family life 
      parents lifestyle 
      educational experience 
      regional setting 
      etc., etc., etc... 

  History

Born in the German Rhineland, Marx spent most of his adult life in political  exile
He studied law in Bonn & history & phil in Berlin
He received his doctorate in philosophy from Jena in 1841

1. Legal relations & the form of the state are rooted in mat conditions of life under name civil society
2. People enter into social relations of production which are indispensable & independent of their will
3. These relations of prod correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers
4. Totality of relations of prod constitutes economic structure of society: the foundation on which legal & political SS arise & to which definite forms of consciousness correspond
5. It is not the consciousness of people that determines their being, but rather that social being determines consciousness
6. Mat forces of prod come in conflict w/ the existing relations of prod
7. The legal representations of property relation's become problematic
8. And so social revolutions occurs:  w/ change in economic foundation, SS is more or less rapidly transformed
9. Changes occur first in the mat economic conditions, & later in the ideological SS:  legal, political, religious, aesthetic or phil 
10. No social order ever disappears before all the prod forces in it are development 
11. New conditions begin amidst old conditions, slowly

• People work on social, material & natural world of which they are part
• In doing so, they change the world, the world changes them ( natural selection) & the activities in which we engage change us
• Work is a part of our human nature:  We are creative beings who must create through work to realize ourself, actualize, develop, etc.
• Humans are constructing & being constructed by nature
• Changing of economic systems is a result of individuals & groups struggling w/ their social & natural contexts
• Marx saw history as an analogy based on competitive struggle

Russia, China:  did they change the economic foundation?  And what was the effect on the superstructure? 
This is Marx's rationale for the development of socialism in capitalistic countries only.

Environmentalism
Civil Rights Movement
Women's Movement
MADD

Born and resided in: Germany, then Known as Prussia
Began as an historian, later converted to a full time sociologist. 

Weber studied legal and economic history at several German universities.
After a brief period as a legal assistant and on completion of his doctoral dissertation, he was appointed professor first (1894) at the University of Freiburg and then (1897) at Heidelberg. Despite a severe nervous breakdown several years later, Weber produced a body of work that established him as the foremost figure in social thought of the twentieth century.

Towards the end of his life, Weber became politically active and served on the committee that drafted the constitution of the Weimar Republic in 1918.

xrefer  Who's Who in the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, © Market House Books Ltd 1999

WEBER, Max (1864-1920). 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism', Max Weber's most controversial and stimulating book, was published in 1904-05. In it he asserted that the stern doctrines of Calvinism bred in believers a relentless commitment to one's earthly calling and an avoidance of trivial pleasures. The result was, in Protestant nations, the rapid accumulation of capital that has made possible the enormous structure of modern economic life. 
   Weber was born in Erfurt, Germany, on April 21, 1864, to an authoritarian father and strongly Calvinist mother. He was educated at the universities of Heidelberg, Berlin, and Gottingen and served briefly in the army. In 1895 he became professor of political economy at Freiburg, and the next year he went to Heidelberg in the same post. He advocated German overseas expansion as a means to raise the political consciousness of the German people. 
   Following a nervous collapse in 1898, Weber was institutionalized periodically until 1903. It was after this period that he did his most significant research. During this time he influenced sociological theory and tried to gain respect for sociology as a discipline by defining a value free methodology for it. He also argued strongly against German aims in World War I. After the war Weber helped draft the constitution of the Weimar Republic and founded the German Democratic party (see Weimar Republic). He died in Munich on June 14, 1920. 

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Excerpted from Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia
Copyright © 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 The Learning Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1904, trans., 1930
General Economic History.
 Economy and Society.  1922; translated as Economy and Society, 1968
Methodology of the Social Sciences. (1949).

