sociology

Society

2022

We explain what sociology is, its history, object of study, branches and other characteristics. Also, its relationship with anthropology.

Sociology offers an interdisciplinary perspective in the study of society.

What is Sociology?

Sociology is the social science dedicated to the study of societies human: their collective phenomena, interactions and processes of change and conservation, taking into account the context historical and cultural in which they are inserted.

In its approach to the phenomenon of human society, sociology employs techniques Y methods from scientific investigation, from various disciplines and areas of knowledge, which provides an interdisciplinary perspective for the analysis and interpretation. Sociological research has both methods qualitative What quantitative.

The sociological perspective is fundamental in the contemporary understanding of human processes. It is always generalizing: it tries to form a broad and complex perspective around social events and dynamics. For this reason, it is common for sociology to venture into the fields of economy, the Political Sciences, the geography, the education, the right and the psychology.

Characteristics of sociology

Sociology studies how changes occur in society.

Broadly speaking, sociology is characterized by:

  • It deals with the study of the constituent parts and internal dynamics of human societies, to understand the ways in which social life is changed or preserved.
  • It is a social science, it applies the scientific method to the social or human areas of knowledge.
  • It has a necessarily broad, generalizing perspective, which makes it a transdisciplinary science, capable of borrowing knowledge from other nearby areas.
  • It is a modern discipline, whose reasonings predate the founding of your formal field of study. Furthermore, it has historically been very close in its approach to anthropology and economic Sciences.
  • It contemplates both theoretical perspectives to understand and explain the social phenomena, as practices to aim at the improvement of society in different aspects.

Object of study of sociology

The object of study of sociology is human society. This encompasses theoretical approaches that seek to explain the causes and meanings of certain behaviors collective, but also the practical application of said knowledge for the active modification of society, seeking to obtain greater well-being through the design of social policies.

These studies can be based on two different perspectives:

  • Microsociology. Focused on daily and small-scale social interaction, that is, face to face. It deals with individuals, their families and the minimum units in which a society can be conceived.
  • Macrosociology. Instead, it targets large-scale population and social systems, making large theoretical abstractions and paying attention to the structure social, more than anything. In this way, it addresses issues such as war, the poverty, the developing, etc.

History of sociology

Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon is considered one of the fathers of sociology.

From classical European antiquity or Asian Confucianism, evidence of sociological thinking can be found. For example, polls, one of the main instruments of any sociological study, were born around the year 1086, judging by the records of the reign of William I of England.

For Western thought, the social and human activities took on a special interest as a result of the French Revolution of 1789 and the emergence of the Illustration. Various institutions European social and political issues were analyzed in depth by writers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu or Giambattista Vico. However, sociology was born as a discipline as a result of the positivist thought of the nineteenth century, under the premise of building a “social physics” (in the sense of a science societies), as part of the positivist projects of the time.

Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) was the main defender of these ideas and is considered the father of the discipline together with his then secretary, Auguste Comte (1798-1857), creator in addition to positivist thought and to whom it is attributed having coined the term "sociology". This name was used for the first time in his Positive philosophy course from 1838.

During the beginning of the 20th century, sociology had a sustained development and growth, especially due to the efforts of Émile Durkheim (1858-1917). This follower of Comte, set out to differentiate sociology from the fields of psychology and philosophy. For this, Auguste Comte postulated the bases of a sociological scientific thought, with The rules of the sociological method Y The Division of Labour in Society , works in which he proposed to design a scientific method to get away from all possible subjectivity.

Other important thinkers of the 20th century contributed greatly to the rise of sociology. Among them stands out, Karl Marx (1818-1883), founder of the doctrine Marxist, which had an enormous influence on the social thought of the twentieth century, taken by the Frankfurt School.

Another important author was Max Weber (1864-1920), a contemporary of Durkheim, who preferred to borrow tools from political science, economics, law, and the philosophy of law. culture, disciplines which he called "the sciences of culture."

Importance of sociology

Sociology quickly became a useful tool for diagnosing societies, that is, to understand in a deeper and more comprehensive way what are the problems which a society faces, and from what different perspectives it can be analyzed.

This is not a minor contribution, especially for a science that was born within the framework of positivism and its desire for science and objectivity: thanks to sociology, today we know that the affairs of society respond to certain patterns and causes that can be objectively analyzed. , and they are not simply random or capricious, nor are they entirely subjective.

Branches of sociology

The sociology of art studies the social processes that engendered a work of art.

Sociology has a large set of branches or applications, among which the following stand out:

  • Economic sociology. It is about the study of the social configurations that accompany economic phenomena, such as production, consumption, exchange. It is an attempt to approach typical economic issues from a social perspective.
  • Sociology of art. It consists, obviously, in the study of art from a sociological perspective, which translates into its understanding as the fruit of a specific human society. In other words, study the social processes that spawned a artwork determined and that, therefore, are reflected in it.
  • Political sociology.As it can be deduced, it deals with the approach to purely political elements and issues, such as political power, mass movements, citizenship, etc., from a sociological point of view; combining both areas to weave an interdisciplinary perspective. It generally consists of a historical comparison of socio-political systems.
  • Gender sociology. Studies human societies emphasizing gender roles and the way in which people think or imagine their conditions as men, women or other possible genders, to understand how social differentiations occur around the issue of biological sex and gender .

Sociology and Anthropology

Although for a long time these two disciplines were practically the same, and although both study fundamentally at the human being and their societies, the truth is that they are two very different approaches from each other.

Perhaps the main difference in its approaches to human society is that anthropology not only uses other social sciences for its studies, but also certain pure sciences, such as science. biology, extracting notions such as biological evolution or ecology to support their perspectives. In this way, anthropologists prefer the qualitative approach to the quantitative one, perhaps because they aspire to be a science of the human being, in general, that analyzes their cultural or linguistic productions in the face of the whole of humanity.

Sociology, on the contrary, is framed within a specific society. Although it aspires to draw conclusions about how human societies operate and are structured, they will do so in a less comprehensive and comprehensive way than anthropology.

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