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Introduction to Social Analysis

Semester 2 Week 1,

Urbanism and Functionalism

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An approach to theory• We will examine theory and methods not as

abstract topics in themselves but as practical tools for understanding the social world.

• We will focus on the questions sociologist ask and ways they have endeavoured to answer them. We will examine key ideas and their use in models of empirical sociological research.

• You should endeavour to make links between this section and the founding fathers and sociological issues covered in Semester 1.

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Course Outline

• For each lecture there is:– a reading in the course pack. The selected reading is designed

as an introduction to the concepts and ideas used in the lecture.– A set of studies which are used in the lecture to illustrate the way

that sociologists doing empirical studies have used the concepts and theories discussed.

• Tutorials are to help you understand the ideas.• The essay is intended to improve your skills.

– Write a book review. Use the knowledge you have gained about sociological concepts and ideas to take a critical look at a particular study. You have to work at identifying the ideas and approached used in that book, and evaluate the study.

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Why theory

• “Nothing so useful as a good theory”

• I will teach theory as a practical resource for making sense of society not simply a history of ideas, or ideas for their own sake.

• In the lectures I will try to make explicit the assumptions about society that motivate and guide the studies under consideration.

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• King Oliver 1923 and Riverside Blues

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_WbQYdQty0&feature=rec-HM-rev-rn

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What is distinctive about urban life?

• Sociology from its inception has been motivated by historical concerns about loss of community and disorganisation engendered by poverty, migration and urban conditions.

• Why is community life in a city so problematic? But to do something about it required information and understanding i.e. theory and data. How can we study urban life? How can we find out how cities work?

• London’s East End and Chicago as historical exemplars.

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Fritz Lang Metropolis

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Hogarth – Gin Lane 1751

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Chicago school• The first ever department of Sociology was set up in the University

of Chicago in 1892.• Park, a former journalist founded the so-called Chicago school of

urban sociology. Their detailed studies of urban social processes in the late 1920s and 1930s have, justifiably become famous as models of diligent empirical research.

• Sociologists at the University of Chicago studied issues of urban life and set about a systematic programme to understand the diversity of ways of life in their city.

• Park looked at the morphology of cities and documented distinctive residential patterns. He proposed research into neighbourhoods - how could the immigrant and floating populations be re-assembled as communities.

• He asked questions about industrial organisation and ‘the moral order’. Did those in different jobs hold divergent values and attitudes?

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Park and Burgess The City

Cities develop in distinctive waysCapitalist city based on property markets and free labour contrast to the feudal city and the Imperial City.

Studies of Morphology of cities based on mappingConcentric rings: the business area in the centre, the slum area (called the zone in transition) around the central area, the zone of workingmen’s homes farther out, the residential area beyond this zone and then the commuter zone of the periphery.

Social and economic differentiationAlso the concept of succession used to described the fact these concentric built up one after the other historically as the city groups and are also invaded successively from the inside. “The zone of transition” c.f. “the inner city”

Idea of ecologySociety compared to a biological system

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Distribution of homes of Cook County accused felons.

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Studies:

• H.W. Zorbaugh The Gold Coast and the Slum 309.73 ZOR *

• Study of two contrasting zones next to each other.

• How the study was done

• Characteristics of each zone 

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Reading:

• Louis Wirth "Urbanism as a way of life" in American Journal of Sociology 1938, vol.44 No. 1, pages 1-24. Also reprinted in R. Sennett 1969 Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities. pages 143-179 301.364 Sen

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Wirth’s Methodology.

• Deductive

• Starts from general characteristics and works out the logical consequences.

• Not empirical. However it is suggestive of what should be observed and documented.

• This the Chicago School went on to do.

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Wirth’s starting point

A number of sociological propositions concerning the relationship between

• (a) size of population,

• (b) density of settlement,

• (c) heterogeneity of inhabitants

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1.Size of the city’s population

Larger numbers involve greater diversity and differentiation.

‘The personal traits, the occupations, the cultural life, and the ideas of the members of an urban community may, therefore, be expected to range between more widely separated poles than those of rural inhabitants.’

The variations give rise to the spatial segregation - color, ethnic heritage, economic and social status, tastes and preferences.

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1.Size of the city’s population (cont.)

“The bonds of kinship, of neighborliness, and the sentiments arising out of living together for generations under a common folk tradition are likely to be absent or, at best, relatively weak in an aggregate the members of which have such diverse origins and backgrounds.”

Under such circumstances “competition and formal control mechanisms furnish the substitutes for the bonds of solidarity that are relied upon to hold a folk society together”

The pecuniary nexus which implies the purchasability of services and things has displaced personal relations as the basis of association.

When individuals cannot know one another intimately and cannot be assembled in one spot, it becomes necessary to communicate through indirect media and to articulate individual interests by a process of delegation.

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1.Size of the city’s population (cont.)

[in the] enlarged market, which in turn accentuates the division of labor - characteristically, urbanities meet one another in highly segmental roles… The contacts of the city may indeed be face to face, but they are nevertheless impersonal, superficial, transitory, and segmental.

The multiplication of persons in a state of interaction under conditions which make their contact as full personalities impossible

Individuality under these circumstances must be replaced by categories. When large numbers have to make common use of facilities and institutions,

those facilities and institutions must serve the needs of the average person rather than those of particular individuals. The services of the public utilities, of the recreational, educational, and cultural institutions, must be adjusted to mass requirements. Similarly, the cultural institutions, such as the schools, the movies, the radio, and the newspapers, by virtue of their mass clientele, must necessarily operate as levelling influences.

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2. Density

The close living together and working together of individuals who have no sentimental and emotional ties foster a spirit of competition, aggrandizement, and mutual exploitation.

Formal controls are instituted to counteract irresponsibility and potential disorder.

Without rigid adherence to predictable routines a large compact society would scarcely he able to maintain itself. The clock and the traffic signal are symbolic of the basis of our social order in the urban world.

City life requires tight scheduling.

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3.Heterogeneity

The social interaction among such a variety of personality types in the urban milieu tends to break down the rigidity of caste lines and to complicate the class structure; it thus induces a more ramified and differentiated frame work of social stratification than is found in more integrated societies.

The heightened mobility of the individual, which brings him within the range of stimulation by a great number of diverse individuals and subjects him to fluctuating status in the differentiated social groups that compose the social structure of the city, brings him toward the acceptance of instability and insecurity in the world at large as a norm.

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Wirth conclusions

• People in cities behave in different ways than the country

• Instrumental

• Transitory relationships

• Blasé attitutudes

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Urbanism and functionalism

• Why city life was as it was? System and function• City / social life/ like an organism – different

parts play different functions• Geography, transport, industry, commerce• Institutions, class, religion, corporations,

government.• Behaviour as functional, blasé distant

fashionable as a way of coping with multiple transient interactions.

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Michael Young and Peter Willmott 1962 Family and kinship in East London.

• Post war East End – how they did the study.

• Rediscovered community

• Role of housing and redevelopment

• Methods of achieving security in an urban economy

• Omissions – migrants, minorities.

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Functionalism

• What function does an institution perform for the wider society?

• Wilmot and Young’s classic study of Bethnal Green takes an essentially functionalist approach seeing working class families as an adaptation to the insecurities of urban life.

• Not necessarily the obvious or intended purpose.

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Dick Hobbs [et al.] 2003 Bouncers : violence and governance in the night-time economy.

• Redevelopment of Manchester

• Drink, sex and violence

• In whose interests is the city run, the functionality of lawlessness.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRer44Lb77A&feature=related

• http://www.kovideo.net/videos/o/Oasis/Lyla-Live-In-Manchester.html