What is Sociology?
Probably every sociologist has been asked this question. There
have been many attempts to answer it--for example, here is
the official
definition from the American Sociological Association ,
and here is one from the Wikipedia,
an on-line encyclopedia . Here is ours:
The term "sociology" was coined by Auguste Comte
in about 1840. He saw it as a science that would discover the
general laws of human action (he also called it "social
physics"). As Comte saw it, sociology would encompass
everything that we now call the "social sciences":
fields like economics, political science, psychology, and anthropology
would just be special areas within sociology. Things didn't
work out exactly as he had planned, but sociology still is
the widest-ranging of the social sciences: sociologists study
topics ranging from large scale processes like globalization
to the details of everyday interactions, and almost everything
in between. Indeed, almost everything that people do, think,
or say has been studied by one sociologist or another. The
diversity of topics is matched by a diversity of methods--the
sources of information used by sociologists include surveys,
experiments, observation, in depth conversations, and reading
of texts. Some sociologists use advanced statistical techniques,
some use basic statistics, and some use no statistics at all.
What distinguishes sociology from the other social sciences
is an emphasis on social relations. To a sociologist, organizations
and institutions are more than just collections of individuals;
they are also webs of roles, expectations, and statuses that
people constantly reproduce (and change) in their interactions
with each other. For example, when trying to explain an example
of ethnic conflict, an economist would look at the material benefits
that individuals gained by sticking with "their" group,
and political scientist would look at the laws and political
institutions that contributed to conflict. A sociologist would
be more likely to ask why people defined the groups as distinct,
how they drew the boundaries between them, and why they saw their
interests or values as antagonistic. |
