The Leadership Style Of A School - 2353 Words

Surname 8 Name Professor Course Date Reflective paper Introduction A leadership style is defined by the approach of the leader in the process full of activity. The school leadership style is one of the most important and key factors in achieving team progress due to its impact on contentment, motivation, obligation, quality and the stage or level of teacher?s acting as well as its influence on the success of the students. I have realized that the main role of a leader in a school is to use the most effective leadership style so as to bring about the discharge of duties by others i.e. teachers, students, staff and parents in the most appropriate manner so as to achieve maximum success in the school. A good leader must shift his†¦show more content†¦For instance, a task of leadership style that stresses the significance of success and good acting, yield, prosperity, evaluation of performance, supporting objectives, rewarding of performance, efficiency, quantity and quality of acting are all important for the achievements of the team and the w hole organization in general. Curriculum leadership is the best leadership style for educational leaders, teachers and administrators as it strategizes on how to cover the curriculum and align it with the assessments. Therefore, curriculum leadership is essential to the improvement of school and their reforms. Curriculum leadership As a school leader whose duties and responsibilities are to govern the school, establish and develop its strategic direction, guiding and developing research and teaching, guiding and developing staff and managing issues related to staff and encouraging the pursuit of teaching excellence, it would be important to adopt the culture of curriculum leadership as my own personal leadership style in making sure that all the affairs of the school run smoothly and successfully and that the curriculum is well covered in time. In chapter one of Reason?s book Stop Leading Like It?s yesterday!, the author encourages the leaders to create a vision that is shared instead of the traditional way of having a vision set primarily by the building leader ?sadly, many schools operate with

Marketing Plan For A Business Level Strategy - 1089 Words

As a rising star, The WhiteWave Foods Company has grown significantly in its short history. Today it is made up of four different groups of business, plus a joint venture in China (2013 Annual Review, 2014): Plant Based Foods (including the brands Silk ®, So Delicious ® and Alpro ® brands), Coffee Creamers Beverages (International Delight and Land O Lakes Half Half and Mini Moo’s), Premium Dairy (Horizon Organic), Organic Greens Produce (Earthbound Farm), and the joint venture with China Mengniu Dairy. WhiteWave has pursued a variety of strategies to support its unprecedented growth. Business-level Strategy Across its various business groups and within each of its brand, WhiteWave tends to follow a focused differentiation strategy to†¦show more content†¦With a low level of diversity, not venturing out of the larger food and beverage industry, WhiteWave could take advantage of operational relatedness, allowing it to share operations if it is opportune. In addition, it has competitive advantages throughout its value chain that it can transfer across the company. According to its website, it has core competencies in identifying trends, developing products with staying power, introducing new categories and developing line extensions, and scaling up quickly, both in manufacturing and marketing (WhiteWave Foods, 2015). Even in its short history as an independent firm, this claim has borne out: Earthbound Farms was acquired in 2013 and WhiteWave Foods was able to see a positive return the following year (Chen, 2014). Likewise, its investments in research and development in the United States and Europe have paid off, with the successful launches of Silk line extensions such as Almond Milk and refrigerated iced coffees (The Whitewave Foods Company, 2014). WhiteWave touts its strong portfolio of products, with its brands enjoying either #1 or #2 market share, all in high-growth markets (2013 Annual Review, 2014). It would most certainly rank as a star on the Boston Consulting Group portfolio analysis matrix. Merger Acquisition Strategy WhiteWave follows a horizontal acquisition strategy to increase market power at the corporate level, with the

Gasoline Motor Oil Which Is More Important free essay sample

Gasoline, Motor Oil: Which Is More Important? Essay, Research Paper Gasoline, Motor Oil: Which is more of import? Any driver will attest that they want to experience safe in their autos, motor oil and gasolene advertizers argue that each merchandise is of import to the driver while endeavoring to carry through the end of doing this experiencing a world. With drivers being put through more and more strict conditions on this states roads and main roads, how could anyone non desire to experience safe in their autos? Travel by car has become progressively viewed as one of the safest manners of travel. Automobile travel has continued to increase # 8211 ; a testament to its turning position as the taking manner of travel within the U.S. Gasoline and motor oil advertizers have aggressively tuned in to this tendency. The advertizers must make up ones mind on how to utilize the statistics to their advantage. We will write a custom essay sample on Gasoline Motor Oil