The Sociological Perspective: How Society Shapes Our Lives

Posted on Sep 12, 2024 in Psychology and Sociology

Is the Decision About Whom to Marry Just a Matter of Personal Feelings?

Why do couples like Tonya and Dwayne marry? Everyone would reply, “People marry because they fall in love.” Most of us find it hard to imagine a happy marriage without love. But, there is plenty of evidence to show that if love is the key to marriage, Cupid’s arrow is carefully aimed by the society around us.

Society has many “rules” about whom we should and should not marry. The law rules out half the population by banning people from marrying someone of the same sex, even if the couple is deeply in love. People, when they are young, are very likely to marry someone close in age. People of all ages typically marry someone of the same race, of similar social class background, same level of education, similar degree of physical attractiveness… People end up making choices about whom to marry, but society narrows the field long before they do.

Sociology teaches us that the social world guides our life choices in much the same way that the seasons influence our choice of clothing.

Seeing the General in the Particular

One good way to define the sociological perspective is seeing the general in the particular. Sociologists look for general patterns in the behavior of particular people.

We begin to see the world sociologically by realizing how the general categories into which we fall shape our particular life experiences.

Example: The Power of Society shows how the social world guides people to select marriage partners. This is why the large majority of married couples are about the same age, have similar educational backgrounds, and share the same racial and ethnic identity… How does social class position affect what women look for in a spouse? Lillian Rubin found that women typically expected the men they married to be sensitive to others, talk readily, share feelings and experiences, not drink too much, not be violent, and hold steady jobs…

This text explores the power of society to guide our actions, thoughts, and feelings. The sociological perspective shows us that factors such as our sex, age, race, and social class guide our selection of a partner.

The Suicide Example

What could be more personal than the lonely decision to end your own life? Durkheim showed that social forces are at work.

Durkheim found that some categories of people were more likely than others to take their own lives. Men, Protestants, wealthy people, and the unmarried each had much higher suicide rates than women, Catholics and Jews, the poor, and married people.

Social integration: People with strong social ties had low suicide rates, and more individualistic people had high suicide rates.

In Durkheim’s time, men had much more freedom than women. Freedom weakens social ties and thus increases the risk of suicide. Protestants were more likely to commit suicide than more tradition-bound Catholics and Jews, whose rituals encourage stronger social ties.

Durkheim’s analysis still holds true. For all categories, suicide was more common among men than among women. White men are almost four times as likely as white women to take their own lives. By Durkheim’s logic, the higher suicide rate among white people and men reflects their greater wealth and freedom, as the lower rate among women and people of color reflects their limited social choices.

Seeing Sociologically: Marginality and Crisis

Two situations help people see clearly how society shapes individual lives:

Living on the margins of society
Living through a social crisis

Living on the Edge

For some categories of people, being an outsider is an everyday experience. People with social marginality are able to use the sociological perspective.

No African American grows up in the United States without understanding the importance of race in shaping people’s lives. Songs by rapper Jay-Z express the anger he feels about the poverty he experienced growing up and also about the many innocent lives lost to violence. He shows that some people of color feel that their hopes and dreams are crushed by society, whereas white people think less often about race and the privileges it provides, believing that race affects only people of color and not themselves. People at the margins of social life (racial minorities, women, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities) are aware of social patterns that others rarely think about.

Periods of Crisis

Periods of rapid change or crisis make everyone feel a little off balance, encouraging us to use the sociological perspective. Mills illustrated this idea using the Great Depression. The unemployment rate soared to 25 percent. People without jobs could not help but see general social forces at work in their particular lives. They took a sociological approach and realized, “The economy has collapsed; there are no jobs to be found!” Mills believed that using what he called the “sociological imagination” helps people understand their society and how it affects their own lives.

Sociology and Personal Growth

We are likely to become more active and aware and to think more critically in our everyday lives. Using sociology pays off in four ways:

The sociological perspective helps us assess the truth of “common sense.” If we think we decide our own fate, we may be quick to praise successful people as superior and consider others with fewer achievements personally deficient.
The sociological perspective helps us see the opportunities and constraints in our lives. It is society that deals us the hand. The more we understand the game, the better players we will be. Sociology helps us learn more about the world so that we can pursue our goals more effectively.
The sociological perspective empowers us to be active participants in our society. The better we understand how society operates, the more effective citizens we become. As we come to see how society affects us, we may decide to support society as it is, or we may set out with others to change it.
The sociological perspective helps us live in a diverse world. The sociological perspective prompts us to think critically about the relative strengths and weaknesses of all ways of life, including our own.

