Introduction to Sociology - The Sociological Imagination - Part 1

I want to talk to you about the the very subject that brings us together and that is the word sociology sociology and it's hard to get all those syllables in I want to talk to you about sociology and I know many of you have had other experiences with sociology or with the other social sciences and in fact this gives me an opportunity to learn something from you so I would like to know first of all how many of you are new to NYU this term raise your hand okay a good number thank you how many of you are in your first year of any university raise your hand Wow okay great thank you so we have a room of young people it's safe to assume and again a hearty welcome I remember I don't really remember when I was in your situation but I have some photographs maybe I'll share at some point during the semester and pass it along how many of you have had another sociology class somewhere in the world a couple of you and how about anthropology a handful and economics and political science and psychology okay thanks so much history all right I saw a lot of hands go up for quite a number of those disciplines when I asked about it I could have asked about others like geography and planning and what's interesting for the present purpose is that sociology includes touches on borders all of those fields and you will see that as the semester goes on that sociology has a kind of its own space but it is adjacent to all of those other spaces and in fact many fields like communications for example emerged out of sociology the field of demography the study of population was born out of sociology studies of various versions of history were born out of sociology and in fact one of the great sociological thinkers a founder of the discipline sometimes a French a French theorist whose name was a Auguste Comte whoop that doesn't this is I'm just learning by the way this whole exciting world of electronics and oh I know what I do how to do I no no don't don't give me any clues I know what I've got to do there we go like that ah see the way it works it's just something fantastic I'm going to get better at this as the semester goes on I know I have a got to put it back and now I go like that oh man I'm just no good okay I'll practice every night for 10 minutes until I get this right I'll roll my arse do it improve my Italian okay so um that's a nice little pattern isn't it so I know what I was doing I wanted to give you the name of a dead European and August comped and uh he a philosopher of the what centuries its 17th century was a do we know we're going to getting confirmed on that 17th century called sociology the queen of the sciences and he meant that in a positive way that sociology is the centerpiece of all of these other disciplines because sociology after all is about human beings and it is about human beings interacting together it is about what happens when human beings interact together so whether it's their economic relationships their relationships of power as the political scientists take it up whether it's comes out of their psychology the fact that they are together and what comes out of that phenomenon is the subject matter of sociology and that being together kind of thing what results from that is what also gives rise to all of these other disciplines which are all about social relations in one form or another but sociology is the heart of it so let's start with some sociology what the first part of this course the heading for it is the sociological imagination who we are and how we got here and I tried to I want to give you one way of answering that question the very term the sociological imagination was a coined by a professor who was at Columbia University and he died uh not so long ago he died quite young in fact but he's when I was young he was about to die so just to give you a a sense of the historic periods and his name was see right mills a professor at Columbia University and he wrote numbers of books but one book a very famous book is called the sociological imagination and that's what you are assigned to read from and so what I'm going to do right now is speak about in effect the Mills version of sociology it isn't the only one but it's a favorite and has survived for a long long time so what is the sociological imagination it is virtually like any kind of associate sociology the idea that it matters who's around that we can answer the question let's try to be a little bit non sociological as a way of getting started if I ask you why are we here yeah you might say well I had to take something between eleven and twelve fifteen that would be an answer because I work after twelve fifteen and I can't I can't get up early so that's why I'm here that's one kind of way of answering it there are many other ways of answering that question as well which is that I have I performed well once on tests and so therefore I was able to get into NYU my family has a lot of money and they're able to pay for my tuition at NYU I I loved NYU I came here as a child and was just blown away by a school whose colors were violet and eggshell that really was a place that I wanted to go to there are many ways of answering that that question of how we got here and some of those ways fit with the idea of the sociological imagination and how Mills would go about explaining what goes on the number one thing that Mills would say I think is that or maybe it's the number two but a critical thing Mills would say is that we have to look beyond the individual and their own sense of how they got to be where they are in life or in geographical space that you may