Assignment: 1: Submitted To: Mrs. Uma Rani

Assignment: 1
SUBMITTED TO:
Mrs. Uma Rani
SOCIOLOGY
1.) Define & Explain Scope of sociology?
Introduction:
Sociology is a social science that studies society and the individual in perspective of
Society. The origins of Sociology lie in the 19th century but during the 1960-70s, it
became a major social science subject, taught in universities and colleges, and
schools. The scope of sociology has only become more scientific with time.
Definition:
"Sociology is the study of human social life, groups and societies. It is a dazzling and
compelling enterprise, having as its subject matter our own behaviour as social
beings. The scope of sociology is extremely wide, ranging from the analysis of
passing encounters between individuals in the street up to the investigation of world-
wide social processes". Anthony Giddens ("Sociology", 1989)
Sociology is the study of society. It concerns itself with the social rules and process
that
Bind and separate people not only as individuals, but as members of associations,
groups, and Institutions. Sociology is both topically and methodologically a very
broad discipline. Its traditional focuses have included social stratification, social
class, social mobility, religion, secularisation, law, and deviance. As all spheres of
human activity are sculpted by social structure and individual agency, sociology has
gradually expanded its focus to further subjects, such
as health, military and penal institutions, the Internet, and even the role of social
activity in the development of scientific knowledge.
The term was coined by Auguste Comte in 1838 from Latin socius (companion,
associate) and Greek logia (study of, speech). Comte hoped to unify all studies of
humankind including history, psychology and economics. His own sociological
scheme was typical of the 19th century; he believed all human life had passed through
the same distinct historical stages and that, if one could grasp this progress, one could
prescribe the remedies for social ills.
Scope of sociology:
There are two schools of thought with different viewpoints regarding scope and
subject matter of sociology- formal school and synthetic school. According to formal
school sociology was conceived to be a social science with a specifically defined
field. This school had George Simmel, Ferdinand Tonnies, Alfred Vierkandt and
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Leopord Von Wiese as its main advocates. On the other hand the synthetic school
with Durkheim, Hobhouse and Sorokin advocated a synthesis in form of coordination
among all social sciences.
Formal school of sociology:
Formal school argued in favor of giving sociology a definite subject matter to make it
a distinct discipline. It emphasized upon the study of forms of social relationships and
regarded sociology as independent. According to Simmel sociology is a specific
social science which describes, classifies, analyses and delineates the forms of social
relationships or in other words social interactions should be classified into various
forms or types and analysed. Simmel argued that social interactions have various
forms. He carried out studies of such formal relationships as cooperation, competition,
sub and super ordinate relationships and so forth. He said however diverse the
interests are that give rise to these sociations; the forms in which the interests are
realized may yet be identical. He emphasized on the process of abstraction of these
forms from human relationship which are common to diverse situations. Vierkandt
maintained that sociology should be concerned with ultimate forms of mental or
psychic relationship which knit the people together in a society. According to Von
Wiese there are two kinds of fundamental social processes in human society. Firstly
the associative process concerning contact, approach, adaptation etc and secondly
disassociate processes like competition and conflict. Apart from these two processes a
mixed form of the associative and dissociative also exists. Each of these processes has
sub-classes which in totality give approximately 650 forms of human relationships.
Sociology should confine itself to the discovery of the fundamental force of change
and persistence and should abstain from a historical study of concrete societies.
Tonnies divided societies into two categories namely Gemeinschaft (Town ) and
Gesellschaft (association) on the basis of degree of intimacy among the members of
the society. He has on the basis of forms of relationship tried to differentiate between
Town and society. Max Weber also makes out a definite field for sociology.
According to him the aim of sociology is to interpret or understand social behaviour.
But social behaviour does not cover the whole field of human relations. Indeed not all
human interactions are social. Sociology is concerned with the analysis and
classification of types of social relationships.
Synthetic school of sociology:
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Synthetic school wanted sociology to be synthesis of the social sciences and thus
wanted to widen the scope of sociology. According to Durkheim, sociology has three
principal divisions' namely-Social morphology, social physiology and general
sociology. Social morphology is concerned with geographical or territorial basis of
life of people such as population, its size, density and distribution etc. This can be
done at two levels -analysis of size and quality of population which affects the quality
of social relationship and social groups. Secondly the study of social structure or
description of the main forms of social groups and institutions with their
classification. Social physiology deals with the genesis and nature of various social
institutions namely religion, morals, law and economic institutions etc. In general
sociology the main aim is to formulate general social laws. Attempt is made to find
out if there are links among various institutions which would be treated independently
in social physiology and in the course to discover general social laws. Hobhouse
perceived sociology as a science which has the whole social life of man as its sphere.
Its relations with the other social sciences are considered to be one of mutual
exchange and mutual stimulation. Karl Mannheim's divides sociology into two main
sections-systematic and general sociology and historical sociology. Systematic
sociology describes one by one the main factors of living together as far as they may
be found in every kind of society. The historical sociology deals with the historical
variety and actuality of the general forms of society. It falls into two sections-
comparative sociology and social dynamics. Comparative sociology deals mainly with
the historical variations of the same phenomenon and tries to find by comparison
general features as separated from industrial features. Social dynamics deals with the
interrelations between the various social factors and institutions in a certain given
society for example in a primitive society. Ginsberg has summed up the chief
functions of sociology as it seeks to provide a classification of types and forms of
social relationships especially of those which have come to be defined institutions and
associations. It tries to determine the relation between different parts of factors of
social life for example the economic and political, the moral and the legal, the
intellectual and the social elements. It endeavours to disentangle the fundamental
conditions of social change and persistence and to discover sociological principles
governing social life.
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Thus on the basis of viewpoints of different sociologists we can get a general outline
of the scope of sociology. Firstly the analysis of various institutions, associations and
social groups which are results of social relationships of individuals should be the
concern of sociology. Secondly the links among different parts of society should be
studied. This objective is dealt with justice by functionalist school of sociology and
Marxist school also gives importance to this viewpoint. Thus social structure should
be given adequate importance in subject matter of sociology. Thirdly sociology
addresses itself to the factors which contribute to social stability and social change.
Fourthly sociology should also explain the trend of the changing pattern and the
aftermath of the changes in the society.
2.) Relation Between sociology & town planning:
Town planning is a branch of sociology that focuses on larger social systems and
social change. It has often been referred to as Macro Practice and has been
recognized for many years as one of the main methods. Sampson (1999) has opined
that Town planning is “The ability of a Town structure to realize the common values
of its residents and maintain effective social controls." Town development seeks to
empower individuals and groups of people by providing them with the skills they
need to effect change in their own communities. These skills are often concentrated
around building political power through the formation of large social groups working
for a common agenda. To work with communities experiencing disadvantage,
enabling them to collectively, identify needs and rights, clarify objects and take action
to meet them within a democratic framework, which represents the needs and rights of
others.”
In order to comprehend where Town planning stands today, it is helpful to view its
history. Town Development has often been an unequivocal and inherent goal of
people, aiming to achieve, through cooperative effort, a better life and has occurred
throughout history. Currently, the field of Town planning encompasses Town
organizing, social planning, human service management, Town development, policy
analysis, policy advocacy, evaluation, mediation, electronic advocacy and other larger
systems interventions and has considerable overlap with many other applied social
sciences, such as urban planning, economic development, public affairs, rural
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sociology and non profit management. Work can be generic or specialized. It takes
place in a given geographical area, focusing on working with the Town to identify
their needs and issues and jointly formulating strategies to address those issues. The
context is either urban or rural, with rural Town development work increasingly
attracting attention in recent years. Specialized Town work focuses on either specific
groups within a region (such as the homeless, the long-term unemployed, families
with young children or ethnic minorities) or on particular concerns (such as public
transport, mental health or drugs action). A good deal of the work is project-based,
which means that Town planning usually have a remit of a specific location or social
issue.
Specialized Town planner tasks typically involve identifying Town issues, needs
and problems; developing new Town -based programmes and resources; evaluating
and monitoring existing programmes; enlisting the co-operation of government
bodies, Town planners and sponsors; helping to raise public awareness on issues
relevant to the Town ; providing leadership and co-ordination of programmes; acting
as facilitator to promote self-help in the Town ; preparing reports and policies;
networking to build contacts and fundraising; developing and agreeing strategies;
liaising with interested groups and individuals to set up new services; mediating and
negotiating with opposing parties; recruiting and training paid and voluntary staff;
planning, attending and co-ordinating meetings and events; overseeing the financial
management of a limited budget; encouraging participation in activities; challenging
inappropriate behaviour and political structures; carrying out various administrative
tasks.
Town -based social work practice embraces an inclusive definition of Town ,
values Town as process, views the individual in the context of a pattern of
relationships that includes family, groups, organizations, and communities, integrates
Town and individual practice, builds interventions on the strengths and assets of
individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities, emphasizes
participation, teamwork, collaboration, and partnerships at all levels, recognizes that
comprehensive interventions are shaped by all interactions and exchanges within the
social ecology, involves interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches,
facilitates empowerment through a reciprocal, educational process of lifelong
learning, encourages innovation and improvement of services.
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Certain fundamental characteristics which underline Town planning are Firstly

