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To better illustrate the distinctive perspectives of the social sciences, let us examine sociological and psychological approaches to the issue of gambling. The growing legalization of gambling in the US has, in effect, increased the number of participants and contributed to a rise in the number of ″problem gamblers″ - that is, people who consistently lose more money than they can afford. Gamblers’ professed goal is economic gain; yet, because the vast majority end up loosing money, their persistence is commonly viewed as ″irrational″ or even ″pathological.″ Viewed from the perspective of psychology, gambling represents an escape into a fantasy world where great fortune can be attained easily. Eventually, people become so dependent on gambling that the activity fulfills an emotional need. As a result, they cannot give up gambling without feeling nervous and upset.
By contrast, in their examination of gambling, sociologists focus on the social networks that develop among many participants. Whether they be offtrack bettors, sport bettors, or poker players, gamblers establish friendship groups and work hard to create feelings of conviviality even among casual acquaintances whom they meet through gambling. Consequently, for such persons, gambling is a form of recreation and may even be their primary social activity. This sociological perspective on gambling casts a shadow on recurring efforts to discourage particular individuals from gambling and to discourage the practice in general. Giving up gambling may, in fact, mean forgoing all social interaction that a person has previously found to be meaningful. Alternatively, participation in Gamblers Anonymous – a self-help group for ″problem gamblers″ modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous – provides a new forum to which ex-gamblers can turn for interaction, understanding, and encouragement. The individual can find social support to replace the friendship groups developed in his or her betting days.
This example shows that by viewing social phenomena from several perspectives, we can enhance our understanding of human behavior. Social science disciplines – in this case study, psychology and sociology – offer distinctive expertise that is valuable in developing a response to those gamblers who wager more money than they can afford to lose.
50 Please, explain why Herbert Spencer did not feel compelled to correct or improve society.
“Another important contributor to the discipline of sociology was Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). A relatively prosperous Victorian Englishman, Spencer (unlike Martineau) did not feel compelled to correct or improve society; instead, he merely wanted to understand it better. Drawing on Charles Darwin’s study On the Origin of Species, Spencer applied the concept of evolution of the species to societies in order to explain how they change over time. Similarly, he adapted Darwin’s evolutionary view of the ‘survival of the fittest’ by arguing that it is ‘natural’ that some people are rich and others are poor.“Spencer’s approach to societal change was extremely popular in his own lifetime. Unlike Comte, Spencer suggested that since societies are bound to change eventually, one need not be highly critical of present social arrangements or work actively for social change. This viewpoint appealed to many influential people in England and the United States who had vested interests in the status quo and were suspicious of social thinkers who endorsed change.”
51Durkheim insisted that behavior cannot be fully understood in individualistic terms, instead it must be understood within a larger social context. He pointed out the influence of groups and societal forces on what had always been viewed as a highly personal act. Clearly, Durkheim offered a more scientific explanation for the causes of suicide than that of sunspots or inherited tendencies. His theory has predictive power, since it suggests that suicide rates will rise or fall in conjunction with certain social and economic changes. It is important to understand that a theory – even the best of theories – is not a final statement about human behavior. Durkheim’s theory of suicide is no exception; sociologists continue to examine factors which contribute to a society’s rate of suicide. For example, people across the United States were shocked by the national news reports in 1987 concerning four New Jersey teenagers who together drove into a garage, closed the door, and let carbon monoxide fumes take their lives, thereby engaging in a collective act of suicide. Within little more than a week, 10 more teenagers in four different states killed themselves in garages using carbon monoxide. These suicides were more than a coincidence; sociological research from 1973 through the present documents that the incidence of suicides increases following nationally televised stories about suicide and that teenagers are especially vulnerable to such ″copycat″ behavior. Studies show that the impact is greatest after the publicized suicide of entertainer or politician and is somewhat less after the suicide of an artist, criminal, or member of the economic elite.
52 Durkheim insisted that the growing division of labor found in industrial societies led to what he called anomie. Please, explain what Durkheim meant and what sociologists call anomie.
Durkheim calls anomie, a term that refers to a condition of relative normlessness in a whole society or in some of its component groups. Anomie does not refer to a state of mind, but to a property of the social structure. It characterizes a condition in which individual desires are no longer regulated by common norms and where, as a consequence, individuals are left without moral guidance in the pursuit of their goals. Durkheim talked about anomic division of labor and anomic suicide, which are abnormal, or pathological, situations. In order to fully understand Durkheim’s concept of anomie, we need to look at his theory on a good society.
