Discussion 1

A Sociology Experiment

Shamus Khan, Princeton University Patrick Sharkey, Princeton University Gwen Sharp, Nevada State College

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A Sociology Experiment

S H A M U S K H A N , P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y P A T R I C K S H A R K E Y , P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y G W E N S H A R P , N E V A D A S T A T E C O L L E G E

WHAT IS SOCIOLOGY?

Sociology

A new science for a changing world

FOUNDERS OF SOCIOLOGY

Karl Marx

Émile Durkheim

Max Weber

AN AMERICAN TRADITION: EXPANDING SOCIOLOGY

Jane Addams

W.E.B. Du Bois

The ideas of tomorrow: a social science at the intersections

A SOCIOLOGY EXPERIMENT

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WHAT IS SOCIOLOGY?

How is our behavior affected by being in a group?

What does it mean to think sociologically?

How did the Industrial Revolution and growth of cities influence the development of

sociology?

In May 2020, protests broke out across the U.S. in response to the killing of George Floyd.

Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man, was killed when a police officer kneeled on his

neck for over 8 minutes, choking him. Floyd repeatedly told the officer he couldn’t breathe

and begged for his life; he eventually lost consciousness and died while onlookers recorded

the entire scene. The video sparked large protests not only in Minneapolis, where George

Floyd was killed, but across the country. And in some cities, the protests turned violent, with

members of the crowds setting fires to government buildings and cars, damaging other

property, and throwing water bottles at police. The police in some cities used tear gas, rubber

bullets, and armored vehicles to control or disperse crowds.1

You probably saw footage of some of the protests that turned violent. Did you

sympathize with the protesters, or did you shake your head and wonder, “What’s wrong with

these people?” Or “There’s no way I would ever behave like that”?

Maybe you’re right. Maybe not.

Sociologist Mark Granovetter has studied a wide variety of topics in his career, like how

organizations work and the way people draw on “friends of friends” to find jobs.2 He has also

produced important insights into the way that our individual behavior can be influenced by

the actions of those around us—like, for instance, in the middle of a brawl, a wild campus

party, or a riot.3

Granovetter began by imagining a scene where a group of people are together in the

same place for a political protest. Most people in the crowd are there to join with others to

express their opinions; they have no intention of throwing a rock through a store window,

starting a fight, or burning a police car. But a couple of those in the crowd are willing to cause

mayhem at the slightest provocation; maybe they didn’t show up specifically hoping for the

protest to turn violent, but they’ll jump in pretty gleefully if an opportunity presents itself. When

a police officer shows up and barks out an order to disperse, those few people suddenly begin

to shout more loudly, and one of them picks up a rock and throws it.

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Most people in the crowd are shocked

by the troublemakers and don’t join them. But

as the police officers press forward, a couple

more people in the crowd, with a surge of

adrenaline, are inspired by the act of rebellion,

pick up a rock or bottle, and throw it at the

police. In response, the police shout orders

more forcefully and start to push a few

protesters backward. Now a larger group of

people in the crowd begin to get agitated,

yelling at the police to stop pushing. They

had no intention of joining in any violence

when they left home, but they see what is

happening around them and join in. They

push back against the advancing officers. The police, outfitted in riot gear, advance with their

batons out; the group of peaceful protesters has become a chaotic, angry mass of people

outraged by the actions of the police and inspired by those around them to fight back.

Explaining all of the individual decisions that result in the outbreak of violence within a

previously peaceful protest is extremely difficult. Economists assume that individuals calculate

the costs and benefits of a potential action and then decide how to act. But if everyone was

thinking through the costs and benefits of their actions, violence usually wouldn’t break out; a

few of the most aggressive protesters with nothing to lose might decide to throw rocks or set a

car on fire, but the rational people in the crowd would walk away. Psychologists try to

understand why some individuals tend to be more prone to violence and impulsive behavior

than others. But in Granovetter’s scenario, most people who showed up at the protest were

not particularly violent people. We would think that the small number of highly-aggressive

people in the crowd would be arrested or shunned, and that would be the end of it.

To understand how violence within a protest that started out peacefully breaks out, we

need to think about individual behavior differently. Staring at a television or computer screen

in the comfort of our living room or dorm room, it’s easy to imagine how calmly we would

behave in the middle of a frantic situation. But Granovetter’s crucial insight was that our

actions don’t take place in a social vacuum, where we can rationally and individually think

through the consequences. They take place within a social context in which our own behavior

is influenced by the setting and by the behavior of everyone around us. This includes other

protesters, but also the police.

A crowd of protesters usually contains a diverse group of people with different

identities, behavioral expectations, and priorities.4 There may be only a few who are willing to

turn to violence first. But there are a few more who may be willing to resort to violence if they

see others taking a lead. And there is a larger group that might join in if a significant number of

protesters become more aggressive. Even more don’t want to take part in violence, and will

Minneapolis police officer watching the crowd of

protesters in Minneapolis. (Source: Chad Davis

Photography; Creative Commons license)

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do so only if they see most of their fellow protesters involved. A few more will only take part in

the violence if everyone else is already doing so. Even if almost all of the protestors would

prefer to avoid taking part in violence, once they are together their behavior changes.

