(a) What is common sense? How are common knowledge and sociology related to each other? Explain. (10 marks) (b) What is the…

(a)

Common sense:

• everyday, taken-for-granted knowledge that people use to get through daily life;
• it is practical, local and based on personal experience, tradition and authority, so it is unsystematic, untested and often contradictory ("birds of a feather flock together" against "opposites attract");
• Alfred Schutz called it the stock of typifications in the life-world.

How sociology relates to common knowledge:

• It tests common sense: sociology uses concepts, evidence and comparison. Durkheim (Rules, 1895) told sociologists to set aside prenotions and study social facts as things. His Suicide (1897) showed suicide, apparently the most personal act, varying with social integration.
• It connects the personal to the structural: C. Wright Mills's sociological imagination turns "private troubles" into "public issues". One person's unemployment is a trouble; mass unemployment is an issue.
• It debunks: Peter Berger (Invitation to Sociology, 1963) saw sociology as looking behind official and everyday appearances.
• It also depends on common sense: everyday knowledge is sociology's raw material. Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel) studies how common-sense reasoning produces social order, and Giddens's double hermeneutic shows sociological ideas flowing back into common sense.

• The Indian view: André Béteille ("Sociology and Common Sense", 1996) argued that sociology must challenge the common sense of one's own society, such as beliefs about caste or gender, through systematic and comparative inquiry, while respecting what people know.
• Conclusion: sociology is neither pure common sense nor its opposite. It is common sense disciplined by method, evidence and theory.

(b)

Area of study:

• similarities: both study human society, institutions, power and change in context;
• differences: history focuses on particular past events, periods and persons; sociology focuses on recurrent patterns and structures, largely in contemporary society.

• Methodology:

• Aim: History — Idiographic: understanding unique sequences; Sociology — Nomothetic: generalisations and causal patterns
• Time focus: History — Mainly the past; Sociology — Mainly the present, with comparison
• Sources: History — Archives, documents, inscriptions, memoirs; Sociology — Surveys, interviews, observation, statistics, and also documents
• Mode: History — Narrative and chronology; Sociology — Concepts, models, comparison and testing

The link:

• G.E. Howard's remark: "history is past sociology and sociology is present history";
• Weber, Marx and Durkheim all built sociology from history, as in The Protestant Ethic, modes of production, and the division of labour.

Convergence:

• historical sociology: Barrington Moore (1966), Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol (1979);
• the Annales school (Bloch, Braudel) brought social structure and the longue durée into history;
• social history and subaltern history (Ranajit Guha) use sociological concepts;
• in India, Desai's Social Background of Indian Nationalism and Srinivas's work on Sanskritisation joined history and sociology.

• Conclusion: history gives sociology depth and context, and sociology gives history concepts and comparison. The boundary is one of emphasis, not of subject matter.

(c)

• Definition: a variable is a concept or attribute that can take different values across cases, such as age, income, caste, religion or voting choice. Research tests relationships between variables.

By causal role:

• Independent variable: the presumed cause (for example, education);
• Dependent variable: the outcome to be explained (income). In Durkheim's Suicide, religion was independent and the suicide rate dependent;
• Intervening or mediating variable: it links the two (social integration mediates between religion and suicide);
• Moderating variable: it changes the strength of a relationship (gender may moderate the returns to education);
• Control variable: it is held constant to rule out other explanations;
• Extraneous or confounding variable: it affects both, creating a spurious relationship.

By nature:

• qualitative or categorical (religion, sex) versus quantitative (income);
• discrete (number of children) versus continuous (monthly income).

By level of measurement (S.S. Stevens, 1946):

• nominal: categories with no order (religion, state);
• ordinal: ranked categories (education level, class self-placement);
• interval: equal intervals but no true zero (temperature, some attitude scales);
• ratio: a true zero (income, age).

• Significance: careful operationalisation of variables makes hypotheses testable and supports causal inference. Level of measurement also decides which statistics can be used.

(d)

Merton's theory:

• Robert K. Merton (Social Theory and Social Structure, 1957), building on Herbert Hyman (1942) and on the relative deprivation findings of The American Soldier, explained how people evaluate themselves against reference groups;
• normative reference groups supply norms; comparative reference groups supply benchmarks;
• they may be membership or non-membership groups;
• orientation to a non-membership group leads to anticipatory socialisation and can cause relative deprivation.

Relevance to digital identity making:

• Visibility of non-membership groups: social media shows influencers, celebrities and global lifestyles, and users adopt their styles, tastes and values. This is anticipatory socialisation online.
• Metrics as validation: likes, followers and shares quantify comparison. Leon Festinger's social comparison (1954) and Cooley's looking-glass self become measurable.
• Relative deprivation: curated upward comparisons produce anxiety, envy and "FOMO", even among people whose material position is improving.
• Normative online communities: caste, religious, fan, gaming and political groups set norms of belonging. In India, caste pages and matrimonial sites turn caste into an online identity.
• Multiple reference groups: users move between several groups, and Merton's idea of role sets helps explain this juggling.

Limits:

• digital reference "groups" are often imagined audiences rather than bounded groups;
• context collapse (Marwick and boyd, 2011) mixes audiences;
• algorithms select whom we compare ourselves with, a structural force Merton did not foresee;
• identity online is also performed (Goffman) and commodified by platforms.

• Conclusion: Merton's theory remains highly relevant. It needs to be extended to cover algorithmic curation and networked, fluid audiences.

(e)

• What "gender-blind" means: classical theories of stratification treated class, status and power as if they were gender-neutral, and took the male worker and household head as the norm.

The classical theories:

• Marx located class in production and ignored unpaid domestic labour;
• Weber's class, status and party said little about gender;
• Davis and Moore (1945) treated rewards as tied to functional importance, ignoring women's unpaid work;
• the "conventional view" (John Goldthorpe, 1983) took the family as the unit, with its class set by the male head.

The feminist critique:

• Joan Acker ("Women and Social Stratification: A Case of Intellectual Sexism", 1973) argued that women's positions were read off their husbands';
• Michelle Stanworth (1984) showed women's own occupations shape family class;
• Ann Oakley (The Sociology of Housework, 1974) made housework visible as work;
• Heidi Hartmann's dual-systems theory (1979) and Sylvia Walby (1990) treated patriarchy as a system of stratification alongside capitalism;
• Kimberlé Crenshaw's intersectionality (1989) and Patricia Hill Collins's matrix of domination show gender, race and class interlocking.

India:

• Uma Chakravarti's Brahmanical patriarchy links caste purity to the control of women;
• Leela Dube showed gender in kinship and inheritance;
• Sharmila Rege's Dalit feminist standpoint;
• Dalit and Adivasi women face a caste–class–gender nexus as landless labourers with unpaid care burdens.

• Qualification: later theory is less gender-blind. Walby, Crompton and Indian scholars have made gender central, and Weber's "status" concept can be extended to gender.
• Conclusion: classical stratification theory was largely gender-blind. Modern theory treats gender as a dimension of stratification in its own right, interacting with class and caste.