Where did Sociology come from?

The Origins of Sociology

Sociology is a relatively young science. It grew out of a growing concern that arose with the establishment of cities and other large groupings of people and the growing inequalities among individuals.

I will leave the biographies out for now and focus on the social trends that gave rise to the need for a study of Sociology.

Trends at this time were such that individuals were coming out of the farms and working in establishments. Consider the evolution of the shoe factory.

Hans Shoemaker the Shoemaker

Imagine there is a person named Hans Shoemaker. He is a shoemaker in a small village and shares the market with 3 other shoemakers. Hans is the best though, so he does well. He does so well that when he hears about a meeting of shoemakers in the city he is the only one who can afford to go.

He attends the meeting and finds out that a stitching machine has been invented! He is so excited! He understands that if he gets this machine he can make twice as many shoes per day. Seeing the opportunity in getting this machine he buys it and returns to his village.

Now, not only does Hans have the most curious contraption in his store window, he can produce twice as many shoes. Eventually, as you can guess, one of the other shoemakers is forced out of business. His name was Ivan. Ivan was a good shoemaker but he could not compare to Hanz, either in skill or in speed (particularly with that new fangled machine!)

Hans, however, is no fool. He recognized that Ivan was a pretty good stitcher so he approaches him in the pub (where all out-of-work shoemakers go to drown their sorrows) and offers him a job!

Now Hans sees that he can produce twice again as many shoes as he has Ivan on the machine and he can do all the cutting work. This trend continues and soon there is a little shoe factory in the town, which used to have 4 independent shoemakers. The shoes are of still high quality but they are produced faster. The people begin to have new expectations of shoemakers and the output and quality of them. This results in the purchase of more shoes.

Now, there starts to be a problem in some cases. It might be that Ivan, Henri and Isaac (the other three shoemakers) miss owning their own business. And they begin to realize that Ivan is making a lot of money for just sitting around out front sizing shoes and talking to buyers. They begin to grumble and say things like "Hans, he is a scoundrel!" and "He could not make so much money without us, ya?"

None-the-less, our every bright Hans sees the situation and decides that he does need these three to continue to work for him so he gives them raises. (Ivan has been quoted as saying "That Hans, he is an angel, ya?"

Analysis

You can see that there is a conflict that is arising here. There is a conflict between the Owner of the Means of Production (Ivan) and the Production Worker (Ivan, Henri and Isaac). Ivan wants to pay the workers as little as possible to maintain high productivity while the workers want to make as much as possible.

This fundamental conflict was the basis of the work of Karl Marx (thus he understandably produced a philosophy of collective ownership called Communism). We will talk more about Communism later.

People like Emile Durkheim viewed this scenario from what he called a Functionalist point of view. Basically he saw that Ivan needed his workers and the workers needed Ivan and that we could understand all of society by understanding these relationships. These thoughts will be very important when we consider Social Structure later in the course.

Let alone that at the time of the industrial revolution the ideas of Charles Darwin were the rage...Sociologist Herbert Spencer, engratiating himself to the rich aristocracy, coined the term "Survival of the Fittest" to describe groups of people, industries and countries! Charles Darwin didn't adopt the term (taking it from Spencer!) until the 5th edition of "Origin of Species" and synonymous for "Natural Selection"

Other trends that were going on in society to bring the field of Sociology was increased Urbanization. This term refers to the trend for more and more people to live in cities. We will talk more about this when we talk about populations, but let it be said that when more and more people live in smaller and smaller places problems arise.

• Urbanization
  • Led to the development of social problems including, but not limited to, the following:
    
• Crime
  • Inequality and the haves and have nots…I will actually have an interesting thing to say about the way in which table manners effected the level of crime when we discuss crime!
• Sanitation
  • Consider that awnings were created so that the sewage thrown from the upstairs dwellings would not land on people! Gross!)
• Food Distribution
  • Growing your own….farmer's market….Hannaford…can you see the trend?
• Housing
  • he invention of the walk up above the store inhabited by the owner, who eventually got enough money to move out to the country…ironic…who then rented the walk up to his employees, then the factory was moved out to the country to reduce the commute for the owner and to expand and the worker is left living in the inner city in under-maintained housing….it is pretty easy to see why this stuff happened!)

Thus, similar to psychology's rise from philosophy, great thinkers began to speculate about the social problems of urbanization and industrialization (and eventually globalization today). This gave birth to the field of study known as Sociology.