and mostly importantly, the Town is the client. The needs of the Town are dominant
and these needs are spelled out in issues that affect large numbers of people. Town
work is methodical and purpose-oriented work aimed at change, the purpose of which
is to solve problems prevailing in the area. Town work is carried out in a residential
area according to the residents' needs for instance a Town affected by escalating
criminal activities may unite to form neighbourhood watch groups. The residents,
associations, organizations and authorities of a given area develop social activities and
resources together, aiming to improve their social conditions by means of various
work activities and methods. Town developers must understand how to work with
individuals and also how to affect communities' positions within the context of larger
social institutions. The planners are to identify groups, individuals and families within
applicable legislation in order to protect and improve the social well-being and
functioning of families and individuals. The worker must have and understanding of
how policy guides human service programs, both in organizations and communities
and must be able to transform those policies and programs to be more responsive to
human needs, whether by developing programs which strive to satisfy Town needs or
enacting some form of social change.
Social workers need to analyze and apply knowledge of bio-psycho-social variables
that affect individual development and behaviour. But they also need to understand
and intervene in the patterns of interaction that generate or perpetuate problems
involving multiple system levels such as family, neighbours, school, and social
service or justice systems. Town -based social work practice sees lasting solutions to
problems as arising from the strengths of the Town and culture of the individuals and
families concerned. It recognizes that clients are involved in larger patterns of formal
and informal helping that may involve social networks including family, church or
temple, friends, neighbours, or Town planners as well as other professionals. Social
work practice sees itself as one part of this larger pattern of helping, its effectiveness
depending on how the whole pattern works to ensure that individual, family, and
Town needs are met.
planners support individuals, groups and organizations on the basis of certain
values and commitments. These values include social justice, participation, equality,
learning and co-operation. Social justice enables people to claim their human rights,
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meet their needs and have greater control over the decision-making processes which
affect their lives. Participation involves facilitating democratic involvement by people
in the issues which affect their lives based on full citizenship, autonomy, and shared
power, skills, knowledge and experience. Equality entails challenging the attitudes
of individuals, and the practices of institutions and society, which discriminate against
and marginalize individuals. Learning requires recognizing the skills, knowledge and
expertise that people contribute and develop by taking action to tackle social,
economic, political and environmental problems. Co-operation is working together to
identify and implement action, based on mutual respect of diverse cultures and
contributions
Rubin and Rubin have defined four essential roles of the social worker in Town
development. They are organizers as teachers, organizers as catalysts, organizers as
facilitators and a linking role.
According to Rothman there are three types of Town models which include
locality development, social action and social planning. Locality development
typifies the methods of work with groups used by settlement houses and in 'colonial'
Town development work. A major focus is on the process of Town building. Working
with a broad, representative cross section of the Town, workers attempt to achieve
change objectives by enabling the Town to establish consensus via the identification
of common interests. Leadership development and the education of the participants
are important elements in the process. In this approach great store is set by the values
of both participation and leadership. Social action is employed by groups and
organizations which seek to alter institutional policies or to make changes in the
distribution of power. Civil rights groups and social movements are examples. Their
methods may be and often are, abrasive and participation is the value most clearly
articulated by those who use this approach. Both leadership and expertise may be
challenged as the symbolic 'enemies of the people'.
Social planning is the method of Town planning traditional to health and welfare
councils, city planners, urban renewal authorities and the large public bureaucracies.
Effort is focused primarily on task goals and issues of resource allocation. Whereas
the initial emphasis of this approach was on the co-ordination of social services, its
attention has expanded to include programme development and planning in all major
social welfare institutions. Heavy reliance is placed on rational problem solving and
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the use of technical methods such as research and systems analysis. Expertise is the
cherished value in this approach, although leadership is accorded importance as well.
Processes provide an excellent framework for the operation of the Town planning in
order to effect successful Town development. The most commonly utilized are
research, planning, coordination, organization, financing, administration, committee
operation and advocacy and social action. To begin, social research is the process of
obtaining facts regarding social phenomena, social problems and their solutions.
Various research methods are used as statistical studies, surveys and case studies. If a
social problem is researched then it can be better understood and strategies can be
implemented to solve the issue. Planning is intentional formulation of future action
and ways of procedure. It is usually carried out by representatives of various group
meeting and making decisions regarding social difficulties and their solutions.
Coordination is the process of working together to avoid unnecessary duplication,
effort and conflict. On the positive side, it is the joining of people, agencies and
forces to support and compels them to strengthen each other thus enabling effective
services that surpass what could be done independently. Organization is the process
of establishing a structure to accomplish certain goals. In Town planning it is the
method of formulating a structure to consider Town needs, resources and the
utilization of the resources to satisfy the needs. Without it activities occur on a hit or
miss basis. There are several underlying principles in Town planning. McNeil has
postulated several principles that are universally applicable. Firstly, Town planning
for social welfare is concerned with people and their needs. Its objective is to enrich
human life by bringing about and maintaining a progressively more effective
adjustment between social welfare resources and social welfare needs. The
community may be a neighbourhood, city, country, state or nation. In recent times,
the ‘international’ Town has emerged It is a maxim in Town planning that the Town
is to be understood and accepted as it is and where it is and all of the people of the
Town are concerned in its health and welfare services. Representation of all
interests and elements in the population and their full and meaningful participation are
essential objectives in Town planning.
According to McNeil the fact of ever changing human needs and the reality of
relationships between and among people and groups are the dynamics in the Town
planning process. Acceptance of the concept of purposeful change and John Dewey’s
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philosophy of the “ever enduring process of perfecting, maturing, and refining” as

goals in Town planning is basic. In addition, he opines that interdependence of all
threads in the social welfare fabric of organization is a fundamental truth. No single
agency can usefully “live unto itself alone” but is constantly performing its functions
in relation to others. Finally, he outlines that Town planning for social welfare as a
process is a part of generic social work.
In concluding, social work practice is broadly defined. Social workers intervene
at all levels, with individuals, families, groups, organizations and communities with
the aim of building partnerships of those involved to strengthen the caring capacity of
communities as they work to resolve issues of immediate concern. Professional
social work practice focuses not only on an individual’s intra-psychic concerns since
the individual client is viewed as part of multiple, overlapping systems that
encompass the person’s social and physical environment. As a result, in many
instances, an effective helping relationship on a micro level is only possible only
through macro intervention strategies. Hence, micro and macro practices are
interwoven by the worker/agency to produce effective casework services. It is
therefore important for macro practitioners to understand the import of individual and
group interventions as it is for micro-practice workers to understand the implication of
organizational, Town and policy change.
3.) Write short notes on:
Social institutions:
A social institution is a complex, integrated set of social norms organized around