II Durkheim's Theory on Anomie
Durkheim mentioned the concept of anomie in The Division of Labor and Suicide (Durkheim, 1897). He introduced this concept in The Division of Labor when he first compared the moral order of traditional and modern societies and refined it in Suicide.
Anomie is defined as a state of "normlessness." Typically, it is a state of moral deregulation resulting from a period of social change, when existing rules, habits, and beliefs no longer hold and alternatives have yet to arise. There is great potential for anomie of this sort in contemporary U.S. science, caused by specialization, technical innovation and the attendant obsolescence of skills, the changing organizational culture of academic science, new goals and bases for legitimating scientific research, and a changing relationship between performance and reward. Under anomic circumstances, behavior is only vaguely guided by shared rules and values.
The concept anomie was used by early sociologists to describe changes in society produced by the Industrial Revolution. The demise of traditional communities and the disruption of norms, values, and a familiar way of life were major concerns of nineteenth-century philosophers and sociologists. For sociologists, anomie is most frequently associated with Emile Durkheim, although others used it differently even during his lifetime.
Durkheim used the French word anomie, meaning "without norms," to describe the disruption that societies experienced in the shift from agrarian, village economies to those based on industry. Anomie is used to describe a state of society, referring to characteristics of the social system, not of individuals, although individuals were affected by this force. Increasingly, this term has taken on a more social psychological meaning. This is not to say that it no longer has uses consistent with the initial definition, but its meaning has been broadened considerably, at times consistent with Durkheim's usage, at times at substantial variance with it.
There are, no doubt, sociologists who cringe at any expanded usage of this and other concepts, but the fact of the matter is that we have no more control over its usage than Thomas Kuhn (1970) has over abominable uses of the concept "paradigm," or than computer engineers have over those who say "interface" when they mean "meet with." Although we cannot completely stop the misappropriation of such terms as anomie we can be careful that sociological extensions of anomie are logically derived from their early uses.
53 As one example of this emphasis, Durkheim (1947, original edition 1912) developed a fundamental thesis to help understand all forms of society through intensive study of the Arunta, an Australian tribe. He focused on the functions that religion performed for the Arunta and underscored the role that group life plays in defi ning what we consider religious. Durkheim concluded that, like other forms of group behaviour, religion reinforces a group’s solidarity.
54 Weber taught his students that they should employ Verstehen (pronounced “fehr—SHTEH—ehn), the German word for “understanding” or “insight,” in their intellectual work. He pointed out that we cannot analyze much of our social behaviour by the kinds of objective criteria we use to measure weight or temperature. To fully comprehend behaviour, we must learn the subjective meanings people attach to their actions—how they themselves view and explain their behaviour. For example, suppose that a sociologist was studying the social ranking of students at a high school. Weber would expect the researcher to employ Verstehen to determine the signifi cance of the school’s social hierarchy for its members. Th e researcher might examine the eff ects of athleticism or grades or social skills or physical
appearance in the school. She would seek to learn how students relate to other students of higher or lower status. While investigating these questions, the researcher would take into account people’s emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes.
55 Karl Marx argued that history could be understood in dialectical terms as a record of the inevitable of materialism. Marx's theory, which he called "historical materialism" or the "materialist conception of history" is based on Hegel's claim that history occurs through a dialectic, or clash, of opposing forces. Hegel was a philosophical idealist who believed that we live in a world of appearances, and true reality is an ideal. Marx accepted this notion of the dialectic, but rejected Hegel's idealism because he did not accept that the material world hides from us the "real" world of the ideal; on the contrary, he thought that historically and socially specific ideologies prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly.
Marx's analysis of history is based on his distinction between the means of production, literally those things, like land and natural resources, and technology, that are necessary for the production of material goods, and the social relations of production, in other words, the social relationships people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production. Together these comprise the mode of production; Marx observed that within any given society the mode of production changes, and that European societies had progressed from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production.
Marx believed that this cycle of growth, collapse, and growth would be punctuated by increasingly severe crises. Moreover, he believed that the long-term consequence of this process was necessarily the empowerment of the capitalist class and the impoverishment of the proletariat. He believed that were the proletariat to seize the means of production, they would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally, and a system of production less vulnerable to periodic crises. In general, Marx thought that peaceful negotiation of this problem was impracticable, and that a massive, well-organized and violent revolution was required. Finally, he theorized that to maintain the socialist system, a proletarian dictatorship must be established and maintained.
Marx held that Socialism itself was an "historical inevitability" that would come about due to the more numerous "Proletarians" having an interest in "expropriating" the "bourgeois exploiters" who had themselves profited by expropriating the surplus value that had been attributable to the proletarians labor in order to establish a "more just" system where there would be greatly improved social relations.
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