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Auguste Comte
-Known as the father of Sociology
- Main concern was the improvement of society
-Believed that social behavior had to be studied scientifically.
- He coined the term sociology to describe a type of science. -
Harriet Martineau
-Lost her sense of taste, smell, and hearing before she reached adulthood.
-Writing career began in in 1825 after family's textile mil was lost to business depression.
- Best known for her translation of Comte's Positive Philisophy.
-Was a strong supporter of both women and enslaved people. -
Herbert Spencer
-Survivor of nine children
-He was taught exclusively by his father and his uncle for math and natural sciences.
-Introduced a theory of social change called Social Darwinism.
-Reportedly died with a sense of having failed. -
Karl Marx
-did not consider himself a sociologsits.
- felt great concern for poverty and inequality
-identified several social classes in the nineteenth century: farmers, servants, factory workers, craftspeople, owners, and capitalists.
-predicted that their would be only 2 soical classes: bourgeoisie and pro letariat. -
Booker T. Washington
-Du Bois’ demands for African American civil rights and racial equality put him at odds with another voice of the African American community, Booker T. Washington
- Washington was a slave.After emancipation, he became an educator, founding the Tuskegee Institute in 1881
- Washington held different assumptions than Du Bois about the best course of action for African Americans
-He worked under the assumption that African Americans should accept segregation in return for promises of economic gains -
Émile Durkheim
-says society only exists because of broad consensus or agreement, among members of society
-sociologists developed the research methods to replace speculation with observation, to collect and classify data, and to use data for testing social theories. Durkheim was the most prominent/
- He first introduced the use of statistical techniques in his groundbreaking research on suicide
-Durkheim showed that human social behavior must be explained by social factors rather than just psychological ones -
Max Weber
-Weber was affected psychologically by the conflicting values of his parents, which led at one point to a mental breakdown.
-Weber trained in law and economics.
-wrote about nature of power, religion of world, and law.
-Weber believed that an understanding of the personal intentions of people in groups can be best accomplished through the method of verstehen -
George Herbert Mead
-Explored how sense of self develops.
- According to Mead, our sense of self develops as we interact with our world. Language, symbols, and communication are at the heart of this process
- Mead’s work laid the foundation for the theoretical perspective of symbolic interactionism. -
Jane Addams
- Was the best known female of social reformers in the united states. -She attended the Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia but had to drop out because of illness.
- When she was a child, Addams saw many examples of government corruption and business practices that harmed workers. -Addams focused on the problems caused by the imbalance of power among the social classes.
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Robert Ezra Park
-Was an aide to Booker T. Washington
-Specialized in race relations and human ecology, social groups/individuals/environments.
- He wanted to know how groups are organized in different ways to enable them to compete and cooperate. Park, who began his career as a journalist, was also interested in the social function of newspapers as a record of public events.
- Park used the city of Chicago as his laboratory to study collective behavior and social interaction. -
W.E.B. Du Bois
-African American educator and social activist,
-Was the first African American who graduated with a diploma from an intergrated highscool in masachuttes
- Du Bois analyzed the sophisticated social structure of African American communities, first in Philadelphia and later in other places
- Du Bois’ concern for his race did not stop at the borders of the United Statehe was also active in the Pan-African movement. -
Julian Samora
-became the first known Mexican American to earn a doctorate in sociology when he graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 1953.
- He went on to conduct pioneering work in Mexican American studies. Samora’s focus was on civil rights and discrimination, poverty, public health, and the movement of people along the Mexican-American border.
-While at Notre Dame University, he founded the Mexican American Graduate Studies Program and headed the Mexican Border Studies Project.
