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SOC4044 Sociological Theory: William Isaac Thomas

SOC4044 Sociological Theory: William Isaac Thomas. William Isaac Thomas. References Coser, Lewis A. 1977. Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context . 2d ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers.

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SOC4044 Sociological Theory: William Isaac Thomas

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  1. SOC4044 Sociological Theory:William Isaac Thomas © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  2. William Isaac Thomas References Coser, Lewis A. 1977. Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context. 2d ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers. Perdue, William D. 1986. Sociological Theory: Explanation, Paradigm, and Ideology. Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company. Thomas, W. I. 1923. The Unadjusted Girl. Boston: Little, Brown. Thomas, W. I. 1928. The Child in America. New York:Alfred A. Knopf. Thomas, W. I. And Florian Znaniecki. [1918-1921] 1958. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. 2d ed. 2 vols. NY:Dover. © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  3. William Isaac Thomas • 1863-1947 • Born in Virginia during the Civil War • Father was a dirt farmer and a Methodist Minister (Perdue 1986:246) © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  4. William Isaac Thomas:Assumptions Assumptions of William Isaac Thomas • Although keenly aware of environmental forces, Thomas assumed freedom to be a crucial property of human nature. • By this logic, individuals are not simple reflections of their environment but active and purposeful beings. • As with the others of the pluralist tradition, Thomas focused on the subjective world of consciousness, relying heavily on attitudes and definitions to account for social action. (Perdue 1986:248) © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  5. William Isaac Thomas:Assumptions • As to the nature of society, Thomas assumed an antagonistic equilibrium in which broad cultural and subcultural values, as well as individual attitudes, are balanced. • He stressed the always tenuous adjustment in a heterogeneous social order beset by the forces of immigration, industrialization, urbanization, and modernization. • For Thomas, as well as Max Weber, the fundamental component of society is social action. © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  6. William Isaac Thomas:Assumptions • Though he dealt with the grander issues of social organization (institutions, norms, and social control), he centered his mature sociology squarely in how the human actor responds to the “total situation.” © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  7. William Isaac Thomas:Assumptions • The total situation involves three components. • Objective Conditions • Including those of enforced norms and cultural values • Individual Attitudes and Group Attitudes • Definition of the Situation • By the socially influenced individual • Thomas Theorem • If men define a situation as real, it is real in its consequences. • Hence, a world of meaning connects the external environment and human actions. © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  8. William Isaac Thomas:Values and Attitudes Values and Attitudes • Value • Any datum having an empirical content accessible to the members of some social group and a meaning with regard to which it is or may be an object of activity. • Attitude • A process of individual consciousness which determines real or possible activity of the individual in the social world. (Perdue 1986:249) © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  9. William Isaac Thomas:Values and Attitudes • Put simply, the value is an external goal object to which people orient their action. Attitudes, on the other hand, are the actor’s predispositions to act. More crucially, the latter represents the “individual counterpart” of the former. • The synthesis of values and attitudes within the individual in the context of the “total” situation shapes social action. That is why actors do not respond to the same events in the same fashion. © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  10. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant Primary work was: The Polish Peasant in Europe and America “. . . the earliest major landmark of American sociological research” (Coser 1977:511) Thomas, William Isaac and Florian Znaniecki. [1918-1921] 1958. The Polish Peasant in Europe and American. 2d ed. New York: Dover. © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  11. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant The raw materials of the book (which are reported in exhaustive detail) are derived from life-histories of Polish immigrants in Chicago. These materials--personal letters, autobiographies, diaries, and other personal documents--are extremely rich in their peculiar specificity. (Coser 1977:512) © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  12. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant In 1908, Helen Culver offered Thomas $50,000 to study problems of immigration. For the next 10 years he directed the Helen Culver fund for Race Psychology, which enabled him to finance the studies that eventually led to the publication of The Polish Peasant. Without this generous endowment it is unlikely that the work would ever have been published. It enabled Thomas to make a number of trips to Poland in search of pertinent materials and also covered other research expenses. © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  13. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant Thomas had originally planned to study a variety of Eastern European immigrant groups, but he gave this up as being too ambitious an undertaking. He focused instead on the Poles, the largest and most visible ethnic group in Chicago, who seemed to be beset by a number of social problems, from family disorganization to crime. It is also likely that this son of a southern rural minister had some special sympathy for the uprooted sons and daughters of Polish villagers struggling to find a foothold in the urban jungles of metropolitan Chicago. © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  14. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant Thomas developed the life-historymethod for researching the plight of Polish immigrants. This method was developed by a twist of fate . . . . . . © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  15. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant One rainy morning, while walking down the back alley behind his house, Thomas had to side-step to avoid a bag of garbage which someone was throwing from a window. As the bag burst open at his feet, a long letter fell out. He picked it up, took it home, and discovered that it was written in Polish by a girl taking a training course in a hospital. © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  16. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant It was addressed to her father and mainly discussed family affairs and discords. It then occurred to Thomas that one could learn a great deal from such letters. This was the unlikely accident that led to Thomas’s development of the life-history method for which he has since become famous. (Coser 1977:533) © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  17. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant For more than a decade after this incident, Thomas moved back and forth between Chicago Polish community and communities in the old country to gather written materials to supplement oral information. The 2,244 pages of the final work are largely given to the reproduction of these materials. © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  18. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant Thomas used 754 letters acquired through an advertisement in a Chicago Polish-language journal, apparently offering 10 to 20 cents for any letter received from Poland. He used some 8,000 documents bought from the archives of a Polish newspaper that he approached during a visit to that country in 1909-1910. © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  19. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant He also used data and documents from Polish parish histories in Chicago, from immigrant organizations, from the files of charitable and legal aid associations, and diaries of Polish immigrants (for which he paid the authors). (Coser 977:533-534) © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  20. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant • In America, the peasant community: • Came to be shattered • The family divided • Traditional values questioned • Individualism exalted The Polish peasant community changed as the children of Polish peasants were raised in America. (Perdue 1986:250) © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  21. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant What follows is the familiar conflict of the generations in which “children brought with the family or added to it in America do not acquire the traditional attitude of familial solidarity, but rather American individualistic ideals, while the parents remain unchanged” (Thomas and Znaniecki [1918-1921] 1958:104). © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  22. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant And as the old controls break down, deviance emerges on a wide scale. (Perdue 1986:250) © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  23. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant Social Change • Social Reorganization • As the organization of community life begins to slip, a collective response reinforces the traditional normative boundary lines. It can be successful in instances where there is only random deviation on the part of a relative few. © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  24. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant • Social Disorganization • “. . . a decrease of the influence of existing social rules of behavior upon individual members of the group” (Thomas and Znaniecki [1918-1921] 1958:1128). As the old ways are swallowed up by the new, the community is no longer able to meet the wishes of its members, and control breaks down. © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  25. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant • Social Reconstruction • It is possible to move beyond the social disorganization stage. New institutions and normative systems can be formed. © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  26. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant It is crucial to observe how Thomas in his treatment of social disorganization differs from Durkheim’s work on anomie. Although both systems of thought focus on the breakdown of normative control, Durkheim’s unit of analysis is the larger society. It emerges as homogenous, integrated through a consensus of values, but threatened by the forces of change. © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  27. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant Thomas offered a different focus. For him the larger American society is heterogeneous and its dominant value system stresses individualism. Although he too portrayed the forces of disintegration, his focus is on the disorganization experienced by a traditional culture in the throes of transition. © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  28. William Isaac Thomas:The Polish Peasant In other words, while Durkheimian sociology would consider the problems posed by immigration for value consensus in the society as a whole, Thomas inverted the problem. His viewpoint is from inside the outcast community. (Perdue 1986:250-251) © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  29. William Isaac Thomas:The Definition of the Situation The Definition of the Situation (an extensive quote from Thomas 1923:41-43 The Unadjusted Girl) “. . . the higher animals, and above all man, have the power of refusing to obey a stimulation which they followed at an earlier time. . . We call this ability the power of inhibition. . . Preliminary to any self-determined act of behavior there is always a stage of examination and deliberation which we may call the definition of the situation. . . © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  30. William Isaac Thomas:The Definition of the Situation Not only concrete acts are dependent on the definition of the situation, but gradually a whole life policy and the personality of the individual himself follow from a series of such definitions. But the child is always born into a group of people among whom all the general types of situation which may arise have already been defined and corresponding rules of conduct developed, and where he has not the slightest chance of making his definitions and following wishes without interference. . . © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  31. William Isaac Thomas:The Definition of the Situation There is therefore always a rivalry between the spontaneous definition of the situation made by members of an organized society and the definition which his society has provided for him. The individual tends to a hedonistic selection of activity, pleasure first; and society to a utilitarian selection, safety first. . . It is in this connection that a moral code arises, which is a set of rules of behavior norms, regulating the expression of the wishes, and which is built up by successive definitions of the situation. In practice the abuse arises first, and rule is meant to prevent its recurrence.” © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  32. William Isaac Thomas:The Definition of the Situation “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” (Thomas 1928) © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  33. William Isaac Thomas:The Definition of the Situation What Thomas was saying was that people respond not only to the objective features of a situation, but also, and often mainly, to the meaning that situation has for them. And once such meanings have been assigned, their consequent behavior is shaped by the ascribed meaning. © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  34. William Isaac Thomas:The Definition of the Situation If people believe in witches, such beliefs have tangible consequences--they may, for example, kill those persons assumed to be witches. This then is the power the human mind has in transmuting raw sense data into a categorical apparatus that could make murderers of us all. © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

  35. William Isaac Thomas:The Definition of the Situation Real World Applications © 1998-2006 by Ronald Keith Bolender

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