Knowing where a store can profitably exist 

McDonalds' assembly line production w/ detailed instructions for preparing all the food

DURKHEIM, Emile (1858-1917). A pioneer social scientist, Emile Durkheim established sociology as a separate discipline, or field of study. He was the first to subject the specific events of everyday life to close sociological study and to determine specific scientific methods of examination. 
   Emile Durkheim was born on April 15, 1858, in Epinal, France. He studied philosophy at the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Upon graduation in 1882 he taught in secondary schools until 1887, when he was appointed to a lectureship especially founded for him at the University of Bordeaux. This was the first course of social science officially provided in a French university. 
   Durkheim's first book, 'The Division of Labor in Society', published in 1893, focused on the problems of new technology and the mechanization of work. This division of labor, according to Durkheim, made workers both more alien to one another, as their jobs were different, and more dependent on one another, as none any longer built the whole of a product. The methods to be used to examine society in this new discipline Durkheim laid out in 'The Rules of Sociological Method' (1895). 
   His classic 'Suicide' (1897) examines the ties that bind individuals to the society in which they live, and their breakdown. Suicide appeared to be more frequent in societies where individuals are less a part of the life around them, as in modern industrial societies. He distinguished three types of suicide: In egoistic suicide the individual shuts himself off from other human beings. Anomic suicide comes from the belief that the world has fallen apart around one. Altruistic suicide springs from great loyalty to a cause. 
   In 1902 Durkheim was appointed to the University of Paris, becoming a full professor in 1906. He taught there until his death on Nov. 15, 1917. 

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Excerpted from Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia
Copyright © 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 The Learning Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Herbert Blumer
 1900 - 1987

Studied under Robert Park

 Born in St. Louis, Missouri; was an American sociologist & a pupil of George Herbert Mead.

When Mead had to give up his position as a lecturer at the University of Chicago due to illness, Blumer took over & continued his work. In his 1937 article "Social Psychology", Blumer coined the term symbolic interactionism & summarized Mead's ideas into three premises:
a. The way people view objects depends on the meaning these things have for them. 
b. This meaning comes about as a result of a process of interaction. 
c. The meaning of an object can change over time. 

In 1952 Blumer became the Chair of the new Sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley. He was secretary treasurer, & later President, of the American Sociological Association. Blumer was presented with the association's Award for a Career of Distinguished Scholarship in 1983.

Anselm Strauss, who worked as a research assistant with Blumer, cofounded grounded theory.

Blumer combined LeBon's & Park's 1939 ideas into his own version of Contagion Theory in "The Field of Collective Behavior."  1969
Movies & Conduct (1933) 
Movies, Delinquency, & Crime (1933) 
The Human Side of Social Planning (1935) 
Social Psychology, Chapter 4 in Emerson Peter Schmidt (ed.) Man & Society: A Substantive Introduction to the Social Science. New York, Prentice Hall (1937) 
Critiques of Research in the Social Sciences: An Appraisal of Thomas & Znaniecki's "The Polish Peasant in Europe & America" (1939) 
Symbolic Interaction: Perspective & Method (1969)

Habit:  we are indoctrinated to do so
In our society, if we work for someone, & do well for them, we assume our reward will be forthcoming in the form of pay, a raise, status, etc.

James S. Coleman
1926  -  1995

James S. Coleman was an Am sociologist. He was a sociological theorist, who studied the sociology of ed, public policy, & was one of the earliest users of the term "social capital". His Foundations of Social Theory stands as one of the most important sociological contributions of the late 20th century.

Coleman received his bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from Purdue U in 1949, & received his Ph.D. from Columbia U in 1955, where he stood under the influence of Paul Lazarsfeld. He achieved renown with 2 studies on problem solving: He taught at Stanford U, the U of Chicago, at Johns Hopkins U (1959-1973), & then again at Chicago, where he directed the National Opinion Research Center. In 1991 Coleman was elected President of the ASA.

Union Democracy (1956, with Seymour Martin Lipset) 
The Adolescent Society (1961) 
Introduction to Mathematical Sociology (1964) 
Equality of Educational Opportunity (1966) 
Mathematics of Collective Action (1973).
Youth: Transition to Adulthood (1973) 
High School Achievement (1982) 
Individual Interests and Collective Action (1986) 
Social Theory, Social Research, and a Theory of Action, article in American Journal of Sociology 91: 1309-1335 (1986). 
Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital, article in American Journal of Sociology 94, pp. 95-120 (1988). 
Foundations of Social Theory (1990)

1.  Social Structure defines the Actors social similarities, which in turn pattern their perceptions of the advantages to be had by taking any of several alternative actions and differentially constrains Actor's ability to take actions
 

3.  Actor's Interests themselves are patterned by Social Structure (2.), psychological factors, other people, etc.
 

5.  Actions are a joint function of Actor's Interests (4.) & the Social Structure's constraining oe enabling features (6.)