Which Is More Important or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page They need to make up ones mind what types of people they want to aim with their ads # 8211 ; the old? immature? male? female? # 8211 ; and what values and desires this group may portion. Two unambiguously different marks are evident in recent newspaper ads for Amoco Ultimate gasolene and Quaker State motor oil. The ad for Amoco Ultimate gasolene consists of a image of the Grand Canyon with the Amoco Ultimate sponsored race auto heading right for the drop. The chief image of the Grand Canyon shows the broad gaping gorge with a attractively colored sky operating expense. With dust winging behind it, the race auto appears to be speeding towards the drop. The auto is painted ruddy, white and bluish. The advertizers have typed # 8220 ; ultimate auto # 8221 ; , with the word ultimate bold faced, in the upper left manus corner of the page with a line drawn to the auto. Underneath the exposure is the slogan # 8221 ; You expect more from a leader. And you get it. # 8221 ; The ad for Quaker State motor oil shows a bottle of motor oil with the word Re-Formulated stamped in ruddy across the top of the bottle. The word Quaker State # 8211 ; stamped in large bold White inscription # 8211 ; lies on the center of the bottle. A image of a mid-size auto, perchance a Ford Taurus, is underneath the Quaker State inscription. Typed in yellow are the words # 8220 ; for protection beyond 3000 stat mis # 8221 ; and followed in white by the phrase # 8220 ; Under any impulsive conditions # 8221 ; . Typed below the bottle in large black letters is # 8221 ; This doesn # 8217 ; t intend losing your 3000 mile oil alteration is O.K. . It merely means you # 8217 ; ll still hold a auto to mistreat tomorrow. # 8221 ; The word # 8220 ; this # 8221 ; is circled in ruddy and an pointer is drawn to the phrase typed in yellow on the bottle. There is an mileometer in the underside left manus corner turn overing over from 3000 to 3001. Written in the underside right manus corner are the words reasonable engineering. What is the mark audience for these two ads? What characteristics might person happen appealing about these ads? Clearly the Amoco Ultimate ad is aimed at the younger, faster, bust up less driver, particularly the racing fan. As NASCAR ( National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing ) has sho wn recently, the age of race auto drivers has become progressively younger. Amoco is concentrating in on this fact and utilizing it as a gross revenues technique. My perceptual experience of the Amoco Ultimate ad is that it is aiming those drivers who tend to experience the impulse to drive fast. The ad is stating them † Be free, driving fast is non merely for race auto drivers. Have faith that no affair how fast you drive your auto ; we will still maintain it whizzing like a race auto. What were the advertizers picks in doing this ad to portray this message? The Grand Canyon # 8211 ; with its auburn colored walls and crannies, its cloud screen with the purple shade # 8211 ; creates a sense of comfy, pleasant, lovely, and unagitated environment. Calculating out the remainder of the ad becomes a spot more complicated. Why the race auto? Why does it look to be speeding towards a drop? Why is it called the Ultimate auto? This is the lone auto in the image and it appears to portray the vision of control. Why? To run a race auto, the driver must hold entire control of the auto and that is what the ad is seeking to state. While the Amoco Ultimate ad attempts to rock drivers to believe that gasolene is the most of import plus to autos, the Quaker State ad relies upon the fact that motor oil is merely every bit of import to autos. This ad is geared more towards the household driver and non the younger and faster driver. This ad is a small easier to calculate out: Re-Formulated Quaker State motor oil offers auto proprietors protection beyond 3000 stat mis, under any impulsive conditions, maintaining engines running clean and problem free. Quaker State put a household auto on the forepart of the bottle to typifying the mean size household auto. The statement # 8220 ; RE-Formulated # 8221 ; lets me cognize that they made alterations to the merchandise. For protection beyond 3000 stat mis is a bold statement. The mean oil alteration happens at 5660 stat mis and is increasing 5 % yearly. This ad doesn # 8217 ; Ts say that it is all right to drive more than 3000 stat mis before you change your oil. The ad mearly suggests that if you do drive more than 3000 stat mis your auto will still be safe. This ad makes the driver experience more secure about when to alter the oil. This ad promotes a sense of security in the type of motor oil used. Now we see two different ways that a driver can experience safer in a auto. The Amoco Ultimate ad attempts to emphasize the fact that no affair how hard a driver pushes their engine, it will still continue to map every bit good as a race auto. It entreaties to rushing values tie ining gasolene with race autos, and demoing that people who drive fast can experience safe and secure. In contrast, the Quaker State ad shows that oil is merely every bit of import as gasolene because you can hold protection beyond 3000 stat mis even if you forget to alter the oil at the 3000 stat mi grade. It is clear that gasolene and oil are really of import to an engine. Together they make a driver feel safer on the route.