think that NYU is a groovy school and that's why you are here you chose NYU maybe you'll even add in that NYU chose you and so you're here but much more is going on than that and that we are all buffeted constantly by the forces of history the forces of social class the forces of race the forces of gender all of these kinds of factors and forces are shaping all of our behavior and pretty much all the time I'll try to convince you as the semester goes on and only by understanding how those forces intersect and in sand in this case at the level of a particular individual each of us can you understand and answer a question like why are we here the why are we here is really a question for investigation it answers to be found Mills would say at the intersection of biography and history so each of us is living our lives getting up in the morning we came out of the womb at an earlier point and it's been really one meal after another and one one session of sleep after another as we've gone forward but we haven't gone forward like a little motorboat isolated in the world instead as we've gone forward all of these other forces are shaping buffeting determining altering that course of our existence and only by getting a handle on those forces will we understand where we are and why we are where we are Mills was very oriented toward problems in society he was oriented toward individual problems and you will see that Mills did this writing 5060 years ago and his repertoire problems he speaks of aren't exactly the same problems as we would speak of today but problems for example of of a race of illness of healthcare and its access of economic deprivation of unemployment if you can't get a job one way of thinking about the fact that you can't get a job is that there's something I've done wrong I should have not gone to NYU I certainly should have not majored in sociology I should have gone to Carnegie Mellon and gotten a degree in engineering for example I made the wrong decision and that's why I'm employed or I don't have any real get-up-and-go I don't have skill I don't have talent I can't get up in the morning that's why I'm can't get a job the alternative is to ask what is going on with the national economy these days how did that happen what kinds of political economic global forces created the economy we're in right now how is it that the economy values one kind of job and not another kind of job I love taking care of small children I want to be a daycare teacher even if I get a job as a daycare teacher I won't be able to pay rent or eat attractive mate I won't be able to do any of those things how is it that this kind of a job is paid so little compared to say being a fighter pilot on a jet plane or being a plumber how come plumbers make three or four or five times what a daycare teacher makes is it something about plumbing that's more important than than helping a child develop or just what maybe that's why I can't get a job maybe that's why I can't make a living it's about the structure of the situation and the way these forces have evolved over history such that this is just the way it's going to be it just as a small footnote doctors in countries in which the doctors are primarily women receive lower income than countries in which the doctors are primarily men so maybe it's not something about doctoring that pays well or doesn't pay well but it's something about the surrounding society and the way it's emerged over history that determines whether something is going to be good or not going to be good individual troubles which I've given you a few examples of our public issues and that's a very important another idea from see right mills people who tend to go around seeing their life as a series of private troubles are missing the boat they should be seeing the relationship between their private troubles and public issues that's I think the second leg of the mills argument and you see when they do that when they see that we'll wait a minute I love children I'm devoting myself to that children are important in society well wait a minute that should be paid well or wait a minute I'm not getting this job because I'm a woman or I'm not getting this job because I'm Hispanic there's something wrong with that that Len leads to once you see there's something wrong with that taking political action the solution is not to enroll in Kaplan or go to church or synagogue the answer is in political and kind and collective moral action I have to join up and this is the political action it isn't just that I now go vote for President Obama as opposed to President Bush it's that I find other people who are similarly situated to me a men who want to do childcare a african-americans who want to be President of the United States whatever it might be I have to link up with people who are in a way in the same predicament I am caused by the same forces of history and culture and politics and all the rest of it and we have to become agents for change we have to organize we have to be together workers of the world unite you have nothing to lose but your chains as Mark said or a gaze of the world unite you have nothing to lose but your stigma women of the world unite you have nothing to lose but your indignity and your poverty and whatever else it might be so now you see a series of things that are interlinked which is that and some other punch lines that you get from see right mills and that is that the sociologist if they're following the sociological imagination full force is engaged and it is something that not only does the sociologist have the sociological imagination with these multiple steps that I've