They respond to the action around them and cues from the setting (such as police in

riot gear) and the violence of the moment spreads through the crowd. While police may deter

violence in some cases, in others, their actions actually make violence more likely.5 If people in

the crowd believe the police acted in a way that was unfair or disrespectful to protesters,

they’re more likely to be pulled into violence if it breaks out.6 In the case of the George Floyd

protests, witnessing police pulling down protesters’ masks (worn because of the Covid-19

pandemic) and spraying them in the face with tear gas, knocking down elderly men and

women, shooting rubber bullets into a crowd, and otherwise acting aggressively toward

peaceful individuals led many protesters—and people watching video footage at home—to

believe the police were acting unjustly. When authority figures are perceived to act unfairly,

protesters are less likely to comply with their orders, and violence becomes more likely.

Crowd violence, like many forms of group behavior, can’t be explained by studying

individuals as if they move through the world completely isolated from each other. The

outbreak of violence in these situations is the product of a collective process where people

come together and experience a common set of emotions, react to the actions of others in

the crowd and the police response, pick up cues from the setting, and take a course of

action. A violent protest or riot is about the way we interact with each other within a specific

context. It is, at a fundamental level, a social event.

Sociology

Sociology covers all aspects of social life, including many topics you might read about

in psychology, economics, or political science. Like psychologists, sociologists study the brain,

but we consider how the brain responds to threats and resources in our social environments.

Like economists, sociologists study economic markets, but we focus on how our social

networks, or connections to other people, influence the way we navigate those markets, and

how those markets are altered by social forces, by culture, and by inequality. Like political

scientists, sociologists study political power and elections, but we focus on how public opinion

is influenced by social forces. Sociology considers how the brain responds to our environment,

how our decisions are influenced by our economic circumstances (especially compared to

the economic circumstances of our neighbors and friends), and how political structures shape

our educational opportunities and life chances.

Sociology—the study of how societies are organized and how the organization of a

society influences the behavior of people living in it—encourages you to approach these

topics with a new perspective, guided by what sociologist C. Wright Mills called the

“sociological imagination.”7 The sociological imagination is the capacity to think about our

own personal experience in relation to a larger set of social forces that influence every aspect

of our lives, whether they are visible to us or not.

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For instance, how did you get your first name? Most likely, your parents chose it for you,

perhaps after much agonizing and discussion of the perfect name. Perhaps you’re named

after a beloved grandparent. Maybe it’s a name someone thought would bring you good

luck. You may have chosen an entirely new name for yourself and had it legally changed. In

some sense, choosing a name is a very private, individual-level decision, tied to parents’

personal tastes and their hopes for their child.

But your name is also tied to the larger culture and influenced by social pressures

outside your family. While your parents most likely picked your name, they probably weren’t

completely free to name you anything they wanted. Take the case of parents in Tennessee

who wanted to name their child Messiah. A judge changed the boy’s name to Martin, arguing

that the name Messiah was not in the child’s best interest.8 (The parents appealed the

decision to a higher court, where it was overturned.) Some countries ban certain names. More

recently, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and singer Grimes announced they had named their son X Æ A-

12; California’s Department of Public Health soon noted that the name wasn’t allowed under

state law, since numbers can’t be part of an official name used on vital records such as birth

certificates.9 The couple changed the name slightly; as of this writing, the boy’s name is X Æ A-

Xii (using a version of the Roman numeral XII instead of 12).

The social pressures parents face when choosing a name don’t come just in the form of

laws. Even if a name is legal, there may be negative consequences for choosing it. In 2008,

employees at a New Jersey grocery store refused to fill an order for a child’s birthday cake.

Why? The parents had ordered a cake decorated with their son’s name: Adolf Hitler

Campbell. The publicity around this incident led the Department of Youth and Family Services

to investigate the child’s parents.10 As the boy grows up, his name is likely to cause others to

make many assumptions about him—assumptions that might impact his ability to get a job, or

a date, or to make friends.

While anyone who names their child Adolf Hitler probably knows there will be negative

reactions, most parents worry about unanticipated problems related to a name. Parents may

worry about social reactions: Will a name cause other kids to tease their child or give them an

embarrassing nickname? Does it seem old-fashioned or boring? Will it seem unprofessional

later in life? Will people discriminate against their child on job applications if they choose an

“ethnic” name, or a name associated with a particular race?

So even though choosing a child’s name is a very personal decision made by individual

families, it’s also a social decision, and one that can have far-reaching consequences for a

child’s life. This is what C. Wright Mills meant by the sociological imagination: the ability to

evaluate some part of your life and recognize how social forces played a role in how it came

to be the way it is.

A new science for a changing world

Where did the sociological imagination come from? Like a lot of academic fields,

sociology emerged in the mid-1800s. There’s a reason ideas began to coalesce at that

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moment: there were suddenly a lot more people in the world, and all these new people

meant that societies were changing rapidly.11 It took almost all of human history—tens of

thousands of years—for the world population to reach one billion people.12 We now add an

additional billion people to the planet in under 20 years.13 More people doesn’t necessarily

mean more problems, but it has led to dramatic changes in the way that humans live

together and the way that society is organized.

