Note: the following has been abstracted from the Grolier Encyclopedia.

Sociology

Sociology is often described as the study of human social relations or group life or as the science of society. Such descriptions convey very little, for other disciplines within the social sciences--including economics, political science, and much of anthropology and even of history--are also concerned with social life, and the focus of each also falls within the scope of human society. Unlike sociology, however, these other disciplines are each unmistakably linked to a particular aspect of human activity; economics, for example, is concerned with buying and selling; political science, with government; and anthropology, largely with early humankind and with present-day preliterate peoples. The field of sociology, on the other hand, seems to lay claim almost to the whole of human life beyond the biological level because virtually all human activities possess a social aspect--sociology is perhaps best viewed as a broad perspective on human activities that differs from the particular viewpoints from which such activities are perceived by direct participants or by students of other social scientific disciplines.

The Sociological Perspective

In analyzing and theorizing about the social aspects of human activity, sociologists have developed a number of important concepts. The most comprehensive of these concepts are the sociological definitions of society and culture. Sociologists use the term society to refer to all the social relations and groups formed by human beings; a society, as a singular unit, refers to members of a particular population occupying a particular territory.

The term culture refers to all ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that people learn from others as members of society (not only to so-called higher aesthetic activities). Culture includes nonsocial skills, such as how to plant crops, drive a car, play the violin, and so on. Apart from the social relationships in which they are taught and learned, such activities are not of primary concern to the sociologist; they are instead studied by the cultural anthropologist, who may take the entire culture of a society, from marriage customs to magic, as a field of inquiry.

Major Concepts

Social interaction, or the mutual responses of two or more individuals, is perhaps the most basic sociological concept, for such interaction is the elementary component of all the relationships and groups constituting human society. Sociologists who concentrate on the details of particular interactions as they manifest themselves in everyday life are sometimes called micro-sociologists, whereas those concerned with the broader pattern of relations among large organizations, such as those composing the state and the economy, and even among entire societies, are called macro- sociologists. Thus some sociologists study how people avoid bumping into each other on the street or how they open and close telephone conversations, whereas other sociologists study world-systems, or the entire range of economic, political, and other interdependencies among all peoples on Earth (except for a few remaining isolated tribal groups). Most sociologists, however, study social phenomena falling somewhere between these two extremes.

Human interaction both creates and is governed by social norms, which are rules or imagined models of conduct present in people's consciousness that guide and control their interactions. Social norms are the part of culture learned by members of a society that is of special concern to sociologists. The laws of the state make up one kind of social norm but by no means the only kind; folkways, etiquette, rituals, and fashion are also social norms, although not embodied in legal statutes. Not all norms apply to every member of society, for individuals differ in the parts they play in interaction with others. When these different parts become expectations to which people feel an obligation to conform, they are called social roles, which are clusters of norms and expectations that apply to different classes of persons. Examples of social roles in various societies include those of son, wife, priest, beggar, aristocrat, sales clerk, old man, and warrior.

A social group is a plurality of individuals in recurring interaction, their interactions controlled by common norms and differentiated roles. The members of a group are at least partially aware of their membership and perceive the group as a coherent, fairly permanent entity. Groups may vary in size from two or three friends who lunch together to thousands of people, not all of whom are personally acquainted. Any recurring pattern of interaction among individuals playing different roles may be said to possess or to constitute a social structure. One may therefore speak of the social structure of the American middle-class family, of a nonliterate tribe, of General Motors or Harvard University, of a juvenile gang, or even of American society as a whole. The study of such structures of interlinked roles and groups differentiates sociology proper from social psychology, the study of the impact of norms, roles, and groups on the individual personality.

Sociological concepts range from universal concepts applicable to all societies, such as those just described, to more historically specific concepts, relevant only to some societies in particular times and places, such as the city, bureaucracy, or social class. The sociological perspective brings both kinds of concepts to bear on human activities. The concepts reviewed here amount to a minimum standard vocabulary shared by sociologists. The discipline has expanded in so many different directions, however, creating specialties and subfields employing such a variety of research methods and theoretical approaches, that heterogeneity rather than a single coherent point of view has become its outstanding characteristic.

