Some more facts about Sociology

The sociologist has a distinctive way of examining human interactions. Sociology is the systematic study of social behaviour and human groups. It focuses primarily on the influence of social relationships upon people’s attitudes and behaviour and on how societies are established and change. As a field of study, sociology has an extremely broad scope and it deals with families, business firms, political parties, gangs, schools, religions, labour unions etc. It is concerned with love, poverty, conformity, discrimination, illness, alienation and community.

The Sociological Perspective. In human society, newspapers, television and radio are the usual sources of information about such groups and problems. However, while the basic function of journalists is to report the news, sociologists bring a different type of understanding to such issues. The perspective of sociology involves seeing through the outside appearances of people’s actions and organizations.

One major goal of this perspective is to identify patterns of and influences on social behaviour. For example, sociologists study the passionate desire of movie or rock fans to see in person, to talk with, even to grab the clothing of a star. Why do people feel this need so powerfully?

The sociological perspective attempts to provide explanations for such patterns. Sociologists are not content to just recognize that millions of people want to meet stars; rather they examine the shared feelings and behavior of fans within the larger social context of human culture.

The Sociological Imagination. In attempting to understand social behaviour, sociologists rely on unusual type of creative thinking, sociological imagination, that is an awareness of the relationship between an individual and the society. Thus instead of simply accepting the fact that movie stars and rock stars are the “royalty” of human society, we could ask, in a more critical sense, why we are not as interested in meeting outstanding scientists, or elementary school teachers, or architects. Sociological imagination can bring new understanding to daily life around us.

Sociology and Social Sciences. The term science refers to the body of knowledge obtained by methods based upon systematic observations. The sciences are commonly divided into natural and social sciences. Natural science is the study of the physical features of nature and the ways in which they interact and change. Astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology and physics are all natural sciences. Social science is the study of various aspects of human society. The social sciences include sociology, anthropology, economics, history, psychology and political sciences. These academic disciplines have a common focus on the social behaviour of people, yet each has a particular orientation in studying such behaviour. Anthropologists usually study cultures of the past and pre-industrial societies that still exist today. Economists explore the ways in which people produce and exchange goods and services. Historians are concerned with the peoples and events of the past and their significance for us today. Political scientists study international relations, the workings of government and the exercise of power and authority. Psychologists investigate personality and individual behaviour. In contrast to other social sciences, sociology emphasizes the influence that society has on people’s attitudes and behaviour. Humans are social animals; therefore, sociologists scientifically examine our social relationships with other people.

To better illustrate the distinctive perspectives of the social sciences, let us examine sociological and psychological approaches to gambling. Viewed from the perspective of psychology, gambling represents an escape into a fantasy world where great fortune can be attained easily. By contrast, sociologists focus on the social networks that develop among many gamblers. Participants in gambling establish friendship groups. For such persons gambling is a form of recreation and may even be their primary social activity. This example shows that by viewing social phenomena from several perspectives, we can enhance our understanding of human behaviour.

Sociology and Common Sense. Human behaviour is something about which we all have experience and at least a bit of knowledge from a source of wisdom, which is called common sense. In our daily life, we rely on common sense to get us through many unfamiliar situations. Unfortunately, this source of knowledge is not always reliable. For example, it was once considered “common sense” to accept that the earth is flat.

Like other social scientists sociologists do not accept something as a fact because “everyone knows it”. Instead, each piece of information must be tested and analyzed in relationship with other data. At times the findings of sociologists may seem like common sense. Yet, it is important to stress that such findings have been tested by researchers.

The simplest definition of sociology is that it is the study of human societies. It stresses the independence of different parts of societies and attempts to go beyond the description of specific events by establishing generalizations. However, defining sociology as the systematic study of societies does not take us far enough, because there are other academic subjects – anthropology, economics, politics and psychology for example – which also attempt to make systematic generalizations about social behaviour. So, sociology cannot be defined either in terms of what it studies (people living in families, going to work and so on) or in terms of how it studies them (making generalizations, interpreting statistics, asking questions and so on), how is it distinguishable from the other social sciences? The answer to this is to be found in the questions that sociologists ask about social life. Sociology begins by asking how societies are possible. It involves being curious about the very fact of social order, about how it changes and, above all, about how our lives as individuals are shaped by the societies in which we live.