outlined but everyone should its about citizenship it's about living a dignified life you've heard the phrase the unexamined life is not worth living this is the non sociological examined life is I don't know if Mills would go so far as to say it's not worth living but it would be something like is a much better life and will create a better world and not just for some highfalutin moral reason of a better world but it will create a better life for me if I can get the whole thing organized in a way that is more fulfilling more Liberatore more more more equal in its opportunity structures everyone will be better off so this then the sociological imagination is a call for political action and it means that when you have the sociological imagination whether you're a professional sociologist like I am or you're a citizen who is a plumber or a childcare worker or a physician whatever that might be that you are engaged in the world you are not just trying to understand the world you're trying to change the world and your efforts to understand the world are so that you can change it you have to be very careful you have to be very thorough you have to be very systematic because you want to try to learn well what it what are the wages for example of a childcare worker what happens when we can't attract the right people to that job what kind of suffering the people experience both the children and the adults because of it how does that work that that it requires systematic scholarship we're not born with that knowledge it's not intuitive so you have to carry out the craft of engaging in systematic observation systematic data collection surveys sometimes like I did when we started this class to find out what year you were you were all in you of course we do it in much more systematic and careful ways we worry about sampling and we have statistical techniques and we we have a lot of fancy stuff we do but the goal is to then break through and create the kind of knowledge that is needed to generate change so that is that is the see right Mills image of what sociology is or what sociology should be and what and what citizenship should be it's a very grand vision isn't it because it includes history and politics and personal troubles and anxieties and and worries and everyone sociology is too important to be left to the sociologists it is everyone's job and especially in a democratic society where presumably the power to act is distributed on a massive basis I should tell you that see right Mills wasn't exactly the most important sociologist who ever lived while he was alive and he had critics and indeed it's probably safe to say that a majority of the professional sociologists in the world really do not follow in the sea right Mills a path they get to get some of it and they think it's kind of cool this history and biography and all of that that that resonates with them but the idea that sociology should have this built-in moral and political role in in the world that excuse me that's a little more controversial and not everybody is on board with that and we're going to be reading you'll be reading from a a dead German named uh uh here up but is his first name is mocks and his I really muck this up ah that's a w w ee ber mocks weber uh it looks like there's a barbecue bit grill called the Weber and for some reason we we really pronounce this correctly so people will laugh at you if you say Max Weber it's German and we call in Max Weber and we're going to be reading Max Weber to get the alternative perspective and some of you will want to read before we meet next time and pick up on your Max Weber and I'm going to be talking about him next time now what I want to do though is push on this sociological imagination a little bit more but in a concrete way to get back to this topic of the one I raised when we began the class the topic of why are we here how did we get here and how can we explain that well one Avenue to explain that is one of the readings that that you have and it's from it's actually it's a it's a book review from The New Yorker written by a staff writer of The New Yorker who has now written many very very popular books his name is mount Malcolm Gladwell he's very very much live and Malcolm Gladwell typically rounds up social science and popularizes it in part because he's a very beautiful writer and so I'm sparing you the 700 page book that Malcolm Gladwell is writing about a book called the chosen by sociologists at Berkeley named Jerome Caravelle and instead just giving you Malcolm Gladwell's review of it in The New Yorker and what what we learn actually what we learn from caravels book and what we learn as Gladwell tells it is how people actually get in to the schools that many of you did not get in so one way one small twist to the explaining why are you here is why are you not at Harvard Yale or Princeton and I won't ask for a show of hands of how many of you were turned down by Harvard Yale and Princeton but a number of you were just like a good large number of you turned down a Stony Brook and Cornell and maybe the University of Chicago and a pan or Penn State or I don't know what your list is of the schools that you got into but you chose not to go to there is a hierarchy and who gets to be in this privileged group a caravel could have done a study that just examined NYU the University of Chicago Johns Hopkins University's that it's more a Boston University that it's more parallel to but he took on the kind of kings of the mountain Harvard Yale and Princeton which are the most selective almost Brown is up there of selective universities in the United States and he tells some