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Dictionary of Sociology
Book Name The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology
1. Page 83 - community
2. Page 255-257 - groups
Chapter Name
3. Page 548-549 - sexuality
4. Page 517-523 - rights
Page 83: Community
critics say concept of community is of questionable value bec it is so ill defined.
Margaret Stacy: the solution to this problem is to avoid the term altogether (??? lmao). they say that there has never been a
theory of community, nor even a satisfactory definition of what community is.
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Etzioni: Community can actually be defined with precision. It has 2 characteristics:
1. a web of affect-laden relationships among a group of individuals, relationships that often crisscross and reinforce one
another
2. a measure of commitment to a set of shared histories and identities.
critics: those who long for communities ignore the darker side of traditional communities.
Linda McClain: in the new communitarian appeal to tradition, there are communities that bank on mutual aid and memory. bec
of this, there is a problematic inattention to the less attractive and unjust features of tradition.
Amy Gutmann: communitarians want us to live in Salem (a community of strong shared values that went so far that they
accused nonconformist members of doing witchcraft in the 17th century).
communitarians counter critics and say that: behind many criticisms of communities lie an image of old communities which are
unlike modern communities.
old communities were geographically bounded, and mostly 1 member of a comm was only member of that comm and no other
comm.
so, other than escaping, individuals barely had an option when it came to choosing their social attachments.
basically, old communities had monopolistic power over their members
new communities:
limited in scope and reach.
members of 1 community are members of other comms also.
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bec of this, comm members have many sources of attachments (work comm, religious comm, etc.) unlike old comms where
they had only 1 source of attachment.
if 1 comm becomes overwhelming, individuals can just detach from that and go to another comm.
For example, if a person finds herself under high moral pressure at work to contribute to the United Way, to give blood, or to
serve at a soup kitchen for the homeless, and these are lines of action she is not keen to follow, she may end up investing
more of her energy in other communities – her writers’ group, for instance, or her church. This multi-community
membership protects the individual from both
moral oppression and ostracism.
Page 255-257: Groups
social scientists have recognized the distinction between “a group defined by outsiders” which has no social reality for its
members and groups that have social and psychological reality as such, for their members.
Henri Tajfel: 2 distinct theoretical senses of the term ‘group’
1. objective collections of similar individuals
defined by outside observers, that is, objectively defined groupings that may be statistic ally significant to the researcher,
but not subjectively significant for their members (that is, some sociological category, such as single-income families in rural
areas).
2. groups defined as such by their members through patterns of interaction and shared representations, that is, a dynamic
social process in which the capacity of people to represent themselves as members of social categories is part of the
process by which sociological categories may become meaningful social groups.
Cooley: made a distinction between primary groups and secondary groups.
primary groups: aka closed groups.
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defined by close, face-to-face interactions.
they have tight/impermeable boundaries w little interaction w outsiders.
secondary groups: example: political parties, trade unions, etc.
aka open groups.
relative loose boundaries, v less barriers to interactions w outsiders.
sometimes, similar groups are distinguishes on the basi of being closed and upon.
some groups also have relatively fixed membership. for ex- race, ethnicity, gender, etc. (except cases of surgical reassignment
of sex, divorce, etc.)
while some groups have possibility of having flexible group memberships: occupational groups, nationalities, etc.
peer groups:
collections of individuals who define themselves and are recognised by others as a distinct social group.
they dont define themselves but shape themselves through social characteristics such as age, gender, sexuality, etc.
such groups have shared norms, culture, rituals, etc.
existing members of a group can be excluded if they breach these group norms/sanctions etc.
peer groups are examples of face-to-face groups.
pressure groups:
kind of social group characterized by a common purpose - to put pressure on governments and decision-making bodies, to
influence public opinion, etc. in order to support the aims of the group.
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these aims can be either for significant reforms to a current system or in order to maintain the status quo of something.
they are diff from groups like political parties (which are groups that are united by common interests) in that they aim to
influence public opinion rather than to govern and make decisions themselves per se.
