sociology

(sō'sē-ŏl'ə-jē, -shē-)

1. The study of human social behavior, especially the study of the origins, organization, institutions, and development of human society.
2. Analysis of a social institution or societal segment as a self-contained entity or in relation to society as a whole.

[French sociologie : socio-, socio- + -logie, study (from Greek -logiā; see -logy).]

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The human body has always been central to sociology because sociology is about the organization of collections of human bodies into forms of social life. Sociologists have also always been concerned with the question of the boundary between the biological and the social in the formation of human identity; the so-called nature/nurture controversy. But until the late 1970s the body as the physical expression or embodiment of human identity, personal experience, and action was largely ignored by sociologists, who concentrated on the structuring of groups and societies. Against this background it is generally agreed that the recent specific interest in the sociology of the body has developed for three main reasons.

Modernity and the body

Firstly, there is the series of complex social and cultural changes associated with the rise of modernity. Modernity has a long history, but amongst the most significant social processes identified with rapid socio-economic and technical change since the nineteenth century, is the emergence of consumer culture. The marketing and consumption of mass-produced consumer goods involves an unprecedented exploitation of visual images of the body, ranging from photography and the cinema to computer-mediated forms of communication. Linked with innovations in processes of mass communication, consumer culture encourages the cultivation of individualized lifestyles in which bodily and self-display play a prominent part. An easy test of the extent of this influence on everyday life is to make a rough count of the images of human bodies in various states of dress encountered during the course of an ordinary day and then add to these the number of mirrors and other surfaces reflecting one's own face and physical appearance. This account can then be compared with an estimate of such images one would have been likely to see before the end of the nineteenth century, especially images of one's own face and body.

The proliferation of images of the body is a significant aspect of the growth of individualism — the high value given to the private individual or person — which is regarded by sociologists as a key feature of modernity. Modernity has been equated with the shift from the social to the individual person who spends increasing amounts of time cultivating personal identity through the cultivation of the body. A good example is the growth in regimes for body modification, including gymnasia, leisure and keep fit centres, and health farms; also the expanding selection of magazines, newspaper articles, and TV programmes designed to encourage body-consciousness and self-expression. It is argued that a key reason underlying this change is the transition from traditional to modern forms of human association, where the links between human beings are no longer established by the rules of traditional community life. Rather, they have been replaced with those based upon agreements and contracts made between people who regard themselves as private individuals operating in a free market. In this situation the individuals are dependent upon their own resources, including those of the body; the competent self requires a functioning body which is capable of sustained activity and of responding to the demands of rapid and risky social change. The move from traditional forms of social and economic organization to ‘late modern’ societies is therefore seen as one requiring a flexible embodied self whose identity is much less stable than perhaps was the case in the past. The result is an increasing tendency to regard the nature of the body not as fixed, but as highly flexible and open to social construction/reconstruction through various techniques of body- and therefore self-modification. Another good example is the rising demand for cosmetic surgery, a reflection of the current value placed upon the interdependence of body and self, and of the importance of embodied self-expression in an individualized social world.

Feminism and the body

The second major influence on the emergence of sociological interest in the body is the feminist movement. From the 1970s feminist scholarship has played an important part in bringing the body back into sociology. The traditional concern of feminists with the exclusion of women from the public sphere is expressed in sociology as a major critical attack on their neglect by male sociologists, who have taken ‘man’, and especially ‘public man’, as the model for the whole of ‘humanity’. Feminists argue that the equation ‘man’ = society stems from a neglect of the personal and social lives of women. This arises from assumptions about the nature of biological differences between the bodies of men and women and their influence on the roles they should play in society. At the heart of this issue is the recurring question of biology and society: to what extent are the differences between male and female bodies biologically determined, or socially and culturally constructed? Whilst biological differences in the reproductive functions of men and women are clearly evident the question remains of the social interpretations placed upon this difference and the ways in which perceptions of these differences influence forms of social discrimination between the genders.

One typical area is the matter of gender differences in the ageing process. Because their bodies are biologically programmed for conception and childbirth, women undergo a number of changes called the menopause, with the cessation of the ability to produce children. With the apparent exception of a few unusual cases, this process of biological change is unknown in men. That much is generally agreed but, as feminist scholars argue, the fact of this bodily change is no justification for the elaborate construction of personal and social distinctions between middle-aged men and women which characterize social stereotypes of ‘menopausal women’. In fact menopausal changes are highly variable and there are good reasons to believe that the severity of these physical effects is widely exaggerated. Yet the menopause is also widely stereotyped as a troublesome period for women.

The major contribution of feminists to the sociology of the body has been to challenge the belief that the biology of the body is the bottom line and to show how the meanings given to the body are socially constructed by those who are in a position to create ideas about the body and put them into practice. In this area many sociologists have been influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, who regards the body as the subject of power and discipline, especially the power and disciplined knowledge of the expert. Partly because power and the exercise of power has always been a central concern for sociologists, Foucault's theoretical and historical analyses of body discipline have formed the basis for much contemporary empirical research on the body, including sexuality, health education, doctor- patient relationships, mental illness, the social organization of hospitals, dentistry, geriatric medicine, and crime and punishment. In this work sociologists are principally concerned to show how experts such as medical investigators do not simply discover the biological secrets of the body, which are somehow waiting there to be observed, but also actively construct ways of perceiving the body and giving meaning to it; observations of the body, even using the most advanced technology, are influenced by the ideas and beliefs of the day. According to Foucault, experts in sexology during the nineteenth century were instrumental in creating a whole new range of sexual experiences and behaviour through their prescriptions of what could be defined as ‘normal’ sexual practice. Their ‘discoveries’ of new sexual deviations and ‘perversions’ had the unintended effect of extending the repertoire of sexual behaviour and producing new forms of social problems for experts to resolve. Similarly, geriatric medicine, also an invention of the nineteenth century, can be seen sociologically as an attempt to determine the nature of the ageing body by constructing categories of distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ ageing processes. This development is a crucial part of the process whereby members of the medical profession lay claims to certain forms of expertise and therefore the power to discriminate between older people. The point is not that there is no such thing as biological sex or the biologically ageing body but that our perceptions and understanding of them are shaped by the practical social activities of those who wish to set themselves up as experts working within specific professional fields.

The civilizing process and the body

In the sociology of the body all roads ultimately lead to contemporary versions of the old nature/nurture debate — the question of the boundaries between the biological, the social, and the psychological. Another key influence here is the German sociologist Norbert Elias (1897-1990), for whom it is a waste of time and intellectual effort to assess the relative contributions of biology, society, and psychology to the causes of any human behaviour. His argument, based on detailed studies of the history of human violence, bodily functions (sexual activity, eating habits, excretion), and the emotions, is that over a long period of time these three have become indivisible. Although human behaviour is inevitably grounded in biology and we cannot escape the material limitations of our bodies, this basic physical potential is overlaid by the long-term cultural transformations that Elias calls ‘the civilizing process’.

The civilizing process is characterized by the gradual domination of learned over instinctual experience, a process he describes as ‘symbol emancipation’. Through the long history of the species, human beings have gradually become distanced, by the accumulation of a vast cultural heritage, from their basic instinctual drives and biological urges: human beings survive because of their innate capacity for learned behaviour. Whilst therefore human societies are composed of bodies these are collections of the bodies of individuals who have learned from a vast inherited cultural repertoire the importance of exercising control over their bodies and who are subject to the often self-imposed restraints of guilt, shame, and embarrassment. One consequence of this long-term process is the emergence of the disciplined individual, who through self and bodily discipline is able to establish collaborative relationships with other people, many of whom, in the modern world, will be strangers. The civilized individual is slow to anger and emotionally calculating, exercising a high degree of discipline over bodily functions such as eating, excretion, and sexual activity. The civilized individual has a strong sense of the boundaries prescribed by good manners and etiquette between one human body and another and the subtle distinctions between public and private space. The civilized individual is the citizen of the modern world.

Body and self

If at the present moment a generalization about the sociological analysis of the human body can be made, it is that recent work is marked by an increasingly sophisticated and theoretically complex rejection of crude attempts to reduce the body to a biological mechanism. In particular, the dualistic or binary approach — inherited from Descartes, who separated the mind from the body — is regarded at worst as totally unacceptable and at best as an issue for further enquiry and research. The idea of the self (or soul) having a separate existence within the body is seen by many sociologists to be indefensible at a time when science and technology are transforming human beings into part biology and part machine. The emergence of ‘cyborg culture’ raises urgent questions about what it is to be a human body, when increasingly our bodies are invaded by surgical techniques, and deficient organs are replaced or given mechanical substitutes. One hope for those who regard the ageing of the population as a major social problem is in the prospect of advances in ‘young’ laboratory-grown replacement tissues and organs to replace the ‘aged’ in the bodies of older people. Similarly developments in genetic science hold out hope for the discovery of the ageing gene and the abolition of old age.

Technology as culture frees the body from biology, because it enables humans to modify their bodies, both in their external appearance and in their inner structures and functions. A concern with modern identities has resulted in much closer enquiry into the emergence of individuality and self-consciousness in late modern forms of social organization, where technology and consumer culture have produced a significant change in the relationship between the social, the cultural, and the biological. Yet at the same time, as many sociologists indicate, the spectre of the death of the body continues to haunt the modern world. The ageing of the population on a global scale is, therefore, a final reason for the increasing interest in the sociology of the body. In modern societies old age takes us to the limits of the increasingly blurring boundary between the biological and the social: old age becomes in a very real sense the final problem. For another twentieth-century German sociologist, Zigmunt Bauman, modern societies conceal death because death conflicts with the continual process of making and re-making the self, which is central to modernity. Selfhood is grounded in consciousness of one's own bodily processes and the belief in science, yet the desire of human beings for complete control over their lives and destinies exists uneasily alongside an increasing awareness of the limitations of scientific knowledge and of the risks it entails.

If the self and the body form a culturally integrated whole and the self is essentially embodied — has no existence outside the body — then problems arise when the body begins to decline or is disabled. For some sociologists the future lies in the disembodied world of ‘cyberspace’, where the electronic media liberate individuals from the encumbrance of the body, a development which is seen as potentially beneficial for those excluded from normal social interaction through bodily impairment and disability. But the reference point of individual identity, even in cyberspace, is still the human body, and in the last analysis images have to be related to embodiment as it is experienced, if they are to influence practical human relationships and shape the quality of the experience of everyday life.

— Mike Hepworth

Bibliography

• Shilling, C. (1993). The body and social theory. Sage, London.
• Turner, B. S. (1996). The body and society, (2nd edn). London

See also ageing; feminism; leisure; philosophy and the body; work and the body.

Sociology as a discipline developed from theoretical writings of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. The predominant theories stem from the work of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton, and James Coleman. The influence of this rich theoretical foundation has manifested itself in major debates over the role of sociology as a science. European and American perspectives on sociology as a science differ, with the American perspective favoring sociology as a scientific discipline and emphasizing a more quantitative methodological approach than the European approach.

Key Concepts in Sociology

Several key concepts in sociology relate to its role in public health. Foremost is the emphasis on society rather than the individual. The individual is viewed as an actor within larger social processes. This distinguishes the field from psychology. The emphasis is on units of analysis at the collective level, such as the family, the group, the neighborhood, the city, the organization, the state, and the world. Of key importance is how the social fabric, or social structure, is maintained, and how social processes, such as conflict and resolution, relate to the maintenance and change of social structures. A sociologist studies processes that create, maintain, and sustain a social system, such as a health care system in a particular country. The scientific component of this study would be the concern with the processes regulating and shaping the health care system. Sociology assumes that social structure and social processes are very complex. Therefore its methodology is appropriately complex and often, particularly in American sociology, dominated by multivariate statistical methods of analysis. The advent of the computer in the second half of the twentieth century presented the field with the opportunity to work with very large bodies of data and complex variables.

Medical Sociology

Earlier social theorists, such as those noted above, did write on subjects of concern to medicine, health, and illness, but medical sociology, as a subdiscipline of sociology, developed in the post-World War II period. Early debates in medical sociology were concerned with the role of sociology as it relates to medicine: Should the field be critical and analytical, concerning itself with the sociology of medicine (i.e., examining how medicine works); or should it be largely applied, focusing on sociology as a handmaiden for medicine? Like many such formative debates, there could be no conclusive answer. However, the field has developed into two groups: those (largely within academic settings) which focus on the sociology of medicine; and those (primarily in schools of public health and governmental institutions) which focus on the application of sociology to medicine. Later debates related to whether the focus should be on health sociology or medical sociology. This debate has moved the field to a broader, more ecological, view of medicine and health.

