Sociological Imagination Essay

Sociological Imagination Essay INTRODUCTION Definition of sociological imagination Sociological theories describe causes and effects of human behavior; study the social life, and society. Above definition displays two concepts: human being at the micro level and society at the macro level. Sociological imagination is a sociological theory that encapsulates these two concepts: individual, and society (What is Sciology). An individual is an element of society. The society acts forces on this element. Sociological imagination enables the individual to identify these forces, their impacts. Sociological imagination is the ability of connecting micro level to the macro level, and distinguishing personal troubles and social issues. Importance of sociological imagination External act of an individual displays what one does, which is the result of cause and effect. The cause aspect defines why one acts in a specific way. Individual act also displays the structural arrangement of a society at a location and a historical point of civilization. Individual act, history, and location are intertwined. Sociological imagination demonstrates how an individual perceives the social forces, as well as the cause and effect relationship of an individual or group of individuals with social issues or social forces. This is why we should care for sociological imagination. Examples In India, many centuries ago, widow women used to commit ritualistic suicide by being burnt alive along with the dead husband. The act of widow women was the result of social forces that existed during that time in India (Deducing with sociological imagination). In John Grishams novel A Time to Kill, the African American Carl Lee Hailey kills two white men who raped and killed his little daughter Tonya. Acts of the white men and Carl Lee Hailey were the result of social forces that existed in social groups in the USA at that time. The social force in this case was racism. Two white men raped and killed Tonya because she was black. Carl Lee killed the white rapists because he knew justice would not prevail for white men (A time to kill 2008). Thesis statement When I analyze my own life through sociological imagination, I am able to explain my acts and social forces behind them. If I can distinguish, good and bad acts using wisdom then I can change my behavior and worldview. Conflict theory envisioned a society as fragmented into groups. More powerful social groups exert forces on less powerful groups. Social imagination discloses the characteristics of social forces when and only when individuals interact with these forces. SOCIAL CONTEXT Definition of social context In a net shell, sociological imagination is an interaction between an individual and social forces. This abstraction points towards the concept of existence of correlation between psychology and sociology. Social context theory reveals this relationship and show societal and social changes over the passage of time, explains the causes that brought changes and offers future change patterns. The model includes three factors: micro socialization process through the behavior of individual and collective of individuals, macro social forces through the social structure, and time (Social context theory). Social context theory is analyzed through social environment dimension and time dimension. Social environment dimension consists of social structures that shape the behavior of individual or group of individuals, social process demonstrates how individuals perceive, interpret and interact with the social structures, and social behavior represents the social realities through behavior of ind ividuals. Time dimension enacts the power of the existing societal forces in maintaining social behavior patters (Social context theory). Social imagination acknowledges the existence of interaction between individual or group of individuals and social forces. Social context theory explains how and why the relationship emerged and what changes the relationship could bring over the passage of time. Specific socio-historical force 1 I lived in Russian part of the Ex-Soviet Union. During mid 1980s, countrys economic conditions started deteriorating. By late 1980s absence of adequate commodities started hurting public. Bad economy as a social structure shaped individuals behaviors with the concept that Russian Federation was feeding the parasites, non-Russians, so Russians must abandon them, the non-Russians. When social structure (bad economy) and social process (individuals interaction) came into conflict, it resulted the break up of the country. Specific socio-historical force 2 I was born and raised in Palestine. Social structure was poor economy, poor living conditions, fundamental religious belief, and constant aggression from Israel. Social process was my perception about Israel and their politics towards Palestine. Poverty, religion, and bad living environment shaped my behavior. My perception was to change living environment, which I found in cooperation with Israel. I voted for peace roadmap with Israel. How your social context could be different Imagine I am living in the USA during the period of segregation. I am an African American. The social structure created by