Subfields

Many of the major subfields of sociology involve the naming of a recognized area of human activity preceded by the phrase "the sociology of." Established fields of teaching and research include sociologies of politics, law, religion, education, industry, art, language, science, medicine, and the city (called urban sociology). The sociologies of some of these areas have been more highly developed than others; some have yet to achieve full recognition as subfields with courses, textbooks, readers, and sometimes journals specifically devoted to them.

Sociologists also study some social phenomena that are not the subjects of any other scholarly discipline; these include marriage and the family; crime and deviance; social inequality and stratification; ethnic and racial relations; population growth and its determinants; social gerontology; and the sociology of sex, or gender, differences. several of these subfields have a history older than sociology itself. Criminology and demography have both become virtually autonomous specialties within sociology, especially in the United States. Criminology has been penetrated by more-general sociological concerns and has tended to become part of the broader study of all kinds of deviant behavior, including those not involving violations of the law. In demography the study of fertility and of migration has been greatly influenced by sociological ideas, but the analysis of mortality and the application of mathematical models to population growth and change are more closely tied to other disciplines.

Sociologists are also active in some subfields that are fully interdisciplinary. The oldest and most important of these subfields is social psychology, which is virtually a separate discipline in its own right, drawing practitioners from both sociology and psychology. Sociological social psychologists have pioneered in the study of interaction in small informal groups; the distribution of beliefs and attitudes in a population, often called public opinion; and how individual personality is shaped through the experience of socialization, or the formation of character and outlook under the influence of the family, the school, the peer group, and other socializing agencies. Psychoanalytic ideas derived from Sigmund Freud and later psychoanalysts have been particularly influential in this last field of social psychology.

A newer interdisciplinary subfield is sociobiology, which investigates the causal relations between the human genetic constitution and social behavior. Named by the Harvard University entomologist Edward O. Wilson, sociobiology has attracted a small but vigorous number of sociologists, although it has been assailed by others as a revival of post-Darwinian biological determinism, the rejection of which played a major role in the development of early-20th-century Anglo-American sociology.

Methods

Sociologists make use of nearly all the methods used in the other social sciences and the humanities, from advanced mathematical statistics to the interpretation of texts. Quantitative methods, increasingly refined and adapted to computer technology, continue to play a central role in the discipline, tending to predominate, at least in the United States, in the research reported in sociology journals. Quantitative research draws data from a variety of sources: official statistics, such as those contained in censuses and in reports on crime or unemployment made by government agencies; opinion and attitude surveys based on questionnaires submitted to large samples of people; and computer simulations of social processes.

Qualitative methods range from ethnographic fieldwork to documentary historical research. Such methods, especially direct social observation at the level of everyday life and the interpretative (or hermeneutical) understanding of the meaning of any and all human productions, have been preferred by sociological followers of various newly influential philosophies of human action, including phenomenology, existentialism, neo-Hegelian Marxism, post-Wittgensteinian linguistic analysis, and structuralism. These approaches, except perhaps the last, have given priority to the methods of everyday experience and of ordinary language over the quantitative measurement of human conduct and the elaboration of highly abstract conceptual schemes still favored by many sociologists.

History Of Sociology

Origins in Europe

The concept of "civil society" as a realm distinct from the state--as expressed in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and later political thinkers of the Enlightenment-- anticipated the subsequent focus of sociology, as did the philosophies of history of the Italian Giambattista Vico and the German G. W. F. Hegel with regard to the study of social change. The first definition of sociology was put forth by the French philosopher Auguste Comte. In 1838, Comte coined the term sociology to describe his vision of a new science that would discover laws of human society resembling the laws of nature by applying the methods of strictly factual investigation that had proved so successful in the physical sciences. The philosopher Herbert Spencer in England soon took up both Comte's term and his mission.

