Essay Example on Sociology is defined as the Study of Human Social Life

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Christianity and started building a new framework that separated religion from politics It was at the end of the Enlightenment that both England and France went through revolutions The French revolution saw dramatic changes in the distribution of wealth aristocrats suddenly lost their money and peasants who had been at the bottom of the social ladder suddenly rose transforming the social structures of a class society The industrial revolution saw a rapid movement of people abandoning their agricultural lives and move to urban areas in the search for work Sudden urbanisation created a new world and people were faced with disorder poverty disease and uncertainty Auguste Comte 1798 1857 classical theorist and French philosopher coined the phrase sociology He sought to explain the radical changes that had occurred due to modernity in order to create social ideas to improve society Comte believed in a law of three stages theological where people took a religious view of society a metaphysical understanding society as a natural not a supernatural His final stage scientific or positivism brought with it a way to apply the methodology used in the natural sciences to study society he believed this stage to be the pinnacle of social development Positivism is an approach that studies society and uses the evidences available like that of statistics qualitative results and experiments In order to identify the function and operation of society Hasan et al 2016 It recognises only what can be scientifically verified Emile Durkheim 1858 1917 The first ever Professor of Sociology was himself concerned with the rapid social change brought about with industrialisation He believed that society was based on a mechanical solidarity and had a strong collective conscience Durkheim 2007

Introduction Sociology is defined as The study of human social life groups and societies Giddens 1989 It involves describing and analyzing how different forces such as social cultural political and economic have on behavior and an individual's identity Van Kreiken et al 2000 Furthermore it encompasses the complex connections on a micro level along with those on a macro level thus enabling sociological imagination This first part of this report will look at the development of social theory and its responses to the changes that took place during the 18th Century It will examine some of the classical social theorists and their contribution to sociological theory The second part will compare two journal articles with the same subject matter knife crime however the research has been conducted using different methodologies positivism a macro quantitative objective and interpretivism a micro qualitative subjective Thirdly it will discuss the findings from the research journals and try to understand their findings before concluding The Development of Sociological Theory The Age of Enlightenment was a period during the 18th Century that was committed to the rise of human intellect and rationality in evaluating society Waters and Crook 1993 Enlightenment emerged out of the scientific revolution it challenged traditions more specifically

He himself a functionalists who saw society as being constructed using different inter dependent components like family and education he believed society would become unstable if just one of these components was not functioning Karl Marx 1818 1883 was the father of socialism communism and conflict theory The theory of conflict stated by Marx arises when resources are unevenly distributed within society His perspective gave an alternative to the functionalists view of the nature of stratification In all the stratified societies there are two classes a ruling class Bourgeois and a subject class Proletariat When the ruling class oppresses the subject class then conflict arises resulting in what Marx described as a revolution He believed this was needed to bring about social change As conflict theory examines the unequal distribution of power in a class system feminism observes it in relation to gender Feminists believe that society is male dominated and seek to change this Feminism origins can be traced back to the Enlightenment which sought to promote equality and that through human reason a better society can be created Interpretivists or anti positivists argue that individuals do not react to external forces like puppets as the positivists believe They believe individuals are more complex and everybody experiences and interprets the world differently Therefore knowledge is acquired through experience rather than imposed from outside Interpretivists adopt qualitative research methodology Social action theorists believe that people's social background does not determine their life s chances or behaviour it more importantly emphasises the role of the actor It believes in the individual and interactions between actors in shaping their personal identity and in turn the wider society Symbolic Interactionist theory is a micro level theory and based on the ontological belief that reality is socially constructed It focuses on understanding the relationship and interactions of individuals Labelling theory focuses on the definitions labels people impose on others and is one of the most important approaches to understanding deviance When people impose their definitions on others they can make the labels have consequences

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