interesting stories and I think you'll enjoy when you have the opportunity opportunity to read about it Harvard Yale and Princeton functioned essentially as finishing schools for the rich in the 18th and 19th centuries and well into the 20th century and so if you were from a good family and your family had money and breeding and didn't have funny accents then and of course we're white goes without saying then you basically had a not just a shot but if you were in the right social category then that was the school that you went to you went to one of those schools or some school like it and there were family traditions of going to Harvard Yale or Princeton or maybe Brown or maybe one of the others Ivy League's and that's where you and that's where you ended up the problem in the twentieth century after the great migrations from Europe is that those great migration from Europe included Jews and Jews intended to do very well in school and so they accomplished a whole lot in the public high schools which they went to and they scored very well on the entrance tests to the degree which they had entrance tests which in many many years before they never had entrance tests because it was just a the entrance test was birth and mode a family that you're from but the problem was when they started to test people or take into account merit the Jews did too well and twenty percent of the entering class at Harvard became Jewish somewhere in the 1930s and this created a crisis for Harvard because it didn't want to be Jew U and it the idea was was that it wouldn't be Harvard anymore because Harvard is many of many things besides the offering of classes people learning that's the stuff you see in the catalog when you open the catalog of Harvard just as you open the catalog of NYU or the University of Michigan or whatever it'll say something about transferring knowledge to the young fulfilling the culture and transferring the culture from one generation to the next join us in this exciting undertaking of learning and and you build a better democracy there's all variations on the theme but my god we don't want Jews doing that kind of thing here with us we all know why they're swarthy they're short they eat with their hands they're loud they're money-grubbing have I offended you yet we certainly don't want no Jews like that the occasional a Rothschild might be all right but we don't want these Jews piling in that redefines what we are and we are for Harvard men and of course it is a it is I failed to mention the great gender issue they took Jews before they took woman women women are yet to come so Harvard had to do something about it and now we're talking about not just Harvard but the other Ivy's had to do something about it as well little did they know that in the in the wings were Asians and Hispanics and blacks and other people of suspect ethnicity who might redefine what the place is and so they used various techniques one of them was geography and geographic distribution so Harvard came up with the idea that it is important for students to learn from each other and to do that we need to have geographic distribution we can't have everybody here come from the Bronx we've got to have people from Montana for example and that look like Marlboro men you've seen what they look like and they'd be good to have here do we have anybody from Montana no we don't we don't what do you know how that happened so they decided that they would have regional quotas so they're not discriminating against Jews that what they are doing is instead a positive thing of generating a diverse student body since there are or were virtually no Jews in Montana if you have a quoted from Montana or from the Mountain West then by then empirically you're going to generate a large number of non Jewish applicants they'll also be non black and non Hispanic and so forth and so on and so therefore that's what Harvard did but it didn't work there first of all there were objections and you were getting the wrong kind of people into into Harvard through that technique and so they looked for other ways of doing it geography loomed large and these geographic distribution requirements the other thing that happened as we learn from the review by Gladwell is they decided that character was important the essence of Harvard and of what it's doing for the world is taking people who have good quality character and training them for leadership so that our country and to some degree our world but our country can be a better place and it will have better leaders and so therefore we've got to get to the character issue well what creates character in our young men and how do we recognize it well one way we recognize it is by sports because on the playing fields of America are the great tests of human character and that for those of you who are not Americans you'll know that this is a distinctive quality still of American universities that sports even counts that sports matters that there are sports that there are uniforms that there are pep rallies and floats and all of that stuff that is bizarre in a European context for example the London School of Economics is not a football power so so this is odd but in part it comes about through this idea that what you're doing in higher education is you are creating character and therefore you've got to find out who has the stuff the right stuff and sports it becomes episode on its face an indicator of character but there are other things like leadership experience what were you president of of what groups did you form and what your references say about you and you need to be interviewed and by an alum to see if you