the preservation of a basic societal value. Obviously, the sociologist does not define
institutions in the same way as does the person on the street. Lay persons are likely to
use the term "institution" very loosely, for churches, hospitals, jails, and many other
things as institutions. Sociologists often reserve the term "institution" to describe
normative systems that operate in five basic areas of life, which may be designated as
the primary institutions.
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 In determining Kinship
 In providing for the legitimate use of power
 In regulating the distribution of goods and services
 In transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next
 In regulating our relation to the supernatural.
In shorthand form, or as concepts, these five basic institutions are called the family,
government, economy, education and religion. The five primary institutions are found
among all human groups. They are not always as highly elaborated or as distinct from
one another as into the United States, but, in rudimentary form at last, they exist
everywhere. Their universality indicates that they are deeply rooted in human nature
and that they are essential in the development and maintenance of orders. Sociologists
operating in terms of the functionalist model society have provided the clearest
explanation of the functions served by social institutions. Apparently there are certain
minimum tasks that must be performed in all human groups. Unless these tasks are
performed adequately, the group will cease to exist. An analogy may help to make the
point. We might hypothesize that cost accounting department is essential to the
operation of a large corporation. A company might procure a superior product and
distribute it then at the price which is assigned to it, the company will soon go out of
business. Perhaps the only way to avoid this is to have a careful accounting of the cost
of each step in the production and distribution process.
Social associations:
Men have diverse needs, desires and interests which demand satisfaction. There are
three ways of fulfilling these needs. Firstly they may act independently each in his
own way without caring for others. This is unsocial with limitations. Secondly men
may seek their ends through conflicts with one another. Finally men may try to fulfill
their ends through cooperation and mutual assistance. This cooperation has a
reference to association.
When a group or collection of individuals organize themselves expressly for the

purpose of pursuing certain of its interests together on a cooperative pursuit an
association is said to be born. According to Morris Ginsberg an association is a group
of social beings related to one another by the fact that they possess or have instituted
SOCIOLOGY
in common an organization with a view to securing a specific end or specific ends.

The associations may be found in different fields. No single association can satisfy all
the interests of the individual or individuals. Since Man has many interests, he
organizes various associations for the purpose of fulfilling varied interests. He may
belong to more than one organization.
Main characteristics:
Association: An association is formed or created by people. It is a social group.

Without people there can be no association. It is an organized group. An unorganized
group like crowd or mob cannot be an association.
Common interest: An association is not merely a collection of individuals. It consists

of those individuals who have more or less the same interests. Accordingly those who
have political interests may join political association and those who have religious
interests may join religious associations and so on.
Cooperative spirit: An association is based on the cooperative spirit of its members.

People work together to achieve some definite purposes. For example a political party
has to work together as a united group on the basis of cooperation in order to fulfil its
objective of coming to power.
Organization: Association denotes some kind of organization. An association is

known essentially as an organized group. Organization gives stability and proper
shape to an association. Organization refers to the way in which the statuses and roles
are distributed among the members.
Regulation of relations: Every association has its own ways and means of regulating
the relation of its members. Organization depends on this element of regulation. They
may assume written or unwritten forms.
Association as agencies: Associations are means or agencies through which their

members seek to realize their similar or shared interests. Such social organizations
necessarily act not merely through leaders but through officials or representatives as
agencies. Associations normally act through agents who are responsible for and to the
association.
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Durability of association: An association may be permanent or temporary. There are

some long standing associations like the state; family, religious association’s etc.
Some associations may be temporary in nature.
Social community:
The term community is one of the most elusive and vague in sociology and is by now
largely without specific meaning. At the minimum it refers to a collection of people in
a geographical area. Three other elements may also be present in any usage. (1)
Communities may be thought of as collections of people with a particular social
structure; there are, therefore, collections which are not communities. Such a notion
often equates community with rural or pre-industrial society and may, in addition,
treat urban or industrial society as positively destructive. (2) A sense of belonging or
community spirit. (3) All the daily activities of a community, work and non work,
take place within the geographical area, which is self contained. Different accounts of
community will contain any or all of these additional elements.
We can list out the characteristics of a community as follows:
Territory
Close and informal relationships
Mutuality
Common values and beliefs
Organized interaction
Strong group feeling
Cultural similarity
Talcott Parsons defined community as collectivity the members of which share a

common territorial area as their base of operation for daily activities. According to
Tonnies community is defined as an organic natural kind of social group whose
members are bound together by the sense of belonging, created out of everyday
contacts covering the whole range of human activities. He has presented ideal-typical
pictures of the forms of social associations contrasting the solidarity nature of the
social relations in the community with the large scale and impersonal relations
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thought to characterize industrializing societies. Kingsley Davis defined it as the

smallest territorial group that can embrace all aspects of social life. For Karl
Mannheim community is any circle of people who live together and belong together
in such a way that they do not share this or that particular interest only but a whole set
of interests.
Social organisation:
Ogburn and Nimkoff have defined organization is an articulation of different parts

which perform various functions; it is an active group device for getting something
done.
Eliott and Merrill says, organization is a state of being, a condition in which the
various institutions in a society are functioning in accordance with their recognized or
implied purposes.
According to H.M Johnson, organization refers to an aspect of interaction systems.
At present the term social organization is used to refer to the interdependence of parts
in groups. These groups may vary in size and nature from workers to the factories.
Many sociologists prefer to use the term social system to refer to the society as such
rather than social organization.
The term is used in sociological studies and researches today to stress the importance
of arrangement of parts in which the parts of society are related to each other and how
each is related to the whole society. Organization makes possible the complex
activities in which the members of a complex society participate. A small body of
organized police can control a very large crowd. A small number of men constituting
themselves as a government can rule a country.
Sometimes the word organization is used to refer to the associational groups. It

includes corporations, armies, schools, banks and prisons. The society consists of
many such organizations. A state is frequently called a political organization. A
school may represent an educational organization and so on. They are all social
organizations. According to Ogburn and Nimkoff entire society represents a wider
organization; a social organization. But society is also quite generally an organized
group of interacting individuals.
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Characteristics:
An organization has its own definite purpose. Without any purpose or goal individuals
come together and establish among themselves a definite pattern or system of
interaction. The smooth running of an organization depends much on the mutual
understanding, cooperation and consensus among its members. The family as an
organization can run smoothly only when its members have mutual understanding,
cooperation and consensus among themselves. An organization is understood as a
mechanism that brings different people together into a network of interaction to
perform different functions.
The organization assigns statuses and roles to the individuals and makes them to
assume statuses and enact roles. The organization can function without any problem if
harmony prevails between the acceptance of the statuses by the members and their
enactment of the related roles. An organization maintains its control over the
behaviour of its members and regulates their activities. It makes use of various formal
as well as informal means of social control for this purpose.
Social stratification:
In sociology and other social sciences, social stratification refers to

the hierarchical arrangement of individuals into divisions of power and wealth within
a society. Stratification derives from the geological concept of strata - rock layers
created by natural processes. The term most commonly relates to the socio-economic
concept of class, involving the "classification of persons into groups based on shared
socio-economic conditions ... a relational set of inequalities with economic, social,
political and ideological dimensions."
In modern Western societies, stratification is broadly organized into three main

layers: upper class, middle class, and lower class. Each class may be further
subdivided into smaller classes (e.g. occupational). These categories are particular
to state-based societies as distinguished from, for instance, feudal societies composed
of nobility-to-peasant relations. Stratification may also be defined by kinship
ties or castes. For Max Weber, social class pertaining broadly to material wealth is
distinguished from status class which is based on such variables as honour, prestige
and religious affiliation. It is debatable whether the earliest hunter-gatherer groups
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may be defined as 'stratified', or if such differentials began with agriculture and broad

