Sociology
Sociology is a branch of the humanities , which seeks to understand and explain the impact of social representations on (thinking) and behaviors (ways of acting) human. His research topics are varied as sociologists interested in both at work, family, media, gender relations (gender), religions, ethnicities, in short, to the environment humans.
Various sociological theories reflect human social phenomena from different angles. They sometimes put more emphasis on the impact of society on the phenomenon under study (effect of the CSP , sex, etc..), sometimes more interested in the motivations of the actors considered relatively rational or interactions between individuals. But most sociologists (even Weberian) use - consciously or not - on the paradigm that "something like the company" exists objectively, that position in the field of ideas opposed to one that potentially would affirm are always rather adversarial encounter between choice of collective forms of life, the meeting itself outside society.
If sociology is still largely an academic discipline, many sociologists are now employed by public institutions, local authorities or private companies to end or consultancy expertise. Other currents, such as the Movement Against Utilitarian Social Sciences (Mauss) criticize the contrary, the economies of these institutional approaches and exclude them from the field of sociology.
Summary |
The term sociology was coined by Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes . The term was popularized by Auguste Comte in the sense of a social physics.
If it is possible to date with relative accuracy the invention of the word sociology, producing the first sociology course or the constitution of the first department of sociology, it is also always possible to recognize in authors' previous forms of reflection or sociological imagination . The development of sociology must therefore be seized from a specific historical context, the three revolutions, which prompted a development of sociological thought and led to the institutionalization of the discipline.
Precursors
The study of what we call the companies did not wait for the invention of the word sociology. The diversity of uses and organizations challenged the thinkers and historians from the outset in any case since they have left their mark by writing. So is it of Xenophon with its economy, Plato , of Aristotle with his Politics, his republic, his Poetics, his Organon, etc.. of Zoroaster with the Avesta. Herodotus , the fifth century BC. BC, the Egyptians interested.
In the Arab-Islamic civilization, Ibn Khaldun , in his book Muqaddima , introduces an accurate and critical sources and puts events in perspective for determining the causes of the rise and decline of Arab dynasties. Some consider him the true father of sociology. Thus, Gumplowicz Ludwig , professor of political science at the University of Graz, in a book entitled Sociological Insights published in Paris in 1900, reports that "a pious Moslem had studied at leisure social phenomena and expressed ideas on this topic profound: what he wrote is what we today call sociology "
In modern times, it is in the Novum Organum, Great food science Francis Bacon , and its classification table of science, we see appearing under the heading of humanities, a set of disciplines on on human societies with the same epistemological status as the natural sciences. In the eighteenth century, several authors began to reconsider the social worlds from mechanical models or physical Newton : the positions and relationships between individuals would obey laws similar to that of gravitation . Montesquieu , and must not be forgotten, especially In the spirit of the laws in which it proposes to apply an inductive method and comparative analysis of political systems in order to reach the laws .
The desire to establish a 'social physics', that is to say knowledge as objective as the physical sciences, but that would cover the field of human organizations and social relations, emerges in the early nineteenth century. The first to propose a theory "scientific" social phenomena in the early nineteenth century is the Count of Saint Simon ( 1760 - 1825 ). He gives the name of social physiology, he puts in a general physiology which would also include the study of collective beings and their organization. The word sociology was born a little quarrel ... When Augustus Earl , who was secretary of St. Simon of 1817 to 1823 , wanted to resume the creation of a science of society, it was first renamed "social physics" But this term was already used by a Belgian , Quetelet (who was studying social phenomena with statistics). So he decided to create the word "sociology." Auguste Comte , sociological theories developed in the positive political system ( 1851 - 1854 ). It is often considered in France as one of the founding fathers of this science.
Les Misrables Victor Hugo is one of the most famous attempts to capture, through literature, the consequences of the industrial revolution.
illustration of "Cosette" in Les Miserables by Emile Bayard 1837-1891.
