SOCIOLOGY

Social work - full-time studies, 18 hours, acad. year 2023/2024. Date

of classes: Friday - according to the schedule, form of conducting
classes: hybrid.
Lectuer: Prof. dr hab. Teresa Sasińska-Klas`

I lecture on: Sociology - genesis, definitions, scope,

functions
Motto of the lecture:

"Do not cry, do not curse, try to understand"

Seneca

I.Preliminary remarks

The aim of the lecture is to introduce students to the world of

sociology as a science. The idea is to introduce the tools and ways of
reasoning used by this scientific discipline.
Sociology studies the entire social world, which is not a simple
task, given the complexity of the life of citizens in society, both
historically and today. Within the interests of sociology there are also
very controversial issues.
Undoubtedly, one of them is currently the issue related to gender
studies. Can sociologists avoid issues that are debatable and raise
social disputes? - no, they cannot ignore them, because they occur in
society and should not only be noticed, but - above all - studied and
analyzed. Undertaking activities aimed at recognizing socially
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controversial issues is one of the tasks and duties of sociologists. It is
they who are to try to answer the questions: why do certain
phenomena and processes occur in society? What causes them to be
socially accepted and what causes them to be rejected by certain social
groups? What is social consent about, and what causes the
phenomenon taking place in society to become the subject of disputes
and social divisions? Is it possible to change anything in the
controversial public perception? What should be done in this regard?
In order to conduct sociological considerations, one does not
necessarily have to agree with all the phenomena that occur in society
or accept them. The point here is to try to analyze and understand why
certain phenomena and processes take place, to think about the theses
and arguments behind people's thinking on some controversial issue.
That doesn't mean we have to accept that this is happening and
causing people to behave the way they do, not the way we would like
them to. The point is to try to answer the question: why? Why is the
situation we are observing taking place? Why do people behave the
way they do in a situation? What causes this behavior to occur? Why
do people behave the way they do in a situation? What causes this
behavior to occur? For example, why do some people not wear masks
in an epidemiological situation, when the sanitary services and the
authorities of the country are strongly calling for it? What is behind
this behavior, what are the motives for it? What needs to be done to
change people's behavior in any matter? Is it possible to achieve this?
What causes social resistance? etc.

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 All this prompts sociologists to undertake reflections and
conduct analyses aimed at explaining the sources of social behavior
and the motives behind these behaviors. The aim of sociologists'
activities is to recognize given social behaviors and verify - using
scientific methods and tools used for this purpose - why they occur in
society? The question arises here: how to verify them? What tools to
use for analysis? What data should be collected to be able to
recognize a given phenomenon? How long should I collect data? etc.
This means that sociologists are ready to think about society in
objective (not subjective!) terms, and this approach forms the basis for
understanding society.

II. Sociology as a science

Sociology is the study of society. The name of this discipline derives
from the combination of two words derived from the Latin language:
Societas - society,
Logos - science.
Sociology under this name developed in the 40s of the nineteenth
century. This term was first introduced into science by the French
thinker August Comte (1798-1857) in the fourth volume of the
"Course in Positive Philosophy" (1839). Comte is also the creator of
the concept of "positivism".
A. Comte's contribution to the emergence of sociology:
1. giving the new science a relatively quickly accepted name,
2. determining the subject of sociology research,

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3. proposing specific research methods to the emerging science.
Ad.1.Comte assumed that it was necessary, as a consequence of the
changes brought about in France as a result of the French Revolution,
to create a new scientific discipline that would deal with the analysis
of society and the changes taking place within it. The French
Revolution brought profound social changes, and the development of
industry changed the traditional patterns of people's lives and initiated
the processes of urbanization, and this must be explored and
explained. Comte wanted to create a science of society that would
explain the laws of social life as the natural sciences explained the
functioning of the physical world.
Comte considered sociology to be a positive science.
Ad.2.As the subject of research, he recognized a society constituting a
whole consisting of citizens. Comte introduced into sociology a
division into:
- social statics and
- social dynamics, i.e. change.
Social statics - in the view of A. Comte - meant order and stability.
Social dynamics - change, transformation, transformation. Both of
these approaches - according to A. Comte - should be used to analyze
society, because they unite society and are at the same time a source
of social permanence, as well as changes taking place in society. And
both of these approaches are used to date.
Ad.3. He constructed and scientificized methods for the study of
social phenomena, to which he included such as:

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- pure observation,
- experiment
- the comparative method,
- historical analysis.
Nowadays, research methods have been expanded and more of them
are used, which in the future will be the subject of separate classes in
the methodology of social sciences.
To this day, August Comte is considered the "father" of | Sociology.