acts of exchange between groups. One of the ongoing issues in determining social
stratification arises from the point that status inequalities between individuals are
common, so it becomes a quantitative issue to determine how much inequality
qualifies as stratification.
Social stratification has been shown to cause many social problems. A comprehensive
study of major world economies revealed that homicide, infant mortality, obesity,
teenage pregnancies, emotional depression and prison population all correlate with
higher social inequality.
3 main characteristics:
1. The rankings apply to social categories of people who share a common

characteristic without necessarily interacting or identifying with each other. The
process of being ranked can be changed by the person being ranked.
Example: The way we rank people differently by race, gender, and social class.
2. People's life experiences and opportunities depend on their social category. This
characteristic can be changed by the amount of work a person can put into their
interests.
Example: The greater advantage had by the son or daughter of a king to have a
successful life than the son or daughter of a minimum-wage factory worker, because
the king has a greater amount of resources than the factory worker — The use of
resources can influence others.
3. The ranks of different social categories change slowly over time. This has occurred
frequently in the United States ever since the American Revolution. The U.S.
Constitution has been altered several times to contain rights for everyone
Social Control:
Social control refers generally to societal and political mechanisms or processes that

regulate individual and group behaviour, leading to conformity and compliance to the
rules of a given society, state, or social group. Many mechanisms of social control
are cross-cultural, if only in the control mechanisms used to prevent the establishment
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of chaos or anomie.[clarification needed] Some theorists, such as Émile Durkheim,

refer to this form of control as regulation. Sociologists identify two basic forms of
social controls
 Internalization of norms and values, and
 External sanctions, which can be either positive (rewards) or negative
(punishment).
Social control theory began to be studied as a separate field in the early 20th century.
The means to enforce social control can be either formal or
informal. Sociologist Edward A. Ross argued that belief systems exert a greater
control on human behavior than laws imposed by government, no matter what form
the beliefs take.
The social values that are present in individuals are products of informal social
control. It is exercised by a society without explicitly stating these rules and is
expressed through customs, norms, and mores. Individuals are socialized whether
consciously or subconsciously. During informal sanctions, ridicule or ostracism can
cause a straying towards norms. The person internalizes these mores and
norms. Traditional society uses mostly informal social control embedded in its
customary culture relying on the socialization of its members to establish social
order. Religion is thought of by some as a common and historically established form
of informal social control. More rigidly-structured societies may place increased
reliance on formal mechanisms.
Informal sanctions may include shame, ridicule, sarcasm, criticism and disapproval.

In extreme cases sanctions may include social discrimination and exclusion. This
implied social control usually has more effect on individuals because they
become internalized and thus an aspect of personality. Informal sanctions check
'deviant' behaviour. An example of a negative sanction comes from a scene in the Pink
Floyd film 'The Wall,' whereby the young protagonist is ridiculed and verbally abused
by a high school teacher for writing poetry in a mathematics class. The scene
illustrates how education is all about control and conformity, and not about creativity
and individuality.
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As with formal controls, informal controls reward or punish acceptable or

unacceptable behaviour (i.e., deviance). Informal controls are varied and differ from
individual to individual, group to group and society to society. For example, at
a women's institute meeting, a disapproving look might convey the message that it is
inappropriate to flirt with the minister. In a criminal gang, on the other hand, a
stronger sanction applies in the case of someone threatening to inform to the police.
Formal social control is expressed through law as statutes, rules,

and regulations against deviant behavior. It is conducted
by government and organizations using law enforcement mechanisms and other
formal sanctions such as fines and imprisonment.[2] In democratic societies the goals
and mechanisms of formal social control are determined through legislation by elected
representatives and thus enjoy a measure of support from the population and
voluntary compliance.(citation needed)
Applications of social control theory:
According to the propaganda model theory, the leaders of modern, corporate-

dominated societies employ indoctrination as a means of social control. Theorists such
as Noam Chomsky have argued that systemic bias exists in the modern
media. The marketing, advertising, and public relations industries have thus been said
to utilize mass communications to aid the interests of certain business elites. Powerful
economic and religious lobbyists have often used school systems and centralised
electronic communications to influence public opinion. Democracy is restricted as the
majority is not given the information necessary to make rational decisions
about ethical, social, environmental, or economic issues.
To maintain control and regulate their subjects, authoritarian organizations and

governments promulgate rules and issue decrees. However, due to a lack of popular
support for enforcement, these entities may rely more on force and other severe
sanctions such as censorship, expulsion and limits on political freedom.
Some totalitarian governments, such as the late Soviet Union or the current North
Korea, rely on the mechanisms of the police state.
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Sociologists consider informal means of social control vital in maintaining public

order, but also recognize the necessity of formal means as societies become more
complex and for responding to emergencies. The study of social control falls
primarily within the academic disciplines of anthropology, political science,
and sociology.
The continual application of low-level fear, as in mass surveillance or an electronic

police state also exerts a powerful coercive force upon a populace.
Concepts of Sociologists:
KARL MARX:
Karl Marx's (1818- 1883) thought was

strongly influenced by:
-The dialectical method and historical
orientation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel;
-The classical political economy of
-Adam Smith and David Ricardo;
- French socialist and sociological
thought, in particular the thought of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
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The most important concepts of Karl Marx
 The following concepts of Marx have aided sociological thought

significantly;
 Dialectical Materialism
 Materialistic Interpretation of History i.e Historical Materialism
 Class and Class conflict
 Alienation
Marx believed that he could study history and society scientifically and discern
tendencies of history and the resulting outcome of social conflicts. Some followers of
Marx concluded, therefore, that a communist revolution is inevitable. However, Marx
famously asserted in the eleventh of his Theses on Feuerbach that "philosophers have
only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it", and he
clearly dedicated himself to trying to alter the world. Consequently, most followers of
Marx are not fatalists, but activists who believe that revolutionaries must organize
social change.
Marx's view of history, which came to be called the materialist conception of history

(and which was developed further as the philosophy of dialectical materialism) is
certainly influenced by Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should be viewed
dialectically. Hegel believed that the direction of human history is characterized in the
movement from the fragmentary toward the complete and the real (which was also a
movement towards greater and greater rationality). Sometimes, Hegel explained, this
progressive unfolding of the Absolute involves gradual, evolutionary accretion but at
other times requires discontinuous, revolutionary leaps - episodal upheavals against
the existing status quo. For example, Hegel strongly opposed the ancient institution of
legal slavery that was practiced in the United States during his lifetime, and he
envisioned a time when Christian nations would radically eliminate it from their
civilization. While Marx accepted this broad conception of history, Hegel was an
idealist, and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms. He wrote that
Hegelianism stood the movement of reality on its head, and that it was necessary to
set it upon its feet. (Hegel's philosophy remained and remains in direct opposition to
Marxism on this key point.)
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Marx's acceptance of this notion of materialist dialectics which rejected Hegel's

idealism was greatly influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity,
Feuerbach argued that God is really a creation of man and that the qualities people
attribute to God are really qualities of humanity. Accordingly, Marx argued that it is
the material world that is real and that our ideas of it are consequences, not causes, of
the world. Thus, like Hegel and other philosophers, Marx distinguished between
appearances and reality. But he did not believe that the material world hides from us
the "real" world of the ideal; on the contrary, he thought that historically and socially
specific ideologies prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives
clearly.
The other important contribution to Marx's revision of Hegelianism was Engels'