There are often among the forerunners of sociology Alexis de Tocqueville ( 1805 - in 1859 ), for his studies of the French Revolution ( The Old Regime and the Revolution ) or the United States ( Democracy in America ). He analyzes and compares the companies of American society and European societies. It is also a visionary regarding the concept of averaging of the company. Sociology's development was intense and regular in the twentieth century. mile Durkheim , who was inspired by certain theories of Auguste Comte to renew this human science , in particular wanted "to study social facts as things").
The three revolutions
If sociology emerged in the nineteenth century, trials and attempts to understand the functioning of society, because major changes are forcing people to rethink the links between them. According to the formula of Jean Duvignaud , sociology can be described as "the daughter of revolutions. "
The political, economic and scientific
First, the nineteenth century was a time of great political instability across Europe. Since 1789, the regimes, movements and political ideologies have multiplied. Insurgencies and wars between European nations this century mark. The old social order, founded on the alliance of the king and the Church, has been discredited, but the ability of societies to define themselves initially leads to a multiplication problems and claims.
The industrial revolution also part of this feeling of living in a new society. Gestures craft, they are transmitted in the family or in organizations of companionship, are devalued by technological advances. Moreover, the rural exodus destroys traditional forms of organization of social life. For farmers become workers, deterioration of living conditions and loss of community support led to a poverty both material and moral. The movement of political protest mix of individual reactions that concern the time theft, begging, vagrancy.
The classical work of Community and Society Ferdinand Tnnies , first published in 1887, is a strong representation of the rupture has been the nineteenth century. He contrasts the warmth of the community, but closed emotional world based on the family, the superficiality of society, an aggregate of individuals having first commercial relationships.
Sociology arises when not only the desire to describe social life but also to respond to social unrest. "They all respond, more or less the same question: how to stop the obvious social crisis in Europe? "
The difference between sociology and political speeches or literary will therefore attempt to provide a scientific answer to these questions. Science itself has indeed had its revolution, the nineteenth century is particularly marked by positivism. Biology, physics and chemistry are experiencing considerable progress that transforms how people perceive their physical environment. Some of these disciplines also participate in the industrial revolution and found technical applications that strongly modify lifestyles. Sociology will be paid by the number of positivism and sociology borrow their models of analysis to biology or physics. The progress of science and their applications seem to prove that a scientifically based discourse can allow the world to intervene and respond to problems that pose the century.
For most sociologists, so this is producing a scientific representation of society capable of meeting the challenges posed by the nineteenth century. It is therefore to provide a critique of modern social life and answers to the most pressing problems. The questions sociologists are highly variable across countries.
Durkheim wishes to reconcile the achievements of the revolution, and first individual autonomy, with a stable social order. In the preface to his first book, The Division of Social Work , he declares: "As to the question that was behind this work is that reports of individual personality and solidarity social. How is it that, while becoming more autonomous, the individual depend more heavily on society? How can he be both more personal and secured? For it is indisputable that the two movements, however contradictory they seem, are continuing in parallel. " If companies can reconcile order and freedom, Durkheim answers, thanks to the "division of labor." This should make it possible to move from mechanical solidarity, based on similarity, the development of organic solidarity, that is to say, arising from the interdependence that exists between individuals in various activities but who need each other to live.