Sociological Research Often Challenges What We Accept as Common Sense

Scientific research often challenges what we accept as common sense. Here are five examples that are not supported by scientific evidence:

“Poor people are far more likely than rich people to break the law.” If you regularly watch TV shows, you might think that police arrest only people from “bad” neighborhoods. But research also shows that police and prosecutors are more likely to treat well-to-do people more leniently.
“The United States is a middle-class society in which most people are more or less equal.” The richest 5 percent of U.S. families control 63 percent of the nation’s total wealth, but almost half of all families have scarcely any wealth at all.
“Most poor people don’t want to work.” This statement is true of some but not most poor people. Half of poor individuals in the United States are children and elderly people who are not expected to work.
“Differences in the behavior of females and males are just ‘human nature.'” Much of what we call “human nature” is constructed by the society in which we live. Some societies define “feminine” and “masculine” very differently than we do.
“Most people marry because they are in love.” In many societies, marriage has little to do with love.

Durkheim’s Principles and Concepts

The writings of this French author have had a lasting impact on modern sociology. He saw sociology as a new science that could be used to elucidate traditional philosophical questions by examining them in an empirical manner. Also, he believed that we must study social life with the same objectivity as scientists study the natural world. Three of the main themes were:

The importance of sociology as an empirical science
The rise of the individual and the formation of a new social order
The sources and character of moral authority in society

The main intellectual concern of sociology is the study of social facts, so sociologists should examine them. Durkheim believed that societies have a reality of their own that means that there is more to society than simply the individual members. According to him, social facts are ways of acting, thinking, or feeling that are external to individuals and have their own reality outside the lives and perceptions of individual people. They exercise a coercive power over individuals. This is because people generally comply with social facts freely, believing they are acting out of choice. In fact, people often simply follow patterns that are general to their society.

Durkheim conceded that social facts are difficult to study because they are invisible and intangible, so they can’t be observed directly. Instead, their properties must be revealed indirectly by analyzing their effects or by considering attempts that have been made at their expression, like religious texts. Durkheim stressed the importance of abandoning prejudices and ideology. He also held that scientific concepts could only be generated through scientific practice.

Durkheim was particularly interested in social and moral solidarity—in other words, what holds society together and keeps it from descending into chaos. In The Division of Labour in Society, he presented an analysis of social change, arguing that the industrial era meant the emergence of a new type of solidarity. For that, he contrasted two types of solidarity: mechanical and organic.

According to him, traditional cultures with a low division of labor are characterized by mechanical solidarity because most members of the society are involved in similar occupations, so they have similar beliefs. In this way, there is little room for individual dissent.

He argued that the specialization of tasks and the increasing social differentiation in advanced societies would lead to a new order featuring organic solidarity. Societies characterized by organic solidarity are held together by people’s economic interdependence and their recognition of the importance of others’ contributions.

Processes of change in the modern world are so rapid and intense that they give rise to major social difficulties. He linked these unsettling conditions to anomie, a feeling of aimlessness or despair provoked by modern social life.

One of Durkheim’s most famous studies was concerned with the analysis of suicide, which seems to be a purely personal act. He showed that social factors exert a fundamental influence on suicidal behavior, and its rates show regular patterns from year to year, and these patterns must be explained sociologically. He found four types of suicide:

Egoistic suicides are marked by low integration in society and occur when an individual is isolated or when his or her ties to a group are broken.
Anomic suicide is caused by a lack of regulation. By this, Durkheim referred to the social conditions of anomie.
Altruistic suicide occurs when an individual is ‘over-integrated’ and values society more than himself or herself.
Fatalistic suicide results when an individual is over-regulated by society. Durkheim saw this as of little contemporary relevance.

Social Role and Role-Guided Behaviour: How Roles Are Internalized

The role provides the pattern according to which the individual is to act in the particular situation. Roles will vary. It would be missing an essential aspect of the role if one regarded it merely as a regulatory pattern for externally visible actions. Roles carry with them both certain actions and the emotions and attitudes that belong to these actions.

For example: A person who is an officer not only acts like an officer, he feels like one.

Identity Is Not Something “Given” but Is Bestowed in Acts of Social Recognition

We become that as which we are addressed. This does not mean that there are not certain characteristics an individual is born with that are carried by his genes. We do know that the room for social formation within those genetic limits is very large indeed. We can say that to be human is to be recognized as human. The child who is given respect comes to respect himself.

Identities must also be socially sustained, and fairly steadily so. The self-image of the officer as an officer can be maintained only in a social context in which others are willing to recognize him in this identity.

Cases of radical withdrawal of recognition by society can tell us much about the social character of identity. For example, a man turned overnight from a free citizen into a convict will discover that he is acting as a convict is supposed to and feeling all the things that a convict is expected to feel.