Sociology in Public Health

Public health has been and remains a very applied field. It is also characterized by a population-based approach to health, and statistical methods are deemed the appropriate underlying method for the field. It is viewed as a science that seeks to intervene, control, and prevent large-scale processes that negatively affect the public's health. By these criteria, there is a strong logical fit of sociological principles and practices within public health. Nonetheless, sociology has not been the key social science discipline in public health. That position has gone to psychology, where the emphasis on individual behavior resonates more with a biomedical model. Despite this, many of the primary concerns of present-day public health, with large-scale variables such as social capital, social inequality, social status, and health care organization and financing, remain topics best suited to the sociological perspective and methodology. The emphasis in public health is thus shifting toward a sociological perspective.

Sociological Concepts in Public Health

Sociology in public health is reflected in the myriad of sociological concepts that pervade the practice of public health. More than any other social science, sociology has the discussion of socioeconomic status at its very core. Social-class variation within society is the key explanatory variable in sociology—for everything from variation in social structure to differential life experiences of health and illness. Indeed, there appears to be overwhelming evidence that Western industrialized societies that have little variation in social class experience have far better health outcomes than societies characterized by wide social-class dispersion. In short, inequalities in health are directly related to social and economic inequalities. Much of later-twentieth-century public health is devoted to the reduction of these inequalities.

Sociological Methods in Public Health

Methodological concerns are critical to sociological research. The great debate in sociology has been on the relative merits and role of quantitative versus qualitative approaches. Both approaches are widely used and play a critical role for public health. Sociology has long recognized that the social world comprises both an objective and a subjective reality. For example, the objective reality of having cancer is accompanied by the subjective reality of the experience of cancer by the patient, and the patient's family and friends. Both realities are relevant to the sociological approach. The subjective, qualitative approach is generally discussed in the theory and methods concerned with illness behavior, but qualitative approaches are equally applicable to the understanding of social policy, world systems, and areas of sociology where statistical measurement is difficult or less relevant.

Within public health, surveillance is seen as a key approach to describing the distribution and dynamics of disease. In sociological approaches to public health, the role of social and behavioral factors in health and illness is central. Survey methodology has occupied a central place in sociological research since the middle of the twentieth century. The concern has been with the collection, management, analysis, interpretation, and use of large quantities of data obtained by direct interview with respondents. Social surveys are characterized by large random samples, complicated questionnaires, and the use of multivariate statistics for analysis. By their very nature, most sociological variables are complex to measure and to analyze. For example, the assessment of socioeconomic status of an individual requires the accurate measurement of several variables that sit within a larger social context. Socioeconomic status (SES) is regarded as a product of several components, including income, residence, education, and occupation. Determining the relative weight of each of these components is a major analytical problem. Thus, when considering the role of socioeconomic status on health care outcomes, there is no easy answer to what mechanism actually works to determine the observed relationship between SES and health.

Sociology and Evaluation in Public Health

Because many sociological variables are at the socalled macro level, there is limited opportunity to intervene rapidly, directly, or simply. For example, the SES of a group is affected by complex components, such as education and occupation, that are part of the total life course of individuals within the group. Thus, to change the SES of a group would require significant redistribution of resources of the larger social structure. A significant period of time and concerted effort is needed to change such macro variables. This is, however, not dissimilar to many other challenges in public health, such as the long-term and time-consuming effort to change lifestyles and reduce behavioral risk factors related to chronic diseases.

The chief role of sociology in public health remains its evaluation of those macro components of society that affect public health at the population level. Such evaluations provide an understanding of why inequalities in health exist, and they help elaborate upon the mechanisms and processes that sustain these inequalities. This relates to the long-standing theoretical concern with social structure among sociologists. Further, sociology reveals the mechanisms for long-term changes that may lead to a reduction in health inequalities. The product of sociological thinking in public health is not immediate nor easily understood by those who seek quick and easy solutions to the suffering of humanity. Nonetheless, the long-term role of sociology in public health is to change and improve the public health.

(SEE ALSO: Community Health; Medical Sociology; Psychology, Health; Social Determinants; Social Health)

Bibliography

Cockerham, W. C. (2000). Medical Sociology, 8th edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Coleman, J. S. (1994). Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Durkheim, E. (1982). The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: Free Press.

Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. New York: Vintage Books.

Merton, R. K. (1957). Social Theory and Social Structure. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Parsons, T. (1951). The Social System. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Weber, M. (1958). From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.

— DAVID V. MCQUEEN

The study of societies; both the description of social phenomena and the evolution of a conceptual scheme for these phenomena. Different strands may be recognized: curiosity about how a society hangs together, theories of social evolution, and the interpretation of these theories.

The study of every aspect and type of society in a scientific way. It encompasses elements of the other social sciences, but views society in a holistic way. That is, sociology does not separate a study of society into areas such as history, economics, or politics, but sees how all these aspects relate to one another.

While the discipline of sociology had its roots in nineteenth-century Europe, it enjoyed its greatest success in the United States during the academic golden age of the mid-twentieth century. Making a science of society was a distinctly modern exercise. Not only did it depend on a modern concept of empirical, experimental science, but it also presupposed "society" as a new object of study. How was one to name, classify, and analyze the forms of human experience in the aggregate—that is, if one sought to discern an aggregate form beyond relations of kin and distinguished from the apparatus of formal government? A kind of age-old ethnography had long enabled observers to comment on the traits of different peoples, usually by remarking on the exotic look and habits of aliens. Also, the idea of large cultural units or civilizations, usually wedded to imperial domains or great religions, such as Christendom, had a long history. Far less developed was the concept of an order to human relations apart from family, state, ethnicity, or belief that might become the basis for a comparative anatomy of differing communities. Modern notions of "economy" and "society" emerged to name such an order, as European colonial expansion, political revolution, and industrialization stirred consciousness of great change and variation in the form human relations could take. From the Scottish Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century to the universities of Wilhelmine Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century, the terms of economy and society were conjoined and contrasted in various ways. In large part, sociology matured as the second term became clearly differentiated from the first. Surprisingly, it was in the United States, where individualism and the pursuit of wealth seemed to reign supreme, that sociology as a study of the collective, noneconomic forms of human life found its most secure home.

The First Sociologists

Although historians cite the beginning of modern social sciences in the work of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the focus in his masterwork Leviathan (1651) on the formation and authority of the state denies him the title of the "first sociologist," which has been bestowed instead on the Scottish writer Adam Ferguson (1723–1816). Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) countered Hobbes in asserting that social sentiments—that is, desires to associate with others due to a dislike of solitude, sympathy with one's fellows and a desire for their esteem, or simple habit—were indeed as "natural" to individuals as their self-regarding appetites. Yet it was the French polymath Auguste Comte (1798–1857) who first used the term "sociology," in 1839 as part of his Course of Positive Philosophy and elaborated on its meaning in his System of Positive Polity (1851–1854).

Americans generally thought of "society" as the eighteenth-century Scottish writers had, recognizing social sentiments but still putting liberal ideas of individualism, progress, and market relations in the forefront. Comte's sociology was first adopted in the United States in 1854 by two writers venturing a principled defense of southern slavery, George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) in Sociology for the South and Henry Hughes (1829–1862) in Treatise on Sociology. Both of these authors contrasted slave society with "free society," for them virtually an oxymoron. Principles of individualism and equality, they wrote, eroded social organization as such. From Comte they borrowed the notion that "society" constituted a realm in itself, unified by sentiments concerned with the wellbeing of the whole and founded, like a family, on hierarchical norms in which superiors governed and cared for dependents incapable of self-rule. Just as Comte fell into obscurity for several decades after his death in 1857, the work of Fitzhugh and Hughes turned out to be a dead-end once the Civil War and the end of slavery made liberal principles all but universal in American society and culture.

American sociology was reborn in the 1880s under different circumstances and with different premises. When William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) began teaching the subject of sociology at Yale University, he relied on its individualistic British exponent Herbert Spencer (1820– 1903). In this view human evolution naturally led toward a modern world in which individuals were habituated to peaceful practices of exchange while the power of the state and coercive rule steadily declined. Hence, free will was rendered compatible with social order. This utopia of social order modeled on the ideal of a free market carried a decided moral meaning for Sumner, who insisted that self-sufficiency was the greatest obligation the individual bore toward society and that the plight of the pauper was the rightful consequence of dissipation. Sumner was challenged by a career civil servant, Lester Frank Ward (1841–1913), who brought Comtean principles back to the American scene by advocating an active state that nurtured the common welfare. According to Ward's 1883 book Dynamic Sociology, social evolution was to be guided by human intelligence rather than understood in naturalistic terms as a phenomenon impervious to will.

Beginnings of Academic Sociology

These early skirmishes over laissez-faire principles and social reform marked the prologue of institutionalized sociology in the United States. By the beginning of the twentieth century a new generation of intellectuals, coming of age amidst economic instability, industrial strife, and dramatic inequalities of wealth, was ready to combine a reforming spirit with the new repute of science in the emerging research universities. The American Social Science Association (ASSA), founded in 1865, represented an early effort to bring organized intelligence to bear on charitable activities concerned with social problems such as pauperism and crime. In 1885 a group of young American scholars, trained abroad in German universities and eager to see the state bring "social" values to bear on economic affairs, split off from the ASSA to establish the American Economic Association (AEA), the prototype for other specialized professional societies such as the American Political Science Association, founded in 1903. Sociology lagged behind. In 1893 the University of Chicago established the first American chair in sociology, awarded to the social gospel minister Albion Woodbury Small (1854–1926), and under Small's editorship the first issue of the American Journal of Sociology appeared in 1895. Ten years later, at the economists' professional meeting, Small and others founded their own organization, the American Sociological Society, later renamed the American Sociological Association (ASA).

Although these academic circles were composed almost entirely of men, women activists in settlement houses helped pioneer the disciplined study of urban and industrial affairs. The social surveys of immigrant neighborhoods conducted by Jane Addams (1860–1935) and her colleagues at Hull-House provided an early model of community research for the University of Chicago sociologists nearby. A few women devoted to studying social problems managed to forge a place in university life, such as Grace Abbott (1878–1939) and Sophonisba Breckin-ridge (1866–1948), also at the University of Chicago, though they were soon segregated from the male sociologists in a separate school of social work. Elsewhere, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) made a distinctive contribution to the new styles of social research when his book The Philadelphia Negro (1899) demonstrated that "social" conditions, such as poverty and discrimination rather than inbred "racial" traits, accounted for regrettable features of crime and broken families among black slum dwellers.

The reformist mood of early academic social science was, however, quite modest and restrained. The middle-class reformers who entered the new academic social sciences typically recoiled from class struggle and wished instead to foster social peace by ameliorating conditions of deprivation, conflict, and misunderstanding. In any case conservative university administrators and trustees imposed strict limits on advocacy of social change. The prolabor activism of Ward's follower Edward A. Ross (1866–1951) led to Ross's forced resignation from Stanford University in 1900. Other early leaders in the field looked askance at social reform. Franklin Giddings (1855–1931), who assumed a chair in sociology at Columbia University two years after Small's appointment at Chicago, sought instead to frame truly "scientific" means of observation, data collection, and statistical measures for social facts. Nonetheless, Small regarded his Christian ideal of a harmonious society as thoroughly compatible with his aspirations for social science, and he persisted in seeing the discipline as an intimate partner to reformers in the field of social welfare. For years, many colleges in the United States used the term "sociology" for courses dealing with charities and corrections, thus carrying on the tradition of the ASSA.

Sociology Professionalized

A clearer differentiation of sociology from social welfare began in the 1910s and continued into the 1920s. The landmark study by W. I. Thomas (1863–1947) and Florian Znaniecki (1882–1958), The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920), helped establish the characteristic disposition of Chicago's increasingly professionalized department: the study of change in the life of social groups, understood as a process of "social disorganization" (the loss of traditional norms) and "reorganization" (adaptation to modern life) experienced by recent immigrants from rural villages to the industrial city; a focus, informed by the philosophy of George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) and the "social psychology" of Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929), on the individual's subjective interpretation of social situations as it emerged in his or her interactions with others; and consequently a style of urban research founded on participant observation, designed both to achieve empathy with the viewpoints of social actors and to map the terrain on which they encountered others, that is, social structure understood as an ecology of social groups. This approach was codified by the new leaders of Chicago sociology in the 1920s, Robert E. Park (1864–1944) and Ernest Burgess (1886– 1966), commencing a vibrant body of research on city neighborhoods, ethnicity and racial groups, and youth gangs and other phenomena, such as the lives of con men and prostitutes, on the margins of polite society.