Medical Sociology free essay sample

For him, sociology was the science of institutions, its aim being to discover structural social facts: A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations. [3] Durkheim acknowledged the limitations of sociology, noting the necessity in social science to form theoretical concepts in the abstract: Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description. [4] Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology. [5][6] He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including social stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. We will write a custom essay sample on Medical Sociology or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Marcel Mauss, a notable social anthropologist of the pre-war era, was his nephew. Durkheimian terms such as collective conscience have since entered the popular discourse. 7] Contents [hide] †¢1 Biography o1. 1 Childhood and education o1. 2 Academic career †¢2 Theories and ideas o2. 1 Theoretical foundations of sociology o2. 2 Social facts o2. 3 Method and objectivity †¢3 Sociological studies o3. 1 Education o3. 2 Crime o3. 3 Law o3. 4 Suicide o3. 5 Religion †¢4 See also †¢5 Selected works †¢6 References †¢7 Further reading †¢8 External links [edit] Biography [edit] Childhood and education Durkheim was born in Epinal in Lorraine, coming from a long line of devout French Jews; his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been rabbis. 8] At an early age, he decided not to follow in his familys rabbinical footsteps. [8] Durkheim himself would lead a completely secular life. Much of his work was dedicated to demonstrating that religious phen omena stemmed from social rather than divine factors. While Durkheim chose not to follow in the family tradition, he did not sever ties with his family or with the Jewish community. [8] Many of his most prominent collaborators and students were Jewish, and some were blood relations. The exact influence of Jewish thought on Durkheims work remains uncertain; some scholars have argued that Durkheims thought is a form of secularized Jewish thought,[9][10] while others argue that proving the existence of a direct influence of Jewish thought on Durkheims achievements is difficult or impossible. [11] A precocious student, Durkheim entered the Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) in 1879. [12] The entering class that year was one of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century and many of his classmates, such as Jean Jaures and Henri Bergson would go on to become major figures in Frances intellectual history. At the ENS, Durkheim studied under the direction of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a classicist with a social scientific outlook, and wrote his Latin dissertation on Montesquieu. [13] At the same time, he read Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. Thus Durkheim became interested in a scientific approach to society very early on in his career. This meant the first of many conflicts with the French academic system, which had no social science curriculum at the time. Durkheim found humanistic studies uninteresting, and he finished second to last in his graduating class when he aggregated in philosophy in 1882. There was no way that a man of Durkheims views could receive a major academic appointment in Paris. Thus in 1885 he decided to leave for Germany, where he studied sociology in Marburg, Berlin and Leipzig. As Durkheim indicated in several essays, it was in Leipzig that he learned to appreciate the value of empiricism and its language of concrete, complex things, in sharp contrast to the more abstract, clear and simple ideas of the Cartesian method. [14] [edit] Academic career A collection of Durkheims courses on the origins of socialism (1896), edited and published by his nephew, Marcel Mauss, in 1928. Durkheim traveled to Bordeaux in 1887, which had just started Frances first teachers training center. There he taught both pedagogy and sociology (the latter had never been taught in France before). [15] From this position Durkheim helped reform the French school system and introduced the study of social science in its curriculum. However, his controversial beliefs that religion and morality could be explained in terms purely of social interaction earned him many critics. The 1890s were a period of remarkable creative output for Durkheim. In 1892 he published The Division of Labour in Society, his doctoral dissertation and fundamental statement of the nature of human society and its development. [16] Durkheims interest in social phenomena was spurred on by politics. Frances defeat in the Franco-Prussian War led to the fall of the regime of Napoleon III, which was then replaced by the Third Republic. This in turn resulted in a backlash against the new secular and republican rule, as many people considered a vigorously nationalistic approach necessary to rejuvenate Frances fading power. Durkheim, a Jew and a staunch supporter of the Third Republic with a sympathy towards socialism, was thus in the political minority, a situation which galvanized him politically. The Dreyfus affair of 1894 only strengthened his activist stance. In 1895 he published Rules of the Sociological Method, a manifesto stating what sociology is and how it ought to be done, and founded the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux. In 1898 he founded the journal LAnnee Sociologique to publish and publicize the work of what was, by then, a growing number of students and collaborators (this is