Factories and the use of steam-powered engines transformed the

economy and, ultimately, virtually every aspect of our lives. (Source)

Much of this shift was driven by the Industrial Revolution, which began in Europe in the

1700s and spread to the U.S. in the 1800s. This revolution—the rapid development of

manufacturing and industry inspired by technological changes in machinery—upended

national economies. Instead of working in agriculture, more and more people worked in

factories. As people moved out of rural villages with hopes of finding manufacturing jobs, cities

grew rapidly. It wasn’t just the economy that changed. So did our politics, the places we lived,

how we survived, how much we relied upon others, how we related to others, what we did

with our time, and what we believed about the world around us. This is what we mean by a

“revolution.” The ways in which humans organized almost every aspect of their lives were

transformed.

Much of early sociology was interested in how communities rapidly changed from

contexts where people had to do most things for themselves—grow their food, make their

clothes, build their own shelters—to communities where people relied on others to do almost

everything for them. If tomorrow there were no more grocery stores, restaurants, or cafeterias,

how would you eat? If suddenly you couldn’t buy clothes at a store, what would you do? For

most of human history, these questions wouldn’t be a problem, they’d be a daily reality. Even

today, billions of people around the world live in rural areas where they are far more self-reliant

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than people in urban areas. But with the Industrial Revolution, this was no longer realistic for

many people. If workers spent all day at a factory, where would they find the time to grow

their own food or weave their own fabric for clothing? City dwellers became increasingly

dependent on each other as they specialized in various tasks.14 A factory worker’s wages

could buy bread from the baker, who in turn used some of that income to buy furniture from a

carpenter, and so on. Writing in 1776, Adam Smith argued that this division of labor was the

most important factor in the wealth of nations.15 If you divided jobs up, different individuals

could specialize in what they were best at and trade the surplus. They’d be dependent on

each other, but their community would have more products to trade as a result of that social

dependency.

In addition to growing interdependence, the population boom and movement to cities

caused other changes that influenced early sociologists. City life in the 1800s was pretty

terrible. With large numbers of people moving into fast-growing cities, buildings were

overcrowded and neighborhoods lacked basic sanitation. Waste from humans and livestock

(including the thousands of horses used as transportation) covered the streets. There were no

workplace safety or minimum wage laws, so people—including children—often worked long

hours in unsafe conditions for extremely low wages. With so many poor workers crowded

together in unsanitary housing, and streets that lacked sewage systems, disease spread easily

and fires wiped out entire neighborhoods. Overall, city life was unpleasant and dangerous for

many of its residents.

This rapidly changing world, with all its growing pains and struggles, was what the

founders of sociology were trying to understand and explain. In this chapter we introduce you

to sociology by covering some classic ideas, many written right around the time that the

human population was growing rapidly, the economy was transforming, and life in

industrialized cities was just beginning. While some of these ideas emerged nearly 200 years

ago, they still influence how we think today. And as our society changes so rapidly around

us—with new technologies fundamentally transforming how we interact with and relate to

each other, work, spend our free time, and even participate in politics—we can look back to

these classic ideas to learn from others who lived through a similarly revolutionary moment of

their own.

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REVIEW SHEET: WHAT IS SOCIOLOGY

CLICK THE LINK FOR:

LEARNING OBJECTIVES KEY QUESTIONS

AUDIO KEY POINTS

PRACTICE QUIZ KEY PEOPLE

VOCABULARY CROSSWORD PUZZLES KEY TERMS

FOUNDERS OF SOCIOLOGY

How did early thinkers view the role of conflict and cohesion in societies?

What did each scholar see as the driving force in society?

Karl Marx

Karl Marx (1818-1883) began writing before the term

“sociologist” existed. Marx’s work spanned a wide range of areas-

history, economics, politics, philosophy, and psychology.

Remembered today as one of the founders of socialism or

communism, Marx actually spent most of his time writing about

capitalism and the massively changing economic relations it

brought about. He witnessed the Industrial Revolution and its world-

altering consequences, particularly the rapid growth of cities as

people moved to work in the new factories. Looking at this situation,

Marx struggled to understand how society was being radically re-

organized. He studied the wide range of ways in which human

societies had been organized throughout history and how they changed. He concluded that

all societies are based on social conflict, a struggle between groups who have differing

interests and needs.16 The basis of this conflict was the ownership and distribution of goods and

resources—or more simply, economic relationships. Marx argued that if you wanted to

understand a society—any society—you needed to look at how things were made. Changes

Karl Marx. (Source)

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to societies came about because of social conflicts over how things are made and

distributed.

Marx argued that the central conflict in an industrialist capitalist society is between two

key groups, or classes: owners (or capitalists) and workers.17 Capitalists own important

resources like factories and determine how workers do their jobs. Workers only truly own their

labor, or capacity to work; they sell this to capitalists for wages. Capitalists want to

accumulate more and more wealth for themselves; the way to do this is to organize work in

such a way that workers receive lower and lower wages for their labor. Part of the capitalists’

strategy is to put workers in competition with one another, so workers view each other as

enemies rather than organizing together to fight the capitalists. Workers, on the other hand,

want higher wages and more control over the labor process—to be able to decide how they

work. So capitalists want to pay workers less and less for their work, while workers want to be

paid more for what they do. From Marx’s perspective, this class conflict defines capitalist

society.18 Such class conflict is so consuming, and so important, that Marx imagined that all

other aspects of our lives—politics, culture, the family—were defined by the economic system

and the tensions within it.