🌸 relationship bw pol parties and pressure groups is often symbiotic and sometimes pressure groups are even close to
pol parties. for ex- r/s between trade unions and labour parties.
🌸 sometimes pressure groups themselves can become pol parties.
2 types of pressure groups:
1. protective: united in their aim to protect the existing and affiliated members of that group. (foe ex- trade unions,
professional associations, etc.)
2. promotional: seek to promote a cause rather than to defend a defined group. (for ex- environmental groups, anti-
censorship groups, etc.)
this distinction bw both kinds of groups is not always clear cut tho.
Page 517-523: Rights
entire discipline of sociology is fundamentally concerned w the issue of human rights, but it is to be kept in mind that
sociologists form a minority of those people who formally study the field of human rights.
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central fields of sociology (discrimination, social class, gender, etc.) and generalised problems of modernity together deal w the
issue of human rights.
the current civil society is characterised by their discourse on human rights and sociology is a discipline to it.
classical grounding (basis) for sociology lies in the works of durkheim, marx, weber and simmel. they are all classical theorists.
in their work, discussions of rights was never a central part.
they were all just critical of the ideas of natural law, and this critique is what people knew about human rights the most at
that time.
1. durkheim:
a. concerned about rights of a man and the relationship bw individualism and human rights. but his attempt to form a
positivist science (a scientific study of the social world) distanced him from the idea of rights specifically.
b. he was aware that the theory of french revolution essentially stated that instead of religion, the rights of a man could be
considered as a model for individual identity.
2. bryan turner:
a. he saw rights as important representations of the collective conscience and something we need in order to form social
solidarity.
b. this served as a normative basis for social order and the individual identity in modernity.
3. weber:
a. believed in fundamental human rights, but his work doesnt include specific sociology of human rights.
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b. his focus was on law rather than human rights. he didn't want to derive any position from sociology so his own
sociology was distant from issues which were more clearly stated in others.
c. it could be said that his sociology of human rights sees human rights as a subjectively meaningful form of rationality,
and this rationality guides social action (social action means any action that invokes responses from other individuals or
groups).
d. weber’s perspective on human rights is a lot more pessimistic rather than being utopian. it is a pessimistic view about
the possibilities of human rights in a world that is increasingly rationalised where rationalities only compete for attention.
4. marx:
a. for him the discussion of human rights was the most central.
b. he criticized and rejected the idea of human rights and said it is an ideological legitimation of bourgeois capitalist
society.
c. because he thought that the ruling ideas of an era are the ideas of a ruling class, he thought that the classic ideas of
individual rights like the Lockean idea of right to property are just ideas that legitimise the privileged position of the
bourgeoise in the society.
d. he thought human rights were mainly cosmic revolutions which brought a new ruling class to power that has new
ideas.
one of the most significant contributions of sociological theory, to the study of human rights, is the analytical focus on the
relationship between the individual and the society.
all major classical theorists mentioned above were interested in this issue.
one central point of articulation between sociology and human rights lies in the recognition that human rights represent
individual and collective aspirations for human freedom.
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idea of freedom: seen as something that gives us autonomy, agence, authenticity, etc. because of this, wheever we see human
rights, we see talks about freedom, power, coercion, etc.
Simmel:
negative freedom means the absence of structural barriers to human agency.
positive freedom represents the construction of social-structure that can provide for basic needs and that can alleviate the
condition of human vulnerabilities.
this basically captures the difference between positive rights and negative rights.
positive rights - norms which are prescribed and specify the duties of powerful entities like the state. they are supposed to
provide resource and opportunities for individuals.
they are also supposed to protect them from natural and social forces which make them vulnerable. in the modern welfare
state, this applies more to global human rights project.
negative rights - concerned with specifying the limitations of power of the state over the individuals.
human rights movements are cultural projects which struggle to negative powerful social forms like tyranny, despotism, etc. at
the same time human rights projects also aim to affirm human existence by providing people w food, shelter, etc.
or many theorists of human rights the experience of the French Revolution is a crucial starting point for thinking about how
human rights claims have been made in relation to power.
