C. Wright Mills - ANSWER-created the "sociological imagination", found that leaders in major areas of influence and authority not only share a singular
... [Show More] vision of what is fair and good but also that they act in ways that serve their interest in maintaining the existing stratification system and their positions in it
Auguste Comte - ANSWER-"father of sociology", coined the term sociology, three stages of development for social sciences
Harriet Martineau - ANSWER-studied American society in depth and was an advocate for slaves, women's rights, wrote extensive analyses of social life, and translated August Comte's ideas into English
Karl Marx - ANSWER-theoretical giant of communist thought, saw conflict as only between classes, believed that all of human history and society can be traced to the basic material circumstances of men and women in a productive relationship with nature.
He attributed inequalities of wealth, power, and prestige to the economic situation that class structures present
Herbert Spencer - ANSWER-society follows a natural evolutionary progression towards something better, inspired functionalism
Emile Durkheim - ANSWER-statistical study of suicide, inspired functionalism, believed that the source of both moral and mental life is society, saw religion as validating the existence of society
Max Weber - ANSWER-sought to explain the origins of capitalism, verstehen, believed the Protestant work ethic was decisive in producing the spirit of the modern form of industrial capitalism, found it possible to establish the social origins of kinship by means of cross-cultural comparisons, differentiated between three types of authority, studied many religions to determine how each established psychological and practical grounds for economic activity, discovered various sources of stratification
Lester Ward and William Graham - ANSWER-under their influence, sociology experienced a loss of interest in the larger problems of social order and social change, began to concentrate on more specific social problems
George Herbert Mead - ANSWER-originated the field of psychology, "me", "I", "generalized other", and symbolic interactionalism
Talcott Parsons - ANSWER-functionalist who advocated grand theory
Robert Merton - ANSWER-proposed building middle range from a limited number of assumptions from which hypotheses are derived and distinguished between manifest and latent consequences of existing elements of social structure. He also concluded that there is a disjunction between means and ends in American society (such as the emphasis on wealth and success without many legitimate means to achieve them)
Herbert Bloomer - ANSWER-founded symbolic interactionalism with George Herbert Mead
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann - ANSWER-conceived the social construct of reality- the familiar notion that human beings shape their world and are shaped by social interaction
Erving Goffman - ANSWER-formed the dramaturgical approach (social interaction as a series of episodes or human dramas in which we are more or less aware of playing roles and, thereby, engage in impression management), and coined the term "role-distance"
Coser, Dahrendorf, and Mills - ANSWER-their work shaped modern conflict theory, which sees conflict between groups or within social organizations
Elton May - ANSWER-identified the Hawthorne effect (the presence of a researcher affects the subject's behavior)
Sigmund Freud - ANSWER-founder of psychoanalysis, considered biological drives to be the primary source of human activity, and identified the components of a person's personality (the id, ego, and superego)
Charles Horton Cooley - ANSWER-theorized about self-concept and the three stages of self-formation, which Cooley referred to as "the looking-glass self", distinguished between primary and secondary groups
Jean Piaget - ANSWER-proposed a theory of cognitive development, which was comprised of four stages (the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the concrete operational stage, and the formal operational stage)
Erik Erikson - ANSWER-delineated eight stages of psychosocial development in which ego identity, ego development, and the social environment are involved
Lawrence Kohlberg - ANSWER-concluded that children go through six stages of moral reasoning
Carol Gilligan - ANSWER-found that women bring a different set of values to their judgments of right and wrong and concluded that there is no essential difference between the inner workings of the psyches of boys and girls [Show Less]