European whites suppressed my rights; I cannot get proper education, proper job, and even a decent place to live. Now, guess I live in the USA when the country has a president who is an African American. It took a long time to make this change, however, now I have equal rights as whites. SOCIAL LOCATION Definition of social location The concept social imagination assigns two attributes: an individual or group of individuals and social forces. Social imagination defines the interaction of an individual or group of individuals with social forces. At the same time, the individual is a character located at a certain place in the society. In American society, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, male, heterosexual, upper middle-class, educated, older defines social location of a person (Social location). Social location defines a persons place in their particular social order. A persons bias, belief, and values are shaped based on social locations. Gender, color, economic level, coming from the village or town, healthy or sick, young or old; these are some of attributes of social location. Individuals from similar social location create their own social hierarchy. Social hierarchy classifies individuals in a group based on esteem, prestige, economic success, and accumulation of wealth into social classes. Description of social location I am from India, a country with 1.22 billion populations. I am male, less than 25, from town, literate, which respectively corresponds to 50 %, 51 %, 75 %, and 28 % of the total population. From the economic standpoint, 18 % constitutes rich and upper middle class, 23 % constitute middle class, and 59 % of the total population are poor. I belong to the 18 % social class (Indias middle class population 2011; Indias population 2012). Personal experience #1 My childhood social location should be classified than middle class. I faced absence of money in fulfilling a childs desire of purchasing toys. Personal experience #2 Teenage years were financially little better, but my parents still were unable to pay tuition for schools with better teachers, and technology. I studied in schools for children from underprivileged families. Personal experience #3 In college years, I became interested in Marxism and concept of conflict theory. Years of impoverished economic conditions contributed social imagination that rich and upper middle class are greedy and want to keep the middle class economically handcuffed forever. RELATIVE CULTURE Personal beliefs, values, or attitudes #1 Edward Taylor defined culture as a complex of behavior pattern and perception which includes knowledge, beliefs, morals, customs, ethics and any other skill and habits acquired by man as a member of society (What is culture?). At the same time, belief, customs, and ethics are relative to individual within his own social context. This is how anthropologist explains comparative culture concept (What is culture relativism?). Sociological imagination is interaction between individual or group of individuals acts and social forces. Individual act is a function of social process; hence, it characterizes consciousness of individuals. Perception, on the other hand, is a function of relative culture. Belief, morals, ethics form the foundation of human perception and its value varies from one social context to other. Social imagination relates to the culture. Personal beliefs, values, or attitudes #2 My social location is poor class in India. Belief, morals, customs relate to orthodox Hindu religion. This culture determines my social context. Hindu religion believes cows are sacred animals. On the other hand, Muslims of the society sacrifice cows in the name of their religion. Social imagination is to make protest to this practice and stop sacrificing cows in the name of religion. Personal beliefs, values, or attitudes #3 I am a Palestinian youth, spend the life in the ghetto in poverty; this is my social location. Belief, morals, customs and ethics relate to fundamental Muslim culture. Social context is formed by the fundamental culture. I perceive that Israel is the cause of my personal problems. Social imagination is to change Israeli attitude toward Palestinians. That is way; I am a member of Hamaz political party. Personal beliefs, values, or attitudes # 4 Social location rich, male, middle aged, an Arab, and an owner of an industry that feeds 300 families. I believe my financial position is vital for the well being of employees. However, due to the economic downturn, the plant has stopped several employee support activities and has reduced salary by 15 %. Employees are blaming me for their personal financial problems. Employees are also blaming that the owner has not reduced own expenses. Employees have taken vows to fight me back. My social imagination is to suppress these new social forces with the help of countrys law enforcement agency. CONCLUSION Sociological imagination to a certain extent accepts Marxs conflict theory and agrees that society is divided into fragmented classes with respective social, political and economic power. Conflict arises when a class or group feels social forces from other classes. Social imagination theory recognizes that social behavior is a result of social culture.

