1. Write examples of each of the following filling no more than one page and be prepared to hand this in at the end of class:
   1. Values, norms, roles (think about how they are different and how they relate to each other
   2. Division of labor, socialization, social control
   3. Give some examples of social control and for each tell
      1. Who initiates the social control
      2. Whether the social control efforts in your example are always successful
      3. What determines whether social control is effective?

Sociology is a discipline and we want to understand how it relates to other disciplines in an intellectual map of the university and how it differs from majors that are not discipline based.

1. Disciplines are responsible for different topics within the intellectual universe or the division of intellectual labor in a university.
   1. Members of a discipline relate to certain writers or researchers who were founding or "seminal" authors who defined the field or produced its first important works.
   2. Even if different disciplines relate to similar subject matter, they tend to draw on different seminal writers and this gives them a different approach or orientation to the same topics of study.
      
   3. To understand differences between disciplines it is important to learn something about their histories and how they came into existence.
      4. Sociology was first named and conceived by social activists during the first half-century of the industrial revolution who
      a. Recognized that the same kinds of scientific principles, rules, and insights (like careful measurement and statistical analysis) that led to technical and scientific revolutions in the "hard sciences" like chemistry and physics could be used to study and understand society.
      b. Believed that a scientific approach to society would help to counter religious and aristocratic beliefs that tended to justify social oppression and inequality.
      c. Thus the people who developed and argued for the importance of sociology were social activists and revolutionaries like Karl Marx and utopian thinkers who created experimental communities like the Oneida or Amana Colonies.
2. Sociology is the study of social life; that makes the field extremely broad and it also means that there is overlap with many other disciplines.
1. The closest overlaps come with the other social science disciplines: anthropology (which which sociology shares a department), psychology, political science, economics, management, and education.
   1. Management and education are not discipline-based fields in the way that the others are since their professors and courses cover relevant topics from many different disciplines.
   2. We emphasize disciplinary breadth in our curriculum with the distribution requirements that have you take two social sciences, four humanities, and three sciences.
   3. We emphasize disciplinary depth as a way for students to understand the distinctive point of view and way of thinking of one discipline.
2. Because of their different histories, traditions, and foci of study disciplines tend to have very different ways of thinking about measurement, what represents a quality piece of research or writing, and what are the proper goals of research and study.
   1. This is a reason that even though disciplines may overlap in their subject matter they usually bring a very different approach to discussing and studying a topic.
   2. Sociology overlaps closely with psychology, for example.
      1. Psychology is the systematic study of the individual in terms of their emotions, development, patterns of thinking, and social relationships
      2. Sociology also includes as an important area of study how people develop a sense of self, how identity emerges, and how small group social relationships function.
      3. While some people in the two fields have very similar approaches and ways of studying the world (Prof. Bill Flack in psychology and I work together and have overlapping training and interests) the two disciplines tend to have sharply different approaches and philosophies.
         1. Psychology as a field identifies much more with "hard" sciences like biology and chemistry than does sociology.
         2. This carries over into an emphasis on precise measurement and experimental testing of causal relationships in psychology.
         3. Traditionally, psychology resisted studying those aspects of individual behavior that could not be directly observed or precisely measured.
         4. This would leave out things like the sense of self, the meanings individuals ascribe to events, and how their values relate to behaviors.
         5. These topics tend to be the things that sociologists study and research and they involve an inherently more evaluative, subjective, and perhaps biased approach to doing research than the "objective science" approach favored by psychology.
         6. Remember that while we may offer general contrasts between disciplines, no generalization applies to every sociologist or every psychologist.
3. It is important to realize that we overlap with disciplines outside of the social sciences as well as with those inside.
   1. For example, history is one of the humanities but a great deal of important sociological work is historical and increasingly historians are using sociological methods like the analysis of surveys to do their work.
   2. We also overlap in important ways with hard sciences. SOCI `130, Medicine and Society, for example, explores the social aspects of disease which most people think of as having to do only with biology. We teach a course on AIDS that is co-taught by sociologists, biologists, chemists, historians, and anthropologists because there are these overlaps.