[Extra] Power of minorities

Minorities are very influential when they are persistent and consistent. They need to make their case repeatedly so that people can see its continued relevance. Major social changes, such as the abolition of slavery, began with the influence of just a few people, but as they stuck with this principle more and more people became convinced by their arguments, until eventually social change was able to happen. In the case of national wars, these minority influences may take considerable time to have an effect, but over time they begin to challenge the generally held belief that the war is justified. It took several years, for example, for the minorities opposed to the US war in Vietnam to have an effect, but eventually they were able  to convince enough people of their case that the US government perceived a need to end the conflict.

[Extra] Controversy in regulations on free trade

The practice of selling a product in a foreign market at a price lower than it commands in the producer's domestic market is called dumping. Critics of free trade often argue that foreign governments give substantial support to their own exporting companies. Government support may permit these firms to extend their export markets by offering lower prices abroad. In retaliation for this interference with free trade, the US adds import tariffs to products that foreign firms dump on US markets to bring their prices in line with those of domestically produced products. However, business often complain that charges of dumping must undergo a lengthy investigative and bureaucratic procedure before the government assesses import duties. US firms claiming that dumping threatens to hurt their business can file a complaint with the US International Trade Commission, which - on average - rejects about half the claims it receives.

[Extra] Stratification of shoes in Europe by social class

In Europe from the early Middle Ages through today, elites have always worn very different shoes from commoners, and shoes, like clothing, have been simple way to note one's class status. The materials used to make shoes, from at least the tenth century, were very different for commoners and nobility. For instance, noble man and women wore shoes made from a variety of luxurious fabrics, including silk, velvet, brocade, and soft leather. Embroidery, vegetable dyes, and beading were used to further decorate elite shoes, while peasants and other commoners wore shoes made of leather or other animal skins. Clogs, simple footwear made out of a carved block of wood, were also a common form of footwear for peasants and other commoners throughout Europe.

- Dutchclogs

- English clogs

***Both images are allowed to use freely by Creative Commons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clog

[Extra] A problem with international trade

A problem with international trade is that it externalizes costs on a grand scale. Tropical hardwood products can be sold extremely cheaply in the US. The environmental costs of producing those hardwood products occur far from the consumer who buys a piece of cheap Brazilian plywood. Making matters worse, the environmental costs of the plywood usually exported to places where there are few legal controls on pollution and resource extraction. A factory in the US, for example, is legally bound to minimize its production of air and water pollution. Pollution control can be expensive, and internalizing this cost makes a factory less profitable. A similar factory in Mexico might have far less responsibility for pollution control, making it cheaper to produce goods there than in the US. Ongoing protests in the US and elsewhere around the world against the WTO(World Trade Organization) and other forces of globalization have been largely about such exporting of massive environmental and social costs of production.

[Extra] How can religion affect the economy?

Saudi Arabia prohibit screening or making movies. So they have no film industry. Also since Saudi Arabia is a ultraconservative muslim country, they prohibit lots of things: liquor, pork, etc. Due to these reasons, Saudi Arabia have different economic structure compared with other religion countries. I think this would be valid example for the question.

[Extra] Strong Programme

 David Bloor was first person who defined "Strong Programme". Simply put, Strong Programme is:

a. Have to explain development and evolution of science knowledge logically by using social condition.

b. Have to explain not only clarified science(like newton science) but also pseudo-science(like alchemy).

c. Same social factor have to be used by same method for explaining clarified science and pseudo-science.

d. And this sociological explaining have to applied in Strong Programme itself.


Based on this four propositions, Bloor advanced methodological relativism, and declared "Objectivity(of science) is social".

Strong Progamme create controversies. Especially assertion that have to use same factor for explaining clarified science and pseudo-science, and success and failure in science. It was very unpersuasive.

[Extra] Types of Suicide

Durkheim defines suicide as follows:

...the term suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result.

—Durkheim, 1897


He also distinguished between four subtypes of suicide:


Egoistic suicide: reflects a prolonged sense of not belonging, of not being integrated in a community, an experience, of not having a tether, an absence that can give rise to meaninglessness, apathy, melancholy, and depression. It is the result of a weakening of the bonds that normally integrate individuals into the collectivity: in other words a breakdown or decrease of social integration. Durkheim refers to this type of suicide as the result of "excessive individuation", meaning that the individual becomes increasingly detached from other members of his community. Those individuals who were not sufficiently bound to social groups (and therefore well-defined values, traditions, norms, and goals) were left with little social support or guidance, and therefore tended to commit suicide on an increased basis. An example Durkheim discovered was that of unmarried people, particularly males, who, with less to bind and connect them to stable social norms and goals, committed suicide at higher rates than married people.

