Sociology

There are numerous explanations for the gender divisions that shape each society, and they fit together well. Historically, the rise of industrial capitalism led to a division between home and work life, creating what Walby calls ‘private’ and ‘public’ patriarchy. More women are entering paid employment, but often in lower paid positions or only in certain fields. Meanwhile, politics can be seen as a very exclusive, male domain, with its long working hours that conflict with some women’s childcare responsibilities. 160-164

Like all feminists, Marxist feminists study the differences and divisions between men and women in society. However, this perspective focuses on the relations between patriarchy and capitalism. It is argued that women’s unpaid domestic labour supports the capitalist economy, by providing a home, food, and love that sustains male workers and by producing the next generation. 161

The term ‘mollies’ was used in a derogatory way to refer to men who engaged in homosexual acts with each other in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It suggested that such men were behaving more like women, and carried a heavy stigma. This can be understood as a precursor to (stereotypical) ideas about ‘effeminate’ behaviour in gay people today. 172

From the late nineteenth century onwards, industrial production grew, and some of the most wealthy industrialists began to acquire so much capital, property and financial assets that they eventually became absorbed into the upper class. However, they did not share the aristocratic status distinction of the original working class, for they were really a capitalist class with propertied interests in land, industry, commerce and finance. 797

By the late nineteenth century, some nation states had expanded so far overseas that they became empires with imperialist powers: the European sates, United States of America, and Japan. These empires became political and economic rivals, and because industrialization had provided them with improved transport, sophisticated technologies and more efficient means of administration, they had a capacity for war. 633

It is argued that there has been a recent process of dealignment, whereby political parties are no longer simply related to particular social classes; politics has become much more about debating issues and concerns that cut across traditional class divisions. Voters act as consumers, choosing rationally and pragmatically between parties on the basis of the causes they promise to address, and these may reflect personal, cultural and environmental issues as much as economic ones. In Habermas’s view, these issues represent the socio-cultural ‘lifeworld’ of particular groups, which are promoted by social movements either ‘defensively’ or ‘offensively’. 838-851

Weber said that social action could be understood in terms of ‘ideal types’. These were analytical tools that help us to identify the key features of phenomena, although they were of course value-relevant rather than objective. Ideal typical forms were abstractions that did not occur in reality, but it was possible to find variations of them in the social world. As an example of this, Weber identified four ideal types of social action: instrumentally-rational, value-rational, traditional, and affectual action. The latter was defined as action that directly expresses an emotion, without reference to goals or values. 40-41

Many changes occurred in the 1960s that created greater gender equality in the private sphere. Legal changes made divorce easier to obtain, giving women the freedom to leave unhappy marriages, while the introduction of the oral contraceptive pill allowed women to choose when, and indeed whether, to have children. It was not until the 1980s that the celebration of sexual freedom gave way to concerns about HIV and AIDS. 179-185

One approach to understanding social identity comes from role-learning theory. This centres on the idea that through socialization, we learn the appropriate actions and meanings associated with particular social roles, and reproduce them through our own behaviour. This helps people to interact on the basis of shared expectations and norms. Social roles are institutionalized social relationships, which are often regarded as fixed and inevitable, but this is because we internalize roles and feel morally obliged to conform to them. 125-127

A key debate is whether or not sociology should be regarded as a science. This depends to some extent on how we define scientific work. An idealized view of science refers to the discovery and collection of facts, through the experimental method. This involves identifying certain ‘variables’ and studying the causal effects of one upon the other (e.g. poverty and crime rates). 15-16