Marx was a relational sociologist. Instead of focusing on the properties and

characteristics of individuals, he argued that individuals are defined by their relationships with

others and with social institutions such as the economy.19 Being a capitalist isn’t a personality

type; it’s a relationship that an individual is in with others—particularly workers. This isn’t to say

that Marx ignored psychology. In fact, a central aspect of his theory involves the concept of

alienation, the feeling of being disconnected from others, from work, and even from our own

sense of humanity. Marx suggested that one of the core problems with capitalism is that

workers are alienated. Since they often have to compete with one another for jobs, they are

alienated from each another. And because the capitalist tells workers how to make things (for

instance, how fast they have to work), they are alienated by the labor process itself. Finally,

they have little control over what they make, so workers are also alienated from the things

they produce. Taken together, Marx argued that workers are alienated from their very

humanity, since they are in tension with other workers and have little control over their work

lives.

The name Karl Marx has come to mean very different things to different people, and is

now associated with radical politics and systems of government like socialism and

communism. But we encourage you to step back from the historical baggage associated with

Karl Marx and think about when and how his ideas might be useful to make sense of your own

experiences. Does it make sense to think relationally, to ask how your relationships form you?

Does it make sense that how you work, and how much control you have over what you do, is

incredibly important for understanding your life? How useful is the idea of alienation in modern

society? Do you ever feel disconnected from others or from the activities that take up your

time? The importance of studying the ideas of someone like Marx, or any of the thinkers we

discuss, is less about knowing what he said, and more about imagining ways in which those

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ideas, and the scholar’s method of studying issues, might be useful for understanding the

social world.

The Haymarket Riots, as represented by the magazine Harpers Weekly in 1886. What began as a peaceful event by

labor activists protesting capitalists and advocating for an 8-hour workday turned into a violent conflict between workers and police. (Source)

Émile Durkheim

French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917; pronounced eh-MEEL DUR-kime) played

a key role in the development of sociology into a social science.20 He insisted that the study of

society should follow rigorous rules and, like other sciences, should rely on data to test whether

our ideas about the world are correct. Durkheim sought to make sociology different from fields

like philosophy. It isn’t enough to think about the world and what others had written about it;

we have to gather evidence to see if we are right, and we should use agreed-upon methods

to gather that evidence in as scientific a way as possible.

Like Marx, Durkheim was deeply interested in the emergence of capitalism and its

effects on society. But instead of focusing on class conflict, he emphasized structural

properties that help explain social life. Durkheim’s structural approach is not opposed to

Marx’s relational approach, but the emphasis is slightly different. By structure we mean forces

that both impact individual behavior and are produced by that behavior. This is one of the

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most important, yet most difficult, concepts in sociology. To better understand it, let’s look

more closely at Durkheim’s work.

In The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim explores how

the structure of societies has changed over time.21 Whereas Marx

thought of the division of labor as the way in which economic

production was divided into more and more specialized tasks,

Durkheim was more interested in society as a whole. He argued

that it was important to see how people in a society were

connected. He called the patterns of these connections solidarity.

Older and simpler societies, Durkheim argued, are defined by

mechanical solidarity. All the parts are intricately connected, the

society is extremely cohesive, and people are highly integrated

with one another. Think of a watch or machine made of parts that

all rely on one another and are integrated together for a single

purpose. Or think of a family, where every member of the family

knows every other member; the family is a cohesive, integrated unit, and family members

generally have clear roles and expectations for each other.

As societies become more complex—as there is an increase in the division of labor—

they are increasingly defined by organic solidarity, where some members are only very

distantly connected to one another, but members increasingly rely on each other. The U.S. is

characterized by organic solidarity. Many of us have almost no connection to the people who

grow the food we eat or make the clothes we wear. And yet we depend on that food and

those clothes to survive.

Durkheim’s fascinating insight is that mechanical societies often make people feel far

more integrated and even as though we’re essential. Mechanical solidarity can give us a

sense of purpose and place, since we feel important to other people and even to our entire

community (though such small worlds can also make us feel trapped). But mechanical

societies can be quite fragile. Remove one part, and the mechanical society might not work

anymore (think about what it would mean to remove one part of a watch, or the impact on a

family if one member suddenly disappeared). Organic societies are far more resilient. They are

less reliant on the individual members. If one small part of the society, or one individual, is

removed, the society is very likely to survive. But for the individuals within these societies, there

can be a sense of uselessness; you’re not necessary or important to the larger community. The

conundrum here is the different consequences for societies and for the people who live in

them: What makes individuals feel essential makes societies fragile, and what makes societies

robust makes individuals feel alone. For Durkheim, how we’re tied to one another—the

structure of solidarity—creates very different experiences for people.