have what it takes if you are a Princeton man do you have the stuff of a Princeton man well what all of these things do contributions extracurricular activities letters of reference leadership qualities interviews a sports stuff all this does what all this does is it it keeps let's just get to the quick it keeps the Jews out and because it provides a mechanism through which things other than merit can actually count and can count to a degree that is unaccountable they assign points it's true for one kind of quality as opposed to another but how you decide that someone has character how you decide they have leadership leadership capabilities how you decide that this kind of extracurricular activity should count more than that kind of extracurricular activity all of that is very subjective and in that subjectivity is the mechanism of changing the outcome of who actually is going to get in and who is not going to get in and so it came to be they even to this day and I should add that all of these universities over the years cleaned up their act they no longer discriminate as far as I know against for example Jews they don't as far as I know discriminate against blacks or Hispanics or Arab Americans or any other group so far as I know they are certainly diverse compared to how they were and they make a big thing out of their diversity as you all know because you're connected into higher education and the issues of who gets in and who doesn't get in but they're all there in some way shape or form and some of you succeeded because of them you did take extra curricular activities seriously you did get advanced training in by enrolling in colleges or junior colleges to be ahead of the game you did get coaching of course some of you at least as you were going through school on how to make a better impact and be more impressive and of course you also learned excuse me you learned how to how to indeed take tests and how to succeed and how to have the right study habits and all of that sort of thing that went into your getting into one school as opposed to another school all of those things then now enter into who gets into Harvard who gets into Yale and who gets into NYU and these are then our our our forces some of the forces that are that are at work I haven't brought up the more clear cases of legacies and at certain times in history at say Princeton legacies and athletes together make up a majority of the student body at Princeton where I have friends who teach one of whom is indeed Mitchell denier uh they actually have a word for admitting students who are being admit on academic criteria in other words that that is a that is a that is a segment of a class that they actually acknowledge because so many other segments of the entering class are entering as legacies as the children of large donors or of athletes because the Ivy League is an athletic league and they must field all the sports and so they need a term for increasing what they call the academic admits whereas here NYU I'm happy to say we don't have that we certainly don't have that term and I think it's because the faculty assumes that the entering class is overwhelmingly made up of academic admits and that's a degree of meritocracy as we call it that certainly was not true in the Ivy League at an earlier time and by the way one of the prideful things about NYU is that NYU compared to other private universities in the American life and an American East Coast did not discriminate very much if they did at all against minorities um and had what we would today call a diverse student body in ways that other places didn't including by social class they somehow managed to do that even though they have always been tuition driven to a degree that public universities are not they'd somehow managed to to bring that off the power of income is very strong in American higher education I don't want to embarrass you but we could do another survey by my asking how many of you come from families where the family income was over $100,000 a year that puts you way way above the norm in American life and I would get the vast majority of hands that would go up I stopped doing it because of my fear of embarrassment but when I taught at public universities which which I have in the past the same is true so in the U in the California system a public university a public educational system the family incomes on the average these are numbers that are from my memory but the public the average of incomes from parents of children who go to the University of California are approximately double those who go to the state college system it's a three tier system in California the University of California the state colleges which are called things like Fresno State and Los Angeles State and then the community colleges it haves again so there's a clear class hierarchy and that getting into the University of California a public university supported by not so well anymore the state budget which means all taxpayers from all walks of life all income classes the University of California is actually a subsidy system through which the upper middle class can transfer their status from one generation to the next that's putting it in the most critical light of course there are exceptions to that massively in the case of the University of California in which people come from working-class homes and that's true we bet to some non-trivial extent here at NYU as well but the point is is that sociologists are always looking for things that partly explain outcomes if we can partly explain an outcome we get very very happy if we can explain an outcome a difference across states across