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Sociology Paradigms

Sociological perspective

general in particular strange in familiar Key concepts in study of society:social location - race, social class, gender, religion etc ( a persons life choices will be influenced on these factors)Marginalization - a group is marginalized when its social location is outside the center of powerPower and equality - many kinds (economic, political, social, cultural ) Sociology can help to create good public policies, fix society problems.
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Major Sociology Paradigms

Society as a well oiled machineSociety as a group of competing interestsAs a bunch of people just interacting with each other Each paradigm provides some assumptions that have to be made before studying a particular problem.Macro and Micro Questions. Micro questions can impact study of macro questions.
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Structural Functionalism (Macro Perspective)

Society as an organism , which diff parts who work together to keep it alive. (complex system whose part stay together to promote stability and promote order). A popular example is the human body.These diff parts are social structures which have some social functions. Social functions:Manifest: intended or obvious (result was expected that we imagined)Latent: unrecognized/unexpected consequences.Social dis-function Criticism :Neglects the negatives of functions of event such as divorceJustifies status quo and does not encourage to take an active role in changing social environment
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Conflict Perspective (Macro Perspective)

Focuses on the negative, conflicted and ever-changing nature of society.Looks at Power struggles : What give some people power, some people get education opportunitiesSociety is made up of an ordered stratification system Imagine a stack of books of different thickness. These books are layers (stratification) with different thickness and order (the book on top has higher order for example). So the books represent classes of peopleFor example: Here the legend defines the layers, Top quintile has the highest order. If you are in the bottom , you would want to move up, if you are at the top, you want to stay there. Stratification examples:Racial StratificationGender Stratification Criticism:Deals with overly negative view of society
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Symbolic Interactionist Perspective (Micro)

Small scale interactions (interaction of an individual with other individuals, objects etc.)Meanings : What a particular thing/person has a meaning in their life. Their actions will depend on the meaning. these meaning will change based on the interactions.SymbolsCulturesExpectationNorms Criticism:neglects macro level, sociologists may miss larger issues of the society
Sociological perspective
Major Sociology Paradigms
Structural Functionalism (Macro Perspective)
Conflict Perspective (Macro Perspective)
Symbolic Interactionist Perspective (Micro)
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