The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) specifically tied the question of rights to the status of
citizenship.
was notable for specifying what rights should be accorded “the man and citizen,” but one of the most crucial debates was
about who would be able to acquire the status of citizen and as a consequence make valid claims to enjoy the rights and
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freedoms specified in the Declaration.
here, rights were seen as privileges which were tied to the status of a citizenship.
The sociological importance of the French Revolution is that it established general grounds for both the exercise of rights
and exclusion from their enjoyment:
1. rights were now seen as privileges that must be enjoyed by individuals.
2. the recognition that not every individual in the society is in a position to enjoy rights because of xyz reasons.
3. human rights are about the process of making claims to human rights by groups that have suffered.
the french revolution also provided a model for people, who dont have citizenships, to make claim for the status of a citizen and
subsequently be granted rights and protection which a citizen gets.
Queer communities, Criminals, Children, etc. have all, in recent times, made claims on human rights in the form of social
movements.
Discussions of human rights are for the most part normative → meaning that they are essentially relating to a certain
standard/norm of things.
dialectical interplay between agency and structure: cultural representation of human rights, historically, is what emerges in
relation of oppressive social structures. when you are able to realise your agency on things, youre able to defeat the current
structure of things.
pehle pehle theorists of rights relied on the existence of natural law → rights exist across space and time and are universally
valid.
this metaphysical understanding was crucial to people like kant and locke and was also the basis for american and french
revolutions.
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marx also kinda to an extent relied on natural law’s existence where ehe dreamt of building a communist utopia based on the
understanding of historical materialism.
natural law is at odds w the sociological axiom that all the cultures are socially constructed and that nothing is universal tbh.
pov of social constructionism (social constructionism means: things that are seen as only biological factors are actually
products of human definition and shaped by culture and are not just biological) : human rights are only cultural representations
which are projected by and on the society.
It is useful to see the distance between sociology and mainstream work on human rights as a product of the tensions between
philosophical debates over universalism and relativism.
Universalism is the belief that there are human rights, values, norms, and ethics that exist across time and space.
Relativism is the idea that rights, values, norms, and ethics are the product of particular cultures and contingent historical
forces. Sociology is firmly grounded in relativism, as is anthropology. It was in anthropology, however, that a sharp tension
between universalism and relativism emerged in the mid twentieth century, and many of the intellectual lessons learned
from this tension remain relevant to understand- ing sociology’s position in relation to human rights.
the UNDHR specified a range of both individual, social and economic rights that were held to be universal for all individuals.
it was denounced by a lot of people as a form of western imperialism especially because it fails to affirm a “right to culture”
and cultural differences that determine the value of things. sometimes cultures ask you to do things that are against
UNDHR but UNDHR doesnt consider that. i think its bec the west just lacks culture that much.
the solution to the relativist–universalist debate lies in the reconception of the idea of culture as a process, where the focus is
on the empirical details of how human rights and local cultures interact dialectically in specific locations to produce new hybrid
and contingent cultural outcomes. this is an anthropological approach.
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however, they do not solve the problems for human rights posed by relativism more generally. for ex- what if the cultural
practice is something like genocide or female genital mutilation, etc. this is a gross violation of human rights. if it is seem in the
normative discourse as just a normal behaviour, then it is impossible for people to advocate for any form of intervention when it
comes to these things.
contemporary theorists have adopted the idea of a minimal morality in which there is a set of rights which majority of the people
consider that to be something that can be exempt from law because it is a part of culture. this serves as a basic common
position for a global project of human rights advancement.
even such minimal moralities cannot be considered global morality though: like slavery, femicide, etc.
relativism falls apart on logical grounds as well, since the relativist position is itself put forth in the form of a general statement of
value, thereby refuting its own foundational proposition that there can be no such general statements of value. Relativism is a
self-defeating argument.
Functionalist sociology: something that is guided by a form of methodological relativism that would look at any given society in
terms of how its values, ethics, norms, and laws are functional or dysfunctional for the maintenance of social order or the
production of social disorder.
when UNDHR came, functionalism was dominant in the american sociological realm.