different settings different historic times we get really excited and the fact that and this outcome that the more prestigious the University the educational institution the higher the income of the families that are sending their kids to that school that is what we call a robust finding because it tends to hold across time and from one state to the next so we know we're dealing with something that's real one of the other ways of deciding who should get in and how you should decide it is by what succeeds who succeeds so we could take a look at a Harvard could or any way you could and see what kinds of success our students have and in a way backfill choose students like the ones who do succeed compared to the ones who don't succeed and so you don't even have to have figure out why there's something an old psychological test book called the raw carrot and cook carrot if I asked you who would you like cook carrots better or raw carrots better and I later find out that people who chose raw carrots did better in life made more income for example then we should just make that a criteria for admission into NYU the people who do the who choose raw carrots they'll do better we don't even have to know why and that's a pretty dumb way of doing things but you but some testing is based on things like that where you don't even know why but it it it could it's predictive and so let's go with that well if we do that one of the great problems is what a success mean let's admit students who will make more money that would be a criteria you that's an obvious one well what about we should admit people who live lives that are happier maybe that's who we should admit or maybe it's we should choose people who we can predict will be more generous toward other human beings maybe that's who we should admit maybe it should be people who vote more intelligently and when they participate in public life they know more of what's going on after all our democracy requires that that's who we should admit and give the privilege of an NYU education what I'm trying to get at here is that who should what success means is itself another variable as we like to say in sociology that's another choice to be made that like you should be from Montana to balance out the people who are from the Bronx it's another choice that has to be made that then structures what is going to be the result and how it's all going to how it's all going to work I want to now talk about what makes somebody smart because probably in this room there's one little bit of consensus and that is is that higher education and universities like NYU should be the place of smart people and we should admit smart people and the tests and all of that are heavily oriented of course toward deciding who's smart and who's not so smart one way of measuring that is IQ and probably everybody in this room raise your hand if you have taken an IQ test raise your hand if you have not taken an IQ test Wow okay the world has changed as I was coming up I would be examined regularly for my IQ and that is how intelligent I am everybody was measured in terms of their IQ which was supposed to get at that raw smartness that some people have much more than other people there is a wonderful phenomenon that has been worked out by actually a New Zealander a scholar in New Zealand who is his name I'm going to give you in a second it's an easy name he's still alive by the way and his name is Jim Flynn and he's famous for something called the Flynn effect and I'm going to tell you what the Flynn effect is it's that in he studied the IQ scores of all the people in the world where IQ tests are given and across history i q-- tests have been given for about a hundred years in the United States and and Europe and what he found out was that they keep going up they go up to such an incredible degree that someone who who scored average in when they first started to be giving them in the 1920s and 1930s would be regarded as a today so it implies that the population has gotten much smarter in the United States and they've also got much smarter in France and in Germany and in the Netherlands wherever and in India wherever this test has been given so that means that can't be measuring something like intrinsic intelligence because there could be no genetic change in such a short period of time that could account for these wild and wide differences and that then means that performance on something even like an IQ test which is deliberately arranged to get at that core quality that supposedly exists of smartness of intelligence that it can't be doing that and it's somehow a fraud it's somehow wrong and if something that has been engineered to go at the raw intelligence can get it then what good are things like interviews or these other kinds of criteria that you are all subject to that I was subject to that are still being the mechanisms through which entering classes at universities of the world are organized smartness is not all it's cracked up to be at least by these measurements how can we I'm going to tell you a little bit about a study done by one of my PhD students years ago her name was Judy and L unfortunately she died at a very young age Judy handle and she studied children learning in school at a local elementary school upper middle class little school and what what she saw were things like this that the teacher would hold up an object and the object would look more or less like like the object I'm going to hold up right now to you except I'm not able to do it very very well at all but it's a oh it's something like it's something like like that can you can you see it something like that