Social fact - wikipedia Social fact Sociology History Outline Portal Theory Positivism Antipositivism Postpositivism Functionalism Conflict theories Social constructionism Structuralism Interactionism Critical theory Structure and agency Actor -- network theory Methods Quantitative Qualitative Historical Comparative Mathematical Computational Ethnography Ethnomethodology Network analysis Subfields Conflict Criminology Culture Development Deviance Demography Education Economic Environmental Family Gender Health Industrial Inequality Knowledge Law Literature Medical Military Organizational Political Race and ethnicity Religion Rural Science Social change Social movements Social psychology Stratification STS Technology Urban Browse Bibliography By country Index Journals Organizations People Timeline This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( September 2010 ) In sociology, social facts are values, cultural norms, and social structures that transcend the individual and can exercise social control. French sociologist Émile Durkheim defined the term, and argued that the discipline of Sociology should be understood as the empirical study of social facts. For Durkheim, social facts ``... 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. '' Contents 1 Durkheim 's social fact 2 Mauss 's total social fact 3 See also 4 References 5 Sources 6 Further reading 7 External links Durkheim 's social fact In The Rules of Sociological Method Durkheim laid out a theory of sociology as ' the science of social facts '. He considered social facts to `` consist of representations and actions '' which meant that `` they can not be confused with organic phenomena, nor with physical phenomena, which have no existence save in and through the individual consciousness. '' Durkheim says that a social fact is a thing that many people do very similarly because the socialized community that they belong to has influenced them to do these things. Durkheim defined the social fact this way : `` A social fact is any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint ; or : which is general over the whole of a given society whilst having an existence of its own, independent of its individual manifestations ``. He viewed it as a concrete idea that affected a person 's everyday life. Durkheim 's examples of social facts included social institutions such as kinship and marriage, currency, language, religion, political organization, and all societal institutions we must account for in everyday interactions with other members of our societies. Deviating from the norms of such institutions makes the individual unacceptable or misfit in the group. Among the most noted of Durkheim 's work was his discovery of the `` social fact '' of suicide rates. By carefully examining police suicide statistics in different districts, Durkheim demonstrated that the suicide rate of Catholic communities is lower than that of Protestant communities. He ascribed this to a social ( as opposed to individual ) cause. This was considered groundbreaking and remains influential. Durkheim 's discovery of social facts was significant because it promised to make it possible to study the behavior of entire societies, rather than just of particular individuals. Durkheim points to individual actions as instances or representations of different types of actions in society. Some contemporary, interpretivist, sociologists like Max Atkinson and Jack Douglas refer to Durkheim 's studies for two quite different purposes, however : Durkheim 's studies are graphic demonstrations of how careful the social researcher must be to ensure that data gathered for analysis is accurate. Durkheim 's reported suicide rates were, it is now clear, largely an artifact of the way particular deaths were classified as `` suicide '' or `` non-suicide '' by different communities. What he actually discovered was not different suicide rates at all -- but different ways of thinking about suicide. His studies are also an entry point into the study of social meaning -- and the way that apparently identical individual acts often can not be classified empirically. Social acts ( even such an apparently private and individual act as suicide ), in this modern view, are always seen ( and classified ) by social actors. Discovering the social facts about such acts, it follows, is generally neither possible nor desirable -- but discovering the way individuals perceive and classify particular acts is what offers insight. A further complication is introduced by asking about the status of our `` discovery '' of these perceptions and classifications. After all, do n't such `` discoveries '' also reflect socially embedded practices of classification ? But if the alleged discoveries of perceptions of social facts are n't therefore dubious, it is hard to see why the original claims about the social facts are. Mauss 's total social fact For Marcel Mauss ( Durkheim 's nephew and sometime collaborator ) a total social fact ( French fait social total ) is `` an activity that has implications throughout society, in the economic, legal, political, and religious spheres ''. Diverse strands of social and psychological life are woven together through what he came to call total social facts. A total social fact informs and organizes seemingly quite distinct practices and institutions. Marcel Mauss popularized the term in his book, The Gift : `` These phenomena are at once legal, economic, religious, aesthetic, morphological and so on. They are legal in that they concern individual and collective rights, organized and diffuse morality ; they may be entirely obligatory, or subject simply to praise or disapproval. They are at once political and domestic, being of interest both to classes and to clans and families. They are religious ; they concern true religion, animism, magic and diffuse religious mentality. They are economic, for the notions of value, utility, interest, luxury, wealth, acquisition, accumulation, consumption and liberal and sumptuous expenditure are all present... '' -- Marcel Mauss See also Sociology Positivism Sociological positivism Antipositivism Sociological perspective Philosophy of social science References ^ Jump up to : Durkheim, Émile ( 1982 ) ( 1st pub. 1895 ). Lukes, Steven, ed. The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method. W.D. Halls ( translator ). New York : Free Press. Jump up ^ `` Emile Durkheim : What Is a Social Fact ? ''. www.csudh.edu. Retrieved 2016 - 02 - 09. Jump up ^ Durkheim, Emile ( 1982 ). `` What is a Social Fact ''. The Rules of Sociological Method : 74. Jump up ^ Durkheim, E. Suicide. 1897. Jump up ^ Schmaus, Warren ( 1994 ). Durkheim 's philosophy of science and the sociology of knowledge : creating an intellectual niche. Chicago : Univ. of Chicago Press. p. 38. ISBN 0226742512. Jump up ^ `` Deviance and Social Control Unit M5 : Suicide ( 2 ) '' ( PDF ). Jump up ^ Douglas, Jack D ( 1967 ). Social Meanings of Suicide. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691621173. Jump up ^ Edgar ( 1999 ), 64 Jump up ^ Edgar ( 2002 ), 157 Jump up ^ Mauss ( 1966 ), 76 -- 77 Sources Edgar, Andrew. ( 1999 ). `` Cultural Anthropology ''. in Edgar, Andrew and Sedgwick, Peter R. ( eds. ). Key Concepts in Cultural Theory. New York : Routledge. ISBN 978 - 0 - 415 - 11404 - 2 Edgar, Andrew. ( 2002 ). `` Mauss, Marcel ( 1872 -- 1950 ) ''. in Edgar, Andrew and Sedgwick, Peter R. ( eds. ). Cultural Theory : the Key Thinkers. New York : Routledge. ISBN 978 - 0 - 415 - 23281 - 4 Mauss, Marcel. ( 1966 ). The gift ; forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. London : Cohen & West. Further reading Shaffer, L.S. ( 2006 ). `` Durkheim 's aphorism, the Justification Hypothesis, and the nature of social facts. '' Sociological Viewpoints, fall issue, 57 -- 70. Full text. External links What is a Social Fact ? at the Wayback Machine ( archived October 3, 2012 ) From Émile Durkheim, The Rules of the Sociological Method, ( Edited by Steven Lukes ; translated by W.D. Halls ). New York : Free Press, 1982, pp. 50 -- 59. Émile Durkheim Books Division of Labour in Society ( 1893 ) Rules of Sociological Method ( 1895 ) Suicide ( 1897 ) Elementary Forms of the Religious Life ( 1912 ) Founded Academic sociology L'Année Sociologique Conceptualized and defined Social integration Collective consciousness Mechanical and organic solidarity Social fact Sociology of knowledge Sacred -- profane dichotomy Quantitative methods in criminology Statistical social research Collective effervescence Anomie Related Positivism Totemism History of sociology Retrieved from `` https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Social_fact&oldid=802159577 '' Categories : Social concepts Émile Durkheim Sociological terminology Hidden categories : Articles needing additional references from September 2010 All articles needing additional references Webarchive template wayback links Talk Contents About Wikipedia Čeština Deutsch Español Français हिन्दी Bahasa Indonesia Italiano Nederlands Polski Português 中文 Edit links This page was last edited on 24 September 2017, at 10 : 36. 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Question: who has propounded the idea that we can treat social facts as things
Answer: Émile Durkheim