France is, when Durkheim founded the French sociology, a country where political unity and state is strong, but which remain strong regional identities. The state must therefore produce a society of individuals. As Durkheim said, "the social fact is a moral fact, the development of the company must produce individuals with the strongest personality," Morality is what the company ... the first is stronger than in Since the latter is organized. "
In Germany, Weber will question him about the types of actions and forms of authority. German culture has been unified before that political unity is achieved, Weber's reflections are less about the lives of society as a vibrant social life. Weber questioned and on modes of action and domination, producing the first criticism of bureaucratic systems. Working on the development of capitalism , it shows the analogy which existed between the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Wanting to verify their election by God, Protestants (especially Calvinists ) are involved in work while rejecting the pleasure associated with consumption. They behave as well as capitalists who reinvest their profits. But it does show how by that society has lost its meaning and its voluntary nature. Where Protestants chose a lifestyle consistent with their religious beliefs, modernity has produced a "Steel Cage" a rational lifestyle he can not escape: "For Weber, the paradox core of capitalism is the birth in a religious context, a new type of man (research-oriented rationality "instrumental" or "formal") whose universalization is likely to lead to a loss of meaning social relations, even though the expansion would continue the stranglehold "rational" about the nature and the social world . "
In Marx , for whom the scientific study of societies, which captures the inevitability of revolution and the advent of a communist society, in Pareto , which seeks to capture the birth and death of elites, or at Park which To understand how the city allows the gradual assimilation of immigrants, the nascent sociology thus appears first as a speech on the problems resulting from "modern" . Sociology is then how to respond to political and economic turmoil that led men to question their own representations of social life. But sociology can not become a discipline in itself as a science and going to university.
Foundation of the Discipline
If the French sociology Durkheim retained in its "founding father" is in part because it was the first to discuss sociology as a scientific discipline. This need both a clarification of its purpose to distinguish the competing discourses on society: on one hand, the differentiation of philosophy , committed to a process of pure reasoning, normative judgments so that it , wants to impose an empirical approach, guided by the desire to establish the facts relied on evidence ( statistics , surveys monographic). On the other hand, break with psychology , which provides explanations at an individual level, whereas the study of his discipline is on a collective level. On the other hand, it also had to recognize that discipline by establishing a team of researchers, creating journals and finally, by having set as an academic discipline (he was the first professorship of sociology in France).
Making a science of sociology
Sociology was not at his birth the only discourse on modernity. As shown by Georg Lukacs in The meaning of this critical realism , literature, the novel and more on realism , in fact offered representations of social life. Thus, in Balzac's realism and the French , it shows how Balzac seeks to build a full description of French society before being renamed "human comedy" his series of books entitled "Social Studies". The link, sometimes confrontational, between sociological discourse and literary discourse is not specifically French. In England, HG Wells participated in the first Congress of Sociology, Germany, the works of Thomas Mann and Max Weber to respond.
According to Wolf Lepenies , sociology will therefore form a third space between science and literature. It will seek to legitimize itself and differentiate itself by its scientific approach to the social world, but never able to achieve the degree of objectivity of natural science. The emerging sociology will be included in important discussions epistemological which it will provide very different responses in France and Germany.
If sociology must confront the claims of literature to say what the social life, it also faces, in science, psychology emerging. Durkheim and strive to distinguish the sociology of philosophy on the one hand and psychology on the other hand, which he accused his rival Gabriel Tarde . His inspiring reported, in addition to Auguste Comte, were Montesquieu and Rousseau , and the "division of labor" the backbone of his work, precisely where the scientific philosopher Durkheim meets.
Comte to Durkheim, the positivism begins with a critique of political economy , like Marxism , but on very different assumptions, mainly concerning the reality given to the company prior existence as a person and ontologically based .
Karl Marx is another thinker who will have a profound influence on social thought and criticism of the nineteenth century. It is mainly in Germany it will become a major theoretical referent of sociology with the Frankfurt School.
Understand the functioning of societies is the hope of a way of fighting for the introduction of a fairer world (Karl Marx), to found a secular morality scientifically independent requirements of religions (Durkheim), to fight against the "evils" of society such as poverty, alcohol, immorality ( The Play ), against the revolution sometimes ( Gustave Le Bon ).
Emile Durkheim is often considered the founding father of French sociology. The first, he laid the foundations for a scientific methodology for sociology, especially in the book The Rules of Sociological Method ( 1895 ) Continuity in The Division of Social Work (1893), a book comes from its thesis. His method is essentially based on the comparison of statistics and quantitative characteristics, seeking to break free of subjectivity associated with any qualitative and rid of any a priori moral or moralistic effort to understand a "social fact" as in his book Suicide (1897).