anyway I did it in on in a paper but I can simplify it and go like that a triangle and the teacher holds it up to the children and they're about 3rd 4th grade and and asks what it is and the little children raise their hands and call out things and they say things like it's it's a sale it's a piece of a puzzle it's a piece of paper all of these answers and finally a child says it's a triangle and the teacher gets very excited this is a nice school so the teacher when the child says it's a set l or the teacher says it's a P or the child says it's a piece of paper the teacher goes oh it's very interesting that's very interesting and then a child says triangle and boom the teacher loses it because that's right and the reason why it's right is because this is fourth grade and we're starting our geometric concepts which is what they do in fourth grade and so this becomes a triangle if it was art class then they don't do geometric concepts and and a sail would be an imaginative child who has artistic qualities but a child who says sail when it's the beginning of geometric principles and they don't know that the children except some children do they get it that this is fourth grade and this is going to be the introduction of geometric concepts now they don't think of it like that but maybe their parents have been holding up things like the blocks and saying you know Jimmy pass me that triangle and the child grabs the wrong thing it eventually gets the right thing sometimes people have referred to the hidden curriculum of the middle-class home as something that trains people for knowing not just what's the difference between a triangle and a square but much more important what's the social context here such that the answer for Miss Jones in the fourth grade is triangle whereas for mr. Smith in our class it's not triangle it's something different where my imagination is being called for being able to as we sometimes say psych out the test psych out the teacher psych out life that I'm sitting in a lecture hall at NYU I I don't wear a big funky hat I don't take off my shirt I don't talk to my neighbors I don't get up and walk to the bathroom and say excuse me excuse me excuse me there's a lot of things we don't do and that is because we we are able to read the context and so this ability to know what is the right answer at the right moment in the right place at the right time is certainly only partially taught in schools it's something that comes from other aspects of life and it becomes another mechanism through which something like an entering freshman class and a university is formed it's both subtle and not-so-subtle what's going on well now I want to look back at what we've done today and at what the lesson was and what what I was trying what I was trying to do it means that a child who does not get into the advanced learning class in high school it may be because they just walk around and say I'm dumb it might be that it's because they didn't know it was a triangle on that occasion it may be because they were unaware of the other ways you need to perform to be an appropriate child such that at each level moving from preschool to school to kindergarten to first grade 12th grade and then on to college this capacity to mobilize the world in effect on your behalf is distributed unevenly as we say some people have it and some people don't a sociologists or have it more and have it less or have it in certain ways compared to other ways but those differences are being organized such that some people are organized in two let's call it privilege and some people are being organized out of let's call it privilege and then there are besides these micro mechanisms like I was bringing up with Judy handles research project and the triangles in the schools besides those subtle details there are these macro force like I am I am a Jew in 1920 and I cannot get into Princeton I am a Jew in Montana if there's one in 1920 and it is easy for me to get into Princeton so there are these forces that are macro forces like bold process of discrimination which get which get institutionalized as we like to say become things like interviews as a requirement for getting in or tests of one kind or another as a requirement to get in or as we like to say often in social science they get naturalized we all take it for granted that that's the way of course you would get into school that's what smart means if you get in geographical distribution it makes sense because then we can all learn from each other whether we come from Idaho or we come from the Bronx these forces become naturalized forces of amazing consequential 'ti of war of peace of gender of sexuality they all become naturalized we take them to be Givens and don't realize that they are human made and can be human changed that they're a result of history and of politics and thus they are subject to alteration if we will engage them at a sociological level and practice the sociological imagination so that's what I hope to do this semester and I hope that you will join me in that enterprise and the TAS is looking at the micro looking at the macro the tour of our course is going to be to start at the micro level and work our way once we get beyond this week from the micro to the macro and end up at very large scale issues so thanks for coming today

Channel: New York University

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Keywords: New York University, NYU, OpenEd, Open Education, Harvey Molotch, Introduction to Sociology

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Length: 53min 44sec (3224 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 21 2010