As the "Chicago school" matured, another touchstone of American sociology was in the works. The community study Middletown (1929) by Robert S. Lynd (1892–1970) and Helen Merrell Lynd (1896–1982) examined work, family, religion, leisure, and civic life in Muncie, Indiana, under the stress of industrial development, class divisions, and modern transportation and communications. Robert Lynd went on to head the new Social Science Research Council (SSRC), begun with Rockefeller backing in 1923 to fund empirical research and promote scientific development through professional seminars on methodology. Before long, an early sign of government interest in sociology appeared in the publication of Recent Social Trends (1932), the work of a committee impaneled by President Herbert Hoover in the fall of 1929 but funded largely by the Rockefeller Foundation and the SSRC. Tellingly, the President's Research Committee on Social Trends was cochaired by an economist, Wesley C. Mitchell (1874–1948), and a political scientist, Charles E. Merriam (1874–1953), representing the more established social science disciplines. But its research was conducted under the leadership of bona fide sociologists, William F. Ogburn (1886–1959), who earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University and then went to Chicago, and Howard W. Odum (1884–1954), another Columbia graduate, who brought academic sociology to the University of North Carolina. Despite its testimony to public interest in sociological research, however, the committee's report was criticized sharply by other sociologists, who considered its dry record of numerical trends in divorce, urbanization, and rates of technological invention unilluminating and uninspired.

By 1928, ninety-nine American colleges and universities had departments of sociology, five times as many as in 1910, and forty-eight others had departments defined as "economics and sociology." In the next decade, sociology achieved a stronger professional footing despite limited prospects for growth during the Great Depression. The membership of the ASA fell drastically, but those who remained were more strictly academic in orientation. As these scholars chafed under the domination of Chicago's inbred sociology department, they demanded that the organization better represent the profession as a whole. Yet the field lacked the kind of unity and coherence customarily claimed by self-conscious professions, and widespread disagreements flourished on what it meant to build a science of society, as the dispute over Recent Social Trends suggested. A vigorous cohort of Columbia-bred sociologists spread throughout the country and pursued the ideal of an "objective" science of society in terms bequeathed to them by Giddings. Their ideal was based not on Chicago's intimate observation of groups, their interactions and their sentiments, but rather on statistical generalizations about the attributes and preferences of individuals, a project that flourished in time with the help of new techniques drawn from opinion polling and market research. Other competitors for disciplinary leadership included the pugnacious Luther L. Bernard (1881–1951), the advocate of an updated Comtean social realism.

The real problem of sociology, compared to fields like economics and political science, lay in uncertainty over the definition of its essential subject matter. Since the 1890s, sociology had been defined alternatively as a kind of master discipline offering a comprehensive vision of society and incorporating all other specialties or as a "residual" field covering issues and problems not addressed elsewhere, such as crime and family. In hopes of escaping this quandary, some figures in the 1930s renewed the attempt to build sociological theory out of traditions of social philosophy. Giddings's successor at the helm of Columbia's department, Robert MacIver (1882–1979), moved in this direction. So did the young Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) at Harvard University. The fact that neither of these figures had any prior training in established sociology departments showed how much the discipline was still, during the 1930s, a work in progress.

Harvard had taught sociology in association with economic history and philanthropic "social ethics," moving to found its own department only in 1931 under the leadership of Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968), a Russian émigré and author of the compendium Contemporary Sociological Theories (1928). In contrast to Sorokin's urge to classify the many variants of theory that composed the field, Parsons believed that a scientific discipline rightly had only one theory, a founding charter established by the synthesis of tendencies formerly at odds with each other. Parsons had been introduced to the social sciences by disciples of the dissenting economist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) and knew little of Chicago's or Columbia's sociological traditions. In his early masterwork, The Structure of Social Action (1937), Parsons portrayed a dawning convergence among exponents of English, French, German, and Italian social thought that overcame the customary divide between "positivist" or empiricist approaches to discovering objective social laws and "idealist" traditions that stressed the unpredictable force of human consciousness and will. But Parsons's synthesis also attempted to get beyond the social "realism" of a Comtean like Bernard and the "nominalist" position of the Giddings school, for whom society was merely a convenient term for an aggregate of individuals. Parsons sought to define "society" as something quite real, even if not a concrete entity in its own right. It was to be understood as an aspect of human experience that, strictly speaking, could be isolated only for the convenience of analysis, namely that element of human action that assured social order primarily by virtue of an integrated set of values held in common by a body of actors.

The Heyday of American Sociology

Parsons was important to the development of American sociology for a number of reasons. Having built his theoretical convergence largely on the work of Emile Durkheim (1858–1918), Max Weber (1864–1920), and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Parsons played a crucial role in drawing grand traditions of European social thought into the American milieu. Parsons's synthetic disposition also led him to promote the realignment of sociology with cultural anthropology and social psychology, a tripartite arrangement realized in a new, interdisciplinary department of social relations begun at Harvard in 1946. The result was a clearer definition of sociology's subject matter, the social realm, than the discipline had ever had before. In Parsons's hands, sociology moved away from close associations with the older, dominant fields of economics and political science. Its special concern was those institutions, such as families, schools, churches, neighborhoods, small groups, organizations, and occupations. In these milieus of association and interaction, scholars could see the formation of personalities, roles, values, orientations, perceptions of reality, sentiments of solidarity, and the like. In this way was everyday behavior shaped and social unity fostered. And in these terms sociology defined the essential "structure" of a society, the patterns of behavior that gave it a unique order and disposition distinct from that of other societies, thus permitting a comparative anatomy of societies.

The immediate post–World War II decades marked the heyday of American sociology. Young scholars entering the academy in the 1940s and 1950s, often of immigrant, wartime émigré, and left-wing backgrounds, helped fuel the field's growth. At the same time, funding increased dramatically from private philanthropies. While Rockefeller funds had dominated in the 1920s and 1930s, now the Ford and Carnegie foundations made large contributions. By the 1960s, government sources offered support from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Defense Department, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The field's infrastructure developed as large-scale survey-research centers at Columbia, Chicago, and Michigan, supported by grants and contracts, provided both jobs and masses of data.

Meanwhile, works such as Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944), David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), and William Whyte's The Organization Man (1956) garnered popular attention for sociology. Ideas cultivated by sociology along with cultural anthropology and social psychology regarding the "culture of poverty," "deviance" and opportunity structures, as well as schooling and race became part and parcel of public debate, policy formation, and presidential speeches in the era of desegregation and the war on poverty. Sociology became an ever more popular field for students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, attracting many of the young dissenters who populated campuses in the 1960s and 1970s. As American universities boomed in size, the ASA continued to grow. By 1972 its peak of 15,000 members represented a tenfold gain over its interwar membership. With this kind of growth, American sociology overshadowed developments in the European countries that were sources of the classics in modern social theory, and European thinkers concluded they had to come to terms with American standards in sociological theory as well as empirical methods.

Despite the common impression that Parsons's "structural-functional" theory of the 1950s represented the prevailing paradigm of postwar sociology, the discipline in fact was never so unified that it rested on a single coherent theoretical foundation. The landmark works in empirical sociology during the postwar period, many of them by the Austrian émigré Paul Lazarsfeld (1901–1976) of Columbia's Bureau of Applied Social Research and the students he trained there, rested on refinements of survey and statistical techniques, assisted by computerized data processing, with no special relation to the kind of abstract theory cultivated by Parsons. Also competing with Parsons's theory was the more modest, "middle-range" view of functional analysis promoted by his student Robert K. Merton (b. 1910), a method intended to discover how different parts of society, its institutions and organizations, worked together and influenced each other without presuming that they all meshed neatly in a harmonious whole. Furthermore, reputable theorists such as Lewis Coser (b. 1913) and Reinhard Bendix (1916–1991) challenged the priority Parsons gave to the problem of social order and his insistence that order required normative consensus.

Outside of functionalism per se, Herbert Blumer (1900–1987) codified the social psychology of the old Chicago school in the theoretical current called "symbolic interactionism," and practitioners of Chicago-style investigations of urban communities continued to produce some lively literature, such as Tally's Corner (1967) by Elliot Liebow (1925–1994). Other derivatives of interactionism flourished, such as the "dramaturgical" view of roles and rituals in everyday life developed by Erving Goffman (1922–1982) and the iconoclastic "labeling" theory of deviance by Howard S. Becker (b. 1928). More ambitious forays to mount full-bore challenges to Parsonsian and Mertonian functionalism, emerging from 1959 to 1966, included the critical sociology of C. Wright Mills (1916–1962), the historical sociology of Barrington Moore (b. 1913), and the individualistic "social exchange" theory of George Homans (1910–1989). Mills in particular criticized the division of sociology between what he regarded as vacuous "grand theory" (like Parsons's) and "abstracted empiricism" (like Lazarsfeld's work), insisting instead that sociologists must draw on a large canvas the social trends that mark "the salient characteristics of their time—and the problem of how history is being made within it" (Mills, p. 165). Similarly, though without Mills's radical intent, Daniel Bell (b. 1919) defined his own work as "sociography," an attempt to delineate the general form and dynamics of contemporary social life. His influential portrait of the present and the near future is The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973).

The Mainstream Assailed

Despite the robust appearance of American sociology, it soon encountered a social, political, and intellectual crisis spawned by protest movements in the 1960s and the accompanying revival of radicalism in academic life. Like all the social science and humanist disciplines, established sociology was criticized, mainly by young graduate students, for having provided an essentially conservative ideological rationale for the status quo. In particular, they charged, the functionalist focus on mechanisms of social order obscured the significance of conflict in social life; applauded conformity with social expectations instead of dissent, deviance, and disruption; suggested that the plight of the poor stemmed from their failure to adequately adapt to normative roles rather than from the exploitative and coercive structure of inequitable social relations; and masked the privilege and bias of sociologists themselves under a false ideal of "value-free" science. The most telling criticism aimed at postwar sociology was that the very disposition that gave sociology its own distinctive "social" province, apart from economics and political science, had denied it the ability to recognize the extent to which American society was governed by punitive inequalities in the distribution and uses of wealth and power.

The charge of entrenched conservatism, vigorously advanced by Alvin Gouldner (1920–1981) in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970), misfired in some respects. Parsons, for one, was a liberal Democrat, and his work had emerged just when the rise of welfare states in western Europe (and more modestly in the United States in the New Deal and the Fair Deal) justified a theory that defined distinctly social needs apart from the imperatives of market economics. Indeed, American functionalism, in one form or another, found welcome abroad in Social-Democratic Sweden. Yet it was precisely the modern liberal (welfare-state) assumptions in postwar sociology combined with the anticommunist biases that governed all academic life during the Cold War era that gave social science its deep confidence in the progressive virtues of contemporary American life, including the view, characteristic of "modernization theory," that American society represented the future for all other, less-developed societies. Hence, it refrained from confronting the forms of inequality and injustice that had long shaped the development of the United States.

Consequently, the 1970s witnessed a flurry of studies dealing with the fault lines of American life. In work by William Julius Wilson (b. 1935) and other new black sociologists, racial cleavages were studied more in terms of political economy than in terms of cultural attitudes. In a revival of Marxism, the meaning of class was studied empirically by writers like Michael Burawoy (b. 1947) and theoretically by Erik Olin Wright (b. 1947), among others. Such concerns with race and class were wedded to issues of gender raised by the revival offeminism, yielding sensitive and highly partisan ethnographies, like the study of black women on welfare by Carol B. Stack (b. 1940), All Our Kin (1974), which rejected all "blame the victim" scenarios of poverty and family dysfunction.

The number of works on women's status from a feminist standpoint grew through the 1970s and 1980s and included studies of how gender distinctions between men and women are socially maintained, such as the widely read psychoanalytic account by Nancy Chodorow (b. 1944), The Reproduction of Mothering (1978). Although several women had earlier achieved distinction, such as Jessie Bernard (1903–1996), Mirra Komarovsky (1906–1999), Rose Laub Coser (1916–1994), Alice Rossi (b. 1922), and Renée Fox (b. 1928), men dominated sociology in its heyday. Beginning in the 1970s, the number of women practitioners increased dramatically, though sociology proved more reluctant than other social science disciplines, particularly anthropology, to revise its general theoretical concepts in the face of feminist criticism, some observers claimed. Paradoxically, the fact that sociology had long recognized a place for studies of women, namely in family dynamics, "ghettoized" such concerns and thus inhibited the understanding that gender inequities were bound up with all aspects of social life. The initiation of the journal Gender and Society in 1987 marked an attempt to enforce that broader view of the problem.