book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, which led Marx to
conceive of the historical dialectic in terms of class conflict and to see the modern
working class as the most progressive force for revolution.The notion of labour is
fundamental in Marx's thought. Basically, Marx argued that it is human nature to
transform nature, and he calls this process of transformation "labour" and the capacity
to transform nature labour power. For Marx, this is a natural capacity for a physical
activity, but it is intimately tied to the human mind and human imagination:A spider
conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an
architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect
from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination
before he erects it in reality. (Capital, Vol. I, Chap. 7, Pt. 1) Karl Marx inherits that
Hegelian dialectic and, with it, a disdain for the notion of an underlying invariant
human nature. Sometimes Marxists express their views by contrasting "nature" with
"history". Sometimes they use the phrase "existence precedes consciousness". The
point, in either case, is that who a person is, is determined by where and when he is -
social context takes precedence over innate behavior; or, in other words, one of the
main features of human nature is adaptability. Marx did not believe that all people
worked the same way, or that how one works is entirely personal and individual.
Instead, he argued that work is a social activity and that the conditions and forms
under and through which people work are socially determined and change over
time.Marx's analysis of history is based on his distinction between the means / forces
of production, literally those things, such as land, natural resources, and technology,
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that are necessary for the production of material goods, and the relations of
production, in other words, the social and technical relationships people enter into as
they acquire and use the means of production. Together these comprise the mode of
production; Marx observed that within any given society the mode of production
changes, and that European societies had progressed from a feudal mode of
production to a capitalist mode of production. In general, Marx believed that the
means of production change more rapidly than the relations of production (for
example, we develop a new technology, such as the Internet, and only later do we
develop laws to regulate that technology). For Marx this mismatch between
(economic) base and (social) superstructure is a major source of social disruption and
conflict. Marx understood the "social relations of production" to comprise not only
relations among individuals, but between or among groups of people, or classes. As a
scientist and materialist, Marx did not understand classes as purely subjective (in
other words, groups of people who consciously identified with one another). He
sought to define classes in terms of objective criteria, such as their access to resources.
For Marx, different classes have divergent interests, which is another source of social
disruption and conflict. Conflict between social classes being something which is
inherent in all human history:The history of all hitherto existing society is the history
of class struggles. (The Communist Manifesto, Chap. 1)
Marx was especially concerned with how people relate to that most fundamental
resource of all, their own labour-power. Marx wrote extensively about this in terms of
the problem of alienation. As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of
alienation but developed a more materialist conception. For Marx, the possibility that
one may give up ownership of one's own labour - one's capacity to transform the
world - is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature; it is a spiritual loss.
Marx described this loss in terms of commodity fetishism, in which the things that
people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to
which humans and their behavior merely adapt. This disguises the fact that the
exchange and circulation of commodities really are the product and reflection of
social relationships among people. Under capitalism, social relationships of
production, such as among workers or between workers and capitalists, are mediated
through commodities, including labor, that are bought and sold on the market.
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Commodity fetishism is an example of what Engels called false consciousness, which

is closely related to the understanding of ideology. By ideology they meant ideas that
reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which are
presented as universal and eternal. Marx and Engels' point was not only that such
beliefs are at best half-truths; they serve an important political function. Put another
way, the control that one class exercises over the means of production includes not
only the production of food or manufactured goods; it includes the production of ideas
as well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a subordinate
class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests). Thus, while such ideas may be
false, they also reveal in coded form some truth about political relations. For example,
although the belief that the things people produce are actually more productive than
the people who produce them is literally absurd, it does reflect the fact (according to
Marx and Engels) that people under capitalism are alienated from their own labour-
power. Another example of this sort of analysis is Marx's understanding of religion,
summed up in a passage from the preface to his 1843 Contribution to the Critique of
Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the
expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of
the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless
conditions. It is the opium of the people. Whereas his Gymnasium senior thesis
argued that the primary social function of religion was to promote solidarity, here
Marx sees the social function as a way of expressing and coping with social
inequality, thereby maintaining the status quo. Marx argued that this alienation of
human work (and resulting commodity fetishism) is precisely the defining feature of
capitalism. Prior to capitalism, markets existed in Europe where producers and
merchants bought and sold commodities. According to Marx, a capitalist mode of
production developed in Europe when labor itself became a commodity - when
peasants became free to sell their own labor-power, and needed to do so because they
no longer possessed their own land or tools necessary to produce. People sell their
labor-power when they accept compensation in return for whatever work they do in a
given period of time (in other words, they are not selling the product of their labor,
but their capacity to work). In return for selling their labor power they receive money,
which allows them to survive. Those who must sell their labor power to live are
"proletarians." The person who buys the labor power, generally someone who does
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own the land and technology to produce, is a "capitalist" or "bourgeois." (Marx

considered this an objective description of capitalism, distinct from any one of a
variety of ideological claims of or about capitalism). The proletarians inevitably
outnumber the capitalists.
Marx distinguished industrial capitalists from merchant capitalists. Merchants buy

goods in one place and sell them in another; more precisely, they buy things in one
market and sell them in another. Since the laws of supply and demand operate within
given markets, there is often a difference between the price of a commodity in one
market and another. Merchants, then, practice arbitrage, and hope to capture the
difference between these two markets. According to Marx, capitalists, on the other
hand, take advantage of the difference between the labor market and the market for
whatever commodity is produced by the capitalist. Marx observed that in practically
every successful industry input unit-costs are lower than output unit-prices. Marx
called the difference "surplus value" and argued that this surplus value had its source
in surplus labour.
The capitalist mode of production is capable of tremendous growth because the

capitalist can, and has an incentive to, reinvest profits in new technologies. Marx
considered the capitalist class to be the most revolutionary in history, because it
constantly revolutionized the means of production. But Marx argued that capitalism
was prone to periodic crises. He suggested that over time, capitalists would invest
more and more in new technologies, and less and less in labor. Since Marx believed
that surplus value appropriated from labor is the source of profits, he concluded that
the rate of profit would fall even as the economy grew. When the rate of profit falls
below a certain point, the result would be a recession or depression in which certain
sectors of the economy would collapse. Marx understood that during such a crisis the
price of labor would also fall, and eventually make possible the investment in new
technologies and the growth of new sectors of the economy.
Marx believed that this cycle of growth, collapse, and growth would be punctuated by
increasingly severe crises. Moreover, he believed that the long-term consequence of
this process was necessarily the enrichment and empowerment of the capitalist class
and the impoverishment of the proletariat. He believed that were the proletariat to
seize the means of production, they would encourage social relations that would
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benefit everyone equally, and a system of production less vulnerable to periodic

crises. In general, Marx thought that peaceful negotiation of this problem was
impracticable, and that a massive, well-organized and violent revolution would in
general be required, because the ruling class would not give up power without
violence. He theorized that to establish the socialist system, a dictatorship of the
proletariat - a period where the needs of the working-class, not of capital, will be the
common deciding factor - must be created on a temporary basis. As he wrote in his
"Critique of the Gotha Program", "between capitalist and communist society there lies
the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding
to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the
revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."
In the 1920s and '30s, a group of dissident Marxists founded the Institute for Social
Research in Germany, among them Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm,
and Herbert Marcuse. As a group, these authors are often called the Frankfurt School.
Their work is known as Critical Theory, a type of Marxist philosophy and cultural
criticism heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, and Max Weber.The
Frankfurt School broke with earlier Marxists, including Lenin and Bolshevism in
several key ways. First, writing at the time of the ascendance of Stalinism and
Fascism, they had grave doubts as to the traditional Marxist concept of proletarian
class consciousness. Second, unlike earlier Marxists, especially Lenin, they rejected
economic determinism. While highly influential, their work has been criticized by
both orthodox Marxists and some Marxists involved in political practice for divorcing
Marxist theory from practical struggle and turning Marxism into a purely academic
enterprise.Other influential non-Bolshevik Marxists at that time include Georg
Lukacs, Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci, who along with the Frankfurt School
are often known by the term Western Marxism. Henryk Grossman, who elaborated
the mathematical basis of Marx's 'law of capitalist breakdown', was another affiliate of
the Frankfurt School. Also prominent during this period was the Polish revolutionary
Rosa Luxemburg.In 1949 Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman founded Monthly Review,
a journal and press, to provide an outlet for Marxist thought in the United States
independent of the Communist Party.In 1978, G. A. Cohen attempted to defend
Marx's thought as a coherent and scientific theory of history by reconstructing it
through the lens of analytic philosophy. This gave birth to Analytical Marxism, an
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academic movement which also included Jon Elster, Adam Przeworski and John
Roemer. Bertell Ollman is another Anglophone champion of Marx within the
academy.
FERDINAND TONNIES:
Ferdinand Tönnies (1855- 1936) was a

