The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology

Summary

Every discipline has its own vocabulary, the words it uses to label and draw attention to what it takes to be worth understanding. In biology, for example, life, cell, and organism are essential for knowing what biology is about, just as sharp, flat, and tempo are essential in music, and culture, interaction, and structure are essential in sociology.

For beginning students, vocabulary often appears as just a daunting collection of definitions to be memorized for the next quiz. What students often miss is that such words are far more than mental hurdles to clear, far more than jargon invented by professionals to distinguish themselves. Taken as a whole, the language of a discipline is a map that identifies a territory of study and provides points of view from which to look at it. Learning a new discipline is like traveling to a foreign land, and technical language is a guide to significant sights to look for and how to pay attention to them.

As such, language plays a key role in drawing attention to different aspects of reality, and in the process it shapes the reality that you perceive and experience. The first time you walk through a field of wildflowers, for example, you may see only a soft sea of colors blending into an undifferentiated whole. But what happens if you take along someone who knows one flower from another, who bends you down to see the details of each? Strolling through country fields will never be the same again. Now you will know the distinct individuality of each variety of flower and how they come together to make this thing you experience as a field. You will find yourself saying, “I never saw that flower before,” when in fact, of course, you saw it a thousand times; what you never did before was to notice it.

Noticing is a great deal of what technical language is about. When we learn the word for a concept — such as system — we can then think about that concept in relation to other concepts — such as family — and thereby understand both in a different way than before. In many ways, this is what thinking is about: noticing and making connections. Whether word labels refer to colors, types of flowers, types of political systems, or theories of social change, they are essential for noticing, connecting, thinking, and understanding.

The language of sociology is what sociologists use to study social life in all its diversity and complexity — to see how this system works differently from that or how one pattern of small group interaction differs from another. It is this language that takes us beyond merely seeing what is all around us, to noticing, to paying attention in ways that enable us to understand social life in a more systematic way. The word culture, for example, points to a collection of things, symbols, ideas, and practices that shape life in a social system such as a society. Culture includes the languages people speak, the foods they prefer, the rules they live by, and the values that shape their choices. Once culture becomes part of our active vocabulary, we are more likely to notice the distinction between an individual’s personality and the culture in which they participate.

We can become more aware that there is something larger than ourselves that we and other people participate in, an “it” to be understood in its own right. From here we can realize that we cannot understand the behavior of individuals without paying attention to the culture of the society in which they live. Instead of merely seeing destructive individual personalities as the cause of social problems, for example, we also notice the many ways in which a society can reward or otherwise promote destructive behavior. In short, we start to notice that everything individuals experience or do always takes place in and is shaped by a cultural context.

Contents

• About this Book
• Dictionary Entries
• Biographical Sketches: A Selected Sociological Who's Who

Extract

sociology Sociology is the study of social life and behavior, especially in relation to social systems, how they work, how they change, the consequences they produce, and their complex relation to people’s lives. The term was first used by Auguste Comte.

From its beginnings, sociology has suffered from somewhat of an identity crisis reflected in its many definitions. It is often referred to as the “study of society,” but this excludes the vast majority of social life that takes place in systems that are much smaller than societies. Studies of groups, corporations, school classrooms, and dysfunctional families are all connected with society in an ultimate sense, but we can ask many sociological questions about them without ever referring to that largest of social systems in which they find themselves. At the other end of the spectrum is the objection that there are increasingly interesting problems that take place at levels larger than societies, at levels encompassing world economic and political systems.

Going in another direction, sociology is often defined as the “study of groups,” but this fails to take into account that the concept of a group is quite precise and narrow in sociology. Many important social systems — from complex organizations and communities to societies and the world economic system — are not groups. In addition, the concept of a group does not include social categories such as those defined by race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and age, which play an important part in social inequality, oppression and conflict.

Sociology might also be defined as the study of social behavior. However, since there is but a small range of human behavior that cannot be construed as social to some degree, this definition confuses sociology with psychology, which is far more concerned with the individual’s internal workings than with their social context and their connection to it. Although human behavior is central to sociological thinking, it is not what makes that thinking distinctly sociological.

Central to any definition of the sociological point of view is the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, for the whole also includes the relations that bind the parts together, which generally cannot be derived from knowledge of the parts alone. It is of course true that social systems would not amount to much if there were no individual people, but it does not follow from this that social systems are therefore just a collection of individuals. Social systems are sets of arrangements in which individuals participate, much like a game that people play. This does not mean that the game is a particular group of people playing it.

To borrow from the chemists, a molecule cannot be understood solely by studying the characteristic of each element that “participates” in it. Indeed, we know next to nothing about molecules unless we understand the bonds that connect them to one another, and these are not characteristics of any of the constituent parts. In the same way, psychological profiles of workers in a corporation will not be of much use in understanding what a corporation is and how it works. It is therefore a combined focus on social systems and their connection to individual people’s lives that distinguishes sociology from other disciplines and provides a unique and powerful vantage point from which to pose questions about human life.