also the name used to refer to the group of students who developed his sociological program). Durkheim was familiar with several foreign languages and reviewed academic papers in German, English, and Italian for the journal. In 1897, he published Suicide, a case study which provided an example of what the sociological monograph might look like. Durkheim was one of the founders in using quantitative methods in criminology during his suicide case study. By 1902 Durkheim had finally achieved his goal of attaining a prominent position in Paris when he became the chair of education at the Sorbonne. Because French universities are technically institutions for training secondary school teachers, this position gave Durkheim considerable influence — his lectures were the only ones that were mandatory for the entire student body. Despite what some considered, in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, to be a political appointment, Durkheim consolidated his institutional power by 1912 when he was permanently assigned the chair and renamed it the chair of education and sociology. It was also in this year that he published his last major work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. The outbreak of World War I was to have a tragic effect on Durkheims life. His leftism was always patriotic rather than internationalist — he sought a secular, rational form of French life. But the coming of the war and the inevitable nationalist propaganda that followed made it difficult to sustain this already nuanced position. While Durkheim actively worked to support his country in the war, his reluctance to give in to simplistic nationalist fervor (combined with his Jewish background) made him a natural target of the now-ascendant French Right. Even more seriously, the generation of students that Durkheim had trained were now being drafted to serve in the army, and many of them perished in the trenches. Finally, Durkheims own son, Andre, died on the war front in December 1915 — a psychological blow from which Durkheim never recovered. Emotionally devastated and overworked, Durkheim collapsed of a stroke in Paris in 1917 and now lies buried at the Cimetiere du Montparnasse in Paris. [edit] Theories and ideas Sociology Portal Theory and History Positivism †¢ Antipositivism Functionalism †¢ Conflict theory Middle-range †¢ Formal theory Critical theory †¢ Socialization Structure and agency Research methods Quantitative †¢ Qualitative Computational †¢ Ethnographic Topics and Subfields cities †¢ class †¢ crime †¢ culture deviance †¢ demography †¢ education economy †¢ environment †¢ family gender †¢ health †¢ industry †¢ internet knowledge †¢ law †¢ medicine olitics †¢ mobility †¢ race ethnicity rationalization †¢ religion †¢ science secularization †¢ social networks social psychology †¢ stratification Categories and lists [show] v †¢ d †¢ e [edit] Theoretical foundations of sociology A funda mental influence on Durkheims thought was the sociological positivism of Auguste Comte, who effectively sought to extend and apply the scientific method found in the natural sciences to the social sciences. According to Comte, a true social science should stress for empirical facts, as well as induce general scientific laws from the relationship among these facts. There were many points on which Durkheim agreed with the positivist thesis. First, he accepted that the study of society was to be founded on an examination of facts. Second, like Comte, he acknowledged that the only valid guide to objective knowledge was the scientific method. Third, he agreed with Comte that the social sciences could become scientific only when they were stripped of their metaphysical abstractions and philosophical speculation. [17] A second influence on Durkheims view of society beyond Comtes positivism was the epistemological outlook called social realism. Although he never explicitly exposed it, Durkheim adopted a realist perspective in order to demonstrate the existence of social realities outside the individual and to show that these realities existed in the form of the objective relations of society. [18] As an epistemology of science, realism can be defined as a perspective which takes as its central point of departure the view that external social realities exist in the outer world and that these realities are independent of the individuals perception of them. This view opposes other predominant philosophical perspectives such as empiricism and positivism. Empiricists such as David Hume had argued that all realities in the outside world are products of human sense perception. According to empiricists, all realities are thus merely perceived: they do not exist independently of our perceptions, and have no causal power in themselves. [18] Comtes positivism went a step further by claiming that scientific laws could be deduced from empirical observations. Going beyond this, Durkheim claimed that sociology would not only discover apparent laws, but would be able to discover the inherent nature of society. Throughout his career, Durkheim was concerned primarily with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in the modern era, when things such as shared religious and ethnic background could no longer be assumed. To study social life in modern societies, he hence sought to create one of the first rigorous scientific approaches to social phenomena. Along with Herbert Spencer, he was one of the first people to explain the existence and quality of different parts of a society by reference to what function they served in maintaining