Sociology - What Is Sociology? | Society & Culture

 

 What Is Sociology?

Sociology is the systematic study of society and social interaction, according to a dictionary. The words "sociology" and "logos," which together imply "reasoned conversation about companionship," are derived from the Latin term socius, which means companion, and the Greek word logos, which means speech or reason. How can the feeling of company or togetherness be described or put into words? Although this is the discipline's starting point, sociology is actually a lot more complicated. It explores a variety of topics using a variety of methodologies and then applies what it learns to the real world.

The social, according to sociologist Dorothy Smith (1926–), is "ongoing concerting and coordinating of persons' activities" (Smith 1999). The systematic study of all facets of life referred to as "social" is known as sociology. These facets of social life are always the result of planned processes. The shortest of daily contacts, like swerving to the right to let someone pass on a busy sidewalk, for example, or the longest-lasting interactions, like the trillions of daily transactions that make up the global capitalist system. Even in the solitude of one's thoughts, if there are at least two participants, there is social interaction, which involves "ongoing concerting and coordinating of activity."

Why did the person cross the sidewalk to the right? How did it come to be accepted as usual for people to move to the right as opposed to the left? Consider the t-shirts you have in your home drawer. What social networks and linkages connect the T-shirts in your dresser to the hazardous and highly exploitative textile factories in rural China or Bangladesh? These are the kinds of inquiries that highlight the particular domain and societal conundrums that sociology aims to investigate and comprehend.

What Are Society and Culture?

Sociologists study all aspects and levels of society. A society is a group of people whose members interact, reside in a definable area, and share a culture. Culture includes the group’s shared practices, values, beliefs, norms, and artifacts. One sociologist might analyze videos of people from different societies as they carry on everyday conversations to study the rules of polite conversation from different world cultures. Another sociologist might interview a representative sample of people to see how email and instant messaging have changed the way organizations are run. Yet another sociologist might study how migration determined the way in which language spread and changed over time. A fourth sociologist might study the history of international agencies like the United Nations or the International Monetary Fund to examine how the globe became divided into a First World and a Third World after the end of the colonial era.

In order to understand how the world was divided into a First World and a Third World following the end of the colonial era, a fourth sociologist can research the past of international organizations like the United Nations or the International Monetary Fund.

These examples demonstrate the various levels of analysis that can be used to examine society and culture, from the close observation of interpersonal interactions to the investigation of broad historical trends influencing entire civilizations. Based on the magnitude of the interactions involved, it is typical to divide these levels of study into various gradations. Sociologists divide the study of society into four distinct levels of analysis: micro, meso, macro, and global, as will be covered in the following chapters. But the fundamental distinction is between macro- and micro-sociology.

Micro-sociology includes the study of social norms governing appropriate conversational behavior. The social dynamics of personal, in-person encounters are the main topic of study at the micro-level of research. Research is done with a particular group of people, such as friends, family members, coworkers, or discussion partners. Sociologists might investigate, using the conversation study as an example, how individuals from various cultural backgrounds interpret one another's actions to observe how various cultural norms of decency result in misunderstandings. Sociologists may be able to suggest some generalizations regarding politeness rules that would be beneficial in easing tensions in mixed-group dynamics if the same misunderstandings continually appear in a variety of different interactions (e.g., during staff meetings or international negotiations).

Seeing how informal networks become a crucial source of assistance and development in official institutions or how an allegiance to criminal gangs is created are two further instances of micro-level study.

The focus of macro sociology is on the characteristics of large-scale, societal-wide social interactions, such as the movements of institutions, classes, or entire societies. The example of how migration affects language usage patterns above is a macro-level phenomenon since it refers to social interaction structures or processes that take place outside or outside the personal circle of specific social acquaintances.

These include the social, political, and economic factors that influence migration; the educational, media, and other communication frameworks that facilitate or impede the spread of speech patterns; the class, racial, and ethnic divisions that give rise to various slang terms and linguistic cultures; the relative segregation or integration of various communities within a population; and so forth. Examining the reasons why women are much less likely than men to hold positions of authority in society or why fundamentalist Christian religious movements are more prevalent in American politics than they are in Canadian politics are two other instances of macro-level studies.

In each instance, the focus of the analysis moves from the subtleties and specifics of micro-level interpersonal interactions to the larger, macro-level systematic patterns that frame social change and social cohesion in society.

One of the fundamental issues facing sociology is the connection between the micro and the macro. However, macro-level processes have their own characteristics that would be missed if sociologists only focused on the interactions of particular individuals, as noted by the German sociologist Georg Simmel in his observation that macro-level processes are in fact nothing more than the sum of all the distinct interactions between particular individuals at any given time (1908).

A prime example is Émile Durkheim's influential study on suicide from 1897. Suicide is among the most private, private, and intimate acts imaginable, but Durkheim showed that rates of suicide varied between religious groups—Protestants, Catholics, and Jews—in a way that could not be explained by the particular variables at play in any particular case. The various religious practices and macro-level factors connected to them had to be used to account for the disparate suicide rates. We'll come back to this illustration in more detail later. On the other hand, while providing the common background for daily life, macro-level phenomena like class hierarchies, institutional organizations, legal systems, gender stereotypes, and urban modes of living can not adequately explain their complexities and micro-variations. 

The close circles in which we travel are constrained by macro-level systems, yet they are also filtered by localized perceptions and "lived" in a variety of innovative and unanticipated ways.