Several near-contemporaries of Comte and Spencer who never called themselves sociologists are today also counted as founding fathers of the discipline. Karl Marx is the most important among them, but their number also includes Henri de Saint-Simon, Alexis de Tocqueville, and to some extent John Stuart Mill. These men were largely speculative thinkers, although a quite different tradition of empirical, chiefly quantitative reporting of social facts also developed in the 19th century. This empirical tradition later became incorporated into academic sociology.

Not until the 1880s and '90s did sociology begin to be recognized as an academic subject. In France, Emile Durkheim, the intellectual heir of Comte, taught sociology at the universities of Bordeaux and Paris and founded the first real school of sociological thought. In Germany, not until the first decade of the 20th century was sociology recognized as an academic discipline, largely owing to the efforts of Max Weber. German sociology, in contrast to the attempt to model the field after the physical sciences dominant in France and the English- speaking countries, was in large part an outgrowth of far- ranging historical scholarship; of a dialogue with Marxism; and of the human-centered focus of German philosophical idealism. The first two emphases were central to Weber's work, and the last predominated in the efforts of Georg Simmel to define sociology as a distinctive discipline.

Emergence in the United States

It was in North America that sociology embedded its deepest roots, originally under the influence of Herbert Spencer's efforts to apply the Darwinian idea of evolution to human society. One of the key American Spencerians was William Graham Sumner, who is believed to have taught the first course in sociology at Yale University as early as 1875. The first sociology professorship on the Eastern seaboard was held (1906) by Lester Ward (1841-1913), a more critical Spencerian, at Brown University, although the first department of sociology had earlier been established (1893) at the University of Chicago. Following the emergence of a coherent Chicago school after World War I, that city remained the center of American sociology until the 1940s.

Despite its European origins, sociology during the first half of the 20th century became primarily an American subject. After the decline of broad evolutionist theories in the Comtean and Spencerian mode, American sociology grew heavily empirical, quantitative, and oriented to the study of particular social problems, such as crime, marital discord, and the acculturation of immigrants. An exception was the influence at Chicago of George Herbert Mead, a pragmatist philosopher who had studied in Germany and whose stress on the roots of mind, self, and society in linguistic communication gave rise to an approach named symbolic interactionism by the sociologist Herbert Blumer (1900-87), one of Mead's students. This approach was largely social psychological and microsociological in emphasis. The most eminent sociologist influenced by it was Erving Goffman, although his individual style and choice of subject defy identification with any school.

In the 1930s, Talcott Parsons of Harvard University introduced the ideas of the European sociologists Durkheim, Weber, and Vilfredo Pareto in a major work (The Structure of Social Action, 1937) that singlehandedly overcame the parochialism of American sociology. Leadership in sociology under the stewardship of such theorists as Parsons and Russian-born Pitirim A. Sorokin for a time passed to Harvard and on to Columbia University. There a student of Parsons, Robert K. Merton, attempted to unite theory, or at least what he called "middle-range theory," with empirical research. He was aided in this effort by the quantitatively skilled Austrian-born sociologist Paul F. Lazarsfeld. Another Columbia sociologist, C. Wright Mills, brought the ideas of Weber and European Marxism to bear on his overall historical analysis of American society. At Harvard, Parsons constructed an elaborate theoretical system that attempted to account for virtually everything in human society. In the 1960s he was assailed by Mills and others, including a new generation of academic Marxists, for his allegedly conservative bias reflected in his relative neglect of group conflict, social change, and the role of power in society.

Later Developments

In the 1970s the currents of theoretical influence began once again to flow in a westward direction out of Europe. Jurgen Habermas, the heir of Germany's Frankfurt school of neo- Marxism, emerged as a master synthesizer, the role Parsons had played in the first postwar decades. French neo-Marxist structuralism also became an influence. In addition, a number of highly sophisticated younger British sociologists, of whom Anthony Giddens and Steven Lukes are among the best known, combined British analytic philosophy with the themes of both European and American micro- and macrosociology. New versions of symbolic interactionism, systems theory (formerly called structural-functionalism), and phenomenology (especially a school originating in California called ethnomethodology) also flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. At the level of theory as well as of method and subject matter, sociology has become a house of many mansions with no single school of thought, nation, university, or topic holding clear ascendancy.