SOCIOLOGY AND CAREER

Arcadio Váldez Gonzáles

Facultad de Ciencias Biológicas

Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León
San Nicolás de las Garza, NL, México
1. Education Raises the
Standard of living
Sociological analysis allows us to gain an in-
depth understanding of careers, as a fundamental
path of modern life and occupational niches, and
the development of new knowledge.
Professional training constitutes one of the most
important chores for society and has been a leading
factor for the changes seen in the XXth century.
Sociological perspectives allow us to discover in
social life: structures, types of players, behavioral
traits, changes and acceptable values.
The importance of sociology resides in the elements
for interpretation that provide us the understanding of
professional career, in which we obtain our education, as
a social opening that also means responsibility and
commitment to the society in our surroundings.
Professional knowledge comes from the sciences for
social development associated with career as of the XIXth
century. It has emerged as a university institution with all
its associated development for almost a thousand years.
Types of Professional Institutions are analyzed to
understand how a professional is formed and the social
consequences that ensue. The implementation of
professions in México has been analyzed since the XVIth
century, seeking to understand its emergence and
development, and its social and economic significance up
to the present.
The objective of this lecture is to explain the
function and place that the student will occupy
with his/her professional job in our contemporary
society.
Focusing on sociology means to analyze the
way in which sociology approaches the analysis
and reflexive thinking about society. Sociological
thinking allows the individual to observe society
through questions such as: sociological structure,
culture, social changes, accepted values; and it
provides the possibility to adopt a perspective
of or approach to the desired or idealized society.
1.1 SOCIOLOGICAL THOUGHT

Humans think of themselves as being configured

in society by means of social relations established
among them, not only determined by social life but
by being capable of constructing and changing the
society to which they conform and constitute.
Individual integration into society is made
possible thanks to family structure.
“Sociological imaginary” according to C. Wright
Mills (1974) is the capacity to understand personal
and social history as components of one and the
same process. Biography refers to one person, who
is social by definition, and history refers to what has
been lived by others.
1.2 SOCIOLOGICAL TROUBLES
A ND QUESTIONS

Sociology is a scientific discipline because it is

capable of explaining social reality by defining
problems and concerns for research and to set
proposals for change.
Individuals do not just live, but provide meaning
to their life, provide meaning to that for which they
live, and provide meaning to the society in which
they live. The direction that life takes is oriented by
social values.
Each society sets it own values in agreement with
its historic development and the dynamics and
interactions with other societies.
1.3 SOCIOLOGICAL METHODOLOGY

