Analysis Of Allen Johnson's Article: The Forest, The Trees

Allen Johnson, in his article, “The Forest, the Trees, and the One Thing,” gives a broad sense of sociology and the misunderstandings many beginners arrive with. In an explanation of a social system (relationships which people and groups are part of (Farrell 2016)), Johnson describes himself playing the game Monopoly with his kids. In playing Monopoly, Johnson, no matter who he’s playing against, follows the rules and tries to win with a competitive edge. “It [Monopoly] has positions (players, banker); it has a material reality (the board, the pieces, the dice, play money, property deeds, houses and hotels); and it has ideas that connect all of this together in a set of relationships. There are values that define the point of the game – to win – and rules that spell out what’s allowed in pursuit of winning, including the idea of cheating” (Johnson 1997: 41). This gives him an idea of how he is expected to act while playing the game. But since his kids are younger than him, with less experience handling money, as well as being the people he’s supposed to want the best for, he feels bad about winning against them.

In every
Instead, they’re a set of rules and relationships people follow and take part in. It’s more of a concept than anything else. As Johnson says, about school as a social system, “social life is messier and more interesting than that, because in many ways social systems aren’t something. They are an ongoing process. They are continually being created and recreated as people do things in order to make them happen. The associations we have with school are just words on a page, images in our minds, until people actually participate in the process of school as a system” (Johnson 1997: 46). Even if we think of a place as a social system, the physical place isn’t what makes the social system. It’s the relationships between the people. And if people don’t interact, there’s no social