Burke: abstract and universal rights produced by french rsdicals during the time of french revolution, when transposed to other
societies, are a direct threat to traditions and values which hold those soceities together. this can also be a critique of the
UNDHR.
in 1960s came the idea of group rights.
was a strong criticism of classical conceptions of human rights.
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Advocates of group rights argued that traditional conceptions of rights, especially those derived from the Natural Law
tradition, were almost completely concerned with the rights of individuals.
In such documents as the UNDHR, the rights specified refer to abstract, idealised individuals who exist outside specific
locations, and historical and group processes.
proponents of individual rights ignore the central sociological fact that individuals exist as members of cultures and groups,
which fundamentally structure and condition individuals’ abilities to claim their human rights. For instance, in the everyday
world, people do not interact with each other based solely on considerations of the individuality of the other person. The
interaction is conditioned by perceptions of the groups, classes, or other categories to which people belong.
“A Sociology of Human Rights”: this work is the starting point for acquiring an extensive understanding of how contemporary
sociological thinking can be made more relevant to human rights. in current times, human rights is at the center of cultural
discourse on global civil society.
turner:
attempts to provide a foundationalist, as opposed to a constructivist, sociology of rights and argues that all human beings
are vulnerable and exist in a relationship to the social and natural world.
this vulnerability is universal. hence, it challenges cultural relativism. (cultural relativism states that there are no universal
grand narratives which are applicable to the mitigation of human rights violations).
he says that our common vulnerability makes us dependent and interdependent on others. a sociological theory of human
rights must focus on this very vulnerability and the ways in which different societies develop institutions.
he developed the ideas of sympathy w cosmopolitanism (the idea that all human beings are a part of a single community)
and these concepts claim that no ethical relationship can exist between two individuals without their prior mutual re-
cognition of each other as free, moral agents. Slavery is the extreme example of the absence of recognition.
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turner’s work provides a grounding for the development of an autonomous sociology of human rights, one which affirms that
a universal aspect of the human condition is vulnerability and which establishes the fact that sociological theory, informed
by the advances in other disciplines, has an important role to play in understanding the origins and consequences of
institutionalized responses to human vulnerability.
Page 548-549: Sexualities
The study of different types of sexual identity has emerged in contemporary sociology, because social constructionism has
argued that the binary division between male and female is too restrictive to capture the great array of human sexual
expression.
The sociology of “sexualities” in the plural recognises the biological differentiation of male and female, but goes on to
emphasize the variety of gender roles that express the complexity of human sexual orientation in society and culture.
This complexity in human sexual expressivity is indicated by the variety of interdisciplinary areas that undertake research on
gender, namely gay studies, gender studies, lesbian studies, and women’s studies. These different areas of study have in
common the notion that the binary division between male and female is an oppressive, hegemonic system of classification that
is based on essentialism and biologism.
It is not just that this rigid binary system is oppressive to women through patriarchy, but that it is also oppressive to men. For
example masculinity is itself not a uniform expression of male identity.
Connell: he hegemonic nature of masculinity and femininity as normalised gender roles that function as an ideology.
Simone de Beauvoir: influenced the emergence of the idea of sexuality as a concept and how it is distinct from sex and gender.
Simone claimed that women are made and not born.
Understanding the complexity of sexuality in human development was further developed by Sigmund Freud.
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Sexuality is now seen to be a dimension of our knowledge about the social world, and hence sexuality is inextricably linked to
the emergence of the self through the acquisition of language.
Judith Butler emphasised the role of language in constructing gender identities.
Butler argues that when, shortly after birth, we exclaim “It’s a girl” we set in place a social process of naming which
allocates and confirms a sexual identity and sexuality that has the effect of “girling”.
these themes of knowledge, language, and power have been embraced by queer theory and postmodernism in gay studies, in
which sexualities are free-floating and forever-changing discourses that frame a variety of positions in social identities.
In sociology, there are classic illustrations of research on homosexuality.
There is also now a journal devoted to the field, namely Sexualities.
Despite these developments in sociological theory, mainstream empirical sociology has some- what neglected the study of
human sexuality.
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