The Family and Socialization

The Family as a Social Institution: The Functions of the Family, with Special Attention to the Socialization Function

To a sociologist, the family is one of the many small face-to-face groups that he calls primary groups. It has peculiar characteristics that differentiate it from other common primary groups. It gives special recognition to the relationship between one male and one or more females or between one female and one or more males. The typical family pattern found in Britain is not the only one or even the universal one.

Anthropologists have found that some pattern of family organization is a common social institution. In families, there is a strong feeling between mother and child, and the position of the father is less definite.

What are the functions of the family? Consideration has been given to the way that the family first fulfills the satisfaction of sex needs, secondly acts as an economic unit, and thirdly cares for the young and old.

Sex Needs: There are very powerful impulses to sexual behavior in most humans, and any organized society will wish to place this area of conduct under a form of control.
Economic: Production of most goods and services is carried out in factories or outside the household, and members of the family are employed as individuals.
Socialization: Just as those who become members of any group must learn its ways, so must new members of the family be socialized into the roles relating to that stage of the life cycle through which they are passing. However, the family has a crucial position in the social structure since it is mainly through the family that society at large initiates its new recruits.

Although any group must initiate its recruits, the family socializes its young in a different way because of its peculiar structure. The difference in age of parents and children helps parents to exert power over children. Also, the family teaches the children the parents’ interpretation of social reality around them. The young learn not just how to subsist but how to exist socially.

Children may play at roles like actors in the theatre, but ultimately they become these roles. Example: The girl playing at mother takes on the characteristics of personality associated with women in that society. Children, as they grow older, gradually achieve the capacity to put themselves in the position of others.

The Family and Socialization: Socialization

Just as those who become members of any group must learn its ways, so must new members of the family be socialized into the roles relating to that stage of the life cycle through which they are passing. However, the family has a crucial position in the social structure since it is mainly through the family that society at large initiates its new recruits.

Early Socialization

The patterns of behavior that a society has to pass on to its new recruits are referred to as its culture. In a primitive society, the transmission of the culture was a major part of education. In our culture, there are many patterns of living that are passed on, but the traditional peoples that Margaret Mead was describing did not yet have to cope with the rapidly changing culture that our children must.

At what age should education outside the family begin, and what alternatives should be available both at the start and later? By the age of five or six, when children in most European countries start at school, the family has done a great deal of an educational nature. Much of the culture has by this age been transmitted. However, the schools have come to consider that they have pastoral care for their pupils. Therefore, the values that the school tries to inculcate may be at odds with those that the family attempts to teach the child.

The roles that an adult in contemporary Britain needs to learn cannot all be taught within the nuclear family.

The family cannot do everything and may clash with the school, where children begin to learn how their family views adults of other social classes that impinge on them; the middle-class child who imitates his mother’s telephone voice when she orders from the local grocer has begun to learn something of the social class system.

Personality

There are inherited determinants of personality which put limits on the molding that society can do.

Anthropologists have reported some of the most significant cases of differences. In an experiment with two tribes, in one tribe the men cared for the children, whilst the women did the hunting and the food gathering. Each sex had the personality characteristics that one would associate with the tasks allocated to it. In the other tribe, the patterns of tasks and of personalities were more akin to that in our own culture. In this process, the link between the community and the personality is the family.

The child loves her mother, not any of her specific acts. The loved adult becomes a model that the child will imitate. He will attempt to imitate all the different roles that the adult plays. Personalities come to differ because of varying inherited potentialities and because the experiences that are met are not common to all members of society.

The development of personality is a process that continues throughout life. By the age of five or six, the child has begun to learn within the family how to cope with the many tensions and frustrations that are inescapable in life with others. Under modern conditions, there is one particular way in which the educational system can be of great assistance in the development of personality.

Control of the Adolescent

While the child grows older, he needs to go outside this narrow circle to fulfill the psychological needs that come with adolescence. The most obvious need is to experiment with sexual roles amongst those of the same age. As soon as the child becomes attached to a group of his own age outside the family, his conduct becomes far less capable of control. When social change is rapid, there is a further cause of difficulty. The code of values evolved in the group may not only be at odds with the home and the school but will also almost certainly differ from the code that was common amongst the adolescent groups of twenty-five years ago. The major causes are that there have been big changes in the generally held moral code over the last generation.

One of the most important attitudes involved in this problem is that towards authority. The ready obedience expected from a five-year-old cannot be exacted from a fourteen-year-old. In the past, there were social institutions organized so that there was a smooth transition in this respect from childhood to full adult status.