German sociologist. He was a major
contributor to sociological theory and
field studies. His distinction between
two types of social groups -
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft - is what
Tönnies is best known for. He was,
however, a prolific writer and also co-
founder of the German Society for
Sociology.
Tönnies distinguished between two types of social groupings. Gemeinschaft often

translated as community refers to groupings based on a feeling of
togetherness. Gesellschaft often translated as society on the other hand, refers to
groups that are sustained by an instrumental goal. Gemeinschaft may by exemplified
by a family or a neighbourhood; Gesellschaft by a joint-stock company or a state.
His distinction between social groupings is based on the assumption that there are
only two basic forms of an actor's will, to approve of other men. Following his
"essential will" ("Wesenwille"), an actor will see himself as a means to serve the goals
of social grouping; very often it is an underlying, subconscious force. Groupings
formed around an essential will are called a Gemeinschaft. The other will is the
"arbitrary will" ("Kürwille"): An actor sees a social grouping as a means to further his
individual goals; so it is purposive and future-oriented. Groupings around the latter
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are called Gesellschaft. Whereas the membership in a Gemeinschaft is self-fulfilling,

a Gesellschaft is instrumental for its members. In pure sociology theoretically these
two normal types of will are to be strictly separated; in applied sociology empirically
they are always mixed.
The important books :
Gemeinschalf and Gessellschaft (1887)
Introduction to Sociology (1936)
Types of social norms stated by Tonnies: Law, Moral rules, Mores and Conventions.
TALCOTT PARSONS:
Talcott Parsons (1902-82) was for many

years the best-known sociologist in the
United States, and indeed one of the best-
known in the world. He produced a
general theoretical system for the analysis
of society that came to b Parsons' analysis
was largely developed within his major
published works called structural
functionalism.
 The Structure of Social Action (1937),

 The Social System (1951),
 Structure and Process in Modern Societies (1960),
 Sociological Theory and Modern Society (1968),
 Politics and Social Structure (1969).
Parsons was an advocate of "grand theory," an attempt to integrate all the social
sciences into an overarching theoretical framework. His early work"The Structure of
Social Action"reviewed the output of his great predecessors, especially Max Weber,
Vilfredo Pareto, and Émile Durkheim, and attempted to derive from them a single
"action theory" based on the assumptions that human action is voluntary, intentional,
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and symbolic. Later, he became intrigued with, and involved in, an astonishing range
of fields: from medical sociology (where he developed the concept of the sick role to
psychoanalysis-personally undergoing full training as a lay analyst) to anthropology,
to small group dynamics to race relations and then economics and education.
Parsons is also well known for his idea that every group or society tends to fulfill four
"functional imperatives".
adaptation to the physical and social environment;
goal attainment, which is the need to define primary goals and enlist individuals to
strive to attain these goals;
integration, the coordination of the society or group as a cohesive whole;
Latency, maintaining the motivation of individuals to perform their roles according to

social expectations.
Parsons contributed to the field of social evolutionism and neoevolutionism. He

divided evolution into four sub processes:
division, which creates functional subsystems from the main system;
adaptation, where those systems evolve into more efficient versions;
inclusion of elements previously excluded from the given systems; and
Generalization of values, increasing the legitimization of the ever-more complex

system.
Furthermore, Parsons explored these sub processes within three stages of evolution:
1) Primitive
2) Archaic
3) Modern (where archaic societies have the knowledge of writing, while modern
have the knowledge of law).
Parsons viewed the Western civilisation as the pinnacle of modern societies, and out
of all western cultures he declared the United States as the most dynamically
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developed. For this, he was attacked as an ethnocentrism. Parsons' late work focused
on a new theoretical synthesis around four functions common (he claimed) to all
systems of action-from the behavioural to the cultural, and a set of symbolic media
that enable communication across them. His attempt to structure the world of action
according to a mere four concepts was too much for many American sociologists,
who were at that time retreating from the grand pretensions of the 1960s to a more
empirical, grounded approach.
Pattern variables
Parsons asserted that there were two dimensions to societies: instrumental and
expressive. By this he meant that there are qualitative differences between kinds of
social interaction. Essentially, he observed that people can have personalized and
formally detached relationships based on the roles that they play. The characteristics
that were associated with each kind of interaction he called the pattern variables Some
examples of expressive societies would include families, churches, clubs, crowds, and
smaller social settings. Examples of instrumental societies would include
bureaucracies, aggregates, and markets.
 Affectivity Vs affective neutrality : When actor is oriented towards maximum

satisfaction from a given choice.
 Particularism Vs.Universalism: Situations are judged according to uniform
criteria (universalism) and not according to actor or individuals relation with
the given subject(particularism).
 Quality Vs Performance : Defining people on the basis of biological difference
and performance is judging people according to their performance and
capacity.
 Self orientation Vs Collective Orientation when the actor acts out of personal
interest it is self orientation.
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MAX WEBER:
Max Weber was born in 1864 and he

too was considered by some to be the
father of sociology. Weber looked at
sociology in terms of it being an
extensive science of social action and
in the beginning he would only focus
on specific social
Contexts. Somewhat in contrast to this belief, he later believed that one of the
most distinguishing characteristics of a society is their change or shift in
motivation that is caused by structural or historical forces.
The concept of the ideal-type came about so the sociologists and others would
have a method to do historical-comparative studies. The ideal-type is mainly
discussing Moral ideals. Weber used this method to form an ideal-type
bureaucracy with the following: hierarchy, impersonality, written rules of conduct,
promotion based on achievement, specialized division of labor, and efficiency.
Weber defined such bureaucracies as goal oriented organizations designed
according to rational principles in order to efficiently attain their goals
(Verstehen). Weber saw many advantages in bureaucracies but he also saw that
sometimes the power shifted only to those at the top and resulted in an oligarchy.
Rationalization is a process in which a person enters, applying practical
knowledge to achieve an end. Rationalization is a large part of Weber's theories on
bureaucracy. This is also where Weber and Marx begin to agree on some of the
models of organization and rationalization. Both socialism and capitalism are the
rational forms of sciences and organizations.
Weber also discussed authority. Weber sought to know what gave the power to
one individual to be able to claim authority over another individual, such as man
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over woman. He also used the ideal-type to explain this in terms of traditional
authority (pre-modern), rational-legal authority (modern), and charismatic.
Max Weber said that sociology is a science that is concerned with a social action
and the course and/or consequences of the action. He had a large influence on
many of the ideas that are used in sociology today. Max Weber died in 1920.
JANE ADDAMS:
The lack of documentation of Addams as a