Altruistic suicide: is characterized by a sense of being overwhelmed by a group's goals and beliefs. It occurs in societies with high integration, where individual needs are seen as less important than the society's needs as a whole. They thus occur on the opposite integration scale as egoistic suicide. As individual interest would not be considered important, Durkheim stated that in an altruistic society there would be little reason for people to commit suicide. He stated one exception, namely when the individual is expected to kill themselves on behalf of society – a primary example being the soldier in military service.

Anomic suicide: reflects an individual's moral confusion and lack of social direction, which is related to dramatic social and economic upheaval. It is the product of moral deregulation and a lack of definition of legitimate aspirations through a restraining social ethic, which could impose meaning and order on the individual conscience. This is symptomatic of a failure of economic development and division of labour to produce Durkheim's organic solidarity. People do not know where they fit in within their societies. Durkheim explains that this is a state of moral disorder where man does not know the limits on his desires, and is constantly in a state of disappointment. This can occur when man goes through extreme changes in wealth; while this includes economic ruin, it can also include windfall gains – in both cases, previous expectations from life are brushed aside and new expectations are needed before he can judge his new situation in relation to the new limits.

Fatalistic suicide: the opposite of anomic suicide, when a person is excessively regulated, when their futures are pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive discipline. It occurs in overly oppressive societies, causing people to prefer to die than to carry on living within their society. This is an extremely rare reason for people to take their own lives, but a good example would be within a prison; some people might prefer to die than live in a prison with constant abuse and excessive regulation that prohibits them from pursuing their desires.



These four types of suicide are based on the degrees of imbalance of two social forces: social integration and moral regulation. Durkheim noted the effects of various crises on social aggregates – war, for example, leading to an increase in altruism, economic boom or disaster contributing to anomie.

[Extra] Structural Functionalism

Structural functionalism concentrates on the positive and negative functions of social structures.  Societal functionalism is a particular type of structural functionalism that aims to explain the role of social structures and institutions in society, the relationship between these structures, and the manner in which these structures constrain the actions of individuals.  According to structural functionalists, individuals have little to no control over the ways in which particular structures operate.  Indeed, structural functionalists understand individuals in terms of social positions.  For example, when the structural functionalists Kingsley Davis and Wilbur Moore discuss social stratification, they do not refer to individuals, but to the positions these individuals occupy.  It is not individuals who are ranked, but positions that are ranked according to the degree to which they contribute to the survival of society.  High-ranking positions offer high rewards that make them worth an individual’s time and effort to occupy.  The structural functionalist account of stratification has been criticized on the grounds that there must be other ways to motivate individuals to occupy particular positions and perform certain tasks without such a disparate system of rewards.

[Extra] Enlightenment

The Enlightenment is the period in the history of western thought and culture, stretching roughly from the mid-decades of the seventeenth century through the eighteenth century, characterized by dramatic revolutions in science, philosophy, society and politics; these revolutions swept away the medieval world-view and ushered in our modern western world. Enlightenment thought culminates historically in the political upheaval of the French Revolution, in which the traditional hierarchical political and social orders (the French monarchy, the privileges of the French nobility, the political power and authority of the Catholic Church) were violently destroyed and replaced by a political and social order informed by the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality for all, founded, ostensibly, upon principles of human reason. The Enlightenment begins with the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The rise of the new science progressively undermines not only the ancient geocentric conception of the cosmos, but, with it, the entire set of presuppositions that had served to constrain and guide philosophical inquiry. The dramatic success of the new science in explaining the natural world, in accounting for a wide variety of phenomena by appeal to a relatively small number of elegant mathematical formulae, promotes philosophy (in the broad sense of the time, which includes natural science) from a handmaiden of theology, constrained by its purposes and methods, to an independent force with the power and authority to challenge the old and construct the new, in the realms both of theory and practice, on the basis of its own principles. D'Alembert, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment, characterizes his eighteenth century, in the midst of it, as “the century of philosophy par excellence”, because of the tremendous intellectual progress of the age, the advance of the sciences, and the enthusiasm for that progress, but also because of the characteristic expectation of the age that philosophy (in this broad sense) would dramatically improve human life.

[Extra] Symbolic interactionism

The symbolic interaction perspective, also called symbolic interactionism, is a major framework of sociological theory. This perspective relies on the symbolic meaning that people develop and rely upon in the process of social interaction. Although symbolic interactionism traces its origins to Max Weber's assertion that individuals act according to their interpretation of the meaning of their world, the American philosopher George Herbert Mead introduced this perspective to American sociology in the 1920s.

