So You Want

To Learn
Sociology?
SOC 105.02
Fall 2023
Week 1.Lecture 1
Logistics I
• Send your (permitted) pet photos!
• Clickers By Next Tuesday
• I will provide a permanent session ID for the class Tuesday
• Lecture slides and recording available on Brightspace!
• How I Lecture/How to Listen
• Tangents (which I hope are interesting)
• The most important items are
• Materials that appear in the readings, on lecture slides, and that I spend time talking about in lecture
• I can and do get things wrong; please challenge and correct me!
• Sometimes I’ll ask you to write me so I can learn more about an issue and return to it
• How to study
• Focus on applying concepts—you’ll learn them faster and better that way!
Agenda
• An example of the sociological imagination
• How is sociology like and unlike other sciences?
• Core concepts in sociology
• How can sociology help us (practically?)
Agenda
• An example of the sociological imagination
• How is sociology like and unlike other sciences?
• Core concepts in sociology
• How can sociology help us (practically?)
College Admissions!
●
“Students for Fair Admissions” V. Harvard (2023)
overturned (6-3 vote) the ability of colleges to use race
as a criterion for admissions
– In effect, it forbids “affirmative action,” or the attempt to use college
admissions to aid historically marginalized/disadvantaged groups
– The particular targets of this suit were elite private and public schools
(Harvard, Stanford, USC, Columbia, UNC, Michigan, University of
California)
●
(ALL of the justices went to “elite” schools; 8 of 9 went to Harvard or Yale)
Chief Justice John Roberts

“an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be

it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise….[a] benefit
to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example,
must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a
benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or
her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must
be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the
university...[affirmative action programs] concluded, wrongly,
that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges
bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin.
Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”
College Admissions III
• Colleges favored people’s appearances in the past
• They switches from “pure” grades and “measurables” to
evaluating the “whole person”
• If you were ugly, that counted (against you)!
• Colleges favor athletes in admission…
• …but not always, and this varies a lot from one university to
another
• (FYI, Cal Tech [Mascot: “Beavers”] and MIT [Mascot:
“Engineers”] actually have varsity athletic teams!)
• MIT: fencing, sailing, pistol, cross-country skiing
• (Elite) Colleges definitely favor rich students
• “Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to
attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago)
as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores.
Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with
comparable test scores from high-income families…” (Source)
College Admissions V
• When we say “college admissions should pick the
best students,” what assumptions are we making?
• That admissions should be clear and simple
• That students show their potential to be the “best”
clearly and in the same way
• That the admissions process works like a piece of a
machine, ideally executing its purpose with minimal
error
Admissions and the
Sociological Imagination
• Who is “best”? By what yardstick?
• How do those who decided what is “best” avoid bias in their
judgments?
• How do we account for change over time?
• Does what is “best” change? Or are we getting fairer or less fair overall
as a society?
What is the sociological imagination?
• We can better understand many phenomena—like college
admissions policies—using the sociological imagination.
• C. Wright Mills
• “A quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in
order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be
happening within themselves” (p. 5, “The Promise”).
• “The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the
relations between the two within society” (p. 6, “The Promise”).
• The application of imaginative thought to the asking and answering of sociological
questions. Someone using the sociological imagination “thinks themselves away” from
the familiar routines of daily life.
The Sociological Imagination II
• Put differently:
• You are embedded in a web of social structures [the
underlying regularities or patterns in how people behave
and in their relationships with one another] that together
comprise “society.”
• Sociology—the science of self-in-society—helps show the
intersection and mutual influence of ourselves and these
structures
C. Wright Mills (1916-1962)
• Troubles
• They “occur within the character of the individual and within the range of
his immediate relations with others; they have to do with his self and with
those limited areas of social life of which [people are] directly and
personally aware” (p. 8).
• Issues
• “…have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the
individual and the range of his inner life. They have to do with the
organization of many such millieux into the institutions of a historical
society as a whole…” (p. 8).
Troubles and Issues (Or, how do you
interpret a social phenomenon?)
From Troubles to Issues…
• Your house is flooded…is this a trouble
or issue?
• “Exurban” development and expansion
• [Regional Scale; source; source]
• 1968 National Flood Insurance
Program (FEMA underwrites building in
floodplains)
• [National Scale; source]
• Anthropogenic climate change (source)
• [World Scale; source]
More Troubles, More Issues…
• You, or a family member, struggles with opioid
addiction…is this a trouble or an issue?
• Opioid addiction and death stresses family and
local social structures
• [Intimate scale; source]
• Addiction is unevenly distributed spatially and
over time
• [Geographic and temporal scale; source]
• Manufacturers of opioids aggressively marketed
them as a cheap alternative to hospitalization,
and hid their addictive properties
• [Economic scale; source 1; source 2]

