Key Sociological Concepts

6 Key excerpts on "Key Sociological Concepts"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  An Introduction to Sociology

  • Ken Browne(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  1The Sociological Approach: Key Ideas and Concepts

  Contents

  1. Key Issues
  2. What is sociology?
  3. How did sociology develop?
  4. Sociology and common sense
  5. Sociology and biological explanations: nurture v. nature
  6. Sociology and journalism
  7. Sociology and psychology
  8. Sociology and science
  9. What is meant by social structure?
  10. What are social processes?
  11. Socialization
  12. Social control
  13. An example of a social process: gender role socialization
  14. Social issues, social problems and social policy
  15. Social issues
  16. Social problems
  17. Social policy
  18. Sociology, social problems and social policy
  19. Chapter summary and revision checklist
  20. Key terms

  KEY ISSUES

  • What is sociology?
  • What is meant by social structure?
  • What are social processes?
  • Social issues, social problems and social policy

  Newcomers to sociology often have only a vague idea as to what the subject is about, though they frequently have an interest in people. This interest is a good start, because the focus of sociology is on the influences from society which mould the behaviour of people, their experiences and their interpretations of the world around them. To learn sociology is to learn about how human societies are constructed, and where our beliefs and daily routines come from and how our social identities are formed; it is to re-examine in a new light many of the taken-for-granted assumptions which we all hold, and which influence the way we think about ourselves and others. Sociology is above all about developing a critical understanding of society. In developing this, sociology can itself contribute to changes in society – for example, by highlighting and explaining social problems such as inequality, crime and poverty. The study of sociology can provide the essential tools for a better understanding of the world we live in, and therefore the means for improving it.

  WHAT IS SOCIOLOGY?

  Sociology

  is the systematic (or planned and organized) study of human groups and social life in modern societies. A

  society

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  eBook - ePub

  Death and Dying

  Sociological Perspectives

  • Gerry R. Cox, Neil Thompson(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2Key Sociological Concepts

  Introduction

  In Chapter 1 we made the case for the inclusion of a sociological perspective in the study of death and dying. We now build on that in this chapter by highlighting a number of Key Sociological Concepts that are of great value in helping us gain insight into the social elements of death and dying.

  It is important to emphasize that what we offer here is far from comprehensive in terms of relevant sociological concepts – indeed, a whole book relating to relevant concepts would be a very large tome, and so in just one short chapter, the best we can hope for is to focus on a select number of concepts and use these to illustrate the potential for learning from what sociological theory has to offer.

  Before exploring those concepts, though, we want to make some general comments about micro and macro sociology and the relationship between them in order to set the scene for the discussion of the 16 concepts we have chosen.

  Micro and Macro Sociology

  As we noted earlier, some elements of sociology focus on the micro level of small-scale interactions, as these are in many ways the channels through which society operates, the basis of the maintenance of social life. Other elements of sociology focus on the larger-scale aspects of society, the macro-level phenomena associated with cultural and structural factors. We want to emphasize the point, right from the start, that both these elements of sociology, micro and macro, are needed to develop as full an understanding of social life as possible. They are complementary dimensions of sociology, not alternatives to be chosen between.

  Micro sociology is useful for making sense of how interactions between individuals or across groups (including families) shape our experiences. It is concerned with such ideas as social roles (sets of expectations), scripts (largely standardized patterns of language and interaction), norms (boundaries of acceptable behavior), and related ideas. There is a rich tradition, with a wealth of theory and research, underpinning micro sociology (Carter, 2016), and its insights have proven to be very helpful and informative for both theory development and professional practice.

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  Explaining Social Life

  A Guide to Using Social Theory

  • John Parker, Hilary Stanworth(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  A famous example is Weber’s analysis of the consequences of the rise in the West of a particular cultural form, Protestantism. He devel-oped this to account for the dominance of capitalism in Western societies but it has also been used to begin explaining the rise of science (Merton, 1957), the character of American urban development (Sennett, 1990) and Swedish environmentalism (Stanworth, 2006). Our claim that our five basic concepts are fundamental for social analysis is supported by the requirement to mobilise them to account for all of the wide- ranging empirical examples we deal with in the text. That they can provide the theoretical underpinning for deriving a further multitude of concepts, strengthens our claim that they provide the basis for social explanation, and that initially mobilising them is a good basis for elementary explanatory strategies. In the following chapters, we shall inevitably be considering the less basic, but equally necessary, concepts and levels of theorising to show how they depend on the basic concepts, but also to suggest that the social sciences are a huge resource of imaginative ideas and examples of effective explanation for us to follow. However we can only provide you with a taste of what is available. Describing and justifying how the book is organised The book is organised around the five concepts we claim are fundamental for social explanation. As already indicated, we will look at each in turn via a pair of chapters which make extensive use of examples. The range of examples has been chosen for three reasons. First, their great variety shows that the five concepts have general application. Second, by providing material from differ-ent places and different points in time we emphasise that the human social world is global and historical: social phenomena are always spatially distrib-uted and emergent in a process of conditioning by preceding history .

