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Auguste Comte
-He was recognized as the father of sociology.
-His main concern was the improvement of society.
-He believed that if societies were to advance that social behavior had to be studied scientifically.
-There was no known science of sociology that existed, he made the term "sociology" to describe it.
-He published his theories in a book titles "Positive Philosophy". -
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Harriet Martineau
-Her writing career, which included fiction as well as sociological work, began in 1825 after her family's textile mill was lost to a depression.
-She is known for her translation of Comte's Positive Philosophy, her English translation remains the most readable one.
-She also made original contributions in the areas of research methods, political economy, and feminist theory.
-By writing about the inferior position of women in society, she helped inspire future feminist theorists. -
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Karl Marx
-He identified several social classes in 19th century industrial society, among them were farmers, servants, factory workers, craftspeople, owners of small businesses, and moneyed capitalists.
-He said that at some point all societies would contain only 2 social classes;The Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat, which the proletariat work for the bourgeoisie and are paid just enough to live.
-To him the key of unfolding history was class conflict- a clash between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. -
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Herbert Spencer
-His career was a mix of engineering, drafting, inventing, journalism, and writing.
-To explain social stability, he compared society to the body, just as the eyes and the heart make essential contributions to the function of the body, religious and educational institutions are crucial for a society's function.
-He introduced a theory of social change called Social Darwinism, saying that evolutionary social change led to progress.
-He wrote, the poor deserve to be poor and the rich to be rich. -
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Booker T. Washington
-He had begun his life in slavery.
-After being let free, he became an educator, founding the Tuskegee Institute in 1881.
-He held different assumptions than Du Bois about he 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. -
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Emile Durkheim
-According to him, society exists because of a broad consensus, or agreement, among members of a society.
-He first introduced the use of statistical techniques in his groundbreaking research on suicide.
-In the study, he demonstrated that suicide involves more than individuals acting alone and that suicide rates vary according to group characteristics.
-He showed that human social behavior must be explained by social factors rather than just psychological ones. -
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Jane Addams
-She was best known of the early female reformers in the U.S.
-As a kid she saw many ways of government corruption & business practices that harmed workers.
-She confounded Hull house which helped immigrants, poor, sick, and aged people.
-She focused on the problems caused by the imbalance of power among the social classes.
-She was active in the woman suffrage and peace movements.
-She was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1931, the first sociologists to receive it. -
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George Herbert Mead
-He taught at the University of Chicago.
-He explored how our sense of self develops.
- According to Mead, our sense of self develops as we interact with our world. Language, symbols, and communication are the heart of this process.
-His work laid the foundation for the theoretical perspective of symbolic interaction. -
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Robert Ezra Park
-He worked as an aide to Booker T Washington at the Tuskegee Institute from 1905 to 1914.
-When he left there, he taught at the University of Chicago, he specialized in race relations and human ecology, study of relationships among individuals, social groups, and their social environments.
-He used the city of Chicago as his laboratory to study collective behavior and social interaction. -
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Max Webber
-His Father was a German Lawyer and Politician, and his mother was a strongly devout Calvinist who rejected the wordly lifestyle of her husband.
-Webber was affected psychologically by the conflicting values of his parents, which led to him having mental breakdowns,
-He wrote on a wide variety of topics: the nature of power, religions of the world, law, economics, and more.
-His most famous book is "The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism" published in 1904-1905. -
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W.E.B. Du Bois
-He was the 1st African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard.
-He learned about racial discrimination when he went to Frisk University.
-This racist policy was based on the assumption that African Americans were an inferior race.
-He studied the social structure of African American communities, first in Philadelphia, and later in more places.
-His concern for his race did not stop at the U.S., he was also in the Pan-African movement, which concerned the rights of all African descendants. -
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Julian Samora
-He was 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.
- His 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.