the quotidian (i. e. y how they make society work), and is thus sometimes seen as a precursor to functionalism. Durkheim also insisted that society was more than the sum of its parts. Thus unlike his contemporaries Ferdinand Tonnies and Max Weber, he focused not on what motivates the actions of individuals (an approach associated with methodological individualism), but rather on the study of social facts. [edit] Social facts Main article: Social fact Durkheims work revolved around the study of social facts, a term he coined to describe phenomena that have an existence in and of themselves and are not bound to the actions of individuals. Durkheim argued that social facts have, sui generis, an independent existence greater and more objective than the actions of the individuals that compose society. Being exterior to the individual person, social facts may thus also exercise coercive power on the various people composing society, as it can sometimes be observed in the case of formal laws and regulations, but also in phenomena such as church practices or family norms. [19] Unlike the facts studied in natural sciences, a social fact thus refers to a specific category of phenomena: t consists of ways of acting, thinking, feeling, external to the individual and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him. According to Durkheim, these phenomena cannot be reduced to biological or psychological grounds. [20] Hence even the most individualistic or subjective phenomena, such as suicide, would be regarded by Durkheim as an objective social facts. Individuals composing society do not directly cause suici de: suicide, as a social fact, exists independently in society, whether an individual person wants it or not. Whether a person leaves a society does not change anything to the fact that this society will still contain suicides. Sociologys task thus consists of discovering the qualities and characteristics of such social facts, which can be discovered through a quantitative or experimental approach (Durkheim extensively relied on statistics). [21] [edit] Method and objectivity In his Rules of the Sociological Method (1895), Durkheim expressed his will to establish a method that would guarantee sociologys truly scientific character. One of the questions raised by the author concerns the objectivity of the sociologist: how may one study an object that, from the very beginning, conditions and relates to the observer? According to Durkheim, observation must be as impartial and impersonal as possible, even though a perfectly objective observation in this sense may never be attained. A social fact must always be studied according to its relation with other social facts, never according to the individual who studies it. Sociology should therefore privilege comparison rather than the study of singular independent facts. 22] It has been noted, at times with disapproval and amazement by non-French social scientists, that Durkheim traveled little and that, like many French scholars and the notable British anthropologist Sir James Frazer, he never undertook any fieldwork. The vast information Durkheim studied on the aboriginal tribes of Australia and New Guinea and on the Inuit was all collected by other anthropologists, t ravelers, or missionaries. [23] This was not due to provincialism or lack of attention to the concrete. Durkheim did not intend to make venturesome and dogmatic generalizations while disregarding empirical observation. He did, however, maintain that concrete observation in remote parts of the world does not always lead to illuminating views on the past or even on the present. For him, facts had no intellectual meaning unless they were grouped into types and laws. He claimed repeatedly that it is from a construction erected on the inner nature of the real that knowledge of concrete reality is obtained, a knowledge not perceived by observation of the facts from the outside. He thus constructed concepts such as the sacred and totemism exactly in the same way that Karl Marx developed the concept of class. [23] [edit] Sociological studies [edit] Education This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2009) Durkheim was also interested in education. Partially this was because he was professionally employed to train teachers, and he used his ability to shape curriculum to further his own goals of having sociology taught as widely as possible. More broadly, though, Durkheim was interested in the way that education could be used to provide French citizens the sort of shared, secular background that would be necessary to prevent anomie in modern societies. It was to this end that he also proposed the formation of professional groups to serve as a source of solidarity for adults. Durkheim argued that education has many functions: 1. To reinforce social solidarity oHistory: Learning about individuals who have done good things for the many makes an individual feel insignificant. oPledging allegiance: Makes individuals feel part of a group and therefore less likely to break rules. 