The contemporary of Durkheim, Max Weber , but following different paths, employs political science, economics, philosophy, culture and law, religious studies, which he said, like sociology, "cultural studies". According to a tradition of German philosophy ( Wilhelm Dilthey in particular), these sciences are too remote from the natural sciences so they can learn from their methods. It offers an understanding of collective phenomena rather than searching for laws (this is the comprehensive method). For Weber, the goal of sociology is:
"(...) Understand constructive social activity and thereby to causally explain its course and its effects. We mean by "active" human conduct (...) when and as long as the agent or agents shall communicate a sense subjective. And activity "social" activity, which, after its intended meaning by the agent or agents refers to the behavior of others, against which, moving it unfolds. "
- Economy and Society, Plon, 1971, p. 4.
 ( 1,820 - 1903 ) |  ( 1858 - 1917 ) |  ( 1858 - 1,918 ) |
The institutionalization of the discipline
The discipline was taught with his own name for the first time at the University of Kansas in Lawrence in the United States in 1890 by Frank Blackmar, with the course title: Elements of Sociology. The Department of History and Sociology at the University of Kansas was established in 1891 , and the first independent faculty of Sociology was established in 1892 at the University of Chicago by Albion Small. The latter was founded in 1895 the journal American Journal of Sociology .
The first European department of sociology was founded in 1895 at the University of Bordeaux in France by Emile Durkheim. The latter based sociological Year in 1896. In 1919 a sociology department was established in Germany at the University Louis and Maximilian in Munich by Max Weber. Another was established in 1920 by Florian Znaniecki in Poland. The first sociology departments in the United Kingdom were founded after the Second World War.
International cooperation in sociology began in 1893 when Rene Worms founded the International Institute of Sociology , eclipsed by the International Sociological Association in 1949 (currently chaired by the French Michel Wieviorka ). In 1905, the " American Sociological Association "was founded and Lester Frank Ward was chosen as its first president.
There is an association of French sociologists: the French Sociological Association (SFA) currently chaired by Dan Ferrand-Bechmann. Moreover, there is an international association of French: the International Association of French Speaking Sociologists (AISLF), currently headed by Monique Hirschhorn.
Sociological Paradigms
Two opposing views often within sociology: the holistic paradigm of Emile Durkheim and the atomistic paradigm defined by Max Weber.
Holistic Paradigm (Durkheim)
That of Emile Durkheim says holistic paradigm (from the Greek holos: forming a whole). For him and those who claim his legacy, the company is a holon, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, it pre-exists the individual and individuals are governed by it. In this context, the company includes individuals and individual consciousness is seen only as a fragment of the collective consciousness.
According to this view, the object of sociological research is the social fact that must be treated as a thing, its cause must be sought in social facts earlier. The social fact, which is subject to institutionalization, is external to the individual and puts pressure on it. Individuals are therefore framed in institutions, themselves inserted into homologous structures to each other. Sociology is the science of time invariant institutional phenomena which are observable.
Marcel Mauss print a significant shift in this doctrine, arguing the need to describe fully and completely the forms in which the phenomenon appears to reveal their secret. Analyze the concrete person of neglecting the sensitivity to the experience.
More recent but certainly bearer, Jean Baechler has developed a paradigm of history and sociology, a method which uses some pins Simmelian studies, which arises on the basis of the criticism of historical reason identified by R. Aron to account for the fate of macroscopic social phenomena .
Paradigm atomistic (Weber)
The view of Max Weber is different is the atomistic paradigm. For him, and even more certainly to Georg Simmel , each individual is a social atom. The atoms act according to motives, interests, emotions are specific and related to other atoms. A system of constant interaction between the atoms produces and reproduces society.
According to this view, the object of sociological research is social action. The emphasis is on the cause of social actions and the meaning given by individuals to their actions. We no longer seek institutional arrangements but a horizon of meanings that serve as references. The institution is there but it is the motives and interests of agents and encloses: the "iron cage" of bureaucracy.
