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Nov 18, 2020 · The following are illustrative examples of sociology. Society. The study of societies, complex social structures that organize human affairs in a place. Culture. Meaning and behaviors that emerge from the shared experiences of groups. This includes national cultures, traditional cultures, super culture and subcultures.
- Overview
- Historical development of sociology
- Founding the discipline
sociology, a social science that studies human societies, their interactions, and the processes that preserve and change them. It does this by examining the dynamics of constituent parts of societies such as institutions, communities, populations, and gender, racial, or age groups. Sociology also studies social status or stratification, social movements, and social change, as well as societal disorder in the form of crime, deviance, and revolution.
Social life overwhelmingly regulates the behaviour of humans, largely because humans lack the instincts that guide most animal behaviour. Humans therefore depend on social institutions and organizations to inform their decisions and actions. Given the important role organizations play in influencing human action, it is sociology’s task to discover how organizations affect the behaviour of persons, how they are established, how organizations interact with one another, how they decay, and, ultimately, how they disappear. Among the most basic organizational structures are economic, religious, educational, and political institutions, as well as more specialized institutions such as the family, the community, the military, peer groups, clubs, and volunteer associations.
Sociology, as a generalizing social science, is surpassed in its breadth only by anthropology—a discipline that encompasses archaeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics. The broad nature of sociological inquiry causes it to overlap with other social sciences such as economics, political science, psychology, geography, education, and law. Sociology’s distinguishing feature is its practice of drawing on a larger societal context to explain social phenomena.
Sociologists also utilize some aspects of these other fields. Psychology and sociology, for instance, share an interest in the subfield of social psychology, although psychologists traditionally focus on individuals and their mental mechanisms. Sociology devotes most of its attention to the collective aspects of human behaviour, because sociologists place greater emphasis on the ways external groups influence the behaviour of individuals.
The field of social anthropology has been historically quite close to sociology. Until about the first quarter of the 20th century, the two subjects were usually combined in one department (especially in Britain), differentiated mainly by anthropology’s emphasis on the sociology of preliterate peoples. Recently, however, this distinction has faded, as social anthropologists have turned their interests toward the study of modern culture.
Two other social sciences, political science and economics, developed largely from the practical interests of nations. Increasingly, both fields have recognized the utility of sociological concepts and methods. A comparable synergy has also developed with respect to law, education, and religion and even in such contrasting fields as engineering and architecture. All of these fields can benefit from the study of institutions and social interaction.
Though sociology draws on the Western tradition of rational inquiry established by the ancient Greeks, it is specifically the offspring of 18th- and 19th-century philosophy and has been viewed, along with economics and political science, as a reaction against speculative philosophy and folklore. Consequently, sociology separated from moral philosophy to become a specialized discipline. While he is not credited with the founding of the discipline of sociology, French philosopher Auguste Comte is recognized for having coined the term sociology.
The founders of sociology spent decades searching for the proper direction of the new discipline. They tried several highly divergent pathways, some driven by methods and contents borrowed from other sciences, others invented by the scholars themselves. To better view the various turns the discipline has taken, the development of sociology may be divided into four periods: the establishment of the discipline from the late 19th century until World War I, interwar consolidation, explosive growth from 1945 to 1975, and the subsequent period of segmentation.
Some of the earliest sociologists developed an approach based on Darwinian evolutionary theory. In their attempts to establish a scientifically based academic discipline, a line of creative thinkers, including Herbert Spencer, Benjamin Kidd, Lewis H. Morgan, E.B. Tylor, and L.T. Hobhouse, developed analogies between human society and the biological organism. They introduced into sociological theory such biological concepts as variance, natural selection, and inheritance—asserting that these evolutionary factors resulted in the progress of societies from stages of savagery and barbarism to civilization by virtue of the survival of the fittest. Some writers believed that these stages of society could be seen in the developmental stages of each individual. Strange customs were explained by assuming that they were throwbacks to useful practices of an earlier period, such as the make-believe struggle sometimes enacted between the bridegroom and the bride’s relatives reflecting the earlier custom of bride capture.
In its popular period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, social Darwinism, along with the doctrines of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, touted unrestricted competition and laissez-faire so that the “fittest” would survive and civilization would continue to advance. Although the popularity of social Darwinism waned in the 20th century, the ideas on competition and analogies from biological ecology were appropriated by the Chicago School of sociology (a University of Chicago program focusing on urban studies, founded by Albion Small in 1892) to form the theory of human ecology that endures as a viable study approach.
- The Study of Social Stratification. Social stratification is the division of society into hierarchical levels, primarily based on wealth, power, and privilege (Doob, 2013).
- The Study of Deviance. Deviance in sociology refers to the violation of societal norms and expectations, which can manifest in many forms, ranging from minor transgressions to severe criminal behavior (Bernburg, 2018).
- The Study of Racial Segregation. Racial segregation refers to the physical or institutional separation of racial groups, and the study of it is central to the sociological examination of racial and ethnic relations (Massey, 2016).
- The Study of Social Movements. The sociological study of social movements focuses on collective social action aimed at creating or resisting social change (Jasper, 2015).
Sociologists identify and study patterns related to all kinds of contemporary social issues. The “Stop and Frisk” policy, the emergence of new political factions, how Twitter influences everyday communication—these are all examples of topics that sociologists might explore. Studying Part and Whole: How Sociologists View Social Structures
- Conflict Theory: Class or Social Inequalities. Among experts, much discussion and evaluation is occurring regarding social classes: how they are created, what fuels them, and what inequalities arise as a result.
- Symbolic Interactionism. Symbolic interactionism, another major sociological framework, aims to explain human behavior by evaluating the symbolic meanings individuals develop and build upon throughout their lives.
- Social Roles. “You are not acting your age.” “That was unprofessional behavior.” These are examples of assigning social roles throughout our interactions in different areas.
- Emotional Expectations. Emotional expression is highly complex. It’s not simply a physiological response to stimuli; gender roles established in our society may influence how we express our emotions.
Nov 30, 2023 · By Chris Drew (PhD) / November 30, 2023. Sociological theory refers to the conceptual frameworks sociologists use to understand, explain, and predict human behavior within the context of social structures and systems. We can generally divide sociological theories into two rough buckets.
Nov 21, 2023 · Some examples of sociology include studying racial issues, gender dynamics, phenomena and feelings around entertainment, the structure of different social institutions, and the...