sociologist is due to a number of factors.
Looking first at her own ideas, she was opposed
to academic sociology, elitism, patriarchy, and
intellectualism. Each of these belief systems is
intrinsic to the assumptions of sociology as it
was practiced after World War I. Although she
considered herself a sociologist, she wanted the
profession
To develop in a radically different direction than it did. Addams was the greatest
woman sociologist of her day. The fact that she was female is vital, for sociology
had a sex-segregated system. After World War I, these two tracks within the
profession split into social work as female-dominated and sociology as male-
dominated. Almost all the women trained in Chicago Sociology prior to 1918were
ultimately channelled into social work positions. Discrimination against hiring
women in academic sociology departments was rampant. The major professional
association, the American Sociological Society (ASS), limited women's
participation in most of its offices and programs; and the social thought developed
after 1918, especially at the University of Chicago, was dramatically patriarchal
and opposed to Addams' vision. An applied, professional component of sociology
died when Addams' severance from sociology occurred, and it has never become a
respected alternative to sociologists in the academy. Other social sciences, like
geography, economics, and history have developed more than one professional
career line, but sociology failed to do this to any considerable extent.
Finally, despite the extensive scholarly and popular study of Addams' life, it is
extremely difficult to trace her influence on sociological thought. Because many
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sociologists claim that she is not a sociologist while many social workers claim
that she is a social worker, it has appeared that Addams' "professional home" has
been found. It is as if people assume she must be one or the other! This
assumption has led to a profound misunderstanding of Addams' intellectual
contributions and impact on sociology. There is absolutely no attempt here to
minimize her impact on social work. Social workers correctly acknowledge
Addams as a major thinker and professional model. The problem lies not with
social workers but with sociologists. Addams was a preeminent sociologist, and an
understanding of her role in sociology is integral to an understanding of this
profession. To undertake any analysis of the role of women sociologists or the
sociological study of women during the era of interest in this book, Addams
‘sociological career and concepts must be considered. When Addams is limited to
membership in only one field, social work, the impact she had on sociology is
entirely overlooked. Concomitantly, there is an unstated assumption that her ideas
and model for action were adopted by social workers and rejected by sociologists.
Instead of this dichotomy between two different specialties, a complex pattern of
incorporating and modifying her ideas in each profession has occurred. It is
beyond the scope or intent of this book to trace Addams' influence on social work;
the task of discovering her role in sociology is difficult enough.
Addams' influence on sociology must often be inferred because most early

sociologists rarely cited the work of their closest colleagues. This has been a
problem in documenting the interaction among all the early Chicago men. People
who co-authored writings or trained students together, such as Park and Burgess,
are easily seen as important colleagues. But people who spoke to argued that
societies evolved much like living organisms, moving from a simple state to a
more complex one resembling the workings of complex machines. Durkheim
reversed this formula adding his theory to the growing pool of theories of social
progress, social evolutionism and social darwinism. He argued that traditional
societies were 'mechanical' and were held together by the fact that everyone was
more or less the same, and hence had things in common. In traditional societies,
argues Durkheim, the collective consciousness entirely subsumes individual
consciousness-social norms are strong and social behavior is well-regulated.In
modern societies, he argued, the highly complex division of labor resulted in
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'organic' solidarity. Different specializations in employment and social roles

created dependencies that tied people to one another, since people no longer could
count on filling all of their needs by themselves. In 'mechanical' societies, for
example, subsistence farmers live in communities which are self-sufficient and
knit together by a common heritage and common job. In modern 'organic'
societies, workers earn money, and must rely on other people who specialize in
certain products (groceries, clothing, etc.) to meet their needs. The result of
increasing division of labor, according to Durkheim, is that individual
consciousness emerges distinct from collective consciousness-often finding itself
in conflict with collective consciousness.Durkheim also made an association of
the kind of solidarity in a given society and the preponderance of a law system. He
found that in societies with mechanical solidarity the law is generally repressive:
the agent of a crime or deviant behaviour would suffer a punishment, that in fact
would compensate collective conscience neglected by the crime-the punishment
acts more to preserve the unity of consciences. On the other hand, in societies with
organic solidarity the law is generally restitutive: it aims not to punish, but instead
to restitute normal activity of a complex society.The rapid change in society due to
increasing division of labor thus produces a state of confusion with regard to
norms and increasing impersonality in social life, leading eventually to relative
normlessness, i.e. the breakdown of social norms regulating behavior; Durkheim
labels this state anomie. From a state of anomie come all forms of deviant
behavior, most notably suicide.
Durkheim developed the concept of anomie later in Suicide, published in 1897. In

it, he explores the differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics,
explaining that stronger social control among Catholics results in lower suicide
rates. According to Durkheim, people have a certain level of attachment to their
groups, which he calls social integration. Abnormally high or low levels of social
integration may result in increased suicide rates; low levels have this effect
because low social integration results in disorganized society, causing people to
turn to suicide as a last resort, while high levels cause people to kill themselves to
avoid becoming burdens on society. According to Durkheim, Catholic society has
normal levels of integration while Protestant society has low levels. This work has
influenced proponents of control theory, and is often mentioned as a classic
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sociological study. Finally, Durkheim is remembered for his work on 'primitive'

(i.e. non-Western) people in books such as his 1912 volume Elementary Forms of
the Religious Life and the essayPrimitive Classification that he wrote with Marcel
Mauss. These works examine the role that religion and mythology have in shaping
the worldview and personality of people in extremely (to use Durkheim's phrase)
'mechanical' societies.Durkheim was also very interested in education. Partially
this was because he was professionally employed to train teachers, and he used his
ability to shape curriculum to further his own goals of having sociology taught as
widely possible. More broadly, though, Durkheim was interested in the way that
education could be used to provide French citizens the sort of shared, secular
background that would be necessary to prevent anomie in modern societies. It was
to this end that he also proposed the formation of professional groups to serve as a
source of solidarity for adults.Durkheim argued that education has many
functions:
1. To reinforce social solidarity
History: Learning about individuals who have done good things for the many
makes an individual feel insignificant.
Pledging Allegiance: Makes individuals feel part of a group and therefore less
likely to break rules.
each other with great frequency, visited each other's homes, and engaged in
organizational work together have few records of their shared interests that are
easily accessible to scholars who study only published writings. Academic
sociologists tend to rely heavily on academic publications, organizations, and
institutions while overlooking applied sociology that is directed to non-academic
audiences, organizations, and institutions. For applied sociologists such as
Addams, indications of mutual influence must often be sought in non-academic
records. Original archival data containing correspondence, newspaper reports, and
organizational records relevant to applied sociology can help to fill the gaps in our
academic documentation. Such alternative resources are particularly vital in a
situation like Addams' where her influence has been buried over the course of
several decades.
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EMILE DURKHIEM:
Emile Durkheim (1858 - 1917) was

concerned primarily with how
societies could maintain their
integrity and coherence in the modern
era, when things such as shared
religious and ethnic background
could no longer be assumed. In order
to study social life in modern
societies,
Durkheim sought to create one of the first scientific approaches to social
phenomena. Along with Herbert Spencer, Durkheim was one of the first people to
explain the existence and quality of different parts of a society by reference to
what function they served in keeping the society healthy and balanced-a position
that would come to be known as functionalism. Durkheim also insisted that
society was more than the sum of its parts. Thus unlike his contemporary Max
Weber, he focused not on what motivates the actions of individual people
(methodological individualism), but rather on the study of social facts, a term
which he coined to describe phenomena which have an existence in and of
themselves and are not bound to the actions of individuals. He argued that social
facts had an independent existence greater and more objective than the actions of
the individuals that composed society and could only be explained by other social
facts rather than, say, by society's adaptation to a particular climate or
ecological niche. In his 1893 work “ The division of labour society”, Durkheim
examined how social order was maintained in different types of societies. He
focused on the division of labor, and examined how it differed in traditional
societies and modern societies. Authors before him such as Herbert Spencer and
Ferdinand Toennies had
2. To maintain social roles
School is a society in miniature. It has a similar hierarchy, rules, expectations to

the "outside world". It trains young people to fulfill roles.
SOCIOLOGY
3. To maintain division of labour.
Sorts students out into skill groups. Teaches students to go into work depending
on what they're good at.
MANUEL CASTELLS:
Manuel Castells born in Hellín, Albacete, Spain, in