Other paradigms
Other operating paradigms in sociology. Thus, social constructivism is considering social reality and social phenomena as being "built", that is to say products and institutionalized. The recent emergence of a sociological analysis based on social networks suggests avenues of research beyond the opposition between holistic and atomistic approach. Similarly, pragmatic sociology has dramatically changed the ways of linking logical investigations, production of models and styles of restitution work.
An evolving discipline
Contemporary sociology has, for many, limited its ambitions: it is limited to the study of human organizations and social institutions, primarily using a comparative method, it has focused on studying the organization of complex industrial societies , that is to say Western companies. This focus has left the field of study of group behavior in social psychology.
Furthermore the anthropology , born of colonial conquests and the study of peoples called it too long primitive research traces the evolution of man (as a species in the case of physical anthropology and the evolution of societies in that of social anthropology ). Nevertheless, some anthropologists have also conducted their studies in industrialized societies. Today sociology and anthropology are differentiated more by their methods and theories, as the object of their studies.
Sociology is not made of a structured set around the same basis and in which all authors share the same views of what is scientific and what would not, what to expect from science , report to modernity . The authors, schools and currents criterion for choosing one or another ( structural , functional , conventional , etc..), as the real grip rather than another ( interactionism , institutionalism , regulationist , Actionism , etc..) without ever explicitly state that they hold and what they release methodological and metaphysical as they deploy their political and scientific traditions where sediment (overt or forgotten by the history of the discipline ) and a href = "Sociologie_de_la_connaissance" title = "Sociology of Knowledge> divergent conceptions of social relationship and not necessarily supportive, even reluctant to discuss them.
Consequently, the modeling of this " science " .
Finally, the issue of sharing of this project (particularly sensitive when it comes to label this or that thought as part of the sociological enterprise or not ) is reflected in the propensity of the discipline to tolerate or exclude objects (that is, in fact, draw outlines) - in other words, since professional sociology, in the space for emotions that determine the subjective desire to seek . To borrow from Luc Boltanski , "sociology of expertise "is characterized by obedience to criteria dimensional exploration of the objects it is given, when the" critical sociology "would assume their multidimensionality .
This section Generally speaking, sociology, developed in the context of United Nations and their collaborations in the twentieth century, with early Durkheim, Mauss, Weber and Marx (much more) the "holism" or "total" actual taking now towards a global society. Fields of study and current Areas of study in sociology are almost as numerous as social phenomena. It may be the study of social movements , the deviance of the human sexuality , the education , the evolution of mentality and intelligence ( Flynn effect ), the immigration of labor , big social families as teachers , the students , the students , the army ...] The study of social phenomena is done through a number of tools that enable the sociologist to understand phenomena whose scale exceeds the possibilities of individual perception, but also limit the inferences that the fact During his work. These tools can be found: the questionnaire , the survey , the observation in situ ( participant or not), maintenance, life story , the group analysis (or "focus group"), the analysis content , the hermeneutics , the statistical analysis , the social network analysis , the action research. The sociologist is primarily a human being with, among other things, sensations, impressions and opinions. To overcome this state during a search, the application of methods recognized by his peers allows the researcher to justify its approach to a social phenomenon. What to observe? Why? These are the first questions a researcher on the subject of his research. Generally, social science methods are divided into two complementary categories, quantitative methods and qualitative methods. Quantitative studies allow the study of sets, the comparison units vis--vis general trends. The first precaution is to identify comparable units and indicators, and to know precisely what the researcher wants to compare. The limits of quantitative studies are achieved when the researcher examines a single or on biographies. The statistics and surveys are the main tools of the quantitative study. Detailed observation, description of situation, that is to say a discourse analysis, a coding tool that can bring out the typologies, trends and so on. Thus, among the methods used in sociological inquiry, we will find including maintenance and observation. Empirical research and its methods
Quantitative Methods
Qualitative Methods
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