Sociology in Distress

At the same time, the fall of functionalism from its pedestal made it seem that sociology, lacking paradigmatic unity, was cast adrift in search of new moorings. Various signs pointed to disciplinary distress. Having enjoyed spectacular growth in the late 1960s, sociology suffered a substantial decline, starting shortly after 1970, in ASA membership and the number of degrees granted. Continued specialization also led many practitioners in the 1980s to lament the fragmentation of their field. The ASA recognized thirty-nine "sections" or research specialties, which included topical concerns as well as distinctive methodologies, ranging from traditional subfields, such as criminology and family, to newer matters, such as comparative and historical sociology, mathematical sociology, Asia and Asian America, aging and the life course, and more.

Highlighting the absence of theoretical consensus, several dynamic intellectual currents during the 1980s and 1990s moved in sharply divergent directions and implied a flight from the discipline's traditional concerns and assumptions. Sociobiology attacked the longstanding assumption that social environment shaped personality, behavior, and social relations more decisively than innate, hereditary traits did. The Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson made sociobiology's first coherent statement in 1975, and the study blossomed by the 1990s along with new studies aiming to isolate genetic sources of behavioral dispositions, such as aggression, sexual promiscuity, and the like. The rise of "rational choice" perspectives in sociology, adopting from economics the principles of methodological individualism, utility optimization, and game theory, reached a new height with the founding of the journal Rationality and Society in 1989 and the 1990 publication of Foundations of Social Theory by James S. Coleman (1926– 1995). Urging an understanding of most social processes as the consequences of actions by individuals seeking to maximize some interests of their own, rational choice renewed the old "nominalist" hostility to notions of society as a reality sui generis.

Meanwhile, another group of sociologists more critical of their society, their discipline, and the discipline's claims to scientific status embraced the disposition known as postmodernism. They emphasized the "social construction" (the historicized, subjective, and social character) of all categories used to grasp reality; regarded modern life as the staging ground for varied techniques of controlling and regimenting unruly people and behaviors; denied that the shape of social life could be understood as "centered" on any essential principles or fully integrated in an overarching whole; and insisted that social action and social change be understood as highly localized, incompletely organized or bounded, strained by contradictory impulses, and largely unpredictable. Such a skeptical view, though antagonistic to rational choice and sociobiology, seemed to share with them a common suspicion of "society" as an entity or structure in its own right. Indeed, "general social theory," which aims to understand societies as wholes and to integrate different dimensions of social life, such as economics, social institutions, politics, and culture, in one view, steadily lost appeal within the discipline.

Other signs also suggested that sociology had entered an era of danger if not disintegration. With the turn to the right in American politics around 1980 and the consequent decline in funding for sociological research geared to public policy and social services, sociologists felt under siege. Sociology departments were eliminated at a few universities. Even the department at Yale University, the home of Sumner and his disciples, was almost closed. Public reception of sociology by this point, strikingly different from the 1950s and 1960s, often appeared hostile. Newspapers were more likely to mock arcane jargon or to assail left-wing biases in ASA proceedings than to seek expert sociological comment on social problems.

Prospects At the End of the Twentieth Century

Nevertheless, graduate student enrollment in the field rebounded in the 1990s, and by the end of the decade, the number of graduate students studying sociology nearly equaled those studying economics. At the same time, while the perennial problems of sociological theory remained unresolved—how to understand the relation between individual and community, how to assess the significance in social action of objective "interests" and subjective "meanings," or whether the field ought to define itself as a scientific or moral discourse—American sociologists continued to generate and develop new techniques, methods, and theories, including sophisticated approaches to understanding social networks, processes of interaction, and dynamic change. Many of these were highly mathematized, others were more historical and ethnographic. However specialized and sophisticated the field had become, a number of sociologists still addressed a broadly educated audience in books concerning "social problems," such as work, immigration, racism, gender inequality, poverty, and homelessness.

By the end of the century, some elder statesmen, such as Neil J. Smelser (b. 1930), director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, greeted late developments of the field with equanimity. Laments over the fragmentation of sociology as a discipline, Smelser suggested, tended to exaggerate the field's unity and coherence at earlier points in its history. In any case, internal specialization, marking off distinct subfields of expertise, inevitably accompanies the growth of a discipline. Smelser pointed out how changes in human organization have challenged the traditional identification of "society" as a unit with the nation-state. New sensitivity was required to both "supranational" and "subnational" phenomena, such as "globalization," racial and ethnic identities, migrations, and community formation and dissolution. He recognized that these factors injected a new complexity to social experience and denied the existence of neatly bounded social units, but he also argued that they made the integrative capacity of general social theory more rather than less urgent if sociological understanding were to advance.

Generally, at the end of the twentieth century, sociologists tended to move away from overarching, architectonic notions of social structure, the metaphor of society as a kind of building, with many levels and rooms configured in a fixed pattern, among which people move and dwell. Instead, they favored more flexible models highlighting purposive action by individuals and groups, processes of interaction, the historical formation and ongoing transformation of social relations in a ceaseless flux, which can never be reduced to a simple story of progressive development. Yet, while these new emphases highlight the active, flexible, complex, and unfinished character of human social behavior, structures of inequality in wealth and power indeed seemed to be deeply entrenched features of the contemporary world. The question had become whether or not the new disposition can contribute to understanding these inequalities and can support efforts to change those forms in hopes of creating a better society, another longstanding aspiration of many modern social theorists.

Bibliography

Abbott, Andrew. Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Alexander, Jeffrey C. Theoretical Logic in Sociology. Volume 4: The Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought: Talcott Parsons. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Bannister, Robert C. Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Blackwell, James E., and Morris Janowitz, eds. Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Camic, Charles. "Introduction: Talcott Parsons Before The Structure of Social Action." In Talcott Parsons, The Early Essays. Edited by Charles Camic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Coleman, James S. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Deegan, Mary Jo. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1988.

Degler, Carl N. In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Fitzpatrick, Ellen. Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Furner, Mary O. Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865–1905. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975.

Haskell, Thomas L. The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977.

Levine, Donald N. Visions of the Sociological Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race. New York: Henry Holt, 1993.

Matthews, Fred H. Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago School. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1977.

Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959.

Ritzer, George, and Barry Smart, eds. Handbook of Social Theory. London: Sage, 2001.

Ross, Dorothy. The Origins of American Social Science. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Seidman, Steven. Contested Knowledge: Social Theory in the Post-modern Era. 2d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994.

Smelser, Neil. "Sociology: Spanning Two Centuries." Paper presented at the Frontiers of the Mind in the Twenty-first Century, Library of Congress Symposium, Washington, D.C., 17 June 1999.

Turner, Stephen Park, and Jonathan H. Turner. The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology. New-bury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990.

Wagner, Peter, Björn Wittrock, and Richard Whitley, eds. Discourses on Society: The Shaping of the Social Science Disciplines. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.

Sociology involves the study of how people relate to each other, as well as how the institutions of society affect behavior and attitudes. For most of the past hundred and fifty years, sociologists have focused mainly on social institutions and structures. It was only around the middle of the twentieth century that they turned their attention to the important roles that technologies (including food production and processing) play in society. Other disciplines (particularly anthropology) have a much longer history of research into food and culture.

Food and food habits have been only implicitly assumed in sociological literature until just recently. Food studies have been an integral part of both rural sociology and medical sociology. For rural sociologists, food has been central in studies of agricultural and technological change. Food has also been a main focus in the studies of farms, community living, social change, and consumer issues. In fact, rural sociologists began to study food production in the 1930s through research on the adoption and diffusion of innovations (new technologies).

For medical sociologists, food and nutrition are now recognized as an important factor in the study of health and wellness. Sociologists examine how our nutritional habits are based on cultural identity, gender, race and ethnicity, and social class. Although food is a fundamental concern for human life, sociologists are now just establishing a sociology of food by identifying how lifestyles, social class, gender, and ethnicity influence food selection and consumption. In fact, much of the market research that food companies conduct is in fact a form of sociological research (e.g., focus groups, surveys, and interviews).

The sociological study of food is important in understanding social change, the state, and consumer society. For example, positive social change has come about as a result of epidemiological and sociological studies of the importance of sanitation. Sociological studies based on food exportation, importation, and food agricultures have examined how states develop. In addition, research into the inequality of distribution and access to food comprises another way that sociologists can expose to explain class, race, and gender differences, as well as forms of political domination. Food is also important in explaining consumerism, cultural assimilation, modernization, and how beliefs and rituals change.

Sociologists have always been interested in social inequality and stratification (i.e., through analysis of gender, ethnic, and class differences.) For example, some foods are associated with women and some with men. Women eat less food overall, and they are usually light foods or foods that can be nibbled, such as salad or fish. Men tend to eat more food, and prefer foods associated with strength, such as red meat. Food habits also vary significantly with age. For example, soft or strained foods are appropriate for very young children who have no teeth, as well as for the elderly (for the same reason). As people age, they also become more concerned about the role of diet in their overall health.

Food also represents distinctive cultures; for example, pasta is associated with Italian culture, or curry with Indian culture. Cultures evolve to suit the local environment. For instance, spicy foods are more popular in the warmer climates. Class distinctions in foods abound. In the early 1900s in Great Britain, people in the upper classes ate more meat than those of the middle or lower classes. However, by the middle of the century, all people ate about the same amount of meat, as advances in food technology put meat in the range of everyone. Economically disadvantaged groups are sometimes forced to eat what is cheap, and these foods may not be as nutritious as higher-priced foods. Disadvantaged groups then are more vulnerable to health problems, such as heart disease or obesity.

It has been said that "We are what we eat." Food becomes part of our self-identity. From a very young age, an individual is socialized into his or her adult eating habits. A person eats what his family eats when he is young—these habits do not tend to change that much with age. In Western cultures, young children are taught that the insects they find are not to be eaten. In other cultures, however, young children are taught that certain insects are edible and they become part of the diet. Foods are part of the rituals we use to accept new members into our group, to celebrate milestones, and to express religious or political beliefs. For example, a new neighbor might be presented with a basket of food or a homemade pie as a welcome gift.

Celebrations, such as birthdays and anniversaries, usually involve some kind of cake or other sweet food. National holidays usually include foods associated with the country. For example, Americans celebrate Independence Day with backyard barbecues (including hamburgers and hot dogs, potato chips and watermelon). Thanksgiving is closely associated with turkey. Religious holidays also use symbolic foods, such as ham at Christmas for Christians. Some religions have specific taboos on food. For instance, Jewish people do not eat pork, while Hindus do not eat beef, and Seventh-Day Adventists do not eat meat at all. Many religions also endorse fasting as part of their rituals.

Sociologists have shown how the level of development within a country influences food habits and preferences. Industrialized countries consume and waste more food than developing countries. Americans may waste up to 25 percent of their food. Waste results from poor storage and processing, as well as from unused leftovers and spoiled foodstuffs that are never used. There is less consumer waste in developing countries. However, this practice is increasing as more countries adopt Western ideas and values concerning food.

Almost every culture has some form of food taboo. In fact, there is only one taboo that is universal, and that is the restriction on eating human flesh. This was not always the case, however. Early people, such as the South American Indians, would grind up the bones of their ancestors into a communal pot, to share their strength and wisdom with all tribal members. Some taboos restrict certain kinds of foods to certain meals. For example, Americans eat cereal for breakfast, but not for dinner. Food taboos may be based on cleanliness standards, but taboos may also be used to change entire food systems. Sometimes it is easier to restrict foods on religious beliefs, than to convince people rationally to change their eating habits. Emotions also play a major role in decisions about what people eat and why. Sociological research and theory are therefore important for understanding how to increase human health through better diet and nutrition.

Bibliography

Beardsworth, Alan, and Terresa Keil. Sociology On The Menu. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Gabaccia, Donna. We Are What We Eat. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

McIntosh, Alex, Sociologies of Food and Nutrition. New York: Plenum Press, 1996.

—Thomas Jefferson Hoban IV

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Quotes:

"To understand the true quality of people, you must look into their minds, and examine their pursuits and aversions." - Marcus Aurelius

"Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak." - Walter Lippmann

"He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out." - Iris Murdoch

"No sociologist should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time. One cannot with impunity try to transfer this task entirely to mechanical assistants if one wishes to figure something, even though the final result is often small indeed." - Max Weber

The systematic study of human society, especially present-day societies. Sociologists study the organization, institutions, and development of societies, with a particular interest in identifying causes of the changing relationships among individuals and groups. (See social science.)

The study of group behavior within a society.

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For the journal, see Sociology (journal).

