What is Sociological Thinking Assignment

Assignment 1 Ques. What is sociological thinking? How is it different from common sense? Ans. This essay sheds light on Allan G. Johnson’s The Forest and the Trees: Sociology as Life Practice and Promise, where he chooses to begin his account of sociological practice by introducing the concept of a collective study of society and two-way process of the social system which is a relationship of an individual with the social system. He further argued that the individualistic model of studying society doesn’t work as the private problems or actions are never personal, they are always in connection to a larger context. Moving to the work of Andre Beteille, Sociology: Essays in Approach and Method with the text Sociology and Common Sense, where he differentiates sociological thinking from common sense by stating that sociological thinking arrives from methodological thinking whereas commonsensical thinking doesn’t follow any methodology. He argued that in the commonsensical term we think and act upon bits and pieces without taking the entire account of context. The way of differentiating is further illustrated in James Finn Garner’s Politically Correct Bedtime Stories where he reproduced the childhood bedtime stories in a satirical way to make them free from any kind of biases. Sociology is not about remembering, learning, or rotting things but it’s real-time processing of things. According to Allan Johnson, sociology exists in almost every aspect of life, and thinking sociologically is a way of thinking about the human world. Sociology touches on the essence of who we are as humans and what we are made of. Sociology is based on us as a part of this world and the connection between the two. The very basic step to think sociologically is to stop thinking individualistically. Most people are likely to think only in terms of individuals and not as a whole. Individualism does not only affect us by isolating us socially but it also promotes diverse competition among members of the society. It makes it tough to maintain as well as endure a sense of solidarity and community in society. It also affects how we think about life in the social context. But individualism does quite affect how we participate in social life. It also affects how we expect about social life and the way we add up to it. Individualism reduces everything to the personalities and behaviors of the people who are in charge in society. Sociological thinking emphasizes how relationships, people as well as connections fit together in the societal structure. Johnson strongly argues that it is necessary to view interconnections and relations in a bigger societal context. As he further argued that personal problems are never personal as they are always connected to something in a larger context. That’s why personal solutions cannot solve social problems since social problems require collective solutions. Although some problems are solved at an individual level yet many problems cannot be solved at the personal level. Thus, collective problems can be solved by accumulating individual solutions. To think sociologically we have to be able to accept as well as comprehend that we live as different individuals apart from communities and societies and groups that make up our environment. It is incorrect to believe that society is just people. Perspective does indeed depend on the society you live in however this way observations are certainly impacted by the personal perspectives through which people are viewing the world. Those personal perspectives are a result of the outcome of a person’s history and society. According to Allan, we take part in something much bigger than ourselves. To understand things from a sociological perspective we need to understand what it is we are participating in and how we participate in it and the reason for this is due to the point that sociology is the study of relations and interconnections between people and society. The larger things that we actively participate in, according to Johnson, are called social systems. A social system is a part of our life that has positions, ideas as well as elements, the idea of a system relates to an accumulation of parts or elements that are connected in ways that form some kind of a whole. The way to understand is to comprehend those differences are a key to how systems work and produce consequences. Differences amount to more than just variety among social systems. The relationship between the social system and an individual is very dynamic as it’s a twoway process between them. Sociology goes on to study the unique relationship between social systems and the people who are participating in them. While social systems and people are closely connected, it is important to realize that people participate in systems without being aware that they are a part of those very systems themselves. People are not just systems and systems are not just people. The practice of studying how people participate in these systems goes on to contribute to thinking sociologically. People are what make systems happen as well as social systems themselves. To think sociologically means to have a clear understanding of the relationships between individuals and social systems. However, social systems and individuals always exist about one another thus sociological practice use more complex models of change that focus on several different levels of social life. To practice sociology effectively, it is probably best to recognize that the individualistic perspective that dominates current thinking about social life is wrong. Everything we do or experience happens in some kind of social context. According to Johnson, an individualistic model is misleading since it encourages us to explain human experience and behavior from a perspective that's so narrow it leaves out most of the action. We cannot understand what happens in social systems by just looking at individuals. In the same way, we can't tell what's going on in a system by looking at individuals, neither can we tell what's going on in individuals by looking at systems. Johnson further illustrates it by giving the instance of Forest and trees. By looking at a single tree, we can’t understand anything about the entire forest as we miss out on the relationship linking trees in a forest. It is that relationship that makes up the forest. That’s why individualism is problematic. Johnson suggested that as a sociologist, we need to stop looking at individual units rather than we need to see the relationship that exists among the units. Pursuing this further, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, very prominent names in the field of sociology, indicated that common sense was not enough to reach the level of comprehension they had sought. Thus, they went on to create new tools of inquiry as well as analysis to attain the result they required in the first place. Durkheim argued that one must get rid of preconceptions to carry out the systematic investigation of a subject. Those preconceptions are not only mostly wrong, they are generally also shaped by limited experiences. Preconceptions prove to be constraints to the examination of the available as well as relevant facts. When it comes to Max Weber, one of his most fundamental ideas enriched sociology everywhere and that idea was that the consequences of human actions are rarely the same as the intentions as intended by the actors, and sometimes the two can be diametrically opposite. What counts here is not the original insight however it is the significance of the domain to which it is applied, as well as the methods and the data by which the insight is tested. Moving to the work of Andre Beteille, he explains how common sense can result in dilution of sociologists’ understanding of concepts, as well as the inability to find the cause that is not obvious. In the article, “sociology and common sense” he explains how sociology is a discipline not only a subject. He argued that thinking sociologically is often misunderstood with commonsensical thinking. It is vital to distinguish common sense from sociology to think sociologically. Whereas sociological