2. To maintain social role oSchool is a society in miniature. It has a similar hierarchy, rules, expectations to the outside world. It trains young people to fulfill roles. . To maintain division of labour. oSchool sorts students into skill groups, encouraging students to take up employment in fields best suited to their abilities. [edit] Crime Durkheims views on crime were a departure from conventional notions. He believed that crime is bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social life and serves a social function. He stated that crime implies, not on ly that the way remains open to necessary change, but that in certain cases it directly proposes these changes crime [can thus be] a useful prelude to reforms. In this sense he saw crime as being able to release certain social tensions and so have a cleansing or purging effect in society. He further stated that the authority which the moral conscience enjoys must not be excessive; otherwise, no-one would dare to criticize it, and it would too easily congeal into an immutable form. To make progress, individual originality must be able to express itself [even] the originality of the criminal shall also be possible (Durkheim, 1895). [edit] Law Beyond the specific study of crime, criminal law and punishment, Durkheim was deeply interested in the study of law and its social effects in general. Among classical social theorists he is one of the founders of the field of sociology of law. In his early work he saw types of law, distinguished as repressive versus restitutive law (characterised by their sanctions), as a direct reflection of types of social solidarity. The study of law was therefore of interest to sociology for what it could reveal about the nature of solidarity. Later, however, he emphasised the significance of law as a sociological field of study in its own right. In the later Durkheimian view, law (both civil and criminal) is an expression and guarantee of societys fundamental values. Durkheim emphasised the way that modern law increasingly expresses a form of moral individualism a value system that is, in his view, probably the only one universally appropriate to modern conditions of social solidarity. [24] Individualism, in this sense, is the basis of human rights and of the values of individual human dignity and individual autonomy. It is to be sharply distinguished from selfishness and egoism, which for Durkheim are not moral stances at all. Many of Durkheims closest followers, such as Marcel Mauss, Paul Fauconnet and Paul Huvelin also specialised in or contributed to the sociological study of law. edit] Suicide In Suicide (1897), Durkheim explores the differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics, arguing that stronger social control among Catholics results in lower suicide rates. According to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration while Protestant society has low levels. There are at least two problems with this interpretation . First, Durkheim took most of his data from earlier researchers, notably Adolph Wagner and Henry Morselli,[25] who were much more careful in generalizing from their own data. Second, later researchers found that the Protestant-Catholic differences in suicide seemed to be limited to German-speaking Europe and thus may always have been the spurious reflection of other factors. [26] Despite its limitations, Durkheims work on suicide has influenced proponents of control theory, and is often mentioned as a classic sociological study. Durkheims study of suicide has been criticized as an example of the logical error termed the ecological fallacy. [27][28] Indeed, Durkheims conclusions about individual behaviour (e. g. suicide) are based on aggregate statistics (the suicide rate among Protestants and Catholics). This type of inference, explaining micro events in terms of macro properties, is often misleading, as is shown by examples of Simpsons paradox. [29] However, diverging views have contested whether Durkheims work really contained an ecological fallacy. Van Poppel and Day (1996) have advanced that differences in suicide rates between Catholics and Protestants were explicable entirely in terms of how deaths were categorized between the two social groups. For instance, while sudden deaths or deaths from ill-defined or unspecified cause would often be recorded as suicides among Protestants, this would not be the case for Catholics. Hence Durkheim would have committed an empirical rather than logical error. [30] Some, such as Inkeles (1959),[31] Johnson (1965)[32] and Gibbs (1968),[33] have claimed that Durkheims only intent was to explain suicide sociologically within a holistic perspective, emphasizing that he intended his theory to explain variation among social environments in the incidence of suicide, not the suicides of particular individuals. [34] More recent authors such as Berk (2006) have also questioned the micro-macro relations underlying Durkheims work. For instance, Berk notices that Durkheim speaks of a collective current that reflects the collective inclination flowing down the channels of social organization. The intensity of the current determines the volume of suicides ( ) Introducing psychological [i. e. individual] variables such as depression, [which could be seen as] an independent [non-social] cause of suicide, overlooks Durkheims conception that these variables are the ones most likely to be effected by the larger social forces and without these forces suicide may not occur within such individuals. [35] Durkheim stated that there are four types of suicide: Egoistic suicides are the result of a weakening of the bonds that normally integrate individuals into the collectivity: in other words a breakdown or decrease of social integration. Durkheim refers to this type of suicide as the result of excessive individuation, meaning that the individual becomes increasingly detached from other members of his community. Those indivi duals who were not sufficiently bound to social groups (and therefore well-defined values, traditions, norms, and goals) were