure and functioning of institutions, culture, and relationships on a group level. Social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behavior are investigated to get a better understanding of human societies.

To think sociologically we must have a sociological perspective. What do we mean by having a sociological perspective? Sociological perspective essentially means that you avoid explaining things on the basis of individual or biological explanations or blame it outright on society. For example; if you are writing about poverty or crime, do not try to explain crime on the basis of psychology of criminal, or do not explain that hormones make men more prone to crime than women etc. These are individual and biological ways of explaining, instead talk about how the things valued in society are difficult to achieve, say money, and people indulge in illicit acts to gain it.

Both Allan Johnson and Beteille Andre in their respective text bring out the concept of “suicide’ by great French sociologist Emile Durkheim and gave a brilliant demonstration of the superiority of his approach over that of common sense through his study of suicide. If we ask why people kill themselves, we’re likely to think first of how people feel when they do it- hopeless, depressed, guilty, lonely, or, in the case of soldiers and suicide bombers, obliged by honor, duty, loyalty, or religious belief to sacrifice themselves for someone else or what they identify as a greater social good. That might explain suicide taken one at a time, but what do we have when we add up all the suicides that happen in a society for a given year? What does that number tell us, and, more importantly, about what? This was the question posed by one of the founders of sociology, Emile Durkheim. He argued tirelessly that the systematic investigation of a subject was not possible unless the investigator freed himself from his preconceptions of it. These preconceptions, shaped generally by a limited experience, were not only often wrong but also impediments to the examination of the available and relevant facts. His argument was that suicide was a social fact whose forms and patterns could not be explained by the known facts of human psychology. While looking at the psychological process in individuals might explain why one person commits suicide, this can’t explain patterns of suicide found in social system.

Sociologically, a suicide rate is a number that describe something about a group or a society, not the individuals who belong to it. Individuals can feel depressed or lonely, but groups and societies can’t feel a thing. Durkheim pursued systematically that distinction between the incidence and the rate of suicide, and brought together a wealth of data to show that suicide rates varied systematically between societies, and between religious, occupational and the other groups within the same society. His study appeared to discover that social causes were behind what common sense might lead one to believe was the supremely private or individual act.

One of Durkheim’s remarkable findings was that suicide rates go up significantly not only after an economic crash but also after an economic boom. The point is that when he had an important idea that appeared to go against common sense, he decided, as a sociologist, to test that idea by systematically assembling a large body of data, and applying to the data, concepts and methods that may also be applied to other domain of life in other parts of the world.

To develop sociological thinking we need to understand the concept behind it in two contexts-

In the text of Allan Johnson, he explains that how ‘the individualistic model doesn’t work’, that we need to develop a sociological perspective and thinking. We first need to understand what to be mean by saying individualistic model? An individualistic model is that model which encourages us to think that if enough individuals change, then systems will change as well, but a sociological perspective shows why change isn’t this simple. An individualistic model is misleading because it encourages us to explain human behavior and experience from a perspective that’s so narrow it misses out of what’s going on. An individualistic model also doesn’t work because personal solutions arise primarily from a sense of our own personal needs. Later on he adds that how as an individual, he may not feel or act in racist ways, and in his heart he may even hate racism, but all of that is beside the core sociological point that he is involved in one way or another by virtue of his participation in society itself. He talks about how sociology makes him aware that he is involved in something larger than himself, sociological practice gets him off the hook of personal guilt and blame for a world that he didn’t create and that isn’t his fault. At the same time, it makes him aware of how he chooses to participate in the world and how and why those choices matter. He have no reason to feel guilty simply because he is white, and because the creation of racism wasn’t his doing but he also don’t have the luxury of thinking that racism and white privilege have nothing to do with him. When we say that we are always participating in something larger than ourselves, it’s important to remember that we are not a homogeneous term. There are multiple “we” in social life and an important part of sociological practice is to see how the presence of multiple “we” affects what happens.

Beteille Andre in his text laid emphasis on the point that sociological perspective is different from common sense. Common sense is not only localized but it is also bound by time, place, class, community, gender and so on. It is also unreflective since it does not question its own origins and presuppositions, or at least does not do so deliberately and methodically. It goes without saying that no sociologist can fully insulate his scholarly work from the presuppositions of his common sense. Our sociology is influenced to a greater or lesser extent by the common sense which is a part of our own social environment, but to what extent is that common sense in its turn influenced by sociology. Common sense is based on a limited range of experience of particular people in particular places and times. Where it relates to such matters as family, marriage, kinship, work and worship, people are inclined to believe that their way of doing things is the right way or the reasonable way. Other ways of acting in these regards strike them as being not only wrong but also contrary to common sense. This is because they only observe or experience other ways of acting and thinking in bits and pieces, and not in their context. It is essential to draw attention to the peculiar preoccupation of sociology with the similarities as well as the differences among societies, with comparison as well as contrast.

Sociology does not simply deal with facts from the entire range of human societies; it seeks to place those facts on the same plane of observation and analysis. One cannot really escape from comparison and contrast while studying sociology. Common sense easily constructs imaginary social arrangements in which there is no inequality, no oppression, no strife and no constraint on individual choice for example a world in which society makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. Sociology is anti-utopian unlike common sense, in its central preoccupation with the disjunction between ideal and reality, between what human beings consider right, proper and desirable and their actual conditions of existence, not in this or that particularly society but in human societies as such.

Sociology is also anti-fatalistic in its orientation. It does not accept the particular constraints taken for granted by common sense as eternal or immutable. It provides a clear awareness than common sense of the range of alternative arrangements that have been or may be devised for the attainment of broadly the same ends. No social arrangement, no matter how beneficial, is without some cost. Social costs and benefits are far more difficult to weigh and measure than the purely economic ones. A finely-tuned judgment is essential for this, and that can be formed only through the disciplined and methodical examination of the varieties of social arrangements created, adopted and replaced by successive generations. This leads to the question of value-neutrality or, better, the distinction between value judgments and judgments of reality in sociology as against common sense. There is agreement among sociologists that questions of fact are distinct from judgments of value, and that two ought to be differentiated as clearly as possible by all the technical means available.

James Garner through his politically correct bedtime stories make you think about sociological perspective, he talks about the older fairy tales and rewritten so that they supposedly represent what a “politically correct” adult would consider a good and moral tale for children. He makes it more interesting by reversing the roles of the heroes and villains of the story. For example woodsman in Little Red Riding Hood is seen by Riding Hood not as a heroic savior but as a “sexist”.

In conclusion, it is not true that sociologist does not or should not express moral preferences. But his moral preferences are or ought to be formed on a somewhat different basis from what is given to each person by his common sense. And a sociological way of thinking has to be different from common sense thinking. When we start thinking sociologically we start examining thinks from that perspective. We start applying sociological lens to everything.

References

1. Johnson Allan G, 2008 Chapter 1. “The Forest, the Trees and One Thing”, Practice What pg.4
2. Durkheim, Emile, 1951. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Glencoe: The Free Press.
3. Beteille Andre. 2009 Chapter 1. “Sociology and Common Sense” Beteille Andre pg.23
4. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engles.1968 the German Ideology. Moscow: Progress Publishers, Beteille Andre pg.24
5. Durkheim Emile 1974 “Value Judgments and Judgments of Reality” Sociology and Philosophy, Glencoe: The Free Press, Beteille Andre pg.25