In order to understand social problems, it is

essential to explain the theory of sociology. It is a rich
body of concepts, principles, fundamentals,
classifications, typologies, and other products that allow
for the search of the possible causes and conditions that
favor such phenomena.
The search for causes and conditions permits us to
understand problems from a scientific perspective. The
theory provides possible lines of explanations to
understand social phenomena.
Hypotheses are suppositions founded on theoretical
explanations, preliminary studies, and logical and
coherent conceptual schemes. Their objective is to be
proven; it demands an explanation of reality.
1.4 THEORY OF SOCIOLOGY
Sociologists’ work consists of studying the individual in
society, and because they form part of their study subject
matter; they get involved in the explanations they derive.
Explanations of phenomena in society are limited by the
developmental level of scientific knowledge at a specific
historical moment.
Social problems do not exist without reason, but rather
must be considered in relationship to the specific societal set
of values. That is, social circumstances are not problems
until considered so and conceptualized by the individuals
who want to study them.
Marxist theory fought for a society in which the
exploitation of humankind by humankind itself would cease
to exist.
Functionalist theory represents the possibility for further
development so that society benefits as a community.
FOUNDERS OF SOCIOLOGY
Auguste Comte was born in Montpellier,
France, the 19th of January,1798. He
died on September 5th of 1857 in Paris.
From an early age on, he showed a
strong rejection toward traditional
Catholicism and monarchy doctrines. He
managed to get a position as professor
in mathematics at the Polytechnic
School in Paris by 1814, but by 1816
was kicked out of this center for taking
part in student revolts. During those
years, he became the personal secretary
of the theoretical sociologist Claude
Henri de Rouvroy, Count of Saint-Simon,
whose influence was to be to felt in
some of Comte’s work.
Èmile Durkheim (1858- 1917), was born in Epinal,
France, in a Jewish family. He is considered one of
the French working on social theory to pioneer and
develop modern sociology. He graduated from the
Ècole Normale Supériure in Paris in 1882, and later
worked as a professor teaching law and philosophy.
By 1887, he started teaching sociology, first at the
University of Bordeaux, and later on at Paris. He used
scientific methods to approach the study of social
groups, believing that individuals are the product of
complex social forces, which cannot be understood
out of the social context in which they live in.
 Karl Marx (1818-1883), born in Trèveris,
Germany the 5th of May, 1818, studied at
the University of Bonn, Berlin, and Jena. He
published articles in the Rheinische Zeitung
(Renan Gacet) in Cologne by 1842, and later on
became chief of editors. In spite of his radical way
of thought, he cannot be considered a communist.
His critiques on the social and political
environment spread through the daily newspaper
and caused the government authorities to oppose
him. He was forced to resign by 1843, and later
the newspaper was canceled, after which he
moved to Paris. His studies about philosophy,
history, political science, led him to adopt the
philosophy of Friedrich Engel. When they met
in1844, they realized that they had independently
arrived at the same conclusions about the nature
of the revolution problems.
Max Weber (1864-1920) was born in
Erfurt, Germany, and studied at the
University of Heidelberg, Berlin and
Gottingen. He lettered in Berlin, and
taught economy at the University of
Freiburg (1894), Heidelberg (1897) and
Munich (1910). He was the editor for
years at the Archiv für
Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, a
German publication on sociology.
Shortly before he died, he formed part of
the German delegation for peace
negotiations at Versailles and also took
part in the redaction committee for the
Weimar Constitution.
Talcott Parsons (1902-1979) was born in
Colorado Springs, Colorado USA, and studied at
Amherst College, London School of Economics,
and the University of Heidelberg in Germany. By
1939, he lectured on sociology at Harvard
University, USA, and by 1944 received full
tenure. Only two years later, he would occupy
the presidency of the Department of Social
Relation at the same university.
Robert King Merton (1910 ) was born in
Philadelphia and received his PhD at Harvard
University in 1936. He became a professor at
Tulane University, lectured in sociology at
Columbus University, and formed part of the
Bureau of Applied Social Research at the latter
university. He proposed functional analysis
based on the study of society from a relative
point of view. Opposed to the “absolute”
functionalism of Bronislaw Malinowsky. Merton
proved that it is excessive to maintain that all
cultural or social elements have a function, and
is therefore indispensable.
Borislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) was a
British anthropologist born in Krakow, Poland.
He completed his studies at the University of
Krakow, Leipzig and London. Malinowsky began
teaching at the University of London by 1924,
and worked as an invited professor at Yale
University during 1939-1942. His research about
the formation of human culture led him to
conduct many studies in Africa, Latin America,
and some regions of the United States. For him,
the notion of context and interdependence of
social facts were fundamental to the study of
culture.
Antonio Caso (1883-1946) was a Mexican writer
and philosopher, one of the most renowned and
active figures of Mexican intellectuality for the first
half of the XXth century. Since the beginning, he
opposed the prevailing positivism (introduced by
Gabino Barrera), criticizing its limited concept on
experience. He introduced to his country the most
advanced philosophical tendencies, in particular the
ideas represented by Henry Bergson and Edmund
Husserl. Casos’s thought, distant from systematic
speech, was characterized by a pluralist character,
and the trust in insight as a way to access knowledge.
He was concerned with the idea of “synthesis” as a
philosophical knowledge goal, in which it must convey
morals, arts, sciences, and culture.
Pablo Gonzalez Casanova (1922 ) is a Mexican
historian, political scientist and sociologist, who
analyzed in-depth the political and economical
troubles that affected Mexico and other Latin
American countries. He was born in Toluca, State of
Mexico, studied at the National School of
Anthropology, “Escuela Nacional de Antropologia,”
UNAM, “El Colegio Mexicano, and at the University of
Paris. He is a well known historian of the Mexican
Illustration, but from 1960 has been dedicated to
studying Latin American politics. His main contribution
is on the studies about the troubles of Latin-American
society from an economic point of view, with a critical
view on the historical handicap that drag those
countries down.
2. Technical and scientific
knowledge and its relation
to professional knowledge
2.1 SCIENCE IN HISTORY

Science has its roots founded in:

1. Technical tradition, where skills and experience
are developed and transferred from generation to
generation, and in
2. Spiritual tradition, in which ideas and human
aspirations are cultivated and are communicated.
Such traditions existed well before human civilization
appeared.
Scientific explanations are characterized by
providing interpretations for natural and social
phenomena based on the objectivity and causation of
the principles of knowledge. To solve a problem, you
have to establish what causes it.
Aristotle was born in Étagère, Macedonia, in 384 BC,
and died in 322 BC in Calcis, Eubea. He separated for
the first time the philosophy disciplines of logic, ethics,
metaphysics, politics, and aesthetics. He studied and
systematized almost every branch of knowledge and
provided the first ordered relations for biology,
sociology, physics, and literary theory, according to a
systematic and analytical method. Aristotle is perhaps
the most important thinker to have influenced
Western history and intellectual development.
The role of philosophers was substituted during
the Middle Ages by that of the theologian or church’s
doctor, figure from the Hebrew tradition, well before
the time of Catholicism. They interpreted and applied
the Holy Scriptures to real problems. The Doctor was
a wise man who provided “erudite or learned” opinion.
2.2 THE INSTITUTION UNIVERSITY

Major changes occurred in medieval

Europe from the XIth through XVIIth centuries,
leading to the conviction that the world does
not follow a “necessary and immutable order.”
The Crusades, Eastern culture and America’s
discovery, all of which shook the Europeans and
forced them to change their conceptions on
philosophy, religion, politics, ethics, geography,
astronomy, technologies, uses and costumes;
all of them led to a crisis. All of those changes
can be summarized and conceptualized by
Ptolemaic and Copernican thought.
THOLOMEUS AND THE COPERNICAN SYSTEMS

In the VIth century BC. the philosopher Thales of Millet,

introduced the concept of the earth being a flat disc floating in
the universal element water.
In the IIIrd century BC. the mathematician and philosopher
Pythagoras established a school of thinking in which
mathematics became the fundamental discipline for all
scientific research. Pythagorean’s thinking postulated that the
earth was a sphere that moved in a circular orbit around a
central fire.
In the IInd century BC during the Hellenist epoch, following
the death of Alexander the Great, the mathematician,
astronomer and geographer Eratosthenes made an
astoundingly precise measurement of the earth’s dimensions;
and the astronomer Aristarco of Samos proposed a sun-
centered planetary system, although such system failed to gain
acceptance in those early times.
The University appropriated from the Greeks,
Romans and Arabs their culture for constituting the
spirit of modernity for the future.
Middle Ages is a term used to refer to a period in
European history following the fall of the Roman Empire
in the Vth century and lasting through the XVth century.
It seems this term was used for the first time by Flavio
Biondo de Forli, a historian who published in 1438 his
work: “Historiarum ab inclinatione romanorun imperii
decades” (Decades of history since the fall of the Roman
Empire). The term implies in its origin, a paralysis of
social progress, considering Middle Ages as a period of
cultural stagnation, chronologically set in between the
glory of the ancient classics and the Renaissance. It is
usually divided into three epochs: early, high, and low
Middle Ages.
SCHOLATICISM was a philosophy and theological
movement which tried to use natural human reasoning, in
particular the Aristotle philosophy and scientific approach to
analyze and understand natural and Christian revelations.
Main stream in schools and universities of Europe during the
Middle Ages, from the XIth through the XVth centuries, its
outmost ideal was to integrate a systematic order for natural
Greek and Roman knowledge, and for the religious wisdom
of Christianity. Originally, scholastic referred to the teachers
of the monastic and cathedral schools of the Middle Ages,
after which the university began, but later applied to anyone
who taught philosophy or theology. The scholastics main
worries were about how to integrate the knowledge already
acquired, separating the reasoning character of Greek
philosophy from that of Christian revelation, rather than
being concerned with the creation of knowledge.
REFORMATION was a religious movement that
emerged in the XVIth century in the Catholic Church
environment, which led to the end of the Church’s
hegemony and the rise of distinctive churches linked
to Protestantism. The Reformation was preceded by
the culture of the Renaissance, and was then
followed by the French Revolution. The Reformation
completely altered the way of life of Western
Europe and initiated a modern age. It began with
Martin Luther challenging the Pope’s authority; the
circumstances that drove him to this situation
started much earlier and were conjured in doctrinal
complex elements, politics, economy, and culture.
UNIVERSITIES are institutions for higher learning,
acknowledged to grant academic grades. The original intention
was that a faculty composed of student groups would gather
to share academic facilities and lodge. Each faculty was an
integral part of a corporation called University, a word from the
abbreviation of the Latin expression universitas
magistrorum et scholarium, union of teachers and
students, organized for mutual benefit and the legal protection
of this collective. Established in the XIIIth century, Cambridge
University is one of the earliest educative institutions in Europe,
and one of the most prestigious in the world, some of its most
outstanding alumni are Charles Darwin, John Maynard Keynes,
Oliver Cromwell, and John Hamilton. Oxford University, the
earliest institution for higher learning in the United Kingdom, is
composed of 35 centers with proper structures and activities.
Great numbers of outstanding alumni have studied at and
graduated from its “All Soul’s College.”
2.3 DEVELOPMENT OF THE UNIVERSITY
Up to the XVIIIth century, university institutions
were composed of five “faculties” or teaching groups:
1. Faculty of Arts. It was equivalent to present day high
school, for debate of authors of the classics.
2. Faculty of Medicine. It was for the treatment of
illness, with hand books developed from Greek and
Roman tradition.
3. Faculty of Jurisprudence. To litigate juridical
agreements on canonical, Roman and “local” rights and
laws.
4. Faculty of Philosophy. It was about the dissertation on
the Greek and Roman classics, fathers of the Catholic
Church.
5. Faculty of Theology. It was to study issues about the
relations between God, Man, and Nature.
Universities have been described as
conforming to models, with other
perspectives regarding the development of the
university institution. There are four types of
universities based on their relation to knowledge
itself and its structural organization:
1. German Model. This is an institution
profoundly specialized with regard to the
subjects of knowledge, and is oriented towards
research. Academic labor is distributed among
the departments and research institutes
according to their theoretical discipline. Its
students are developed principally for research in
specific areas.
INTERNATIONAL TRANSFER OF
UNIVERSTY MODELS

