SO 4029 Sociology of the City The Social Map

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SO 4029 Sociology of the CityThe Social Map
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Sociological Theory

• Action Society as the aggregate of the
  unintended consequences of individual action
• Structuralism Society as a system of external
  and constraining institutions, rules, norms and
  values (social facts)
• Process Sociology Society as a dialectical
  process whereby individuals collectively produce
  and reproduce society through ongoing
  interaction, enabled and constrained by the
  products of past action
• Cultural Turn/Postmodernism Society as an
  unstable and shifting kaleidoscope of socially
  constructed symbolic and textual meanings
• Question What gives form to our social
  relations, systems and structures?

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Homo Sociologicus and the Privileging of the
External

• Society shapes the individual
• Homo Sociologicus Individual as Tabula Rasa
  (Blank Slate)
• Society shapes Society
• The Durkheimian Rule

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Organising Experience A Little Psychology?

• Phenomenology
• Simmel
• Symbolic Interactionism
• Habitus (Bourdieu)
• Ontological Security (Giddens)
• Normalcy Alarms (Goffman)

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But Definitely NO Biology!

• Anti-biologism as a formative influence
  (Benton, 1984)
• The Spectre of Biological Determinism
• Limits to Constructionism?
• Cultural Universals Cultural Distinctiveness
  (Konner, 1991)

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Social Construction or Co-construction?

• Claude Levi Strauss dialectical relationship
  between brain and society?
• Building an Internal Model of our World -
  Negotiation, Expectation, Predictability,
  Security
• The internal/external dialectic is crucially
  shaped by the limitations and propensities
  imposed by the brains hard wiring.
• The Pleistocene Brain (Maryanski Turner, 1992)

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The Social Map

• Social Classification
• Cognitive Parsimony Routinisation
• Emotion
• Complexity Reduction Reciprocal Constraint
  Reciprocal Reinforcement

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The Social Map

• Socialisation and the Self Concept
• Social Order
• The Problem of Conflict and Change

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The Social Map
?
Me
I Consciousness - the executive in working
memory that organises experience and action in
the here and now. Me Self Identity the
accumulated, socially constructed values,
opinions, beliefs and attributes that have shaped
the (multiple and overlapping) self concept. N
Noumena Things as they exist in themselves. P
Phenomena Things as they appear to us, through
sensory experience, the socially categorised and
classified world as are aware of it.
N
P
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Micro Relations

• Consensus In Group Bias (Tajfel)
• The Other
• The Janus Self The Limits of Homogeneity
• Multiple/Overlapping Identities and Keying

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Macro Relations

• Crystallisation
• Power Cultural Contestation
• Ideology, Resistance,
• Dependency and Inertia

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The Social Map the Urban Environment

• Social Environmental Complexity

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The Social Map the Urban Environment

• Social Organisation
• Anonymity/Estrangement
• Community
• Social Polarisation, Ethnic Class Divisions
• Functional Organisation
• Bureaucracy Specialisation
• Differentiation

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The Social Map the Urban Environment

• Social Interaction Social Control
• Reciprocal Constraint Reciprocal Reinforcement
• Civil Inattention
• The Civilising Process
• Regimentation
• Mass Media
• Authority Surveillance

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The Social Map the Urban Environment

• Social and Environmental Rationalisation
• The Janus Self
• Flaneury Consumer Culture