III. Sociological perspective

Sociologists study behavior at the level of social groups, rarely at
the individual level. The analysis of the behavior of individuals is left
to psychologists. Broadly understood sociology means that one looks
at the world from a special perspective, which is referred to as
"sociological imagination". The American sociologist C. Wright
Mills (1916-1962) in 1959 used the phrase "sociological imagination"
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to stimulate in us as citizens the need for a broader view of reality.
We are recently observing situations that as a result of the
pandemic in Poland, Ukraine, Germany and other countries in 2020-
2022, many thousands, and in the world - many millions of people -
have lost their jobs in the last several months, which was their basic
source of income. And this is already a "social problem", not just an
individual one, and it directly affects the economic recession. And this
already requires social solutions on a macro-scale.

1
Charles Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, New York: Oxford University Press 1959.

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 Sociological imagination helps people to transcend limited
personal experience and allows them to see relationships with other
people who find themselves in a similar situation and relationships
with the institutions of society as a whole. It's about looking at the
world just ignoring your own experiences and ideas and proposing
how the world should work, and it's also about seeing how it actually
works. The media and journalists have a significant role to play in this
regard, especially in situations of sudden, rapid change, in conditions
of deepening regression, etc.
This does not mean that sociologists do not have their own
preferences, do not have their own values or do not have their own
opinions about the social world. The point here is that in order to
change the world, you first need to understand it, to understand the
logic of some social process.
The point here is to understand what caused us to live in the
conditions of media civilization, in the mediatized world, in the
mediasphere, and all the time it is a process of dynamic change, as
August Comte would describe it. What does this change lead to? – we
try to give a reliable answer to such a question and we are fully aware
that this is not an easy task to perform.
Sociology is one of the social sciences along with economics,
psychology, cultural anthropology, geography, political science,
security sciences, social communication sciences and media in.
Among the social sciences, sociology stands out for its ambition to

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understand the entire social world. Society is a very difficult subject to
study: it is extremely complex, it is constantly changing.
The challenges facing sociology are as follows: developing
ways to accurately observe society and verifying hypotheses about
how it functions, e.g. how to study social media users, which are
constantly increasing. What does it mean that the private sphere has
shrunk so much, and that the public sphere is rapidly expanding? Is
this a favorable trend? There are even more such questions.
Therefore, the question arises: how to implement these challenges
correctly from the theoretical, methodological and empirical side.
These are the questions!!!! which is easier to formulate than to give a
binding and complete answer.

IV. Research methods: basic breakdown

For the purposes of the preliminary analysis of the methods used

in sociology, it is necessary to point out the commonly used division
into:
1. Quantitative methods,
2. Qualitative methods.

Ad.1. Quantitative methods used in sociological research are

based on questions that are posed and answered using numbers. In the
analysis of the collected material, quantitative distributions of a

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phenomenon are presented, e.g. the scale of COVID-19 incidence in
the period: March- October 2021 or November 2021-April 2022
in selected countries of Central and Eastern Europe - comparative
analysis, gender diversity of Internet users, equipment with
information and communication technologies of households. At that
time, there was a overmortality of young people in the age range of
20-34 years, in the case of |Poland - 63%, the highest percentage in
EU countries. For this purpose, we use statistical methods.

Ad.2. Qualitative methods consist of accurate observations and

analyses, followed by detailed descriptions, usually recorded. In
qualitative research, we subject the observed phenomenon to in-depth
analysis, the intention is to capture a socially important social trend. In
our qualitative analysis, we try to answer the question: is the detected
trend representative for the whole society, or only for some
specifically separated social group, e.g. young or old people.
A detailed discussion of research methods and techniques used in
media studies will be the subject of separate didactic classes in the
future in the course of further studies.

