The Meaning of Sociology, Essay Example

Why many people might confuse sociology, with many different fields such as psychology, or theology. While this is connected, sociology is the study of human institutions, and human social relationships. In a nutshell, sociology is the study of human social life. The concepts of sociology take a look at how different forms of groups interact with each, such as, teenagers, couples, singles, and other diverse groups. The concept of sociology places an emphasis on examining societies, as well as factors of a global perspective, and individual entities. As stated by Berger, “sociology is an individual pastime in the sense that it interests some men and bores others.” (Berger 12) In hoping to provide a better understanding of what sociology is and better yet, to understand its benefits and perspectives, this paper will provide a well needed explanation.

Sociology gives a comprehension of social patterns of behavior and social issues. It helps us recognize the social decides that administer our lives. According to Berger, the nature of sociology is scientific, and what the sociologist discovers and states about the social phenomena that they study, occurs within a strictly defined certain frame of reference. (Berger 2) Sociologists consider how these tenets are made, looked after, changed, passed in the middle of eras, and imparted between individuals living in different locations around the globe. In addition, sociology looks at the impact of what happens when these social rules are broken. Sociology helps us comprehend the elements of the social frameworks inside which we experience our lives. This implies that sociology looks at practices and connections, as well as how the bigger world we live in impacts these things. The way in which society is organized, takes a look at the social structures, in what is around the way people organize and interrelate social life. In addition to the operations of society, social processes, and how it shapes people lives in ways in which people do not realize.  From this perspective, those that study sociology, sociologists, will say that we as people are products of sociology.  As Durkheim states in assigning the term social to describe the subjects, “it is appropriate, since it is clear that, not having the individual as their substratum, they can have none other than society, either political society in its entirety or one of the partial groups that is includes—religious denominations, political and literary schools, occupational corporations, etc.” (Durkheim 20-21)

Despite the fact, the way we perceive their presences, these methodologies and structures may seem to people as through a mysterious fog in the course of daily life. Sociologist endeavor to make sense of things that get caught in the fog, as well as to clarify, analyze, study, and to uncover their effects and interrelationships on groups and individuals. By explaining and describing these social arrangements, sociologists help us to comprehend our general surroundings and better comprehend ourselves. In taking a deeper look at sociology, Human science helps us comprehend why we see the world the way we do. People are constantly immersed with messages in an assortment of structures about how we and our general surroundings, both are and ought to be. The way in which these messages are received, comes from different diverse forms such as, advertisement pitches from feeding hungry children, to athletic or apparel, political and religious entities, laws handed down, teachers, and parents. Sociology provides individuals with the tools to evaluate these types of messages that society is constantly inundated with including why and how it influences people, the source, and how individual roles play apart in changing, perpetuating, and producing them.

Sociology also likes to evaluate the commonalities that people share between individuals, societies, and cultures. Sociologists realize that, despite the fact that individuals in distinctive locations in the same city, nation, or world dress in an unexpected way. Talk in an unexpected way, and have various convictions and traditions, a number of the same sorts of social powers are grinding away molding their lives. As Berger relays, “sociological insights have served in a number of instances to improve the lot of groups of human beings by uncovering morally shocking conditions or by clearing away collective illusions or by showing that socially desired results could be obtained in more humane fashion.” (Berger 3) This is an especially critical point of view in our current reality where media features are regularly blamed for concentrating on issues that are divisive. Sociologists search for what social process and social structures mean for various groups.  They examine how society impacts different groups shape. Sociologists can help groups discover basic concerns, comprehend perspectives from other groups, and learn different approaches to cooperate instead of work in conflict with one another. Sociology provides individuals with tools to help comprehend how and why society changes.