This led Durkheim to think about two important dimensions of society: integration and

regulation. Integration is how tied you are, as an individual, to others. One of the big

challenges to the college experience, for example, is integration—feeling like you belong, that

Émile Durkheim. (Source)

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you fit in with others around you. Durkheim argued that you can have too much integration,

where you feel trapped by a group, like it’s inescapable. Or you can have too little

integration, where you feel like you’re alone, without connections to others. The important

insight here is that your social ties to others have a big impact on you. You’ll learn a lot more

about this idea as you continue with this book.

Regulation is the idea that all groups have rules, both formal and informal. We call these

rules norms, or expectations for our behavior. Think of the norms of a classroom for a moment.

If you want to speak or ask a question, you raise your hand. If you haven’t been in a classroom

before, you might not know this; in fact, it’s a skill many children in kindergarten have to learn.

But in other settings, the norms are very different; if you’re on a date and raise your hand to

speak, it will almost certainly be viewed as strange. Part of being a member of a community is

learning its norms. Some community norms are extremely powerful and compelling; others are

fairly weak. And Durkheim thought that you could have too much regulation, or too little. He

referred to the experience of too little regulation as anomie, a situation in which people do not

have clear moral standards or social expectations to guide their behavior. The less we feel

integrated into the community around us, and the faster the rules about acceptable behavior

change, the more likely we are to feel anomie. If enough people experience it, entire societies

can crumble, as individuals break rules, follow their own personal desires, and lose faith in the

importance of the larger group.

When you read these ideas, one of the best ways to make sense of them is to apply

them to your own life. How do the relationships you have with other people influence you?

What are the norms of behavior in the various groups of which you are a part? Sometimes a

group’s norms can be so strong that it feels like a straightjacket: you can’t do what you want.

Sometimes norms are so weak it feels like anything goes, and you’re not even sure what the

group is or stands for.

Max Weber

Durkheim was particularly interested in

social structures—how the forces outside us work

in powerful ways. For him, sociology was the

scientific study of these social influences. Other

thinkers took a very different approach. Max

Weber (1864-1920; pronounced VAY-ber)

emphasized methodological individualism.22

Weber was not opposed to the idea of social

structures, but he argued that in order to make

sense of the world it was often necessary to focus on the individual.

Weber’s own definition of sociology is one of the most famous. He thought of sociology

as “a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and

thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences.”23 If that doesn’t make a

Max Weber. (Source)

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lot of sense to you, don’t worry! What Weber meant was that, like Durkheim, he thought of

sociology as a science. But where Durkheim was often most interested in the structures of a

society, Weber suggested that sociology should look at social action, or behaviors that

produce structures. And sociologists should seek to understand the causes of social actions (“a

causal explanation of its course and consequences”). But finally—and this is the challenging

part—the kind of understanding that sociologists generate is interpretive. Weber means that it

is important to understand the subjective meaning of actions. If you want to understand

someone’s behavior, you can’t just say there is an objective, universal law that guides it. You

need to make sense of the meaning that individuals get from and assign to that behavior.

Weber understands sociology as a science, but not one like physics, which has universal laws.

Because humans are involved, the science of sociology is necessarily interpretive, because we

have to understand how the people involved made sense of the world. In order to understand

this, let’s look at one of Weber’s most famous arguments.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber explored one of the same

questions that Marx did: where does capitalism come from?24 Marx thought that capitalism

emerged out of the previous economic system, feudalism. And he thought that economic

relations were the most important factor in understanding a society. But Weber takes a more

interpretive approach. Instead of looking for an objective rule to guide his explanation of

human behavior, Weber looks at the subjective meanings behind the emergence of

capitalism.

This approach is distinctly cultural. By culture, Weber means the values that people hold

and that ultimately guide their social actions. He suggests that particular values created kinds

of actions that led to the emergence of capitalism. Specifically, he argued that the cultural

dynamics of Calvinism—a type of Protestantism that emerged in Europe in the 1530s—inspired

church members to believe in hard work, to value economic success, and to invest what they

made rather than spend it on themselves. These cultural values guided actions that resulted in

capitalism. Whereas Marx believed that capitalism caused culture, Weber suggested that

culture may have caused capitalism.

If we return, then, to the idea of an interpretive understanding, we see that Weber’s

approach to sociology means looking closely at the actions of individuals, and asking what

meanings they attach to those actions.

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REVIEW SHEET: FOUNDERS OF SOCIOLOGY

CLICK THE LINK FOR:

LEARNING OBJECTIVES KEY QUESTIONS

AUDIO KEY POINTS

PRACTICE QUIZ KEY PEOPLE

VOCABULARY CROSSWORD PUZZLES KEY TERMS

AN AMERICAN TRADITION: EXPANDING SOCIOLOGY

What did Jane Addams and W.E.B. Du Bois see that other sociologists missed?

How does adding gender and race to our analysis help us better understand society?