V. Looking at the world through the eyes of a sociologist

Is the sociological perspective of looking at society necessary in

medical, in the media professions, also in journalism? Why?

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 - in order to understand the complex social world, sociologists have
developed - and continue to do so - certain ways of thinking about the
social world that help both to understand it and to ask questions that
concern it. For example, we have been asking ourselves for some time
whether we live in a society of risk. The eminent Munich sociologist
Ulrich Beck (1944 - 2015) considered this issue in depth in a book
written in German entitled Risikogesellschaft, and then in the work
World Risk Society (1999)2. Today we see that the risks around us are
increasing, or more precisely: this process is on the path of growth and
living us as citizens functioning in conditions of risk is more difficult.
We have been experiencing this for several months, living in the
conditions of the pandemic threat, which is not completely weakening,
but takes on a dynamic and at the same time difficult to predict form.
We must constantly follow this phenomenon and look at it through the
eyes of a sociologist in search of an answer: what does it mean for us
as citizens? How can we mitigate this risk? Is it possible to extinguish
this process, or is it impossible? What actions to take in this direction?
etc.

VI. Subject of sociology research

The subject of sociological research are:

1. Phenomena and processes of formation of various forms of
collective life, e.g. the increasingly common process of
2
Full title: Risikogesellschaft - Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (1986). Edition translated from English
to Polish was published under the title Risk Society. W drodze do innej nowoczesności, Warsaw 2002 i 2004,
Ed. Scholar, p. 372.

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corporatization of professional work, growing communication
mediated with the use of new new media3, globalization,
2. Structures of various forms of human collectivity, e.g. group,
class, caste, layered and other structures,
3. Phenomena and processes occurring in communities resulting
from the interaction of people on each other, e.g. cooperation,
competition, digitization of broadcasters and media recipients, social
media, etc.
4. Forces that bring together and break up (integrate and
disintegrate) the collective, e.g. the communality of life, the value
system shared by the majority of citizens, social pathology, addiction
to the Internet, etc.,
5. Changes and transformations taking place in human
communities, e.g. migration, educational aspirations, computer crime,
urbanization, technological modernization, pandemic, etc.

VII. The aims of sociology

Two basic goals of sociology can be pointed out:
1. Empirical (i.e. based on the interpretation of factual data)
analysis of various data on social life, e.g. analysis of the incidence
rate of citizens with cancer, cultural activity in cultural institutions,
quantitative distribution of Internet users, ways of spending free time,
employment on the labour market, unemployment rate, etc.

3
The author of the term new new media is an American media expert Paul Levinson, from Fordham University
in New York (USA), who presented the specifics of the process of evolution of contemporary media in the
book New New Media published in 2009. Its translation was published in Polish under the title Nowe Nowe
Media by the WAM Publishing House: Cracow 2010.

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 2. Formulation of theoretical generalizations detecting the laws
of structure and the laws of development, e.g. digitization of the
educational process, mediatization of politics, globalization of the
media, digitization of the public sphere, etc.

VIII. Functions of sociology

1.Creating a general vision of society by characterizing its structure

and changes taking place in society, e.g. we have been talking for
some time about the fact that we live in a media society, and a few
decades ago we experienced that we lived in an industrial society,
previously in an agrarian (agricultural) society. We also point out that
today information is becoming more and more mediatized, it becomes
a commodity that is bought or sold, etc.

2. Creating a set of socio-technical guidelines (this is often referred to

as: engineering and organizational function, we mean a kind of social
engineering) e.g. we observe permanent, seasonal, pendulum
migrations, from villages to cities, from cities to the countryside and
here we can clearly see the need for sociological analyses in the form
of counseling, searching for answers to questions: how to regulate
these processes, is it possible? What are the effects of migration? Or
another thread: Is it possible to effectively control content on the
Internet? How to do it? Should we tighten the control of citizens'
behaviour in public spaces? How to educate students in the conditions

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of the pandemic: directly, remotely, hybridly? How is it better? Where
are the risks, and where can we see the benefits of introducing such a
way of teaching?

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