Sociology clearly, is always changing, and this change has been the main motivator for sociologists from the start of the field of science. “These enumerations are meaningful to him (sociologists) in terms of their much broader implications for an understanding of institutions and values in our society.” (Berger 5) Why many in the field believe that sociologists should not stop with providing meaning to why and how society keeps evolving, but they have an obligation to act utilizing their unique perspectives and skills to work to make society better. The purpose of sociology is to simultaneously inquire and to concern itself with improving, criticizing, explaining, and understanding the human condition. In understanding the perspective of sociology, individuals are able to take action, if we do not agree with what is occurring. People are able to participate more in shaping the future for others and themselves. Sociology gives individuals theoretical points of view inside which to causing these understandings and examination strategies that permit sociologists to scientifically study social life. Social science is sociology. That implies sociologists work to comprehend society in extremely disciplined and structured ways. Like researchers who study the physical world, sociologists take after logical rules that fuse a combination of methods and theories that accommodate precision in collecting, evaluating, and understanding data. On account of sociology, theories concentrate on how social connections work. They give a method for clarifying these connections. Exploratory strategies give methods for creating precise examination results.

For sociology, it is not just simply sound judgment. Consequences of sociological exploration may be surprising. They regularly demonstrate that factors are not generally, or even typically, what they at first appear. As Berger points out, “people who like to avoid shocking discoveries, who prefer to believe that society is just what they were taught in Sunday School, who like the safety of the rules and the maxims of what Alfred Schuetz has called the “world-taken-for-granted,” should stay away from sociology.” (Berger 11) This statement implies that the findings in sociology are often conflicting with things that everybody already knows, or common sense. What we consider the ability to think, or something that everyone knows, is really in view of our own encounters and the thoughts and generalizations we hold. This provides for us an extremely restricted perspective of how the bigger world really is. In crafting a sociological viewpoint obliges that individuals are to look past our personal encounters to better comprehend ordinary life. Sociology permits individuals to search for the social strengths that affect our lives and structure those encounters.

When we have a strong comprehension of these powers, people are able to address these factors better. This type of sociological perspective is best used when understanding, the sociological imagination in which, “men and women now hope to grasp what is going on in the world, and to understand what is happening in themselves as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society.” (Mills 3) Sociology and the sociological imagination serves as an outward view of human self-consciousness, as people will be suddenly awakened to a more familiar mentality. In a way, even if incorrectly, individuals usually feel that they are now able to give themselves with comprehensive orientations, cohesive assessments, and adequate summations. (Mills 4) Thinking back on old decisions, that seemed dense, people will be able to obtain a new way of thinking, as they experience by their sensibility and reflection, “transvaluation of values”, in which social sciences provides them with cultural meaning. As Mills points out in understanding both the sociological imagination and society, “it works between the personal troubles of milieu and the public issues of social structure.” (Mills 4) This can be examined when looking at the issues of gender and race, as sociology is primed with studying how these factors impact groups and society at large.

Sociology is comprehending the way individuals act and do, it’s the attention on human foundations and our practices. It’s about social issues, people who make up society, society itself, the structures of society, ETC, educational, legal, and educational systems. Sociology helps people make sense of the world, and how it and the people within it are constantly changing. Sociology is an illuminating and exciting field of science in which explains and analyzes significant matters in the world, community, and the personal lives. Sociology at the personal level examines the social consequences and causes of factors such as love (hetero-homo), religious identity, aging, different behaviors, family conflict, gender, and racial identity. Sociology at the societal level, explains and examines issues such as social movements, urban community, business firms, schools and education, prejudice and discrimination, wealth and poverty, law and crime. While Sociology at the global level looks to examine the social phenomena such as economic development, peace and war, migration, and population growth.

Sociology empowers us to comprehend the dynamics and structure of society and their unpredictable associations with examples of human conduct and changes in human life. Sociology influences human demeanor, activities, and opportunities. For instance women’s activists, they have solid suppositions and have changed sex issues in connection to the power a noteworthy change concurred, and as indicated by West and Zimmerman, “both gender role and gender display focus on behavioral aspects of being a woman or a man (as opposed, for example, to biological differences between the two).” (West and Zimmerman 126) Women’s activists contend that society is commanded by men. Within the patriarchal society, men victimize ladies with a specific end goal to forestall guys and females increasing equivalent rights. There are different strands of conviction inside women’s liberation, for example, radical woman’s rights, liberal women’s liberation and Marxist women’s liberation. Women’s activist scholars incorporate Ann Oakley or Germaine Greer in which empowers individuals to comprehend that feminists hold point of view or perspective. In sociology helps to take a closer look at the accomplishments of gender and sex in the connection to a power. In providing a sociology perspectives on issues such as gender and sex West and Zimmerman elaborate:

