Rules of Sociological Method.

I. Introduction:
     Durkheim: Brief bio:

•   Lived from 1858 - 1917.
•   Considered one of the founding fathers of sociology.
•  He wrote The Division of Labor in 1893 as his dissertation, Suicide in 1897, and the Elementary forms of  Religious Life  in 1912.

    The Rules were written in 1895, and represent Durkheim’s hope to develop a systematic sociology.  Substantively, Durkheim was interested in that which held society together, and was writing in response to two types of arguments he disagreed with.  In his conceptualization of a social fact, he is arguing against social contract theorists, such as Hobbes and Rousseau, who saw all of life in contractual terms.  On their view, individuals were constrained by society, but deliberately so: people designed the constraints to guide society through the repression of individual will with a strong state.  Social contract theorists posit an initial agreement among people that binds society together.  Thus social life springs from individual choices.  In his work on social facts, Durkheim is also arguing against thinkers like Spencer who see society in functional terms (more on just what that is below): such that the social end was the cause of an event.

II.  What is a social Fact
    Examples:

• Duties, Oaths, Habits, customs, norms, rules for relations.
• Can be identified with means or rates
• In general they are 'ways of acting, thinking, and feeling existing outside the individual.'  The key elements are that they constrain (or can constrain) individuals who go against them.  The type of sanction is usually social: stigmatization, etc. but can be material (prison, fines, etc.) depending on the formality of the rule in question.

Definitions:

"[social facts] consist of manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him.”" [ p. 142].

“A social fact is identifiable through the power of external coercion which it exerts or is capable of exerting upon individuals.” (p.146)

 "A social fact is every way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations." (p. 147).

    Durkheim defined two types of social facts:

• Constraints coming from social organization:(Legal, and moral constraints)
• (A sub-type of social constraints might be demographic: group heterogeneity, inequality, etc.  That constrain who people can meet thus how they behave.  (See See Blau 1977; Blau 1994)

• "Social Currents": Moments of enthusiasm crowd behavior, etc.  These consist of riots, thug activity at sporting events (see Buford, (1991) for a good example), mass hysteria (was the Y2K event a ‘social fact’?), the feeling of spirit in a call-and-answer preaching church, etc.

Why are the characteristics of 'social facts' ?

• They are external to the individual
• They constrain the individual.
• They are general throughout the social unit.

In what way are social facts 'external to the individual

• They are immutable to changes by any one (or often a few) individuals.
• We don't choose the types of 'social facts' we get to live under
• They differ form physical fact in that while slow to change, they DO change.  They are not necessary across all of time and space.

In what way do they constrain and individual?

•  Normative pressure if broken (everyone knows you don’t pick your nose in public, or talk to   strangers in an elevator).
•  Legal:  Societies develop formal rules that correspond to them
•  Linguistic and cultural: Habits, turns of phrase, aphorisms, expressions of  the common culture
•  Physical: Opportunity for interaction.

How are they ‘general’?

• This is a little less clear.  They need not be uniform – not everyone conforms to a rule after all, but they must be fairly wide-spread, and the persistence can’t depend on a few people acting in concert.  We as a class can’t decide to change the set of social facts on the campus.
• Most importantly, they cannot be defined only through universality. If everybody does something, but each for individual reasons, then it is not social.  The classic example is people putting up umbrellas in the rain.  Everyone does it, but it entirely explainable at the individual level.

Because social facts exist external to and above individuals, they are very slow to change.  Socialization and education are key to the transmission of social facts (we  will see  this again in Bourdieu’s conception of Habitus), as the young of a society learn the set of acceptable behaviors (see also, (Elias 1994)

Does this mean that people are puppets of the social system?
What are some of the questions this conception of social life raises?

• Questions about liberty and democracy?
• Questions about human agency?

What types of things are not social facts?

• Individual Actions that have no social consequence
• General behavior that is explainable at the individual level

 III.  Rules for the Explanation of Social Facts.

This section of the reading is a little frustrating because he is writing against other authors (Spencer, Compte, Hobbes, Rousseau, etc.). This means that he will walk through another persons’s argument, then show why it is wrong (or at least argue that it is wrong), leading to a series of negative examples.

1) The causes of a social fact cannot be found in the functions of a social fact.

• Functionalist arguments (of the type E.D. was arguing against) say that something exists because it is needed for the greater whole to survive.  Common loose talk in biology is often this way: We have a heart in order to get oxygen to the cells.  This teleology places the END RESULT as the CAUSE of the prior event, and therefore violates the notion of a one-directional causal sequence.
• Thus he says:

"Therefore when one undertakes to explain a social phenomenon the efficient cause which produces it and the function it fulfils must be investigated separately.” (p.150)

Thus we seek the cause of something in that which precedes it, not in the things that it does.

BUT ---

 “…to explain a fact which is vital, it is not enough to show the cause on which it depends. We must also – at least in most cases – discover the part that it plays in the establishment of that general harmony.” (p.151)

E.D. says that function is important for explaining why a certain social fact survives, but does not explain how it comes into being.  To do that, we must make reference to an earlier social fact. "It is therefore in the nature of society itself that we must seek the explanation of social life." (p. 152).

2) Social facts are not the result of psychological or individual facts.

 “Since their essential characteristics is the power they possess to exert outside pressure on individual consciousnesses, this shows that they do not derive from these consciousnesses and that consequently sociology is not a corollary of psychology.” (p.152)

• Social facts are larger than individuals: they exist above and beyond a given person
• If they depended on people, then we would expect greater consistency of society by race.  That many different types of societies exist within races, and similar societies across race, then it is unlikely that an individual biological/psycholocial function creates society.
• If there is something inside of people that drives social facts, it is entirely unclear what that something could be.
• (He also makes an argument against complete historical determinism, in that past social facts do not necessarily determine future social facts – the world changes in complex ways through interaction with current social activity.)

Two principles for explaining a social fact:

 1) “The determining cause of a social fact must be sought among antecedent social facts and not among the stats of the individual consciousness.” (p.155)

 2) “The function of a social fact ought always to be sought in its relation to some social end.” (p.155)

Where do we look for social facts that could cause other social facts?

· The first origins of all social processes of any importance should be sought in the internal constitution of the social group.  This is what E.D. calls the ‘Social Milieu’

· The social milieu consists of THINGS and PERSONS

· ‘Things’ includes material objects, but also laws, customs etc.

·  However, things contain no volition, no motor, they can’t put something into action (but see Marx on the springs of a given social system).  Thus we have to look toward people’s interaction to find the motor of social facts.

· “The principle task of the sociologist ought to be, therefore, to discover the different aspects of this milieu which can exert some influence on the course of social phenomena.” There are two types:

o The number of social units, the ‘size of society

o the degree of social interaction, what he calls the ‘dynamic density’.

“Dynamic density may be defined … as the function of the number of individuals who are actually having not only commercial but also social relations, i.e. who not only exchange services or compete with one another but also live a common life.”

Example:
    Patterns of relations in high school we discussed in class. The cultural forms of a school will vary depending on the structure of friendships in that school.