How Sociologists View Society?
The experiences of individuals and how they are influenced by interactions with social groups and society at large are of interest to all sociologists. A sociologist believes that no one's personal choices are made in a vacuum. People are influenced by social norms and cultural traditions to make certain decisions over others. By analyzing the behavior of sizable populations of individuals who share the same society and are subject to the same social influences, sociologists attempt to identify these broad patterns.
One of the most challenging sociological issues, though, is figuring out how people fit within society. This is partially due to the reified usage of these two names in common speech. Reification describes the process through which ambiguous social ties, intricate processes, or abstract notions come to be perceived as "things." One of the best instances of this is when someone claims that "society" caused them to do something or develop in a certain way. First-year sociology students occasionally use the word "society" in their writings to describe an entity with independent agency or as a cause of social conduct.
The "individual," on the other hand, is a being that appears to be substantial, palpable, and unaffected by anything occurring outside of the skin sack that houses its essence. Insofar as a society and the person appear to be separate objects, the traditional separation between the two is a reified creation. It has been decided that concepts of "the individual" and "society" are actual, solid, and autonomous objects. Society and the person are not objects nor are they independent of one another, as we will learn in the next chapters. Without the relationships to others that determine his or her interior subjective life and their external socially defined roles, an "individual" is impossible.
The issue for sociologists is that these ideas about the self, society, and their interrelationship are conceptualized in terms defined by a very prevalent moral framework in contemporary democratic nations, namely that of personal accountability and autonomy. In this paradigm, it's common to disregard any suggestions that a person's behavior should be interpreted in terms of their social setting as "letting the person off" from accepting personal responsibility for their acts.
Talking about society is equivalent to having a lax or permissive moral code. As a social science, sociology maintains its objectivity on these kinds of moral issues. It is significantly more difficult to conceptualize the individual and society. The challenge for sociologists is to be able to see people as fully social beings who also have agency and freedom of choice. People are beings who do assume individual obligations in their regular social roles and face societal repercussions if they don't fulfil them. However, the way people assume responsibility—and occasionally the pressure to do so—is socially determined.
The challenge for sociologists is to comprehend society as a dimension of experience with predictable and routine behavioural patterns that exist regardless of any given person's goals or sense of self. A society, however, is nothing more than the continual social interactions and behaviours of certain people.
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