Symbolic interaction theory analyzes society by addressing the subjective meanings that people impose on objects, events, and behaviors. Subjective meanings are given primacy because it is believe that people behave based on what they believe and not just on what is objectively true. Thus, society is thought to be socially constructed through human interpretation. People interpret one another’s behavior and it is these interpretations that form the social bond. These interpretations are called the “definition of the situation.” For example, why would young people smoke cigarettes even when all objective medical evidence points to the dangers of doing so? The answer is in the definition of the situation that people create. Studies find that teenagers are well informed about the risks of tobacco, but they also think that smoking is cool, that they themselves will be safe from harm, and that smoking projects a positive image to their peers. So, the symbolic meaning of smoking overrides that actual facts regarding smoking and risk.

Critics of this theory claim that symbolic interactionism neglects the macro level of social interpretation—the “big picture.” In other words, symbolic interactionists may miss the larger issues of society by focusing too closely on the “trees” rather than the “forest”. The perspective also receives criticism for slighting the influence of social forces and institutions on individual interactions.

[Extra] Frankfurt School(Frankfurt Schule)

The Frankfurt School (German: Frankfurter Schule) is a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, associated in part with the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. The school initially consisted of dissident Marxists who believed that some of Marx's followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx's ideas, usually in defense of orthodox Communist parties. Meanwhile, many of these theorists believed that traditional Marxist theory could not adequately explain the turbulent and unexpected development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century. Critical of both capitalism and Soviet socialism, their writings pointed to the possibility of an alternative path to social development.

Although sometimes only loosely affiliated, Frankfurt School theorists spoke with a common paradigm in mind, thus sharing the same assumptions and being preoccupied with similar questions. In order to fill in the perceived omissions of traditional Marxism, they sought to draw answers from other schools of thought, hence using the insights of antipositivist sociology, psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, and other disciplines. The school's main figures sought to learn from and synthesize the works of such varied thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Weber and Lukács.

Following Marx, they were concerned with the conditions that allow for social change and the establishment of rational institutions. Their emphasis on the "critical" component of theory was derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, materialism and determinism by returning to Kant's critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel's philosophy, with its emphasis on dialectic and contradiction as inherent properties of reality.

Since the 1960s, Frankfurt School critical theory has increasingly been guided by Jürgen Habermas's work on communicative reason, linguistic intersubjectivity and what Habermas calls "the philosophical discourse of modernity". More recently, critical theorists such as Raymond Geuss and Nikolas Kompridis have voiced opposition to Habermas, claiming that he has undermined the aspirations for social change which originally gave purpose to critical theory's various projects—for example the problem of what reason should mean, the analysis and enlargement of "conditions of possibility" for social emancipation, and the critique of modern capitalism.

[Extra] Rural sociology

The field of Rural Sociology is a sub-field of sociology, the study of human societies and social groups. Rural sociologists focus on the study of social life in rural and non-metropolitan areas domestically and internationally. They continue to develop theory and knowledge and produce information relevant to public policy and local development.

Rural Sociology research focuses on environmental well-being, sustainable development of natural resources, social and community quality of life, and diffusion and impacts of technologies. The faculty in SENR provides expertise for students to focus on agriculture and the environment or social change and development.

[Extra] Industrial sociology

Industrial sociology, until recently a crucial research area within the field of sociology of work, examines "the direction and implications of trends in technological change, globalization, labour markets, work organization, managerial practices and employment relations to the extent to which these trends are intimately related to changing patterns of inequality in modern societies and to the changing experiences of individuals and families the ways in which workers challenge, resist and make their own contributions to the patterning of work and shaping of work institutions."

One branch of industrial sociology is Labor process theory (LPT). In 1974, Harry Braverman wrote Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, which provided a critical analysis of scientific management. This book analyzed capitalist productive relations from a Marxist perspective.[2] Following Marx, Braverman argued that work within capitalist organisations was exploitative and alienating, and therefore workers had to be coerced into servitude. For Braverman the pursuit of capitalist interests over time ultimately leads to deskilling and routinisation of the worker. The Taylorist work design is the ultimate embodiment of this tendency.

[Extra] Cyberbullying

What is Cyberbullying?

Cyberbullying is any harassment that occurs via the Internet. Vicious forum posts, name calling in chat rooms, posting fake profiles on web sites, and mean or cruel email messages are all ways of cyberbullying.

Examples of Cberbullying

A student is bombarded by anonymous threatening and taunting emails at home, even though there is no direct harassment at school. The victim has no idea who is sending the messages and starts to feel like everybody is against them. That student is being cyberbullied.
A school bulletin board is spammed with name-calling posts that spread vicious rumors about a specific student. The rumors aren’t true but kids at school see the posts and believe them. The student is then ostracized by peers. This student is the victim of cyberbullying.

A nasty fake profile is posted at a social networking site using a student’s real name, photo, and contact information. That student starts getting weird email messages from strangers who think the profile is real. Some of the messages are crude. Some of the messages are mean. This is another example of cyberbullying.

These are just a few examples of cyberbullying. If you are taking part in things like this it is not harmless fun. You are being a cyberbully. If you are the victim of this type of treatment you are being cyberbullied and there are things you can do to stop the harassment.

