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Introduction to Social Analysis

Semester 2 Week 2

Sociology and biography

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Contrast to last week

• Cultural turn in sociology

• Shift from trying to understand the social system to trying to understand how people make sense to their world.

• Top down v. bottom up

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

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What can we learn from the stories people tell?

What are the possibilities and limitations of using biographies, auto-biographies and life histories to create authentic stories and understand what society is and how it works?

Behind this question is the bigger question about the relationship between society and the individual.

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Clifford R. Shaw The Jack-Roller - A Delinquent Boy's Own Story

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• Chicago school

• Clifford’s role

• What do we learn?

• How do we learn it?

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Chicago school

• Context of Chicago

• Empirical sociology programme

• Influence of W.I. Thomas

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Clifford’s role

• Part of academic and professional establishment

• Presents story for its utility – social problems perspective

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What do we learn from the book?How do we learn it?

• “the boy’s own story” – something about Stanely, something about his family and social circle, and something about Chicago

• Context and commentary from official record and Clifford’s interpretation.

• We can read study as a historical document telling us about a former society and its values.

• Doesn’t tell as about – the Jazz Age, Prohibition, or the Great Depression.

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Biography and auto-biography are necessary but insufficient tools to understand social life

• People’s accounts of their lives, activities, values and behaviour is absolute core of what sociologist work with.

• It is insufficient in itself. Need tools of interpretation. • What should you pay attention to when doing a

sociological reading of a life history?• Who is telling the story and how it is told• What is the context of the story• Bottom up as opposed to top down perspectives -

Sociological Imagination (C. Wright Mills) the link between private concerns and public issues

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How are life histories constructed?

• Questioning memory in terms of accuracy and selective bias

• Narrative coherence

• What is the role of authorship in biography?

• “Authorship, like identity, is something to be contested and established.”

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• Reading:

• Prue Chamberlayne, Joanna Bornat, and Tom Wengraf. (eds) 2000 The turn to biographical methods in social science: comparative issues and examples New York : Routledge, . Introduction and Chapter by Rustin.

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• Describes people as “historically formed actors whose biographies are necessary to render fully intelligible their historical action in context”

• “the embeddedness of the biographical account in social macro-structures

• “the study of a single case involves mobilising tacit or explicit knowledge about other cases”

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Gardner Katy 2002 Age, narrative and migration Oxford Berg 301.45109421 GAR

• East End and Bangladesh

• Narrative styles

• Cross society and culture comparisons – “the global is local”.

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Bengali women in London

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• “The informants, it seems, have actively participated in how they are represented. Such appearances are, however, misleading… ... [The authors] chose what words to include, what to edit out, and how to frame the women’s words.

• .. The book is my narrative as much as theirs. This does not invalidate it; it just makes it one kind of truth amongst others.”

• (Gardner 2002: 28-9)

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• Narrative genres very widely and are closely related to existing cultural forms as well as the diverse construction of identity.” (Gardener 2002:31)

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Conclusion

• Essential but limited understanding of what can we understand society from the perspective of only one person

• Biographical accounts need:– Comparison– Interpretation– Context.– http://www.zoerahman.com/– http://www.myspace.com/zoerahman

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Conclusion

• We can also generalise from biographical data to all the different kinds of data Sociologists collect and use.

• A response to a question in a questionaire also depends on: Comparison, Interpretation, Context by the composer of the question, the respondent and the analyst.