Department of Sociology
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What is Sociology?
Sociology in its simplest form is the study of society and social behavior. In a synthesis of theoretical analysis and empirical research, sociology provides a systematic understanding of societies, the organization of social life, and the ongoing processes by which social structures constrain social action yet are constantly being recreated and reaffirmed through action. Several key themes distinguish sociology from other perspectives and identify the central problems sociologists study.
Sociology has a unique perspective that distinguishes it from other social or behavioral sciences and -- more importantly -- challenges conventional wisdom. Sociologist C. Wright Mills, a product of populism, pragmatism and German social theory, called this perspective “the sociological imagination.” The perspective encourages students to recognize that individual troubles reflect public problems-- that the root of human experience is often not in individual experience but in the social structures and opportunities that both constrain and enable individual action. The sociological imagination is a self-consciousness that sees structure, culture, and history as shaping character and human behavior. We start not with the individual but with social conditions. Social order precedes any individual and will be here long after all of us are gone. How social life is organized -- from situations to organizations to stratification hierarchies to societies -- shapes the opportunities and constraints for human values, thinking, and action. As a result, individuals are, in many ways, the products of social processes. At the same time, there is a dialectical quality to social context; it is produced and constituted by human actors, and -- despite its obduracy -- has to be reproduced and can be changed by human actors who possess socially based but potentially creative minds.
The sociological perspective invites students to look at familiar surroundings as though seeing them for the first time. It provides a critical and reflexive view of a world they have always taken for granted. It encourages them to examine the world with the same curiosity and fascination that would come with their first exposure to an exotic, alien culture. A rule of this perspective (as Peter Berger put it in Invitation to Sociology) is “Things are not what they seem.” Social structures can have surprising unintended consequences, and the “best laid plains” often become transformed, go off course, or are subverted. Sociologists often find order and disorder in unexpected areas. Elements of social life conventionally thought to be manifestations of individuals -- the self, art, leadership, and criminality to name a few -- are, in fact, social or collective constructions. The sociological perspective is a way of perceiving and conceiving that is at once skeptical, critical, scientific, analytic, non-deterministic, cosmopolitan, and humanistic. Sociology is a social science and uses the methods of science to expand knowledge. At the same time, sociology is more than just a science; it is tempered by humanistic values and insights gained from the larger whole that is the human condition.
The 1960s marked a major and decisive turning point in Sociology (and social thought generally) in which the dominance of a single theory and single methodology were challenged by a plurality of other perspectives and approaches. Cultures, values, norms, and symbols thought to be univocal were discovered to be equivocal or multivocal, interpreted and defined by perspective, position, and context. Contemporary Sociology is characterized by a diversity of conceptual paradigms and methodologies that are responses to changing social conditions, multiple realities, developments in cognate fields, and disciplinary debates and discussions. This has led to expanded ways of doing research, whether comparative, historical, qualitative, or cultural. While never eschewing quantitative methods, legitimate “ways of knowing” have become more diverse. Today scholars experiment with new and different methodologies. Sociology continues to be expanded and applied to new areas -- emotions, the body, sexuality, time and space, consumption, globalization, and chaos/complexity. However, an enduring set of concerns revolves around issues of the social conditions for democracy, justice, and equity or their opposites -- exclusion, partiality, and inequality. Sociologists have made significant contributions and arguments about social institutions and practices that reproduce or mitigate the reproduction of inequality and exclusion. Power, resources, and forms of capital have figured prominently in this body of scholarship.
Part of the aftermath of the 1960s was the rediscovery of history and culture. What was thought to be universal and invariant was found to be transitory, conditional, and temporal. Objects thought to be persistent and tenacious, e.g. social structures, were found to be in process and constructed. Though we think in terms of systems and networks of interconnections, we note incoherence, contradiction, ambiguity, transition, and contingency in social life. This necessitates studying history, process, change, and collective action. The past with its consequences and the structure/culture with its contexts provide the conditions for and against which humans are continuously recreating their existence.
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University of Missouri
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