The Sun Essay -- Sun Solar Power Solar System Essays

The Sun   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The sun is the largest object in the solar system. It is a middle-sized star and there are many other stars out in the universe just like it. Even though it is only a middle-sized star it is large enough to hold over 1 million Earth’s inside if it were hollow. The temperature on the sun is far too much for any living thing to bear. On the surface it is 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit and the core is a stunning 27,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But don’t worry we are over 90,000 million miles away, the sun could never reach us, at least not yet. The sun is a still a middle aged star and later in its life it will become a Red Giant. In this stage it will get bigger, and closer to us causing a temperature increase and most likely the end of the world as we know it, but this will not take place for quite some time.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  But the sun is not our enemy, if it weren’t for that big ball of burning gas there would be no life on this planet at all. We need its heat, its light, and its energy. Without these our planet would be frozen over like a big ice cube and there would be no signs or traces of life ever. In total amount the sun provides about 2 pounds of energy to us every day. Yes, that’s right only 2 pounds. The sun evaporates water from the earth’s lakes, streams, and rivers. It also heats the earth and cools the earth at the same time. Without the Earth’s atmosphere to protect us from the sun’s ultraviolet rays we would be toast. This is kind of how the greenhouse effect takes place. The greenhouse effect is when the atmosphere of the earth traps heat from the sun and lets sunlight heat plants, yet prevents much of the heat from getting out. In a similar way, the atmosphere lets sunlight through to the surface of the earth. The sunlight warms th e earth, but the heat that created cannot easily pass back through the atmosphere into space.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Now what is going on in the sun? When we look up we just see a bright object that makes us warm, sometimes gives us sunburn and gives us light, on the contrary. The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees. The sun is so hot that everything on it is a gas. About 75% of the sun is made up of hydrogen, about 23% is helium and the remaining percent consist of iron, copper, aluminum, and about 70 more elements that are comm... ... as Stonehenge, to see the suns shadow and tell the time of day. Ancient people also used the sun to tell directions, they knew that it rose in the east and set in the west everyday, and that one whole day was the time it took the sun to get from one edge of the horizon to the other. Ancient calendars were based on the phases of the moon. The phases occur because sunlight reflected by the moon is seen from different angles as the moon circles the earth. Even today the sun has an important role in surveying and navigating people. Surveyors can use the sun to calculate their own position and other positions on the earth.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Well, that about does it as a summary for the sun. Even though this essay may have brought out some true facts about the sun there is still much more to know about the sun. Some stuff we don’t even know about the sun and may never know, but what we do know is good. We know that it is the largest object in the solar system, it is the size of 1 million earth’s and it hotter than 27,000,000 in the core, now that’s cooking.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Bibliography 1.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The World Book Encyclopedia, â€Å"sun† Robert W. Noyes 2.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Why the sun shines 3.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Science Book