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Sociology is the scientific study of society.^[1] It is a social science which uses various methods of empirical investigation^[2] and critical analysis^[3] to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity. For many sociologists the goal is to conduct research which may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, while others focus primarily on refining the theoretical understanding of social processes. Subject matter ranges from the micro level of individual agency and interaction to the macro level of systems and the social structure.^[4]

The traditional focuses of sociology have included social stratification, social class, social mobility, religion, secularisation, law, and deviance. As all spheres of human activity are affected by the interplay between social structure and individual agency, sociology has gradually expanded its focus to further subjects, such as health, medical, military and penal institutions, the Internet, and the role of social activity in the development of scientific knowledge.

The range of social scientific methods has also expanded. Social researchers draw upon a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques. The linguistic and cultural turns of the mid-twentieth century led to increasingly interpretative, hermeneutic, and philosophic approaches to the analysis of society. Conversely, recent decades have seen the rise of new analytically, mathematically and computationally rigorous techniques, such as agent-based modelling and social network analysis.^[5][6] Sociology should not be confused with various general social studies courses which bear little relation to sociological theory or social science research methodology.

Contents 1 History 1.1 Origins 1.2 Foundations of the academic discipline 1.3 Other developments 2 Positivism and anti-positivism 2.1 Positivism 2.2 Antipositivism 3 Theoretical frameworks 3.1 Functionalism 3.2 Conflict theory 3.3 20th-century social theory 4 Structure and agency 5 Research methodology 5.1 Sampling 5.2 Methods 5.3 Computational sociology 5.4 Practical applications of social research 6 Areas of sociology 7 Scope and topics 7.1 Culture 7.2 Criminality, deviance, law and punishment 7.3 Economic sociology 7.4 Environment 7.5 Education 7.6 Family, gender, and sexuality 7.7 Health and illness 7.8 Internet 7.9 Knowledge and science 7.10 Media 7.11 Military 7.12 Political sociology 7.13 Race and ethnic relations 7.14 Religion 7.15 Social networks 7.16 Social psychology 7.17 Stratification 7.18 Urban and rural sociology 7.19 Work and industry 8 Sociology and the other academic disciplines 9 Journals 10 See also 11 References 12 Further reading 13 External links

History

Main articles: History of sociology, List of sociologists, and Timeline of sociology

Origins

Sociological reasoning predates the foundation of the discipline. Social analysis has origins in the common stock of Western knowledge and philosophy, and has been carried out from at least as early as the time of Plato. The origin of the survey, i.e., the collection of information from a sample of individuals, can be traced back at least early as the Domesday Book in 1086,^[7][8] while ancient philosophers such as Confucius wrote on the importance of social roles. There is evidence of early sociology in medieval Islam. Some consider Ibn Khaldun, a 14th century Arab Islamic scholar from North Africa, to have been the first sociologist; his Muqaddimah was perhaps the first work to advance social-scientific reasoning on social cohesion and social conflict.^{[9][unreliable source?][10][11][12][13][14]}

The word sociology (or "sociologie") is derived from the Latin: socius, "companion"; -ology, "the study of", and Greek λόγος, lógos, "word", "knowledge". It was first coined in 1780 by the French essayist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836) in an unpublished manuscript.^[15] Sociology was later defined independently by the French philosopher of science, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), in 1838.^[16] Comte had earlier used the term "social physics", but that had subsequently been appropriated by others, most notably the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet. Comte endeavoured to unify history, psychology and economics through the scientific understanding of the social realm. Writing shortly after the malaise of the French Revolution, he proposed that social ills could be remedied through sociological positivism, an epistemological approach outlined in The Course in Positive Philosophy [1830–1842] and A General View of Positivism (1848). Comte believed a positivist stage would mark the final era, after conjectural theological and metaphysical phases, in the progression of human understanding.^[17] In observing the circular dependence of theory and observation in science, and having classified the sciences, Comte may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.^[18]

Auguste Comte

Comte gave a powerful impetus to the development of sociology, an impetus which bore fruit in the later decades of the nineteenth century. To say this is certainly not to claim that French sociologists such as Durkheim were devoted disciples of the high priest of positivism. But by insisting on the irreducibility of each of his basic sciences to the particular science of sciences which it presupposed in the hierarchy and by emphasising the nature of sociology as the scientific study of social phenomena Comte put sociology on the map. To be sure, [its] beginnings can be traced back well beyond Montesquieu, for example, and to Condorcet, not to speak of Saint-Simon, Comte's immediate precessor. But Comte's clear recognition of sociology as a particular science, with a character of its own, justified Durkheim in regarding him as the father or founder of this science, in spite of the fact that Durkheim did not accept the idea of the three states and criticised Comte's approach to sociology.

— Frederick Copleston A History of Philosophy: IX Modern Philosophy 1974, ^[19]

Karl Marx

Both Comte and Karl Marx (1818–1883) set out to develop scientifically justified systems in the wake of European industrialisation and secularisation, informed by various key movements in the philosophies of history and science. Marx rejected Comtean positivism but in attempting to develop a science of society nevertheless came to be recognized as a founder of sociology as the word gained wider meaning. For Isaiah Berlin, Marx may be regarded as the "true father" of modern sociology, "in so far as anyone can claim the title."^[20]

To have given clear and unified answers in familiar empirical terms to those theoretical questions which most occupied men's minds at the time, and to have deduced from them clear practical directives without creating obviously articifial links between the two, was the principle achievement of Marx's theory ... The sociological treatment of historical and moral problems, which Comte and after him, Spencer and Taine, had discussed and mapped, became a precise and concrete study only when the attack of militant Marxism made its conclusions a burning issue, and so made the search for evidence more zealous and the attention to method more intense.

— Isaiah Berlin Karl Marx: His Life and Environment 1937, ^[21]

Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was one of the most popular and influential 19th century sociologists. It is estimated that he sold one million books in his lifetime, far more than any other sociologist at the time. So strong was his influence that many other 19th century thinkers, including Émile Durkheim, defined their ideas in relation to his. Durkheim’s Division of Labour in Society is to a large extent an extended debate with Spencer from whose sociology, many commentators now agree, Durkheim borrowed extensively.^[22] Also a notable biologist, Spencer coined the term "survival of the fittest". Whilst Marxian ideas defined one strand of sociology, Spencer was a critic of socialism as well as strong advocate for a laissez-faire style of government. His ideas were highly observed by conservative political circles, especially in the United States and England.^[23]

Foundations of the academic discipline

Main articles: Émile Durkheim and Social facts

Émile Durkheim

Formal academic sociology was established by Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who developed positivism as a foundation to practical social research. While Durkheim rejected much of the detail of Comte's philosophy, he retained and refined its method, maintaining that the social sciences are a logical continuation of the natural ones into the realm of human activity, and insisting that they may retain the same objectivity, rationalism, and approach to causality.^[24] Durkheim set up the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895, publishing his Rules of the Sociological Method (1895).^[25] For Durkheim, sociology could be described as the "science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning".^[26]

Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a case study of suicide rates amongst Catholic and Protestant populations, distinguished sociological analysis from psychology or philosophy. It also marked a major contribution to the theoretical concept of structural functionalism. By carefully examining suicide statistics in different police districts, he attempted to demonstrate that Catholic communities have a lower suicide rate than that of Protestants, something he attributed to social (as opposed to individual or psychological) causes. He developed the notion of objective suis generis "social facts" to delineate a unique empirical object for the science of sociology to study.^[24] Through such studies he posited that sociology would be able to determine whether any given society is 'healthy' or 'pathological', and seek social reform to negate organic breakdown or "social anomie".

Sociology quickly evolved as an academic response to the perceived challenges of modernity, such as industrialization, urbanization, secularization, and the process of "rationalization".^[27] The field predominated in continental Europe, with British anthropology and statistics generally following on a separate trajectory. By the turn of the 20th century, however, many theorists were active in the Anglo-Saxon world. Few early sociologists were confined strictly to the subject, interacting also with economics, jurisprudence, psychology and philosophy, with theories being appropriated in a variety of different fields. Since its inception, sociological epistemologies, methods, and frames of enquiry, have significantly expanded and diverged.^[4]

Durkheim, Marx, and the German theorist Max Weber are typically cited as the three principal architects of social science.^[28] Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, Lester F. Ward, Vilfredo Pareto, Alexis de Tocqueville, Werner Sombart, Thorstein Veblen, Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel and Karl Mannheim are occasionally included on academic curricula as founding theorists. Each key figure is associated with a particular theoretical perspective and orientation.^[29]

Marx and Engels associated the emergence of modern society above all with the development of capitalism; for Durkheim it was connected in particular with industrialization and the new social division of labour which this brought about; for Weber it had to do with the emergence of a distinctive way of thinking, the rational calculation which he associated with the Protestant Ethic (more or less what Marx and Engels speak of in terms of those 'icy waves of egotistical calculation'). Together the works of these great classical sociologists suggest what Giddens has recently described as 'a multidimensional view of institutions of modernity' and which emphasizes not only capitalism and industrialism as key institutions of modernity, but also 'surveillance' (meaning 'control of information and social supervision') and 'military power' (control of the means of violence in the context of the industrialization of war).

— John Harriss The Second Great Transformation? Capitalism at the End of the Twentieth Century 1992, ^[29]

Other developments

Ferdinand Tönnies' bust in Husum, Germany

The first college course entitled "Sociology" was taught in the United States at Yale in 1875 by William Graham Sumner.^[30] In 1883 Lester F. Ward, the first president of the American Sociological Association, published Dynamic Sociology—Or Applied social science as based upon statical sociology and the less complex sciences and attacked the laissez-faire sociology of Herbert Spencer and Sumner.^[23] Ward's 1200 page book was used as core material in many early American sociology courses. In 1890, the oldest continuing American course in the modern tradition began at the University of Kansas, lectured by Frank W. Blackmar.^[31] The Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago was established in 1892 by Albion Small, who also published the first sociology textbook: An introduction to the study of society 1894.^[32] George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley, who had met at the University of Michigan in 1891 (along with John Dewey), would move to Chicago in 1894.^[33] Their influence gave rise to social psychology and the symbolic interactionism of the modern Chicago School.^[34] The American Journal of Sociology was founded in 1895, followed by the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 1905.^[32] The sociological "canon of classics" with Durkheim and Max Weber at the top owes in part to Talcott Parsons, who is largely credited with introducing both to American audiences.^[35] Parsons consolidated the sociological tradition and set the agenda for American sociology at the point of its fastest disciplinary growth. Sociology in the United States was less historically influenced by Marxism than its European counterpart, and to this day broadly remains more statistical in its approach.^[36]

The first sociology department to be established in the United Kingdom was at the London School of Economics and Political Science (home of the British Journal of Sociology) in 1904.^[37] Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse became a lecturer in the discipline at the University of London in 1907.^[38] Harriet Martineau, an English translator of Comte, has been cited as the first female sociologist.^[39] In 1909 the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (German Sociological Association) was founded by Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber, among others. Weber established the first department in Germany at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1919, having presented an influential new antipositivist sociology.^[40] In 1920, Florian Znaniecki set up the first department in Poland. The Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt (later to become the Frankfurt School of critical theory) was founded in 1923.^[41] International co-operation in sociology began in 1893, when René Worms founded the Institut International de Sociologie, an institution later eclipsed by the much larger International Sociological Association (ISA), founded in 1949.^[42]

Positivism and anti-positivism

Positivism

Main article: Positivism

The overarching methodological principle of positivism is to conduct sociology in broadly the same manner as natural science. An emphasis on empiricism and the scientific method is sought to provide a tested foundation for sociological research, based on the assumption that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that such knowledge can only arrive by positive affirmation through scientific methodology.

"Our main goal is to extend scientific rationalism to human conduct... What has been called our positivism is but a consequence of this rationalism."

— Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), ^[43]

The term has long since ceased to carry this meaning; there are no fewer than twelve distinct epistemologies that are referred to as positivism.^[24][44] Many of these approaches do not self-identify as "positivist", some because they themselves arose in opposition to older forms of positivism, and some because the label has over time become a term of abuse^[24] by being mistakenly linked with atheoretical empiricism. The extent of antipositivist criticism has also diverged, with many rejecting the scientifically driven social epistemology and others only seeking to amend it to reflect 20th century developments in the philosophy of science. However, positivism (broadly understood as a scientific approach to the study of society) remains dominant in contemporary sociology, especially in the United States.^[24]

Loic Wacquant distinguishes three major strains of positivism: Durkheimian, Logical and Instrumental.^[24] None of these are the same as that set forth by Comte, who was unique amongst sociologists in advocating a formulation with such a restrictive epistemology and grandiose teleology.^[45][46] While Émile Durkheim rejected much of the detail of Comte's philosophy, he retained and refined its method. Durkheim maintained that the social sciences are a logical continuation of the natural ones into the realm of human activity, and insisted that they should retain the same objectivity, rationalism, and approach to causality.^[24] He developed the notion of objective sui generis "social facts" to delineate a unique empirical object for the science of sociology to study.^[24]

The variety of positivism that remains dominant today is termed instrumental positivism. This approach eschews epistemological and metaphysical concerns (such as the nature of social facts) in favor of methodological debates concerning clarity, replicability, reliability and validity.^[47] This positivism is more or less synonymous with quantitative research, and thus only resembles older positivist stances in practice: since it carries no explicit philosophical commitment, its practitioners may have any of a variety of viewpoints, including postpositivism and antipositivism. The institutionalization of this kind of sociology is often credited to Paul Lazarsfeld,^[24] who pioneered large-scale survey studies and developed statistical techniques for analyzing them. This approach lends itself to what Robert K. Merton called middle-range theory: abstract statements that generalize from segregated hypotheses and empirical regularities rather than starting with an abstract idea of a social whole.^[48]

Antipositivism

Main article: Antipositivism

Reactions against social empiricism began when German philosopher Hegel voiced opposition to both empiricism, which he rejected as uncritical, and determinism, which he viewed as overly mechanistic.^[49] Karl Marx's methodology borrowed from Hegelian dialecticism but also a rejection of positivism in favour of critical analysis, seeking to supplement the empirical acquisition of "facts" with the elimination of illusions.^[50] He maintained that appearances need to be critiqued rather than simply documented. Early hermeneuticians such as Wilhelm Dilthey pioneered the distinction between natural and social science ('Geisteswissenschaft'). Various neo-Kantian philosophers, phenomenologists and human scientists further theorized how the analysis of the social world differs to that of the natural world due to the irreducibly complex aspects of human society, culture, and being.^[51]

At the turn of the 20th century the first generation of German sociologists formally introduced methodological antipositivism, proposing that research should concentrate on human cultural norms, values, symbols, and social processes viewed from a resolutely subjective perspective. Max Weber argued that sociology may be loosely described as a science as it is able to identify causal relationships of human "social action"—especially among "ideal types", or hypothetical simplifications of complex social phenomena.^[52] As a nonpositivist, however, Weber sought relationships that are not as "ahistorical, invariant, or generalizable"^[53] as those pursued by natural scientists. Fellow German sociologist, Ferdinand Tönnies, theorized on two crucial abstract concepts with his work on "Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft" (lit. community and society). Tönnies marked a sharp line between the realm of concepts and the reality of social action: the first must be treated axiomatically and in a deductive way ("pure sociology"), whereas the second empirically and inductively ("applied sociology").^[54]

Max Weber

[Sociology is ] ... the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces. By 'action' in this definition is meant the human behaviour when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful ... the meaning to which we refer may be either (a) the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or (b) the meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract. In neither case is the 'meaning' to be thought of as somehow objectively 'correct' or 'true' by some metaphysical criterion. This is the difference between the empirical sciences of action, such as sociology and history, and any kind of priori discipline, such as jurisprudence, logic, ethics, or aesthetics whose aim is to extract from their subject-matter 'correct' or 'valid' meaning.

— Max Weber The Nature of Social Action 1922, ^[55]

Both Weber and Georg Simmel pioneered the "Verstehen" (or 'interpretative') method in social science; a systematic process by which an outside observer attempts to relate to a particular cultural group, or indigenous people, on their own terms and from their own point-of-view.^[56] Through the work of Simmel, in particular, sociology acquired a possible character beyond positivist data-collection or grand, deterministic systems of structural law. Relatively isolated from the sociological academy throughout his lifetime, Simmel presented idiosyncratic analyses of modernity more reminiscent of the phenomenological and existential writers than of Comte or Durkheim, paying particular concern to the forms of, and possibilities for, social individuality.^[57] His sociology engaged in a neo-Kantian enquiry into the limits of perception, asking 'What is society?' in a direct allusion to Kant's question 'What is nature?'^[58]

Georg Simmel

The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life. The antagonism represents the most modern form of the conflict which primitive man must carry on with nature for his own bodily existence. The eighteenth century may have called for liberation from all the ties which grew up historically in politics, in religion, in morality and in economics in order to permit the original natural virtue of man, which is equal in everyone, to develop without inhibition; the nineteenth century may have sought to promote, in addition to man's freedom, his individuality (which is connected with the division of labor) and his achievements which make him unique and indispensable but which at the same time make him so much the more dependent on the complementary activity of others; Nietzsche may have seen the relentless struggle of the individual as the prerequisite for his full development, while socialism found the same thing in the suppression of all competition – but in each of these the same fundamental motive was at work, namely the resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.

— Georg Simmel The Metropolis and Mental Life 1903, ^[59]

Theoretical frameworks

Main article: Sociological theory

The contemporary discipline of sociology is theoretically multi-paradigmatic.^[60] Modern sociological theory descends from the historical foundations of functionalist (Durkheim) and conflict-centered (Marx) accounts of social structure, as well as the micro-scale structural (Simmel) and pragmatist (Mead) theories of social interaction. Contemporary sociological theory retains traces of these approaches.

Presently, sociological theories lack a single overarching foundation, and there is little consensus about what such a framework should consist of.^[60] However, a number of broad paradigms cover much present sociological theorizing. In the humanistic parts of the discipline, these paradigms are referred to as social theory, and are often shared with the humanities. The discipline's dominant scientifically-orientated areas generally focus on a different set of theoretical perspectives, which by contrast are generally referred to as sociological theory. These include new institutionalism, social networks, social identity, social and cultural capital, toolkit and cognitive theories of culture, and resource mobilization. Analytical sociology is an ongoing effort to systematize many of these middle-range theories.

Functionalism

Main article: Structural functionalism

A broad historical paradigm in both sociology and anthropology, functionalism addresses the social structure as a whole and in terms of the necessary function of its constituent elements. A common analogy (popularized by Herbert Spencer) is to regard norms and institutions as 'organs' that work toward the proper-functioning of the entire 'body' of society.^[61] The perspective was implicit in the original sociological positivism of Comte, but was theorized in full by Durkheim, again with respect to observable, structural laws. Functionalism also has an anthropological basis in the work of theorists such as Marcel Mauss, Bronisław Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. It is in Radcliffe-Brown's specific usage that the prefix 'structural' emerged.^[62] Classical functionalist theory is generally united by its tendency towards biological analogy and notions of social evolutionism. As Giddens states: "Functionalist thought, from Comte onwards, has looked particularly towards biology as the science providing the closest and most compatible model for social science. Biology has been taken to provide a guide to conceptualizing the structure and the function of social systems and to analysing processes of evolution via mechanisms of adaptation ... functionalism strongly emphasizes the pre-eminence of the social world over its individual parts (i.e. its constituent actors, human subjects)."^[63]

Conflict theory

Main article: Conflict theory

Functionalism aims only toward a general perspective from which to conduct social science. Methodologically, its principles generally contrast those approaches that emphasise the "micro", such as interpretivism or symbolic interactionism. Its emphasis on "cohesive systems", however, also holds political ramifications. Functionalist theories are often therefore contrasted with "conflict theories" which critique the overarching socio-political system or emphasize the inequality of particular groups. The works of Durkheim and Marx epitomize the political, as well as theoretical, disparities, between functionalist and conflict thought respectively:

To aim for a civilization beyond that made possible by the nexus of the surrounding environment will result in unloosing sickness into the very society we live in. Collective activity cannot be encouraged beyond the point set by the condition of the social organism without undermining health.

— Émile Durkheim The Division of Labor in Society 1893, ^[64]

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

— Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto 1848, ^[65]

20th-century social theory

Anthony Giddens

The functionalist movement reached its crescendo in the 1940s and 1950s, and by the 1960s was in rapid decline.^[66] By the 1980s, functionalism in Europe had broadly been replaced by conflict-oriented approaches.^[67] While some of the critical approaches also gained popularity in the United States, the mainstream of the discipline instead shifted to a variety of empirically-oriented middle-range theories with no single overarching theoretical orientation. To many in the discipline, functionalism is now considered "as dead as a dodo."^[68]

As the influence of both functionalism and Marxism in the 1960s began to wane, the linguistic and cultural turns led to myriad new movements in the social sciences: "According to Giddens, the orthodox consensus terminated in the late 1960s and 1970s as the middle ground shared by otherwise competing perspectives gave way and was replaced by a baffling variety of competing perspectives. This third 'generation' of social theory includes phenomenologically inspired approaches, critical theory, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and theories written in the tradition of hermeneutics and ordinary language philosophy."^[69]

The structuralist movement originated from the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure and was later expanded to the social sciences by theorists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss. In this context, 'structure' refers not to 'social structure' but to the semiotic understanding of human culture as a system of signs. One may delineate four central tenets of structuralism: First, structure is what determines the structure of a whole. Second, structuralists believe that every system has a structure. Third, structuralists are interested in 'structural' laws that deal with coexistence rather than changes. Finally, structures are the 'real things' beneath the surface or the appearance of meaning.^[70]

Post-structuralist thought has tended to reject 'humanist' assumptions in the conduct of social theory.^[71] Michel Foucault provides a potent critique in his archaeology of the human sciences, though Habermas and Rorty have both argued that Foucault merely replaces one such system of thought with another.^[72][73] The dialogue between these intellectuals highlights a trend in recent years for certain schools of sociology and philosophy to intersect. The anti-humanist position has been associated with "postmodernism," a term used in specific contexts to describe an era or phenomena, but occasionally construed as a method.

Structure and agency

Main article: Structure and agency

Structure and agency forms an enduring ontological debate in social theory: "Do social structures determine an individual's behaviour or does human agency?" In this context 'agency' refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and make free choices, whereas 'structure' refers to factors which limit or affect the choices and actions of individuals (such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, and so on). Discussions over the primacy of either structure and agency relate to the core of sociological epistemology ("What is the social world made of?", "What is a cause in the social world, and what is an effect?").^[74] A general outcome of incredulity toward structural or agential thought has been the development of multidimensional theories, most notably the action theory of Talcott Parsons and Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration.

Research methodology

Main article: Social research

Sociological research methods may be divided into two broad categories:

• Quantitative designs approach social phenomena through quantifiable evidence, and often rely on statistical analysis of many cases (or across intentionally designed treatments in an experiment) to create valid and reliable general claims
• Qualitative designs emphasize understanding of social phenomena through direct observation, communication with participants, or analysis of texts, and may stress contextual and subjective accuracy over generality

Sociologists are divided into camps of support for particular research techniques. These disputes relate to the epistemological debates at the historical core of social theory. While very different in many aspects, both qualitative and quantitative approaches involve a systematic interaction between theory and data.^[75] Quantitative methodologies hold the dominant position in sociology, especially in the United States.^[24] In the discipline's two most cited journals, quantitative articles have historically outnumbered qualitative ones by a factor of two.^[76] (Most articles published in the largest British journal, on the other hand, are qualitative.) Most textbooks on the methodology of social research are written from the quantitative perspective,^[77] and the very term "methodology" is often used synonymously with "statistics." Practically all sociology PhD program in the United States require training in statistical methods. The work produced by quantitative researchers is also deemed more 'trustworthy' and 'unbiased' by the greater public,^[78] though this judgment continues to be challenged by antipositivists.^[78]

The choice of method often depends largely on what the researcher intends to investigate. For example, a researcher concerned with drawing a statistical generalization across an entire population may administer a survey questionnaire to a representative sample population. By contrast, a researcher who seeks full contextual understanding of an individuals' social actions may choose ethnographic participant observation or open-ended interviews. Studies will commonly combine, or 'triangulate', quantitative and qualitative methods as part of a 'multi-strategy' design. For instance, a quantitative study may be performed to gain statistical patterns or a target sample, and then combined with a qualitative interview to determine the play of agency.^[75]

Sampling

The bean machine, designed by early social research methodologist Sir Francis Galton to demonstrate the normal distribution, which is important to much quantitative hypothesis testing.

