Republic of the Philippines

BOHOL ISLAND STATE UNIVERSITY, MAIN CAMPUS

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AND ARCHITECTURE
Tagbilaran City

Vision: A premier S&T university for the formation of world - class and virtuous human resource for sustainable development in Bohol and the Country.
Mission: BISU is committed to provide quality higher education in the arts and sciences, as well as in the professional and technological fields;undertake
research and development and extension services for the sustainable

LEARNING MODULE 1 – GENDER AND SOCIETY

OVERVIEW

Gender and society concepts help individuals understand how others behave in a
certain situation. It also considers the development of our gendered identities and adopt
to the society we belong. This subject explores the workings of the institutions that could
possibly shape our gendered lives and leads to an understanding of the relationship
between gender and the social structure.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

By the end of this part, students should be able to:

 Define the term ‘sociology’

 Differentiate ‘society’ and ‘culture’
 Know the history of sociology

INTRODUCTION

Have you ever wondered why we act differently in different kinds of social situations? Why
do we might have different behaviors in a same situation? Why might people acting
similarly not feel connected to others exhibiting the same behavior? These are some of
the many questions sociologists ask as they study people and societies.

Sociology is the study of groups and group interactions, societies and social interactions,
from small and personal groups to very large group. It is the systematic study of society
and social interaction.

Society is a group of people who live in a particular and defined geographic area, who
interact with one another, and who share a common culture.
The term culture refers to the group’s shared practices, values, and beliefs. Culture
encompasses a group’s way of life, from routine, everyday interactions to the most
important parts of group members’ lives. It includes everything produced by a society,
including all the social rules. Sociologists often study culture using the sociological
imagination, which pioneer sociologist C. Wright Mills described as an awareness of the
relationship between a person’s behavior and experience and the wider culture that
shaped the person’s choices and perceptions.

History of Sociology

Auguste Comte (1798-1857)

The Father of Sociology

In 1780, French essayist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès

(1748-1836) first coined the term sociology in an unpublished
manuscript. The term was reinvented by Auguste Comte in 1838.
He became a pupil of social philosopher Claude Henri de
Rouvroy Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825). Before being a
pupil of a social philosopher, Comte originally studied to be an
engineer. They both thought that social scientists could study
society using the same scientific methods utilized in natural
sciences. Comte also believed in the potential of social scientists
to work toward the betterment of society.

Comte named the scientific study of social patterns

positivism. He described his philosophy in a series of books
called The Course in Positive Philosophy (1839-1842) and A General View of Positivism
(1848). He believed that using scientific methods to reveal the laws by which societies
and individuals interact would usher in a new “positivist” age of history. While the field
and its terminology have grown, sociologists still believe in the positive impact of their
work.

Harriet Martineau (1802-1876)

The First Woman Sociologist
 Harriet Martineau was a writer who addressed a wide
range of social science issues. She was an early observer of
social practices, including economics, social class, religion,
suicide, government, and women’s rights. Martineau was the
first to translate Comte’s writing from French to English and
thereby introduced sociology to English-speaking scholars.
She is also credited with the first systematic methodological
international comparisons of social institutions in two of her
most famous sociological works: Society in America (1837)
and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838).

Martineau found the workings of capitalism at odds

with the professed moral principles of people in the United
States; she pointed out the faults with the free enterprise
system in which workers were exploited and impoverished
while business owners became wealthy. She further noted that the belief in all being
created equal was inconsistent with the lack of women’s rights.

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

He was a German philosopher and economist. He

and Friedrich Engels co-authored the Communist
Manifesto in 1848. The said book is considered to be one
of the most influential political manuscripts in history. It
also presents Marx’s theory of society, which differed
from what Comte proposed.

Marx rejected Comte’s positivism. He believed

that societies grew and changed as a result of the
struggles of different social classes over the means of
production.

Marx predicted that inequalities of capitalism would become so extreme that

workers would extremely revolt. This would lead to the collapse of capitalism, which would
be replaced by communism. Communism is an economic system under which there is no
private or corporate ownership: everything is owned communally and distributed as
needed. Marx believed that communism was a more equitable system than capitalism.

While his economic predictions may not have come true in the time frame he
predicted, Marx’s idea that social conflict leads to change in society is still one of the major
theories used in modern sociology.
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

In 1873, the English philosopher Herbert

Spencer published The Study of Sociology, the first book
with the term “sociology” in the title. Spencer rejected
much of Comte’s philosophy as well as Marx’s theory of
class struggle and his support of communism. Instead,
he favored a form of government that allowed market
forces to control capitalism. His work influenced many
early sociologists including Émile Durkheim (1858–
1917).