knowledge is general, if not universal, common sense is very particular and localized. A very essential as well as the commendable contribution of sociology has been to prove that common sense is highly variable as well as has social constraints including constraints of time and place. Unlike common sense, sociology does not confine or restrict itself to a body of facts delimited by time as well as space. Sociological thinking deals with arguments as well as facts however connections between those very frequently may seem loose, open as well as ambiguous. Common sense has a lot of constraints which include how it is bound by time, place as well as community and gender. As opposed to sociological thinking, common sense is incredibly unreflective in that it does not question its origins, whereas sociological thinking questions the very construction of knowledge and many other perspectives related to it. Commonsensical thinking is based on a very limited range of experiences of particular people in particular places and times. Thus, people may perceive sociological thinking as thinking against common sense. Social theories are anti-utopian and anti-fatalist, whereas common sense is utopian and fatalistic. Sociological thinking does not accept the constraints that are assumed to be eternal or inviolable by common sense. Common sense is fatalistic whereas the sociological perspective is comparative. Additionally, he wanted to argue that sociology is distinct from common sense because it is characterized by unresolved and perhaps unresolvable differences. It has a body of concepts, methods, and data, no matter how loosely coordinated, for which common sense of even the most acute and well-informed kind cannot be a substitute. Sociological knowledge, on the other hand, aims to be general if not universal, while common sense is specific and local. One of the lasting contributions of sociology has been to show that common sense is highly variable, subject to the constraints of time and place as well as other, more specifically social constraints. In saying that sociology is distinct from common sense, one does not mean that it should intentionally be arcane or esoteric. It is not easy to disengage oneself from common sense when analyzing the human condition, and more particularly when analyzing one’s society. For instance, responses are common sense and are specific to a particular area whereas sociological knowledge is applicable everywhere. He later added that commonsensical thinking is highly variable as it changes by time not by place. It tends to change and has a shorter validity. It’s like what is commonsensical for one generation, may not be for another generation. Whereas sociological knowledge is like a mathematic formula in that it is applicable for a longer period and remains constant. A sociologist named Emile Durkheim laid bare the illusion of understanding created by common sense the most. He argued tirelessly that systematic investigation could not be conducted unless the investigator let go of his preconceptions of the subject. These preconceptions, shaped generally by a limited experience, were not 0nly often wrong but also impediments to the examination of the available and relevant facts. Based on a systematic distinction between occurrences and rates of suicide, Durkheim compiled data to demonstrate how suicide rates differ systematically across societies, as well as between religious, occupational, and other groups within the same society. As a sociologist, he systematically gathered large amounts of data and applied concepts that may also be applied to other domains of life in other parts of the world to test ideas deemed incongruous by common sense. According to Max Weber, a fundamental idea of sociology has been that consequences of human action are rarely the same as the intentions, and sometimes they are opposed. Beteille also commented briefly on Weber’s approach to religion and its importance, as well as the fact that it has been misrepresented frequently. The prevailing view among social theorists until Weber’s time was that, for good or evil, religion was a great source of social stability. Marx held this view, and he ascribed a negative value to religion because he thought that change was both necessary and desirable. Moving further, Beteille mentioned M.N. Srinivas’s formulation of the important distinction between the book-view and the field-view of Indian society, emerging as the principal protagonist of the latter and repeatedly drawing attention to the errors of the former. Srinivas’s most seminal contribution was his exposure of the misperception of caste among educated Indians. He attacked the concept of caste as a rigid and inflexible system based on the division of Hindu society into the four varnas. Additionally, he was able to see more clearly than the political commentators of the day that caste played an increasing role in Indian politics by focusing on Jati rather than Varna. Content-wise sociology is concerned with current affairs but at the same time, it deals with lineage, kinships, and also with individuals. It is from a personal topic to a public topic. As a result of A.M. Shah’s systematic analysis of a wealth of empirical materials, some common misconceptions about the Indian family system have been exposed. This misperception arises partly from a confused conception of the joint family, and partly from insufficient attention to the available evidence. Shah’s work shows that the proportion of joint families is much larger than the nuclear family in the Indian population. His work is very important because India was and is understood to be the Land of Joint Family which is breaking down to the ill – effects of modernization. It shows the decline of the Golden Age where all lived together in society. According to Beteille, Common Sense is something that makes things simpler and does not allow one to look at complexity. Whereas Sociological thinking makes a person look at the complexity of the matter concerned methodologically. The most important difference between common sense and sociological thinking is that in common-sensical terms, we think and act upon bits and pieces without taking the entire account of context. While sociological thinking arrives due to methodology taking the entire context. He later added that the method used here to distinguish between them is the comparative method. Further, Durkheim explained that comparative sociology is not a special branch of sociology, it is sociology itself. Comparisons can include facts borrowed either from a single and unique society, from several societies of the same species to several distinct social species. Also mentioned is that, as a sociologist, we should be value-neutral and treat our values as data. Further, it is illustrated by James Finn Garner in Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. In this book, Garner proposes to create “meaningful literature that is free from bias and purged from the influence of its flawed cultural past.” The results are extremely funny. These revisionist folktales are updated to reflect modern political sensibilities and exhibit an engaging sense of irony. In “Little Red Riding Hood”, Grandma exacts her feminist revenge on the woodchopper, who “assumes that womyn and wolves can't solve their problems without a man's help.” Using just the right tone, the author writes this: clever, with a dash of self-awareness. The stories are brief and easy to digest, but that does not necessarily mean that they are easily forgotten. Having finished this collection, “happily ever after” will never be the same. Therefore, it is not true that sociologists do not express moral preferences or should not do so. He, however, forms his moral preference on a different basis than what is given to each person by their common sense. It is doubtful that sociology can ever attain a state from which it can dictate the individual’s moral choices. It is up to each individual to decide which choice is right for them. In a wide variety of situations, sociology can only help the individual understand the alternatives available and the likely costs and benefits of each.