Research Paper on William James and Functionalism

PSY 101 4/7/13 â€Å"William James and Functionalism† I. Introduction William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who had trained as a physician. He was the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James wrote influential books on pragmatism, psychology, educational psychology, the psychology of religious experience, and mysticism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James. In the summer of 1878, William James married Alice Gibbens. William James was born at the Astor House in New York City.He was the son of Henry James Sr. , a noted and independently wealthy theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics. James also worked on man y theories included functionalism which is the second paradigm in Psychology. According to William James, functionalism assumed that the human mind served an adaptive role.It explored the function of thoughts and behaviors. II. What is functionalism in Psychology? Functionalism is a theory of the mind in contemporary psychology, developed largely as an alternative to both the identity theory of mind and behaviorism. This theory is built on the premise that human mental states (beliefs, desires, pain, etc. ) are constituted solely by their functional role — that is, they are causal relations to other mental states, sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs . Functionalism is a theoretical level between physical implementation and behavioral output.Therefore, it is different from its predecessors of Cartesian dualism (advocating discrete mental and physical substances) and Skinnerian behaviorism and physicalism (declaring only physical substances): It is only concerned with the ef fective functions of the brain. Since mental states are identified by a functional role, they are said to be realized on multiple levels. In other words, they are able to be manifested in various systems as long as the system performs the appropriate functions. While computers are physical devices with electronic substrate that perform omputations on inputs to give outputs, our brains also act as physical devices with neural substrate that perform computations on inputs which produce behaviors. â€Å"The Principles of Psychology† is a monumental text in the history of psychology, written by William James and published in 1890. James's psychology included four methods: analysis (i. e. , the logical criticism of precursor and contemporary views of the mind), introspection (i. e. , the psychologist's study of his own states of mind), experiment (e. g. , in hypnosis or neurology), and comparison (i. . , the use of statistical means to distinguish norms from anomalies). III. The p aradigm of functionalism The subject matter of psychology: Psychology is the study of mental activity (e. g. perception, memory, imagination, feeling, judgment). Mental activity is to be evaluated in terms of how it serves the organism in adapting to its environment. The methods of psychology: Mental acts can be studied through introspection, the use of instruments to record and measure; and objective manifestations of mind, through the study of its reations and products, and through the study of anatomy and physiology. The functionalists tended to use the term ‘function' rather loosely. The term is used in at least two different ways. It can refer to the study of how a mental process operates. This is a major departure from the study of the structure of a mental process, the difference between stopping a train to tear it apart to study its parts (structuralism), and looking at how the systems interact while it is running (functionalism). The term ‘function' can also ref er to how the mental process functions in the volution of the species, what adaptive property it provides that would cause it to be selected through evolution. Functionalism never really died, it became part of the mainstream of psychology. The importance of looking at process rather than structure is a common attribute of modern psychology. As an individual approach it lacked a clear formulation and inherited the problems of the structuralist reliance on introspection. IV. William James’ approach on functionalism Unlike Many Psychologist who were interested on structuralism (structures of the mind), WilliamJames instead was interested in consciousness and how it functions in individuals, especially in relation to behavior. James’s psychology experiments with his students tended to be more curious adventures in consciousness and practical application. James taught at Harvard University from 1878-1890. During this time, he completed his renowned psychological work: â₠¬Å"The Principles of Psychology† in which he elucidated his functionalist insight into such subjects as consciousness, habit, and emotion. He was also became over saturated with the subject of functionalism and psychologyV. Functionalism vs. Structuralism As soon as psychology started to gain scientific relevance, so started the debate over how it was most appropriate to describe behavior and the human mind. Structuralism was first introduced by Wilhelm Wundt. It was then formally named and established by one of his students named Edward B. Tichener who broke away from many of the previous ideas put forward by Wundt. Structuralism aims to describe the structure of the mind in terms of the most primitive elements of mental experience. It focused on the breaking down of the brains mental rocesses into its basic components. These basic components were then attempted to be discovered by a method known as introspection. Introspection can be defined as the examination or observation of one’s own mental and emotional processes. Structuralism is based on the idea tha t the aim of psychology is to investigate how the elements are relate to each other which is done by the study into sensations, images and feelings. Functionalism was formulated as a reaction to structuralism and aims to explain mental processes in a more accurate manner than structuralism.It does this by focusing on the purpose of consciousness and behavior. It was brought forward by William James (1842-1910) and was derived from the theory of natural selection created by Darwin which suggests that unless characteristics of a species, including the processes in the brain, served some sort of purpose they would not be selected over time by nature and would not have survived. There are weaknesses to both approaches. Structuralism was criticized for lacking reliability in its results due to the study of the structure of the mind being too subjective. Others argue that it was oo concerned with i nternal behavior that cannot be easily observed and therefore not easily measured. It could also be argued that everyday psychological problems cannot be solved by looking at the sensations of them alone and the mental operations that are promoted by functionalism have to be considered. VI. Conclusion Functionalism formed as a reaction to the structuralism and was heavily influenced by the work of William James and the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin. Functionalists sought to explain the mental processes in a more systematic and accurate manner.Rather than focusing on the elements of consciousness, functionalists focused on the purpose of consciousness and behavior. Functionalism also emphasized individual differences, which had a profound impact on education. Work Cited: * James, William. The principle of Psychology. Vol. 1 and 2. 1890. Dover publications 1950. * James, William. Psychology (Briefer Course) (1892) University of Notre Dame Press 1985: Dover Publications 2001. * Wade, Carole. Tavris, Carole. Psychology Tenth Edition. Upper Saddle River. Pearson Education 2011, 2008, 2006. * http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/William_James

Origins of Leadership and Power Essays - 2720 Words

This paper will study the different facets of leadership and power in small group interactions. The variety and number of studies that have focused on leadership and power attest to the importance and ambiguousness that surround any attempts to define their origins or implications. First, the definitions of leadership and power from a social psychological viewpoint will be presented. Then a discussion will follow examining the effect of different variables on the leadership effectiveness and then a look at the convergence of power and leadership and their interrelationship. Leadership Leadership is an important element in the functioning of group interactions toward an organized goal. Leadership has been defined in many†¦show more content†¦Departing from the theoretical definitions of leadership in terms of assumptions of group members and the use of broad terms like power and characteristics best suited are definitions that are more practical in nature. Leadership can also be defined as the person or persons who possess directive roles in any group interaction (Hollander, 1985). All of these theorists definitions of leadership stress the fact that leadership is not a one-person social process. In order for a person to be a successful leader and exhibit those leadership skills which are accepted and praised by the dominant culture, there must be followers, or people whom the leader can lead (Hollander, 1985). The discussion of the qualities of leaders and origins of leadership will follow the detailing of the theoretical definition of power. Power Power is broadly defined by sociologists as the capacity of one person to achieve purposes without the consent of or against the resistance of others (Hewitt, 2000). There have been attempts to measure the social power of those deemed to possess it, to determine the level of their potential influence. 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