Marx, Weber, and Durkheim had many more contributions than those we outlined

above. You could spend an entire class on any one of them. But you may have noticed

something about all three: they were men, they were white, and all wrote from a European

perspective. It’s not an accident that these three became the most prominent scholars writing

about social trends at the time. As we will learn in the coming chapters on gender, on race

and ethnicity, and on inequality, a powerful set of social forces affects who is able to get the

best education and who is not, whose voice is heard in public debates and whose is ignored,

and who is remembered in history books and who is often forgotten.

It’s important to recognize that the founding ideas of sociology did not come solely

from White men in Europe. In fact, the Industrial Revolution which inspired all three men to

write had perhaps its greatest impact in the United States. And many more thinkers affected

how we understand that revolution, as well as the development of sociology. We don’t have

space to cover them all, but two of the most important were Jane Addams and William

Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois.

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Jane Addams

Jane Addams (1860-1935) was an activist and

sociologist and is considered the founder of the field of

social work. She helped co-found the American Civil

Liberties Union (in 1920) and was the first American

woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize (in 1931). She was

one of the most important thinkers and activists of her

day, and one of the most influential people in the early

1900s.

Addams performed much of her social work in

Chicago. In 1871, Chicago was engulfed in flames.25

Referred to as “the Great Fire,” a major portion of the city

more than four miles long and nearly a mile wide was

totally destroyed. This left a third of the city’s population-

around 100,000 people-homeless. As the city was rebuilt,

poorer residents found themselves pushed out of the city

center into mostly poor, ethnic enclaves. And as the

Industrial Revolution raged, more and more women found themselves destitute, unable to find

decent-paying jobs to support themselves or their families.

Addams spent part of her early life traveling. Inspired by communal living situations she

saw in England, she founded Hull House in Northwest Chicago. She envisioned Hull House as a

center for social reform, where women could be educated, have support raising their

children, and engage in social activism. Most important to sociology, Addams used this

experience to scientifically study poverty and dependence.26 The residents of Hull House often

participated in research and teaching, inspiring the earliest members of the Chicago School of

sociology. In fact, women from Hull House regularly taught at the University of Chicago,

combining moral philosophy with social statistics and a demand for empathetic

understanding of the experiences and subjective understandings of the poor. Together with

Addams they wrote Hull House Maps and Papers, which mapped the different neighborhoods

of Chicago, discussed their social dynamics, and described the populations that lived within

them.27 A compendium of statistical information, this work, gathered by community members

as part of a participatory project, inspired scholars to use social statistics and observations to

chart neighborhood dynamics. This approach would come to define the Chicago School, one

of the most important traditions in sociology and one that is still important to this day.

Jane Addams. (Source)

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Hull House in 1889. Eventually this complex contained more than 13 buildings

dedicated to social reform, providing education, resources, and autonomy for some of Chicago’s poor women and children. (Source)

Addams drew attention to problems experienced by women in cities, to child labor, to

the struggles of laboring people, and to the moral obligation to eradicate poverty. Addams,

more than Marx, Weber, or Durkheim, insisted on socially-engaged scholarship. This meant

making the people she was working to help a fundamental part of her research practice. For

Addams, scholarship was not about studying other people; it meant engaging with them and

learning from that experience. While she published in the leading sociological journals,

Addams never held a full-time faculty position, though she was offered many.28 Instead, she

dedicated herself to teaching those who often could not receive a formal education.

Addams’s socially-engaged approach to understanding and helping residents

(particularly women) in the ethnic neighborhoods of Chicago was not the only great

American tradition of sociology. Addams’s work dealt almost exclusively with White

Americans. But there was another population in this nation that had long been subject to

some of the worst oppression imaginable: African Americans.

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W.E.B. Du Bois

Born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, W.E.B. Du

Bois (pronounced doo-BOYS) became the first African American

to earn a PhD from Harvard University. Du Bois was a sociology

professor and, like Addams, a social reformer and activist. He

was one of the founders of the National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and wrote dozens of

books, many considered foundational texts in sociology.29 Du

Bois spent his career at colleges and universities that served

Black students (who often could not attend other institutions

because of segregation), in part due his commitment to

educating other African Americans and in part because racism

excluded him from positions at universities that served White

students.

Du Bois made countless contributions to American sociology, particularly in his

investigation of the relationship between slavery and capitalism. No other thinker—Marx,

Weber, Durkheim, or Addams—considered race to be central to the social organization of

human communities. Several never considered it at all.

In Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois directly challenges one of Marx’s central

assumptions.30 Marx believed that slavery was an old economic form from earlier civilizations,

and largely incompatible with capitalism. Du Bois disagreed and gathered historical and

statistical evidence on the ways in which slavery and capitalism mutually reinforced one

another. He argued,

Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but

of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European

commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale; new cities were built on the results of

black labor, and a new labor problem, involving all white labor, arose both in Europe and

America.

Du Bois insisted that slavery didn’t just impact the economy in the South. Slavery was a

global system from which northern merchants and manufacturers profited, English industrialists

lived, and European capitalists made their fortunes. What’s more, slavery didn’t just oppress

African Americans; enslaved labor impacted White workers as well.

