西方社会学名著选读.docVIP

1.1 What is Sociology? Sociology is the systematic study of social behaviour and human groups. It focuses primarily on the influence of social relationships upon people抯 attitudes and behaviour and on how societies are established and change. As a field of study, sociology has an extremely broad scope. The Sociological Imagination In attempting to understand social behaviour, sociologists rely on an unusual type of creative thinking. C. Wright Mills (1959) described such thinking as the Sociological Imagination, an awareness of the relationship between an individual and the wider society This awareness allows people (not simply sociologists) to comprehend the links between their immediate, personal social settings and the remote, impersonal social world that surrounds them and helps to shape them. A key element in the sociological imagination is the ability to view one’s own society as an outsider would, rather than from the limited perspective of personal experiences and cultural biases. Sociological imagination can bring new understanding to daily life around us or even to our view of the past. For example, Claude Fischer (1988) studied gender differences in telephone use during the half century before World War II and the social meanings of these differences During the period of 1890-1940, telephones became popular in middle-class urban homes as well as on many farms. Fischer observes that, in the period under study, North American women seemed to have a special affinity for the household telephone and that affinity seemed to involve sociability. He offers a number of possible explanations for this gender difference, among them: Women, especially homemakers, were typically more isolated from daily adult contact than men were. Therefore telephone calls allowed many women to experience some of the social contact that their husbands found in the work place. Women抯 traditional role as 憇ocial managers?for their families led to extensive telephone responsibil