1942) is a sociologist especially associated with
information society and communications research. He
is a member of the International Ethical, Scientific
and Political Collegium, a leadership and expertise
organisation for developing means of overcoming the
problems to establishing a peaceful, socially-just, and
economically-sustainable world.
The sociological work of Prof. Manuel Castells Oliván synthesises empirical

research literature with combinations of urban sociology, organization
studies, internet studies, social movements, sociology of culture, and political
economy. About the origins of the network society, he posits that changes to the
network form of enterprise predate the electronic internet technologies associated
with network organisation forms Moreover, he coined the term “The Fourth
World”, denoting the sub-population socially excluded from the global society;
usual usage denotes the nomadic, pastoral, and hunter-gatherer ways of life beyond
the contemporary industrial society norm.
In the 1970s, following the path of Alain Touraine Castells was a key developer of
the variety of Marxist urban sociology that emphasises the role of social
movements in the conflictive transformation of the city, He introduced the concept
of "collective consumption" comprehending a wide range of social struggles —
displaced from the economic stratum to the political stratum via state intervention.
Transcending Marxist strictures in the early 1980s, he concentrated upon the role
of new technologies in the restructuring of an economy. In 1989, he introduced the
concept of the "space of flows", the material and immaterial components of global
information networks used for the real-time, long-distance co-ordination of the
economy. In the 1990s, he combined his two research strands in The Information
SOCIOLOGY
Age: Economy, Society and Culture, published as a trilogy, The Rise of the

Network Society (1996), The Power of Identity (1997), and End of
Millennium (1998); two years later, its worldwide, favourable critical acceptance
in university seminars, prompted publication of a second (2000) edition that is 40
per cent different from the first (1996) edition.
The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture comprehends three
sociologic dimensions — production, power, and experience — stressing that the
organisation of the economy, of the state and its institutions, and the ways that
people create meaning in their lives through collective action, are irreducible
sources of social dynamics — that must be understood as both discrete and inter-
related entities. Moreover, he became an established cybernetic culture theoretician
with his Internet development analysis stressing the roles of the state, social
movements and business, in shaping the economic infrastructure according to their
interests. The Information Age trilogy is his précis: "Our societies are increasingly
structured around the bipolar opposition of the Net and the Self"; the “Net” denotes
the network organisations replacing vertically-integrated hierarchies as the
dominant form of social organization, the Self denotes the practices a person uses
in reaffirming social identity and meaning in a continually changing cultural
landscape.
DAVID HARVAYE:
SOCIOLOGY
David Harvey was born in St. Louis,

Missouri, August 18, 1936, and spent his
formative years in Wood River, Illinois, a
"factory town" surviving on the largess of
Standard Oil of Indiana. His father was a
pipe fitter and a militant trade unionist.
Harvey received all three degrees from the
University of Illinois, where he was taught
his craft by a diverse group of scholars.
Chief among these were sociologists such as: Bernard Farber, family and kinship; Bernard
Karsh, industrial and economic sociology; Joseph Gusfield, social movements; David Bordua
and Daniel Glazer, delinquency and criminology; Louis Schneider, social theory; and
Bernard Lazerwitz, statistics and survey research. His minor field of concentration was social
anthropology. He took courses in the Anthropology Department from F.K. Lehmann, kinship
and structuralist method; Ed Bruner, culture and personality; and Julian Stewart, social
evolution and cultural ecology. Arriving at the University of Nevada in 1968 and working in
an atmosphere of relative freedom, Harvey developed a sociological perspective grounded in
Marxist materialism and the dialectical methods of Frankfurt sociology. During the last two
decades he has done research in these traditions.
Between 1970 and 1980, he conducted research on subjective alienation, or reified
consciousness. Working with professor Lyle G. Warner and Elizabeth Safford Harvey, this
research has produced several articles on the social psychological scaling and measurement
of reified consciousness, and the structural antecedents of alienated subjectivity. In the
eighties, he returned to poverty research, the area in which he had written his dissertation.
Out of this latter work has come a community ethnography of a poor white slum entitled
Potter Addition: Poverty, Family, and Kinship in a Heartland Community. A second volume,
Potter Addition: The Social History of a Heartland Slum is now in progress. A third volume
is now in the planning stage. It documents the rise and fall of the Lincoln Republic as it
played out in the Illinois Midlands.
Recently, Harvey has co-authored several papers on a variety of topics with Dean Mike Reed
of UNR's College of Business Administration. The general focus of their work involves a
rethinking of the social scientific significance of Marxist materialism, Hegelian dialectics,
and the productivist ontology undergirding both. This rethinking has led them to adopt a
critical philosophy of science position based on the critical naturalist methods and realist
SOCIOLOGY
ontology of Roy Bhaskar. This refocusing has coincided with a growing interest in two
substantive fields of enquiry--chaos theory and social evolution, and has produced several
articles on chaos theory and its application in the social sciences.
Harvey continues to explore the synthetic possibilities chaos theory has for sociological
research. One such project works from Jack Goody's comparative research on the evolution
of the European family to construct a chaos-based analysis of the social evolution of Western
kinship's domestic domain. Such a project employs the historical materialist paradigm, and,
as such, is inherently critical of Claude Lévi-Strauss's linguistically-based alliance theory of
kinship systems. Finally, a second project, still in the planning stages, attempts to apply some
of the more elementary modeling techniques of chaos theory to explore the iterative
dynamics of Marx's theory of capitalist crises as it is formulated in Volume III of Capital

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1.) Define & Explain Scope of sociology?

2.) Relation Between sociology & town planning:

Certain fundamental characteristics which underline Town planning are Firstly

philosophy of the “ever enduring process of perfecting, maturing, and refining” as

3.) Write short notes on:

A social institution is a complex, integrated set of social norms organized around

When a group or collection of individuals organize themselves expressly for the

in common an organization with a view to securing a specific end or specific ends.

Association: An association is formed or created by people. It is a social group.

Common interest: An association is not merely a collection of individuals. It consists

Cooperative spirit: An association is based on the cooperative spirit of its members.

Organization: Association denotes some kind of organization. An association is

Association as agencies: Associations are means or agencies through which their

Durability of association: An association may be permanent or temporary. There are

Close and informal relationships

Common values and beliefs

Strong group feeling

Talcott Parsons defined community as collectivity the members of which share a

thought to characterize industrializing societies. Kingsley Davis defined it as the

Ogburn and Nimkoff have defined organization is an articulation of different parts

According to H.M Johnson, organization refers to an aspect of interaction systems.

Sometimes the word organization is used to refer to the associational groups. It

In sociology and other social sciences, social stratification refers to

In modern Western societies, stratification is broadly organized into three main

may be defined as 'stratified', or if such differentials began with agriculture and broad

1. The rankings apply to social categories of people who share a common

Social control refers generally to societal and political mechanisms or processes that

of chaos or anomie.[clarification needed] Some theorists, such as Émile Durkheim,

Informal sanctions may include shame, ridicule, sarcasm, criticism and disapproval.

As with formal controls, informal controls reward or punish acceptable or

Formal social control is expressed through law as statutes, rules,

Applications of social control theory:

According to the propaganda model theory, the leaders of modern, corporate-

To maintain control and regulate their subjects, authoritarian organizations and

Sociologists consider informal means of social control vital in maintaining public

The continual application of low-level fear, as in mass surveillance or an electronic

Karl Marx's (1818- 1883) thought was

The most important concepts of Karl Marx

 The following concepts of Marx have aided sociological thought

Marx's view of history, which came to be called the materialist conception of history

Marx's acceptance of this notion of materialist dialectics which rejected Hegel's

The other important contribution to Marx's revision of Hegelianism was Engels'

Commodity fetishism is an example of what Engels called false consciousness, which

own the land and technology to produce, is a "capitalist" or "bourgeois." (Marx

Marx distinguished industrial capitalists from merchant capitalists. Merchants buy

The capitalist mode of production is capable of tremendous growth because the

benefit everyone equally, and a system of production less vulnerable to periodic

Ferdinand Tönnies (1855- 1936) was a

Tönnies distinguished between two types of social groupings. Gemeinschaft often

are called Gesellschaft. Whereas the membership in a Gemeinschaft is self-fulfilling,

The important books :

Gemeinschalf and Gessellschaft (1887)

Introduction to Sociology (1936)

Talcott Parsons (1902-82) was for many

 The Structure of Social Action (1937),

adaptation to the physical and social environment;