Georg Simmel (1858-1918)

Georg Simmel was a German art critic who wrote
widely on social and political issues as well. Simmel took
an anti-positivism stance and addressed topics such as
social conflict, the function of money, individual identity in
city life, and the European fear of outsiders (Stapley 2010).
Much of his work focused on the micro-level theories, and
it analyzed the dynamics of two-person and three-person
groups. His work also emphasized individual culture as the
creative capacities of individuals. Simmel’s contributions to
sociology are not often included in academic histories of
the discipline, perhaps overshadowed by his
contemporaries Durkheim, Mead, and Weber.
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917)

Durkheim helped establish sociology as a formal

academic discipline by establishing the first European
department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux
in 1895 and by publishing his Rules of the Sociological
Method in 1895. In another important work, Division of
Labour in Society (1893), Durkheim laid out his theory
on how societies transformed from a primitive state into
a capitalist, industrial society. According to Durkheim,
people rise to their proper levels in society based on
merit.

Durkheim believed that sociologists could study

objective “social facts”. He also believed that through
such studies it would be possible to determine if a
society was “healthy” or “pathological.” He saw healthy
societies as stable, while pathological societies experienced a breakdown in social norms
between individuals and society.

In 1897, Durkheim attempted to demonstrate the effectiveness of his rules of social

research when he published a work titled Suicide. Durkheim examined suicide statistics
in different police districts to research differences between Catholic and Protestant
communities. He attributed the differences to socioreligious forces rather than to
individual or psychological causes.

George Herbert Mead (1863–1931)

George Herbert Mead was a philosopher and

sociologist whose work focused on the ways in which
the mind and the self were developed as a result of
social processes. He argued that how an individual
comes to view himself or herself is based to a very
large extent on interactions with others. Mead called
specific individuals that impacted a person’s
life significant others, and he also conceptualized
“generalized others” as the organized and
generalized attitude of a social group. Mead’s work is
closely associated with the symbolic interactionist
approach and emphasizes the micro-level of analysis.
 Max Weber (1864–1920)

Prominent sociologist Max Weber established a

sociology department in Germany at the Ludwig Maximilians
University of Munich in 1919. Weber wrote on many topics
related to sociology including political change in Russia and
social forces that affect factory workers. He is known best
for his 1904 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism. The theory that Weber sets forth in this book is
still controversial. Some believe that Weber argued that the
beliefs of many Protestants, especially Calvinists, led to the
creation of capitalism. Others interpret it as simply claiming
that the ideologies of capitalism and Protestantism are
complementary.

Why study Sociology?

Sociology was developed as a way to study and try to understand the changes to
society brought on by the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Some of the earliest sociologists thought that societies and individuals’ roles in society
could be studied using the same scientific methodologies that were used in the natural
sciences, while others believed that it was impossible to predict human behaviour
scientifically, and still others debated the value of such predictions. Those perspectives
continue to be represented within sociology today.
Studying sociology is beneficial both for the individual and for society. People learn
how to think critically about social issues and problems that confront our society. The
study of sociology enriches students’ lives and prepares them for careers in an
increasingly diverse world. Society benefits because people with sociological training are
better prepared to make informed decisions about social issues and take effective action
to deal with them.

Theoretical Perspectives
Social events, patterns, and interactions are studied by sociologists. They also
develop theory trying to elaborate why things work as they do. In sociology, theory is a
way to explain different aspects of social interactions and to create a hypothesis about
society.
Theories vary in scope depending on the scale of the issues that they are meant
to explain.
Macro-level theories – talks about large-scale issues and large groups of people
Micro-level theories – theories that look at specific relationships between individual or
small groups

In sociology, a few theories provide broad perspectives that help explain many
different aspects of social life, and these are called paradigms. Paradigms are
philosophical and theoretical frameworks used within a discipline to formulate theories,
generalizations, and the experiments performed in support of them. Three paradigms
have come to dominate sociological thinking, because they provide useful explanations:
structural functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism.

SOCIOLOGICAL
LEVEL OF ANALYSIS FOCUS
PARADIGM
The way each part of
Structural Functionalism Macro or Micro society functions together
to contribute to the whole
The way inequalities
contribute to social
Conflict Theory Macro
differences and perpetuate
difference in power
One-to-one interactions
Symbolic Interactionism Micro
and communications

Functionalism
- Also called structural-functional theory
- Sees society as a structure with interrelated parts designed to meet the
biological and social needs of the individuals in that society.
- Criticized as it cannot adequately explain social change and focuses too much
on the stability of societies

Conflict Theory
- Looks at society as a competition for limited resources
- Criticized as it tends to focus on conflict to the exclusion of recognizing stability

Symbolic Interactionist Theory

- Focuses on the relationships among individuals within a society
- Criticized because of the difficulty of remaining objective and narrow focus on
symbolic interaction

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