SOCIOLOGY

Sociology

Sociology

Introduction

Durkheim conceived of sociology as the scientific study of a reality sui generis, a clearly defined group of phenomena different from those studied by all other sciences, biology and psychology included.”The term "social fact”used often by Durkheim means "a category of facts which present very special characteristics: they consist of manners of acting, thinking, and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him.” (Douglas 2001)It was from this base that Durkheim undertook his study of Suicide.

Durkheim sees social facts as absolutely objective "things”that can be analyzed and evaluated in a scientific way. From this notion of objective social facts he deduced that "one social fact could be used to explain another.”This principle is commonly found amongst other scientific disciplines, for example the theory of gravity which was used to explain the solar system used this same principle but in the field of Physics.

Durkheim applied the idea that one can "explain one social fact by another”in his book "suicide”Concluding that, "suicide varies inversely with the degree of social integration.”In other word the "facts”of "social integration”can be used to explain the phenomena of suicide. (Douglas 2001) In this essay I will investigate how Durkheim arrived at this conclusion and how valid his research methods and subsequent conclusions are.

Characters in Glass, Paper Beans

It's a Sunday, late in the winter. Here sits our author, Leah Hager Cohen, in the Someday Cafe. Her thick Boston Globe takes up a good portion of the rickety table she's sharing with a stranger. Her large coffee steams in its heavy glass tumbler. It could be the Daily Grind, except there's a Suggestion Box nailed upside down to the ceiling and a sign on the wall reading Coffee Kills. Cohen feels a brief surge of annoyed guilt about the people crowded in the doorway waiting for a table, but she overcomes it. She's paid for her time at a table. She turns to the objects which please her -- her coffee, her newspaper -- and for an instant she sees them with the penetrating curiosity she experienced as a child. And so begins this book -- Glass, Paper, Beans. For those waiting in the doorway, I hope she went home to write it.

To engage us with her stories of glass, paper, and coffee, Cohen introduces three individuals whose work helped bring them to her table. In New Brunswick, Canada, Brent Boyd fells timber, some of which makes its way to the paper mills that supply the Globe with newsprint. Ruth Lamp supervises a night shift at the Anchor Hocking glass factory in Ohio. And Basilio Salinas grows coffee in a communal Zapotec village in Oaxaca, Mexico. Throughout her account of one day in each of their lives Cohen intersperses meditations on the history of glass, paper, and coffee, and much else besides.

Cohen is most vigorous and lively when she joins her three workers on the job. Out in the frigid dawn woods she watches 32-year-old Brent manipulate ...