Why Do People Cyberbully?

Bullying has been around forever but cyberbullying is different because it lets a bully remain anonymous. It is easier to bully in cyberspace than it is to bully face to face. With cyberbullying a bully can pick on people with much less risk of being caught.
Bullies are natural instigators and in cyberspace bullies can enlist the participation of other students who may be unwilling to bully in the real world. Kids who stand around doing nothing in a real life bullying incident often become active participants in online harassment.

The detachment afforded by cyberspace makes bullies out of people who would never become involved in a real life incident. The Internet makes bullying more convenient and since the victim’s reaction remains unseen people who wouldn’t normally bully don’t take it as seriously.

Introduction to Sociology/demography

1. Summary

Demography is the science of populations. Demographers seek to understand population dynamics by investigating three main demographic processes: birth, migration, and aging (including death). All three of these processes contribute to changes in populations, including how people inhabit the earth, form nations and societies, and develop culture.

Today, there is growing interest among the public in demography, as “demographic change” has become the subject of political debates in many developed countries. Most of these countries have birth rates below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, and, at the same time, life expectancy has been rising considerably and continues to rise – a development sometimes called “the aging of societies.”

While demography cannot offer political advice on how to tackle demographic change, demographers seek to describe the phenomena related to this change, and to understand their causes. Using reliable data and the statistical processing of these data, modern demographic research embraces many scientific disciplines, including mathematics, economics and other social sciences, geography or biology.

2. What did you learned/What did you interested

I didn't know about demography before. The contents of this wikibooks give me basic concepts about demography. It was beneficial to read this chapter.

3. Question

Why poor countries control population?

Introduction to Sociology/Family

1. Summary

Today, there are so many variations of "family". So the family cannot define simply. It is relatively new phenomenon that question about the basic concept of family. The structures of family are defer from culture. And they changes over time. We can see the life cycle of family: Courtship, Marriage, Children, Divorce, Death and Widowing. There are new developments in family: One-Parent Households, Cohabitation, Same-Sex Unions, Childfree.

2. What did you learned/What did you interested

The new developments in family were very interested. Today, many Korea's young couples are trying to avoid have children. So the contents about cohabitation and childfree were felt very familiar to me.

3. Question

In family how can we split work responsibilities literally 50/50?

Introduction to Sociology/Social Movements

1. Summary

Social movement is a sustained series of interactions between power holders and persons successfully claiming to speak on behalf of a constituency lacking formal representation, in the course of which those persons make publicly visible demands for changes in the distribution or exercise of power, and back those demands with public demonstrations of support. Aberle describe social movements into four type.

Social movements has stages.

There are various theories which attempted to explain how social movements develop: Deprivation Theory, Mass-Society Theory, Structural-Strain Theory, Resource-Mobilization Theory, Political Process Theory, Culture Theory.

2. What did you learned/What did you interested

Aberle's description about social movements was very interested. I think his description method was very creative.

3. Question

Is there any exception violated stages of social movements?

International Relations/The Cause of War

1. Summary

We can detect factors of war. But we can't make a system for predicting where and when war will occur. There are many theories about the cause of war: psychological theories, anthropological theories, sociological theories, information theories, economic theories, marxist theories.



2. What was interested/What did you learn

I was interested in the theories about the cause of war, especially information theories. Information theories argue that all wars are based on lack of information. This theory is predicated on the notion that the outcome of wars is not randomly determined, but fully determined on factors such as doctrine, economies, and power. While purely random events, such as storms or the right person dying at the right time, might have had some effect on history, these only influence a single battle or slightly alter the outcome of a war, but would not mean the difference between victory and defeat.



3. Question

Is there any new theories about the cause of war?

Extra discussion

* How are Koreans treated abroad?

Actually, South Korea is still not popular in most of the world. When Koreans went abroad, the most often asked question is "Are you Japanese?" or "Are you Chinese?". I think this happens because Korea's population is smaller than Japan and China.

Introduction to Sociology/Gender

1. Summary

For many people, the terms “gender” and “sex” are interchangeable. This idea has become so common, particularly in western societies, that it is rarely questioned. Yet biological sex and gender are different; gender is not inherently connected to one’s physical anatomy.

Sex is biological and includes physical attributes such as sex chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, internal reproductive structures, and external genitalia. At birth, it is used to identify individuals as male or female.  Gender on the other hand is far more complicated. Along with one’s physical traits, it is the complex interrelationship between those traits and one’s internal sense of self as male, female, both or neither as well as one’s outward presentations and behaviors related to that perception

2. What was interesting/What did you learn

The theories of gender difference was interested. Especially sociobiology's theory.



3. Discussion point

Gender is the socially constructed component. So, could we design our children's gender?