Chart
C. Wright Mills II
• How do troubles and issues come together over time?
• Relationship between cherished values and perceived threat (p. 11)
Aware of Cherished Values?
Yes No
Perceived Yes Crisis/Panic Uneasiness
Threat? No Well-Being Indifference

• “To understand the changes of many personal milieu we are required

to look beyond them” (p. 10).
• From 1959 to today, more awareness of “cherished values?”
Agenda
• An example of the sociological imagination
• How is sociology like and unlike other sciences?
• Core concepts in sociology
• How can sociology help us (practically?)
Sociology is Similar to Other Sciences!
• Observation and measurement
• Systematic definitions of object of study and measures that are reliable and
valid
• Reliability: using the same measurement of the same group under the same conditions
gives you the same result
• Validity: you are measuring the underlying object you think you are
• Validity can be internal (true under carefully controlled conditions, like laboratory
experiments) and external (actually true in people’s everyday lives)

• Causes and explanation

• How can events in the (social) world be accounted for by other things in the
world?
• Why do things happen? ( Related to “How” they happen)
Sociology is Different from Other Sciences!
• Sociology’s object of inquiry is irreducibly social
• People are reflexive—they can take themselves as objects of inquiry and
react to being categorized and measured
• “The first fruit of [the sociological] imagination…is the idea that the
individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only
by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in
life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances”
(C. Wright Mills, p. 5).
• Impossible objectivity
• Everyone, including social scientists, is embedded in social structures, so
strict scientific objectivity is impossible
Agenda
• An example of the sociological imagination
• How is sociology like and unlike other sciences?
• Core concepts in sociology
• How can sociology help us (practically?)
Social Construction
• We tend to think of the world, even the social world, as given or inevitable,
but sociology emphasizes that things are socially constructed, which
means…
• An idea or practice that a group of people agree exists. It is maintained over time by
people taking its existence for granted.
• Examples
• Gender roles in children
• A football game
• Money
• Love
• Language
• (Bonus round: name something in the social world that’s not socially constructed!)
Social Construction II
• Discomfort and social construction
• Is it “awkward” or “painful” or “funny”?
• Not the nature/nurture arguments
• Instead, social construction is about trying to understand what parts are
and aren’t “natural,” instead of taking “human nature” as the default
Social Order
• The relative durability and persistence of social structures across time
and space
• The stability of social life shows that social structures exist, and have norms,
roles, and values that both constrain and motivate
• These norms, roles, and values get “inside” people through socialization
• Socialization is…
• …the social process through which children develop an awareness of social
norms and values and achieve a distinct sense of self.
• Unavoidable, and most intense during childhood.
• Examples: this lecture hall, games, the military and war, the family
Agency and Structure
• “We influence social structures and they influence us” (HOW?)
• One extreme: radical free will
• Other extreme: radical determinism
• Both extremes are incoherent
• Radical free will can’t account for how society will “push back” against
choices
• If radical determinism is true, why bother trying?
Agency and Structure II
• Most of us (in American society) are
socialized into “free will”
• A million other motivational quotes
• Sociologists, in contrast, lean towards
determinism
• BUT sociologists still believe in free
will!
• How? Through probabilistic tendencies
• Most structures operate on big groups of
people and change the behavioral tendencies
of that group, not individuals
• We’re not talking about you; we’re talking
about people like you
Micro and Macro
• Sociology also distinctively thinks at dual levels of analysis
• Micro
• The study of human behavior in contexts of fact-to-face interaction
• Macro
• The study of large-scale groups, organizations, or social systems
• But...how do these two things intersect, exactly?
Social Change
• Sociology arose to try and understand two giant, deeply-connected,
world-historical shifts
• The rise of (now post-) industrial capitalism
• An economic system based on the private ownership of wealth, which is invested
and reinvested in order to produce profit
• Example: where doesn’t the language of profit apply?
• The rationalization of science, business, and government
• The process by which modes of precise calculation and organization, involving
abstract rules and procedures, increasingly come to dominate the social world.
• Example: your education as the managed “return on investment” that should
have a measurable impact on your salary
Agenda
• An example of the sociological imagination
• How is sociology like and unlike other sciences?
• Core concepts in sociology
• How can sociology help us (practically?)
Can Sociology Save the World?
• Awareness of cultural variation
• Help assessing policy
• Self-enlightenment

But what is the sociologist’s role in doing all this,

and what should it be?