W.E.B. Du Bois. (Source)

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Enslaved people clothed the

world with the cotton they picked

and satisfied millions of tobacco

addicts with the plants they grew and

harvested. They did this without

getting paid. But there were massive

fortunes to be made by financing

these goods, by trading and shipping

them to faraway factories, by turning

cotton into cloth, and by selling that

cloth in stores. A wide array of

businesses benefitted in some way

from the work of enslaved workers.

What’s more, White workers’ wages

were undercut by southern plantation

owners’ use of enslaved labor. Du Bois

argued that “the plight of the white

working class throughout the world today is directly traceable to Negro slavery in America, on

which modern commerce and industry was founded...”31

According to Marx, low-paid White workers should have united with enslaved people to

overcome their oppression. In the southern U.S. before the Civil War, Du Bois noted that there

were 5,000,000 Whites, of whom 2,000,000 owned at least one enslaved worker. But the vast

majority of enslaved people were owned by just 8,000 White families. So why didn’t enslaved

African Americans and free White workers band together and overthrow this small class of

capitalists?

Du Bois argued that economic wages are not the only factor that drives our behavior.

Race matters. Sometimes, people receive wages that aren’t economic. For example, part of

the wages of being a professor are status, or our relative social standing. Americans value

education and tend to express admiration for those engaged in educating others and who

know about the world.

And race matters. Du Bois stressed that to understand White workers, you need to

understand the psychological wages of Whiteness: that is, in a racial system, Whites get paid

in things other than money. While the 8,000 southern families who owned almost all the

enslaved people in the U.S. used the myth of racial inferiority to justify enslaving African

Americans, White workers supported this myth because they preferred the status of being

White. They accepted lower economic wages because of the psychological wages they

received from feeling that they were better than African Americans:

…the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in

part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles

of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white

J.J. Smith’s Plantation in South Carolina (1862). (Source)

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people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from

their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to

encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect

upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the

deference shown to them.32

Du Bois’s work has three important

implications. The first is that slavery and the

growth of capitalism were interrelated. The

second is that understanding social life requires

looking at race relations. Finally, Du Bois

recognized that economics is not necessarily the

dominant value for people. Sometimes people

value their status and receive psychological

wages for holding a position above others in a

status hierarchy, no matter how much they make

in wages.

Again, we ask you to take a step back

and ask how you might make sense of your own

life with insights from Du Bois and Addams. What

socially-engaged insights have you developed in

your own life? How have you learned by engaging with communities around you? What kinds

of status do you value? What kinds of work would you never do, no matter how much you

were paid? What kinds of work would you love to do, no matter how little you were paid?

What psychological wages are important to you? And how have race and gender impacted

your life?

The ideas of tomorrow: a social science at the intersections

Marx, Weber, and Durkheim were all interested, fundamentally, in the same thing: how

the emergence of capitalism, or industrial society, was radically changing the world. Yet they

were often silent on the experiences of the vast majority of people within that world—women,

non-Whites, and non-Europeans. While the major revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries

were economic and political, with the emergence of capitalism and the formation of

democracy, the 20th century saw a series of revolutions of its own, more civic and social. In

the rest of this book you will read about many of these, from the civil rights movement to the

women’s movement to the fight for equality for LGBTQ+ people. These movements integrated

increasingly diverse voices into sociology, voices that more broadly represent the human

population and its interests and concerns.

Worker with a cotton gin. The cotton gin helped turn cotton into a massively profitable crop and

supported the growth of slavery in cotton- producing states. (Source)

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REVIEW SHEET: AN AMERICAN TRADITION: EXPANDING

SOCIOLOGY

CLICK THE LINK FOR:

LEARNING OBJECTIVES KEY QUESTIONS

AUDIO KEY POINTS

PRACTICE QUIZ KEY PEOPLE

VOCABULARY CROSSWORD PUZZLES KEY TERMS

A SOCIOLOGY EXPERIMENT

What comes next?

We developed this resource so you can take any chapter, dive in, and help see that

part of the world a little bit differently after applying the sociological imagination. But though

every chapter can stand on its own, it’s useful to see each chapter as part of a larger resource

that contains its own logic and structure.

The first few chapters give you a lens through which to look outward, to help you start to

think like sociologists. This chapter provides some orientation to what sociology is and where it

came from, and the “Methods” chapter describes the tools of sociology. Methods are the

approaches that sociologists take to gather evidence about how the world works, and the

methods of sociology are more diverse than any other discipline in the social sciences. We

then proceed with “Social Structure and the Individual,” a chapter that captures perhaps the

central idea of sociology: Individuals are free to make decisions and take actions, but those

decisions and actions are constrained by a larger set of forces, institutions, and contexts—

what the authors call the social structure. Understanding the link between the individual and

social structure allows you to understand much of the core theory of sociology.

Once you’re thinking like a sociologist, the next set of chapters break down how the

social world works. We delve into how humans are classified, sorted, and separated into

groups and categories, sometimes by choice, sometimes by force. We are sorted into

occupations and groups of people with more or less power and economic resources (“Social

A Sociology Experiment (Fall 2021 Edition)

Page 22

Class, Inequality, and Poverty”), into racial and ethnic groups based on our ancestors’ origins

and skin tone (“Race and Ethnicity”), and into categories of “Gender and Sexuality” that are

constantly changing and profoundly social in nature. All of this classification—the categories

we create and our ideas, attitudes, traditions, and practices that we use to see, interpret, and

change the world around us—is referred to as “Culture.”