“Component adult members of these societies see differences between the two as fundamental and enduring—differences seemingly supported by the division of labor into women’s and men’s work and an often elaborate differentiation of feminine and masculine attitudes and behaviors that are prominent features of social organization.” (West and Zimmerman 128)

Sociologists provide activists to accept unequivocally in equity, ladies were compelled to take a load off back and permit the man to take control and overwhelm, even though can see a radical improvement for women to take responsibility and battled for balance, as should be obvious this was a noteworthy change in the public eye and bring about social changes.

In switching gears from the sociological perspective of gender and sex to racial issues, we can see that sociology provides the terms dominant group, minority, ethnicity, and race all certain and distinctive implications. To comprehend the sociological point of view on ethnicity and race, it is vital to comprehend the implications of these ideas. Ethnic groups do not exist just on account of the normal national or social causes of the gathering, notwithstanding. They create in light of their novel chronicled and social encounters, which turn into the premise for the bunch’s ethnic personality. For instance, before movement to the US, Italians did not consider themselves a different gathering with basic hobbies and encounters.

Be that as it may, the procedure of movement and the encounters they confronted as a gathering in the US, including segregation, made another personality for the group. The problem taken with understanding race and ethnicity, is that many do not have a firm understanding of the social implications of racism. “Too many social analysts researching racism assume that the phenomenon is self-evident, and therefore either do not provide a definition or provide an elementary definition.” (Bonilla-Silva 465) Like ethnicity, race is principally, however not only, a socially developed class.  On account of their cultural or biological characteristics, which are marked as second rate by compelling groups in the public arena, minorities are often frequently singled out for unjustifiable and differential treatment. It is not the biological qualities that characterize racial groups, yet in the way groups have been dealt with generally and socially. Society appoints individuals to racial classifications (White, Black, and so forth.) not in view of science or reality, but since of sentiment and social experience. As such, how different groups of races are characterized is a social methodology; it is socially developed.

Sociology encompasses all of these factors and elements that help to make up society as a whole. In looking at the way in which sociology does provide meaning to and benefit society, we can see that it is an integral part of the college education. Sociology taught in the higher education is essential for evaluating human life. As the world around continues to evolve with each generation, each new discovery, and each new leadership, sociologists are called upon to help better explain these changes as well as help to provide meaning to how they impact our lives. Sociology is helping people to understand how they roles plays a part in society, as it helps in crafting the way human life works. It examines the structure of society, and how its institutions and components work together. It provides further comprehension to how these institutions can help individuals socialize in society, and good perspectives on why there are differences and commonalities among diverse groups in society.

Sociology has been instrumental in individual’s attitudes evolving from understanding other people. In parts of our own personal society people are limited to the amount that people are able to experience directly or indirectly. Sociology has changed our outlook in regards to problems in society such as those discussed above, as well as help to craft a viable solution to societal problems. Sociology are continuing to make great contributions to not only our own understanding, but also society at large at how they contribute to their own issues, and to their own solutions.

Works Cited

Berger, Peter. “Sociology as an Individual Pastime.” Invitation to Sociology. 1963. Print.

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation.” American Sociological Review, Vol. 62, No. 3. pp. 465-480. 1997. Print.

Durkheim, Emile. “What Makes Sociology Different?” The Rules of Sociological Method. N.d. Print.

Mills, Wright C. “Chapter One: The Promise.” The Sociological Imagination. 1965. Print.

Ross, Andrew. “Anti-Social Debts.” Contexts. 2012. Print.

West, Candance, Zimmerman, Don. “Doing Gender.” Gender and Society Vol.1. 1987. Print.