Marxism: Class, Ideology and the Conflict Theory of Society
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848) Marx and Engels open the Communist Manifesto with this claim. Hitherto (up to now) means every society that historians can study, from ancient slave-owning states to feudal Europe. In each case, they argued, […]
Functionalism: The Organic Analogy, Value Consensus and Social Order
“I have used the analogies, but only as a scaffolding to help in building up a coherent body of sociological induction.” Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology (1876) Herbert Spencer spent hundreds of pages comparing society to a living body. In this quote, though, he is being careful. He calls the comparison scaffolding: a tool […]
Grouping the Perspectives
Structural theory, social action theory and structuration: the framework behind every perspectives page on this site “The basic domain of study of the social sciences, according to the theory of structuration, is neither the experience of the individual actor, nor the existence of any form of social totality, but social practices ordered across space and […]
Different Ways of Seeing Society: A First Look at Perspectives
So far, this section has treated sociology as though all sociologists agree with each other. In reality, sociologists have developed different, competing theories, known as perspectives, about how society works and why. You will meet these perspectives applied to specific topics, such as education, the media and crime, elsewhere on histpology.co.uk. Some perspectives, broadly described […]
Social Order and Social Control
Most people, most of the time, follow the norms and values of their society without being forced to. Sociologists use the term social order to describe this general pattern of predictable, cooperative behaviour, which allows society to function smoothly on a daily basis. Social order does not happen automatically. It is maintained through social control: […]
Socialisation: Becoming a Member of Society
Socialisation is the lifelong process through which people learn the norms, values and culture of their society. Nobody is born already knowing how to behave; every skill from using language to knowing when to say “please” and “thank you” has to be learned from other people. Sociologists distinguish between primary socialisation and secondary socialisation. Primary […]
Society, Culture, Norms and Values
Every society has a culture: a shared way of life that includes language, customs, beliefs and everyday habits, passed down from one generation to the next. Culture is learned, not something people are born with, which is why people raised in different societies can grow up with very different habits and beliefs. Culture is made […]
Thinking Sociologically: The Sociological Imagination
What Is Sociology? Sociology is the systematic study of society: how people live together in groups, and how those groups shape the way people think and behave. The word was first used by the French thinker Auguste Comte in the early 1800s, at a time when industrialisation (the shift from farming to factory-based production) and […]
What Is Sociology?
An introduction to thinking sociologically “Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between the personal troubles of milieu and the public issues of social structure.” C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959) The American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote these words in 1959, in a book that is still read […]
A Level Sociology: Exam boards and Content
A Level Sociology: how this course works “The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society.” — C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959) Mills was an American sociologist writing about why studying society matters. His point was that our own individual lives (biography) are shaped […]