Holistic view
Prioritize the invariant and the transient. Downgrades flux of actions and events.
Opposes positivism, goes beyond what is immediately observable.
Constraining nature of social structures. How much freedom do people really have? Question of agency.
Demonstration: 123- sequencing.
EMILE DURKHEIM
Emile Durkheim: What is a social fact? - Foundation of Sociology.
Durkheim defined the "social fact" this way: "A social fact is any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint; or: which is general over the whole of a given society whilst having an existence of its own, independent of its individual manifestations".
He viewed it as a concrete idea that affected a person's everyday life. Durkheim's examples of social facts included social institutions such as kinship and marriage, currency, language, religion, political organization, and all societal institutions we must account for in everyday interactions with other members of our societies.
Deviating from the norms of such institutions makes the individual unacceptable or misfit in the group.
Among the most noted of Durkheim's work was his discovery of the "social fact" of suicide rates. Police suicide statistics in different districts show that the suicide rate of Catholic communities is lower than that of Protestant communities. He ascribed this to a social (as opposed to individual) cause. This was considered groundbreaking for sociology as a discipline..
Social facts are like "things" to be studied. Society is seen as a holisitic entitiy, social facts should be explained through other social facts, and the functioning of society is independent from psychology, or other forms of explanation of behavior.
Emergence: Life as a phenomenon cannot be explained through the qualities of carbon molecules, it is not "derivative" of the underlying material. It emerges as a unique phenomenon in a more complex environment.
FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE
Overview
the meaning of individual concepts depends on their relationship to the whole. system.
Synchronic or diachronic investigation of language: analysis of the current system, or analysis of the system's evolution over time.
langue and parole. Parole is spoken language (one word after another) and langue refers to the system underneath: the shared set of structural properties underlying language use. What people say makes sense only because of the pre-existing structural properties of language.
Sign: refers to the relationship between signifier and signified. A signifier is a spoken word, it refers to the concept underneath, the signified. Together, they form a sign.
The nature of the sign is arbitrary (conventional).
Meaning derives from a system of differences: A chess piece does not get its meaning from the material it is made of, but from the relation to other pieces. The same is true for words. The meaning of the sign depends on differences from an absent totality. ("green" means something only in relation to the whole color system that is referenced implicitly.) There are no positive, self-defined signs in language.
Paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations in language.
We can extend the analysis of language to culture as a whole. Culture is itself a language.
Parole versus langue: Applied to the social realm, there is a grammar underneath our social relations, and when we live our lives, we implicitly understand this, even if we sometimes act against it.