The first two parts of the book introduce you to the way sociologists think about the

world and how sociology illuminates the organization of our social worlds. The remaining

chapters ask you to use your sociological imagination to see our social worlds from various

perspectives. We start with one of the core institutions of society, “Family”; we consider

“Education,” “Religion,” and the economy as a whole in “Economic Sociology.” These

chapters reveal how social forces affect every aspect of our lives, from our belief in an all-

powerful deity to our relationships with family members to the functioning of economic

markets. A sociological perspective allows us to think about how the size and layout of our

homes in a residential area changes the way we interact with each other (“Urban Sociology”),

how we come together to create laws and rules and to generate social change (“Politics and

Social Movements”), and why those laws and rules are broken, why norms are violated, why

violence occurs and—perhaps more surprisingly—why it doesn’t happen more often

(“Deviance, Crime, and Violence”).

The ideas of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Addams, Du Bois, and many others gave rise to a

new way of thinking, one that sits at the intersections of many different disciplines in the social

sciences. But sociology reveals something that is often missed by these other disciplines. We

are confident that you will come away with a new view of our social world, and a new set of

ideas and tools with which to investigate it.

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REFERENCES

1 Hill, Evan, Ainara Tiefenthäler, Christiaan Triebert, Drew Jordan, Haley Willis, & Robin Stein. 2020. “8 Minutes and 46 Seconds: How George Floyd was Killed in Police Custody.” New York Times, May 31. Retrieved at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html 2 Granovetter, Mark. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology, 78(6): 1360-1380. 3 Granovetter, Mark. 1978. “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior.” American Journal of Sociology, 83(6): 1420- 1443. 4 Maguire, Edward R. 2015. “New Directions in Protest Policing.” Saint Louis University Public Law Review, 35(1): 67- 108. 5 Koerth, Maggie & Jamiles Lartey. 2020. “De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer. Departments Respond

with Force Anyway.” FiveThirtyEight.com, June 1. Retrieved from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/de-escalation- keeps-protesters-and-police-safer-heres-why-departments-respond-with-force-anyway/ 6 Maguire, Edward R. 2015. 7 Mills, Charles Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. 8 Associated Press. 2014, February 4. “Tennessee Judge Who Vetoed Messiah as Baby’s Name Is Fired.” Retrieved from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tennessee-judge-who-vetoed-messiah-as-babys-name-is-fired/ 9 Yasharoff, Hannah. 2020. “’Looks Better TBH’: Grimes and Elon Musk Slight Change Baby’s Name to Comply with State Law.” USA Today, May 25. Retrieved from https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2020/05/25/elon-musk-grimes-slightly-change-baby- name-comply-california-law/5254771002/ 10 Shimell, Doug & Phil Houser. 2009, January 14. “Adolf Hitler Campbell, Sisters Taken from Parents.” WCAU/NBC. Retrieved from https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Adolf_Hitler_Campbell__Sisters_Taken_from_Parents_Philadelphia.ht ml 11 McKeown, Thomas 1976. The Modern Rise of Population. London: Edward Arnold. 12 Bongaarts John. 2009. “Human Population Growth and the Demographic Transition.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1532): 2985-2990. 13 United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. 1999. The World at Six Billion. New York: United Nations Population Division. 14 Harari, Yuval Noah. 2015. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: Harper Perennial. 15 Smith, Adam. 2003 [1904]. The Wealth of Nations. Edwin Cannan (Ed.). New York: Bantam Classic. 16 Marx, Karl & Friedrich Engels. 1992. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Oxford University Press. 17 Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. New York: Penguin. 18 Marx & Engels, 1992. 19 Marx, Karl, with Friedrich Engels. 2016. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers. 20 Durkheim, Émile. 2014. The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method. New York: Free Press. 21 Durkheim, Émile. 2014. The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press. 22 Weber, Max, 1968 [1922]. Economy and Society, Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press. 23 Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. New York: Bedminster Press. 24 Weber, Max. 2003. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. 25 Sawislak, Karen. 1995. Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871-1874. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 26 Addams, Jane. 1912. Twenty Years at Hull House. New York: Macmillan Publishers. 27 Hull House. 1895. Hull House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing out of the Social Conditions. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. 28 For example, see Addams, Jane. 1899. “Trade Unions and Public Duty.” American Journal of Sociology, 4(4): 448– 462; Addams, Jane. 1912. “Recreation as a Public Function in Urban Communities.” American Journal of Sociology, 17(5): 615–619. 29 For example, see Du Bois, W.E.B. 1899. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Philadelphia: Published for the University; Du Bois, W.E.B. 2018. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. 30 Du Bois, W.E.B. 2017. Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk

Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. New York: Oxford University Press. 31 Du Bois, 2017, p. 30. 32 Du Bois, 2017, p. 700-701.

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Cover Photo: Protesters gather in Minneapolis. Source: Chad Davis Photography; Creative Commons

license)