The German university experience in the

XIXth century would provide the contemporary
type of university with modern ideas. It was home
for the most advanced science.
Japan would take from the German model
that most compatible with Japan’s society for
those times, that is: the notion of State control of
the University system within a disciplinary
authoritarian frame.
2.4 SCIENCE AND TECHNIQUE IN
MODERN WORLD
The work of Philosophers, Wise men and
Theologians was not applied to productive forces in
the society of the ancient world nor of the Middle Ages,
nor was their product used in the economy environment,
neither to promote social changes. It only served to
demonstrate that the royal society was elitist and
imperfect.
The changes were induced in Europe during the
XVIth – XVIIth centuries as a result of such events
as the battles in the Crusades, the discovery of the
Americas, growth of maritime trade in commerce and
discovery of the route to the East. All the latter events
produced a great number of changes and demands for
knowledge and basis for applied development.
Between the XVIth and XVIIth centuries Europe
experienced a flow of information that brought a great
number of new demands and foundations to apply those
new skills and knowledge. This derived into seafaring
commerce and colonization. The decadent feudal
system had nothing to do with the development of
cities, commercial trade, the industrial revolution, and
social and Church reform.
Engines are not a product of the slow
improvement of artisans’ tools based on its every day
use; on the contrary, engines burst into the laborer’s
world. They “appear” in practice to displace him.
Machinery is the product of theoretical principles applied
to production problems, and this process is not a
function of the laborers.
Some authors refer to it as “capitalist
development” mostly during the last third of the
XXth century, with its new contractor’s organization,
trust, holdings, cartels, new energy sources as oil and
electricity, and new financial systems. This speaks
rather of a Second Industrial Revolution.
First industrial revolution took place in the
United Kingdom by the end of the XVIIIth century;
it brought about a profound transformation of the
economy and British society. The most immediate
changes were produced by the production processes
such as: what was produced and how and where.
Labor was conducted at factories for manufactured
primary goods and services.
Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, and it
was for a long time the leading producer of industrialized
goods in the world. This meant changes in the distribution
social values. In the early stages, the workers’ buying
power was reduced and there was a loss in quality of life
in regard to their social values. Later on, it translated into
an increase in the social quality of life for the entire
population.
Afterwards, an industrial revolution was set into motion in
other countries, first in France, Belgium, Germany and the
United States by middle of XIXth century. By the end of
this century, it made its way to Sweden and Japan, and by
the early XXth century to Russia and Canada. However, it
was not until after the middle of the XXth century that the
industrial revolution finally arrived in Latin America, Near
East, Central and Southeast Asia, and part of Africa.