1. Answer the following questions:

1. What does sociology focus on as a field of study?
2. What and who does it deal with?
3. What differs the work of a journalist from that of a sociologist?
4. What are the main goals of the sociological perspective?
5. What types are the sciences commonly divided into?
6. What differs natural science from social science?
7. What social sciences do you know and what do they study?
8. How does the sociological imagination, as a unique feature of sociology, make sociology different from the other social sciences?
9. What is common sense?
10. Why is sociology more than a collection of commonsense observations?
11. Is sociology an important science, in your opinion?

What is Sociological Theory? Origins of Sociology.

Why do people commit suicide? One traditional commonsense answer is that people inherit the desire to kill themselves. Another view is that sunspots drive people to take their lives.

Sociologists are not particularly interested in why any one individual commits suicide; they are more concerned with why people in general take their own lives. In order to undertake such research, sociologists develop theories that offer a general explanation of some type of behaviour.

In sociology a theory is a statement or a series of statements that uses concepts to explain problems, actions or behaviour. An effective theory will have both explanatory and predictive power. That is, it will help us to develop a broad and integrated view of seemingly isolated phenomena and to understand how one type of change in an environment leads to others.

An essential task in building a sociological theory is to examine the relationship between bits of data, gathered through research that may seem completely unrelated. For example, in researching the problem of suicide sociologists are primarily concerned not with the personalities of individual suicide victims, but rather with suicide rates and how they vary from country to country. And their research suggests that suicide, while a solitary act, is related to group life. They have developed a theory to explain how individual behavior can be understood within a social context. Their theory has predictive power, since it suggests that suicide rates will rise or fall in conjunction with certain social and economic changes.

It is important to understand that a theory – even the best of theories – is not a final statement about human behavior. This theory of suicide is not an exception. Sociologists continue to examine factors, which contribute to a society’s rate of suicide. The sociological research shows that the incidence of suicide increases following nationally televised stories about suicide, and the impact is the greatest after the publicized suicide of an entertainer or politician, and is somewhat less after the suicide of an artist, a criminal or a member of the economic elite.

One means of classifying sociological theories is by the subject under study. Thus, there are theories concerning the causes of criminal behavior or the universal nature of religion. Yet, theories can also be distinguished by levels of analysis. There are two of them.

Macrosociology concentrates on large-scale phenomena or entire civilization. Thus, the above-described cross-cultural study of suicide rates is an example of macrosociology.

By contrast, microsociology stresses study of small groups and often uses experimental studies in laboratories. Sociologists find it useful to employ both of these approaches. In fact, we can learn a great deal by using macro-level and micro-level analysis to study the same problem. For example, we might try to understand criminal behavior at the macroscopic level by analyzing crime rates in various countries and at the microscopic level by examining the social forces that influence individuals to become criminals or delinquents.

Origins of sociology. Philosophers and thinkers of ancient and medieval societies made countless observations about human behavior and predicted that a systematic study of human behavior was needed to improve society.

The first founder of sociology as a science was the French theorist Auguste Conte (1798-1857). He gave sociology its name. The 2^nd founder of sociology was Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). He greatly dominated scholarly thinking in his times by suggesting that societies are bound to change.

Few sociologists have had such a dramatic impact on many different areas within the discipline as Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) did. Above all, he will be remembered for his insistence that behavior cannot be fully understood in individualistic terms, that it must be understood within a larger social context. He developed a fundamental thesis to help understand all forms of society through intensive study of group behavior.

Another important theorist who contributed to the scientific study of society was the German philosopher Max Weber. He pointed out that much of our social behavior cannot be analyzed without studying the subjective meanings people attach to their actions – how they themselves view and explain their behavior. He suggested that sociologists should thoroughly consider thoughts and feelings of the people under study.

Contemporary sociology reflects the diverse contributions of earlier theorists and gains new insights, which help to better understand the workings of modern human society.

1. Answer the following questions:

1. What are sociologists particularly interested in, while investigating a problem of human behavior?
2. What is a theory and what makes any theory especially effective?
3. Why is it very important to examine the relationships between bits of data gathered through research?
4. How are theories classified?
5. What levels of analysis in sociology do you know?
6. Is sociology really a new science?
7. Who are the two founders of sociology?
8. What other important theorists in sociology do you know?
9. What does microsociology focus on?
10. What does microsociology study?