left with little social support or guidance, and therefore tended to commit suicide on an increased basis. An example Durkheim discovered was that of unmarried people, particularly males, who, with less to bind and connect them to stable social norms and goals, committed suicide at higher rates than married people. [36] †¢Altruistic suicides occur in societies with high integration, where individual needs are seen as less important than the societys needs as a whole. They thus occur on the opposite integration scale as egoistic suicide. [36] As individual interest would not be considered important, Durkheim stated that in an altruistic society there would be little reason for people to commit suicide. He stated one exception, namely when the individual is expected to kill themselves on behalf of society – a primary example being the soldier in military service. †¢Anomic suicides are the product of moral deregulation and a lack of definition of legitimate aspirations through a restraining social ethic, which could impose meaning and order on the individual conscience. This is symptomatic of a failure of economic development and division of labour to produce Durkheims organic solidarity. People do not know where they fit in within their societies. Durkheim explains that this is a state of moral disorder where mans desires are limitless and, thus, his disappointments are infinite. †¢Fatalistic suicides occur in overly oppressive societies, causing people to prefer to die than to carry on living within their society. This is an extremely rare reason for people to take their own lives, but a good example would be within a prison; people prefer to die than live in a prison with constant abuse and excessive regulation that prohibits them from pursuing their desires. These four types of suicide are based on the degrees of imbalance of two social forces: social integration and moral regulation. [36] Durkheim noted the effects of various crises on social aggregates – war, for example, leading to an increase in altruism, economic boom or disaster contributing to anomie. [37] [edit] Religion This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2008) In classical sociology, the study of religion was primarily concerned with two broad issues: 1. How did religion contribute to the maintenance of social order? 2. What was the relationship between religion and capitalist society? These two issues were typically combined in the argument that industrial capitalism would undermine traditional religious commitment and thereby threaten the cohesion of society. More recently the subject has been narrowly defined as the study of religious institutions. In his article, The Origin Of Beliefs Emile Durkheim placed himself in the positivist tradition, meaning that he thought of his study of society as dispassionate and scientific. He was deeply interested in the problem of what held complex modern societies together. Religion, he argued, was an expression of social cohesion. His underlying interest was to understand the existence of religion in the absence of belief in any religions actual tenets. Durkheim saw totemism as the most basic form of religion. It is in this belief system that the fundamental separation between the sacred and the profane is most clear. All other religions, he said, are outgrowths of this distinction, adding to it myths, images, and traditions. The totemic animal, Durkheim believed, was the expression of the sacred and the original focus of religious activity because it was the emblem for a social group, the clan. Religion is thus an inevitable, just as society is inevitable when individuals live together as a group. Durkheim presented five elementary forms of religious life (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life; Conclusion) to be found in all religions, from the more primitive to Judeo/Christian/Moslem. These are: 1. Sacred/Profane division of the world; 2. Belief in souls,spirits, mythical personalities 3. Belief in divinity, either local or multi-local 4. a negative or ascetic cult within the religion 5. Rites of oblation, communion, imitation, commemoration or expiation. He argued that these five forms were communal experiences, thereby distinguishing religion from magic. Durkheim thought that the model for relationships between people and the supernatural was the relationship between individuals and the community. He is famous for suggesting that God is society, writ large. Durkheim believed that people ordered the physical world, the supernatural world, and the social world according to similar principles. Durkheim’s first purpose was to identify the social origin of religion as he felt that religion was a source of camaraderie and solidarity. It was the individual’s way of becoming recognizable within an established society. His second purpose was to identify links between certain religions in different cultures, finding a common denominator. Belief in supernatural realms and occurrences may not stem through all religions, yet there is a clear division in different aspects of life, certain behaviours and physical things. In the past, he argued, religion had been the cement of society—the means by which men had been led to turn from the everyday concerns in which they were variously enmeshed to a common devotion to sacred things. His definition of religion, favoured by anthropologists of religion today, was, A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, i. e. , things set apart and forbiddenbeliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.