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  Elements of Sociology

  for Students of Health Disciplines

  • Ugo Giorgio Pacifici Noja(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • tab edizioni

    (Publisher)

  Introduction to sociology: the basic concepts part one Chapter 1 What is Sociology Today? Today we can define sociology as the discipline that studies soci-ety 1 and social groups . Sociology’s task today is to explain those aspects of human be-haviour which are included in the concepts of culture and society . Others define sociology as the «scientific study of society, its in -stitutions and social relationships» 2 . As a world-famous sociologist said, sociology «aims to make human behaviour less predictable by activating sources of inter-nal, motivational decisions […] – providing human beings with a wider knowledge of their situation, and thus of widening the sphere of their freedom of action» 3 . In other words, sociology develops different analyses of society and its categories which are useful tools to understand complex behaviours , social norms and the choices society makes 4 . 1. Christophe Guilluy, sees the end of society as such as a result of the disappearance of the middle class. This point of view can be compared with the late British political leader Margaret Thatcher’s stance, which she had already expressed in La società non esiste, Luiss, 2019. 2. Alessandro Orsini, ed., Course of General Sociology (Corso di Sociologia Generale), il Mulino, 2019, p. 5. 3. Quoted in Carmen Leccardi, Zygmunt Bauman: Critical Sociology and Ethical Com -mitment in the Era of Globalization (Zygmunt Bauman: sociologia critica e impegno etico nell’epoca della globalizzazione), in Sociologies of our Times (Sociologie contemporanee), Maurizio Ghisleni e Walter Privitera , ed., Utet, 2009, p. 4. 4. Maurizio Ambrosini, Loredana Sciolla, Sociology (Sociologia), Mondadori, 2019, pp. 6-7. 18 Introduction to sociology: the basic concepts 1.1. The Birth of Sociology In 1813 the French philosopher Henri-Claude de Saint-Simon 5 had the insight to create a new “ science of man ” that seeks to study how society is structured 6 .

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  Reason of Sociology

  George Simmel and Beyond

  • Kauko Pietila(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  2 Fundamental Concepts: Society and Community The preceding chapter argued that sociology was a normative project. Its central concept, society, was an idea that involved values and had far-reaching practical consequences (probably that is why it has had, and continues to have, both protagonists and antagonists). In this sense sociol-ogy is comparable to its adversary, economic liberalism, which in the early nineteenth century was ratcheted up ‘from academic interest to boundless activism’ to establish and maintain laissez-faire (Polanyi, 1957 [1944]: 137). Sociology was ratcheted up to counteract the consequences of eco-nomic liberalism; the instrument it used was its normative idea of society. We also saw in the previous chapter that • energetic efforts were made to get rid of the idea of society; • in general the efforts were unsuccessful; the idea – or, perhaps more properly, a feeling or a touch – of a societal whole kept returning to its refuters; • and the re-emerging society retained normative connotations. The goal of this book is to rehabilitate openly the idea of society. As the idea is infused with norm and value, a condition that is considered prob-lematic in science, it seems reasonable to examine and clear up this issue. This will be the first subject for examination in this chapter. The conclu-sion is that sociology’s basic concepts necessarily contain normative and evaluative elements. From this I proceed to locate the foundational con-cept in classical and modern sociology; the representatives here are Weber and Parsons. The outcome of this examination is that sociology’s basic concept after all was not society, it was community. Instead of society, community was conceptually distinct and essential. Society was looked at from the communal point of view as an emergency condition. And it seems that it was in fact community that those who disavowed society wanted to get rid of.

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  Economy and Society

  A New Translation

  • Max Weber, Keith Tribe(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  Only this analytical 27 See §2 below. [MW] 28 See Chapter 3. [MW] Basic Sociological Concepts 95 perspective is capable, and should be capable, of the sociological understanding of individual human beings (and only human beings) differentiated by type. We should discount the monumental misapprehension that an “individualistic” method involves an individualistic evaluation of any kind, just as we preclude the view that the inevitably rational character of concept formation involves a belief in the primacy of rational motives, or even a positive evaluation of “rationalism.” Even a socialist economy would have to be construed and un-derstood “individualistically,” that is, on the basis of the action of individ-uals, the types of “functionaries” who arise in it, just as exchange transactions would be understood by marginal utility theory (or a yet-to-be-found “better” alternative that in this respect has a similar method). For even there, the most significant empirical sociological work always begins with the question: Which motives determined, and do determine, the individual functionaries and members of this “community” to behave in such a way that this commu-nity was first created, and continues to exist? All functional concept forma-tion that starts at the level of the “whole” is only a preliminary for such an investigation, a preparation whose utility and indispensability—if done properly—no one can dispute. 10. It is usual to call some principles of the sociology of Verstehen “laws”— Gresham’s “Law,” for example. Such principles are formed from observation and represent the typical chances that, given the existence of particular cir-cumstances, we might expect a certain pattern of social action that can in turn be understood in terms of the typical motives and typical intentions of the actor.

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