Quantitative methods are often used to ask questions about a population that is very large, making a census or a complete enumeration of all the members in that population infeasible. A 'sample' then forms a manageable subset of a population. In quantitative research, statistics are used to draw inferences from this sample regarding the population as a whole. The process of selecting a sample is referred to as 'sampling'. While it is usually best to sample randomly, concern with differences between specific subpopulations sometimes calls for stratified sampling. Conversely, the impossibility of random sampling sometimes necessitates nonprobability sampling, such as convenience sampling or snowball sampling.^[75]

Methods

The following list of research methods is neither exclusive nor exhaustive:

• Archival research or the Historical method: draws upon the secondary data located in historical archives and records, such as biographies, memoirs, journals, and so on.
• Content analysis: The content of interviews and other texts is systematically analysed. Often data is 'coded' as a part of the 'grounded theory' approach using qualitative data analysis (QDA) software, such as NVivo.^[79]
• Experimental research: The researcher isolates a single social process and reproduces it in a laboratory (for example, by creating a situation where unconscious sexist judgments are possible), seeking to determine whether or not certain social variables can cause, or depend upon, other variables (for instance, seeing if people's feelings about traditional gender roles can be manipulated by the activation of contrasting gender stereotypes).^[80] Participants are randomly assigned to different groups which either serve as controls—acting as reference points because they are tested with regard to the dependent variable, albeit without having been exposed to any independent variables of interest—or receive one or more treatments. Randomization allows the researcher to be sure that any resulting differences between groups are the result of the treatment.
• Longitudinal study: An extensive examination of a specific person or group over a long period of time.
• Observation: Using data from the senses, the researcher records information about social phenomenon or behavior. Observation techniques may or may not feature participation. In participant observation, the researcher goes into the field (such as a community or a place of work), and participates in the activities of the field for a prolonged period of time in order to acquire a deep understanding of it. Data acquired through these techniques may be analyzed either quantitatively or qualitatively.
• Survey research: The researcher gathers data using interviews, questionnaires, or similar feedback from a set of people sampled from a particular population of interest. Survey items from an interview or questionnaire may be open-ended or closed-ended. Data from surveys is usually analyzed statistically on a computer.

Computational sociology

A social network diagram consisting of individuals (or 'nodes') connected by one or more specific types of interdependency.

Main article: Computational sociology

Sociologists increasingly draw upon computationally intensive methods to analyze and model social phenomena.^[81] Using computer simulations, artificial intelligence, complex statistical methods, and new analytic approaches like social network analysis, computational sociology develops and tests theories of complex social processes through bottom-up modeling of social interactions.^[82] Although the subject matter and methodologies in social science differ from those in natural science or computer science, several of the approaches used in contemporary social simulation originated from fields such as physics and artificial intelligence.^[83][84] By the same token, some of the approaches that originated in computational sociology have been imported into the natural sciences, such as measures of network centrality from the fields of social network analysis and network science. In relevant literature, computational sociology is often related to the study of social complexity.^[85] Social complexity concepts such as complex systems, non-linear interconnection among macro and micro process, and emergence, have entered the vocabulary of computational sociology.^[86] A practical and well-known example is the construction of a computational model in the form of an "artificial society", by which researchers can analyze the structure of a social system.^[87][88]

Practical applications of social research

Social research informs politicians and policy makers, educators, planners, lawmakers, administrators, developers, business magnates, managers, social workers, non-governmental organizations, non-profit organizations, and people interested in resolving social issues in general. There is often a great deal of crossover between social research, market research, and other statistical fields.

Areas of sociology

• Social organization is the study of the various institutions, social groups, social stratification, social mobility, bureaucracy, ethnic groups and relations, and other similar subjects like family, education, politics, religion, economy, and so on and so forth.
• Social psychology is the study of human nature as an outcome of group life, social attitudes, collective behavior, and personality formation. It deals with group life and the individual's traits, attitudes, beliefs as influenced by group life, and it views man with reference to group life.
• Social change and disorganization is the study of the change in culture and social relations and the disruption that may occur in society, and it deals with the study of such current problems in society such as juvenile delinquency, criminality, drug addiction, family conflicts, divorce, population problems, and other similar subjects.
• Human ecology deals with the nature and behavior of a given population and its relationships to the group's present social institutions. For instance, studies of this kind have shown the prevalence of mental illness, criminality, delinquencies, prostitution, and drug addiction in urban centers and other highly developed places.
• Population or demography is the study of population number, composition, change, and quality as they influence the economic, political, and social system.
• Sociological theory and method is concerned with the applicability and usefulness of the principles and theories of group life as bases for the regulation of man's environment, and includes theory building and testing as bases for the prediction and control of man's social environment.
• Applied sociology utilizes the findings of pure sociological research in various fields such as criminology, social work, community development, education, industrial relations, marriage, ethnic relations, family counseling, and other aspects and problems of daily life.

Scope and topics

Main articles: Subfields of sociology and Outline of sociology

Culture

Max Horkheimer (left, front), Theodor Adorno (right, front), and Jürgen Habermas (right, back) 1965.

Main articles: Sociology of culture and Cultural studies

For Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history".^[57] Whilst early theorists such as Durkheim and Mauss were influential in cultural anthropology, sociologists of culture are generally distinguished by their concern for modern (rather than primitive or ancient) society. Cultural sociology is seldom empirical, preferring instead the hermeneutic analysis of words, artifacts and symbols.^{[dubious – discuss]} The field is closely allied with critical theory in the vein of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and other members of the Frankfurt School. Loosely distinct to sociology is the field of cultural studies. Birmingham School theorists such as Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall questioned the division between "producers" and "consumers" evident in earlier theory, emphasizing the reciprocity in the production of texts. Cultural Studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural practices and their relation to power. For example, a study of a subculture (such as white working class youth in London) would consider the social practices of the group as they relate to the dominant class. The "cultural turn" of the 1960s, which ushered in structuralist and so-called postmodern approaches to social science and placed culture much higher on the sociological agenda.

Criminality, deviance, law and punishment

Main articles: Criminology, Sociology of law, Sociology of punishment, and Deviance (sociology)

Criminologists analyse the nature, causes, and control of criminal activity, drawing upon methods across sociology, psychology, and the behavioural sciences. The sociology of deviance focuses on actions or behaviors that violate norms, including both formally enacted rules (e.g., crime) and informal violations of cultural norms. It is the remit of sociologists to study why these norms exist; how they change over time; and how they are enforced. The concept of deviance is central in contemporary structural functionalism and systems theory. Robert K. Merton produced a typology of deviance, and also established the terms "role model", "unintended consequences", and "self-fulfilling prophecy".^[89]

The study of law played a significant role in the formation of classical sociology. Durkheim famously described law as the "visible symbol" of social solidarity.^[90] The sociology of law refers to both a sub-discipline of sociology and an approach within the field of legal studies. Sociology of law is a diverse field of study which examines the interaction of law with other aspects of society, such as the development of legal institutions and the effect of laws on social change and vice versa. For example, an influential recent work in the field relies on statistical analyses to argue that the increase in incarceration in the US over the last 30 years is due to changes in law and policing and not to an increase in crime; and that this increase significantly contributes to maintaining racial stratification.^[91]

Economic sociology

Main article: Economic sociology

The term "economic sociology" was first used by William Stanley Jevons in 1879, later to be coined in the works of Durkheim, Weber and Simmel between 1890 and 1920.^[92] Economic sociology arose as a new approach to the analysis of economic phenomena, emphasising class relations and modernity as a philosophical concept. The relationship between capitalism and modernity is a salient issue, perhaps best demonstrated in Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) and Simmel's The Philosophy of Money (1900). The contemporary period of economic sociology, also known as new economic sociology, was consolidated by the 1985 work of Mark Granovetter titled "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness". This work elaborated the concept of embeddedness, which states that economic relations between individuals or firms take place within existing social relations (and are thus structured by these relations as well as the greater social structures of which those relations are a part). Social network analysis has been the primary methodology for studying this phenomenon. Granovetter's theory of the strength of weak ties and Ronald Burt's concept of structural holes are two best known theoretical contributions of this field.

Environment

Main articles: Environmental sociology, Sociology of disaster, and Human ecology

Environmental sociology is the study of societal-environmental interactions, typically placing emphasis on the social factors that cause environmental problems, the impacts of these problems on society, and the efforts to resolve them. Attention is also paid to the processes by which environmental conditions become defined and known to a society.

Education

Main article: Sociology of education

The sociology of education is the study of how educational institutions determine social structures, experiences, and other outcomes. It is particularly concerned with the schooling systems of modern industrial societies.^[93] A classic 1966 study in this field by James Coleman, known as the "Coleman Report", analyzed the performance of over 150,000 students and found that student background and socioeconomic status are much more important in determining educational outcomes than are measured differences in school resources (i.e. per pupil spending).^[94] The controversy over "school effects" ignited by that study has continued to this day. The study also found that socially disadvantaged black students profited from schooling in racially mixed classrooms, and thus served as a catalyst for desegregation busing in American public schools.

Family, gender, and sexuality

"Rosie the Riveter" was an iconic symbol of the American homefront and a departure from gender roles due to wartime necessity.

Main articles: Sociology of the family, Sociology of childhood, Sociology of gender, Feminist sociology, Feminist theory, and Queer theory

Family, gender and sexuality form a broad area of inquiry studied in many subfields of sociology. The sociology of the family examines the family, as an institution and unit of socialisation, with special concern for the comparatively modern historical emergence of the nuclear family and its distinct gender roles. The notion of "childhood" is also significant. As one of the more basic institutions to which one may apply sociological perspectives, the sociology of the family is a common component on introductory academic curricula. Feminist sociology, on the other hand, is a normative subfield that observes and critiques the cultural categories of gender and sexuality, particularly with respect to power and inequality. The primary concern of feminist theory is the patriarchy and the systematic oppression of women apparent in many societies, both at the level of small-scale interaction and in terms of the broader social structure. Social psychology of gender, on the other hand, uses experimental methods to uncover the microprocesses of gender stratification. For example, one recent study has shown that resume evaluators penalize women for motherhood while giving a boost to men for fatherhood.^[95] Another set of experiments showed that men whose sexuality is questioned compensate by expressing a greater desire for military intervention and sport utility vehicles as well as a greater opposition to gay marriage.^[96]

Health and illness

Main articles: Sociology of health and illness and Medical sociology

The sociology of health and illness focuses on the social effects of, and public attitudes toward, illnesses, diseases, disabilities and the ageing process. Medical sociology, by contrast, focuses on the inner-workings of medical organizations and clinical institutions. In Britain, sociology was introduced into the medical curriculum following the Goodenough Report (1944).^[97]

Internet

Main article: Sociology of the Internet

The Internet is of interest to sociologists in various ways; most practically as a tool for research and as a discussion platform.^[98] The sociology of the Internet in the broad sense regards the analysis of online communities (e.g. newsgroups, social networking sites) and virtual worlds. Online communities may be studied statistically through network analysis or interpreted qualitatively through virtual ethnography. Organizational change is catalysed through new media, thereby influencing social change at-large, perhaps forming the framework for a transformation from an industrial to an informational society. One notable text is Manuel Castells' The Internet Galaxy—the title of which forms an intertextual reference to Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy.^[99]

Knowledge and science

Main articles: Sociology of knowledge and Sociology of scientific knowledge

The sociology of knowledge is the study of the relationship between human thought and the social context within which it arises, and of the effects prevailing ideas have on societies. The term first came into widespread use in the 1920s, when a number of German-speaking theorists, most notably Max Scheler, and Karl Mannheim, wrote extensively on it. With the dominance of functionalism through the middle years of the 20th century, the sociology of knowledge tended to remain on the periphery of mainstream sociological thought. It was largely reinvented and applied much more closely to everyday life in the 1960s, particularly by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966) and is still central for methods dealing with qualitative understanding of human society (compare socially constructed reality). The "archaeological" and "genealogical" studies of Michel Foucault are of considerable contemporary influence.

The sociology of science involves the study of science as a social activity, especially dealing "with the social conditions and effects of science, and with the social structures and processes of scientific activity."^[100] Important theorists in the sociology of science include Robert K. Merton and Bruno Latour. These branches of sociology have contributed to the formation of science and technology studies.

Media

Main article: Media studies

As with cultural studies, media studies is a distinct discipline which owes to the convergence of sociology and other social sciences and humanities, in particular, literary criticism and critical theory. Though the production process or the critique of aesthetic forms is not in the remit of sociologists, analyses of socialising factors, such as ideological effects and audience reception, stem from sociological theory and method. Thus the 'sociology of the media' is not a subdiscipline per se, but the media is a common and often-indispensable topic.

