The Changing Nature of the Social World—and Sociology
One of the most important lessons you will learn in your study of sociology is that what you think and do as an individual is affected by what is happening in groups, organizations, cultures, societies, and the world. This is especially true of social changes, even those that are global in scope and seem at first glance to be remote from you, such as Mohamed Bouazizi’s public suicide and the revolution throughout much of the Middle East that it helped set in motion. The roots of that dramatic act of protest lay in poverty, high unemployment, an authoritarian government, and political corruption that affected Bouazizi personally. Before his actions, most Tunisians would never have risked their lives to protest against their country’s repressive regime. Yet Bouazizi and tens of thousands of others in countries across the region did just that. While you may or may not be motivated to engage in revolutionary activities, you are continually affected by the social changes taking place around you.
Will our highways be safer and injury rates lower because of the sensors in self-driving cars like this one? Or will we have more air pollution and therefore more illness because there will be so many self-driving cars on the road? Sociologists assess the so-called butterfly effects of changes like driverless cars.
ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP/Getty Images
A second important lesson in sociology is that you are not only affected by larger events but also capable to some degree of having an impact on large-scale structures and processes. This is an example of the butterfly effect (Lorenz 1995). While this concept is generally applied to physical phenomena, it also applies to social phenomena (Daipha 2012). The idea is that a relatively small change in a specific location can have far-ranging, even global, effects over both time and distance. For example, Bouazizi’s actions helped lead to the Tunisian revolution and, more generally, to street demonstrations and civil war, as well as counterreactions elsewhere in the Arab world that continue to reverberate throughout the region and many other parts of the world. Perhaps the arc of your life and career will be affected by the upheavals that began with the Arab Spring. More important, it is very possible that actions you take in your lifetime will have wide-ranging, perhaps global, effects.
This example of the relationship between people and larger social realities and changes set the stage for the definition of sociology as the systematic study of the ways in which people are affected by and affect the social structures and social processes associated with the groups, organizations, cultures, societies, and world in which they exist.
Sociology deals with contemporary phenomena, as you have seen, but its deep historical roots have led to many longer-term interests. In the fourteenth century, the Muslim scholar Abdel Rahman Ibn Khaldun studied various social relationships, including those between politics and economics. Of special importance to the founding of sociology was the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution. During this industrial age, many early sociologists concentrated on factories, the production that took place in those settings, and those who worked there, especially blue-collar, manual-labor workers. Sociologists also came to focus on the relationship between industry and the rest of society, including, for example, the state and the family.
By the middle of the twentieth century, manufacturing in the United States was in the early stages of a long decline that continues to this day. (However, manufacturing in other parts of the world, most notably in China, is booming.) The United States had moved from the industrial age to the “postindustrial age” (Bell 1973; Leicht and Fitzgerald 2006). In the United States, as well as in the Western world more generally, the center of the economy and the attention of many sociologists shifted from the factory to the office. That is, the focus moved from blue-collar, manual-labor work to white-collar office work (Mills 1951) as well as to the bureaucracies in which many people worked (Clegg and Lounsbury 2009; Weber [1921] 1968). Another change in the postindustrial age was the growth of the service sector of the economy, involving everyone from high-status service providers such as physicians and lawyers to lower-status workers behind the counters of fast-food restaurants and now those who drive for Uber.
The more recent rise of the “information age” (Castells 2010; Kline 2015) can be seen as a part, or an extension, of the postindustrial age. Knowledge and information are critical in today’s world. So, too, are the technologies—computers, smartphones, the world wide web—that have greatly increased the productivity of individual workers and altered the nature of their work. Rather than designers drawing designs by hand, computer-assisted technologies are now used to create designs for everything from electric power grids to patterned fabrics. The widespread use of smartphones has enabled, among many other things, the rise of companies such as Uber and Lyft, the success of which is threatening the rental car industry and especially the taxicab industry and the livelihoods of many taxi drivers (who are also threatened by driverless cars). A passenger uses an app to indicate that he or she needs a ride, and one is provided by an independent car owner for a set fee, which is automatically charged to the passenger’s credit card. Some of the drivers work a few hours a day for these services in search of a little extra money, while others work full-time for the services. Their willingness to do this work has reduced the need for taxicabs and full-time taxi drivers.
More generally, less and less work occurs in the office because the computer and the internet now allow many people to work from anywhere. Many are part of the “gig economy” meaning that they are temporary workers handling a number of short-term jobs (“gigs”) rather than working full-time for an organization.
However, it is not just work that has been affected by new technologies. Uber is part of the growing “sharing economy” (Sundararajan 2016), in which people share (for a fee) many things; most notably, some share their homes through websites such as Airbnb.com (Pogue 2014). One key component of this new technological world, Google, is so powerful that a 2011 book is titled The Googlization of Everything (Vaidhyanathan 2011). Thus, much sociological attention has shifted to computers and the internet, as well as those who work with them (Lynch 2016; Scholz 2013).
The transition from the industrial to the postindustrial and now to the information age has important personal implications. Had you been a man who lived in the industrial age, you would have worked (if you could find a job) for money (pay). You would have done so to be able to buy what you needed and wanted. Women working in the private sphere were largely uncompensated or compensated at a lower rate, as is often still the case. However, in the postindustrial age, it is increasingly likely that men and women will be willing, or forced, to work part time or even for free (Anderson 2009; Dusi 2017; Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010), as in the case of interns, bloggers, and contributors to YouTube and Wikipedia.
You may be willing to perform free labor because you enjoy it and because much of what is important in your life is, in any case, available for free on the internet. There is no need for you to buy newspapers when blogs are free. Similarly, there is no need buy CDs when music is streamed free on various internet sites or inexpensively by Spotify. Why buy or rent DVDs when movies can be downloaded, or viewed, at no cost or inexpensively from the internet (from Netflix, for example)? However, while all of this, and much else, is available for free, the problem is that the essentials of life—food, shelter, clothing—still cost money, lots of money.