Military

Main article: Military sociology

Military sociology aims toward the systematic study of the military as a social group rather than as an organization. It is a highly specialized subfield which examines issues related to service personnel as a distinct group with coerced collective action based on shared interests linked to survival in vocation and combat, with purposes and values that are more defined and narrow than within civil society. Military sociology also concerns civilian-military relations and interactions between other groups or governmental agencies. Topics include the dominant assumptions held by those in the military, changes in military members' willingness to fight, military unionization, military professionalism, the increased utilization of women, the military industrial-academic complex, the military's dependence on research, and the institutional and organizational structure of military.^[101]

Political sociology

Main article: Political sociology

Jürgen Habermas

Historically political sociology concerned the relations between political organization and society. A typical research question in this area might be: "Why do so few American citizens choose to vote?"^[102] In this respect questions of political opinion formation brought about some of the pioneering uses of statistical survey research by Paul Lazarsfeld. A major subfield of political sociology developed in relation to such questions, which draws on comparative history to analyze socio-political trends. The field developed from the work of Max Weber and Moisey Ostrogorsky,.^[103]

Contemporary political sociology includes these areas of research, but it has been opened up to wider questions of power and politics.^[104] Today political sociologists are as likely to be concerned with how identities are formed that contribute to structural domination by one group over another; the politics of who knows how and with what authority; and questions of how power is contested in social interactions in such a way as to bring about widespread cultural and social change. Such questions are more likely to be studied qualitatively. The study of social movements and their effects has been especially important in relation to these wider definitions of politics and power.^[105]

Race and ethnic relations

Main articles: Sociology of race and ethnic relations and Sociology of immigration

The sociology of race and of ethnic relations is the area of the discipline that studies the social, political, and economic relations between races and ethnicities at all levels of society. This area encompasses the study of racism, residential segregation, and other complex social processes between different racial and ethnic groups. This research frequently interacts with other areas of sociology such as stratification and social psychology, as well as with postcolonial theory. At the level of political policy, ethnic relations is discussed in terms of either assimilationism or multiculturalism. Anti-racism forms another style of policy, particularly popular in the 1960s and 70s.

Religion

Main article: Sociology of religion

The sociology of religion concerns the practices, historical backgrounds, developments, universal themes and roles of religion in society.^[106] There is particular emphasis on the recurring role of religion in all societies and throughout recorded history. The sociology of religion is distinguished from the philosophy of religion in that sociologists do not set out to assess the validity of religious truth-claims, instead assuming what Peter L. Berger has described as a position of "methodological atheism".^[107] It may be said that the modern formal discipline of sociology began with the analysis of religion in Durkheim's 1897 study of suicide rates amongst Roman Catholic and Protestant populations. Max Weber published four major texts on religion in a context of economic sociology and his rationalization thesis: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (1915), The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism (1915), and Ancient Judaism (1920). Contemporary debates often centre on topics such as secularisation, civil religion, and the role of religion in a context of globalisation and multiculturalism.

Social networks

Harrison White

Main article: Social network

A social network is a social structure composed of individuals (or organizations) called "nodes", which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige. Social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals. Social network analysis makes no assumption that groups are the building blocks of society: the approach is open to studying less-bounded social systems, from nonlocal communities to networks of exchange. Rather than treating individuals (persons, organizations, states) as discrete units of analysis, it focuses on how the structure of ties affects individuals and their relationships. In contrast to analyses that assume that socialization into norms determines behavior, network analysis looks to see the extent to which the structure and composition of ties affect norms. Unlike most other areas of sociology, social network theory is usually defined in formal mathematics.

Social psychology

Main article: Social psychology (sociology)

Sociological social psychology focuses on micro-scale social actions. This area may be described as adhering to "sociological miniaturism", examining whole societies through the study of individual thoughts and emotions as well as behavior of small groups.^[108] Of special concern to psychological sociologists is how to explain a variety of demographic, social, and cultural facts in terms of human social interaction. Some of the major topics in this field are social inequality, group dynamics, prejudice, aggression, social perception, group behavior, social change, nonverbal behavior, socialization, conformity, leadership, and social identity. Social psychology may be taught with psychological emphasis.^[109] In sociology, researchers in this field are the most prominent users of the experimental method (however, unlike their psychological counterparts, they also frequently employ other methodologies). Social psychology looks at social influences, as well as social perception and social interaction.^[109]

Stratification

Main articles: Social stratification, Social mobility, and Social class

Social stratification is the hierarchical arrangement of individuals into social classes, castes, and divisions within a society. In modern Western societies stratification traditionally relates to cultural and economic classes arranged in three main layers: upper class, middle class, and lower class, but each class may be further subdivided into smaller classes (e.g. occupational).^[110] Social stratification is interpreted in radically different ways within sociology. Proponents of structural functionalism suggest that, since the stratification of classes and castes is evident in all societies, hierarchy must be beneficial in stabilizing their existence. Conflict theorists, by contrast, critique the inaccessibility of resources and lack of social mobility in stratified societies.

Karl Marx distinguished social classes by their connection to the means of production in the capitalist system: the bourgeoisie own the means, but this effectively includes the proletariat itself as the workers can only sell their own labour power (forming the material base of the cultural superstructure). Max Weber critiqued Marxist economic determinism, arguing that social stratification is not based purely on economic inequalities, but on other status and power differentials (e.g. patriarchy). According to Weber, stratification may occur amongst at least three complex variables: (1) Property (class), (2) Prestige (status), and (3) Power (political party). Pierre Bourdieu provides a modern example in the concepts of cultural and symbolic capital. Theorists such as Ralf Dahrendorf have noted the tendency toward an enlarged middle-class in modern Western societies, particularly in relation to the necessity of an educated work force in technological or service-based economies.^[111] Perspectives concerning globalization, such as dependency theory, suggest this effect owes to the shift of workers to the Third World.^[112]

Urban and rural sociology

Main articles: Urban sociology and Rural sociology

Urban sociology involves the analysis of social life and human interaction in metropolitan areas. It is a normative discipline, seeking to provide advice for planning and policy making. After the industrial revolution, works such as Georg Simmel's The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) focused on urbanization and the effect it had on alienation and anonymity. In the 1920s and 1930s The Chicago School produced a major body of theory on the nature of the city, important to both urban sociology and criminology, utilising symbolic interactionism as a method of field research. Contemporary research is commonly placed in a context of globalization, for instance, in Saskia Sassen's study of the "Global city".^[113] Rural sociology, by contrast, is the analysis of non-metropolitan areas.

Work and industry

Main article: Industrial sociology

The sociology of work, or industrial sociology, examines "the direction and implications of trends in technological change, globalization, labour markets, work organization, managerial practices and employment relations to the extent to which these trends are intimately related to changing patterns of inequality in modern societies and to the changing experiences of individuals and families the ways in which workers challenge, resist and make their own contributions to the patterning of work and shaping of work institutions."^[114]

Sociology and the other academic disciplines

Sociology overlaps with a variety of disciplines that study society, in particular anthropology, political science, economics, and social philosophy. Many comparatively new fields such as communication studies, cultural studies, demography and literary theory, draw upon methods that originated in sociology. The terms "social science" and "social research" have both gained a degree of autonomy since their origination in classical sociology. The distinct field of social psychology emerged from the many intersections of sociological and psychological interests, and is further distinguished in terms of sociological or psychological emphasis.^[115]

Sociology and applied sociology are connected to the professional and academic discipline of social work.^[116] Both disciplines study social interactions, community and the effect of various systems (i.e. family, school, community, laws, political sphere) on the individual.^[117] However, social work is generally more focused on practical strategies to alleviate social dysfunctions; sociology in general provides a thorough examination of the root causes of these problems.^[118] For example, a sociologist might study why a community is plagued with poverty. The applied sociologist would be more focused on practical strategies on what needs to be done to alleviate this burden. The social worker would be focused on action; implementing theses strategies "directly" or "indirectly" by means of mental health therapy, counseling, advocacy, community organization or community mobilization.^[117]

Social anthropology is the branch of anthropology that studies how contemporary living human beings behave in social groups. Practitioners of social anthropology, like sociologists, investigate various facets of social organization. Traditionally, social anthropologists analysed non-industrial and non-Western societies, whereas sociologists focused on industrialized societies in the Western world. In recent years, however, social anthropology has expanded its focus to modern Western societies, meaning that the two disciplines increasingly converge.^[119][120]

Sociobiology is the study of how social behavior and organization have been influenced by evolution and other biological process. The field blends sociology with a number of other sciences, such as anthropology, biology, and zoology. Sociobiology has generated controversy within the sociological academy for allegedly giving too much attention to gene expression over socialization and environmental factors in general (see 'nature versus nurture'). Entomologist E. O. Wilson is credited as having originally developed and described Sociobiology.^[121]

Irving Louis Horowitz, in his The Decomposition of Sociology (1994), has argued that the discipline, whilst arriving from a "distinguished lineage and tradition", is in decline due to deeply ideological theory and a lack of relevance to policy making: "The decomposition of sociology began when this great tradition became subject to ideological thinking, and an inferior tradition surfaced in the wake of totalitarian triumphs."^[122] Furthermore: "A problem yet unmentioned is that sociology's malaise has left all the social sciences vulnerable to pure positivism—to an empiricism lacking any theoretical basis. Talented individuals who might, in an earlier time, have gone into sociology are seeking intellectual stimulation in business, law, the natural sciences, and even creative writing; this drains sociology of much needed potential."^[122] Horowitz cites the lack of a 'core discipline' as exacerbating the problem. Randall Collins, the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Advisory Editors Council of the Social Evolution & History journal, has voiced similar sentiments: "we have lost all coherence as a discipline, we are breaking up into a conglomerate of specialities, each going on its own way and with none too high regard for each other."^[123]

In 2007, The Times Higher Education Guide published a list of 'The most cited authors of books in the Humanities' (including philosophy and psychology). Seven of the top ten are listed as sociologists: Michel Foucault (1), Pierre Bourdieu (2), Anthony Giddens (5), Erving Goffman (6), Jürgen Habermas (7), Max Weber (8), and Bruno Latour (10).^[124]

Journals

The most highly ranked journals in the field of general sociology are the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, the British Journal of Sociology, and Sociology.^[125] Many more specialized journals also exist.

See also

	Book: Sociology
Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print.

Sociology portal

Main article: Outline of sociology

• History of social science
• History of sociology
• List of sociologists
• List of sociology journals
• Subfields of sociology
• Timeline of sociology

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Further reading

• Aby, Stephen H. Sociology: A Guide to Reference and Information Sources, 3rd edn. Littleton, Colorado, Libraries Unlimited Inc., 2005, ISBN 1-56308-947-5 . OCLC 57475961. 
• Babbie, Earl R.. 2003. The Practice of Social Research, 10th edition. Wadsworth, Thomson Learning Inc., ISBN 0-534-62029-9 . OCLC 51917727. 
• Collins, Randall. 1994. Four Sociological Traditions. Oxford, Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-508208-7 . OCLC 28411490. 
• Coser, Lewis A., Masters of Sociological Thought : Ideas in Historical and Social Context, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. ISBN 0-15-555128-0.
• Giddens, Anthony. 2006. Sociology (5th edition), Polity, Cambridge. ISBN 0-7456-3378-1 . OCLC 63186308. 
• Landis, Judson R (1989). Sociology: Concepts and Characteristics (7th ed.). Belmont, California: Wadsworth. ISBN 0-534-10158-5. 
• Macionis, John J (1991). Sociology (3rd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-820358-X. 
• Merton, Robert K.. 1959. Social Theory and Social Structure. Toward the codification of theory and research, Glencoe: Ill. (Revised and enlarged edition) . OCLC 4536864. 
• Mills, C. Wright, The Sociological Imagination,1959. OCLC 165883. 
• C. Wright Mills, Intellectual Craftsmanship Advices how to Work for young Sociologist
• Mitchell, Geoffrey Duncan (2007, originally published in 1968). A Hundred Years of Sociology: A Concise History of the Major Figures, Ideas, and Schools of Sociological Thought. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-0-202-36168-0. OCLC 145146341. 
• Nisbet, Robert A. 1967. The Sociological Tradition, London, Heinemann Educational Books. ISBN 1-56000-667-6 . OCLC 26934810. 
• Ritzer, George and Douglas J. Goodman. 2004. Sociological Theory, Sixth Edition. McGraw Hill. ISBN 0-07-281718-6 . OCLC 52240022. 
• Scott, John & Marshall, Gordon (eds) A Dictionary of Sociology (3rd Ed). Oxford University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-19-860986-8, . OCLC 60370982. 
• Wallace, Ruth A. & Alison Wolf. 1995. Contemporary Sociological Theory: Continuing the Classical Tradition, 4th ed., Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0-13-036245-X . OCLC 31604842. 
• White, Harrison C.. 2008. Identity and Control. How Social Formations Emerge. (2nd ed., Completely rev. ed.) Princeton, Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-13714-8 . OCLC 174138884. 
• Willis, Evan. 1996. The Sociological Quest: An introduction to the study of social life, New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press. ISBN 0-8135-2367-2 . OCLC 34633406. 

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