Sociology and it's Scope

 

Sociology

Sociology is formed from two words-“Societus” [Latin] which means Society and “Logos” [Greek] which means scientific study. Therefore, according to the words, sociology is the science that studies the society. Auguste Compte developed the word Sociology in 1839 AD.

Sociology can be defined in the following ways:

Science of society or of social phenomena.

It is the inter-action of human minds.

It is the study of human inter-action and inter­relation their conditions and consequences.

It is the science that deals with social groups; their internal forms or modes of organisation, the processes that tend to maintain or change these forms of organisation and relations between groups.

It is a special social science concentrating on inter-human behaviour, on processes of sociation, on association and dissociation as such.

It is the study of the relationships between man and his human environment.

It may be defined as a body of scientific knowledge about human relationships.

It is  the science of collective behaviour.

Scope of Sociology:

Different sociologists have put forward their views with regard to the determination of the scope of sociology. Considering those views, we can categorize them into 2 major school of thought:

Particularistic School

This schools presents sociology as the particularistic science. The supporters of this schools are- Max Weber, George Simmel and Ferdinand Tonnies. This school argues that sociology should have a particular are of study which means sociology should deal with what is excluded in other social sciences. The main arguments presented by its supporters are:

Simmel: The difference between Sociology and other special sciences is that it deals with the same topics but with the angle of social relationship. Sociology is a specific social science which describes, classifies, analyses and delineates the forms of social relationships.

Small: According to Small, the scope of sociology is the study of the generic forms of social relationships, behaviours and activities, etc.

Max Weber: 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 inter-actions are social.

Tonnies: Sociology focuses on the form of relation that differentiates society from a community.

 

According to the formalistic school, sociology studies one specific aspect of social relationships, i.e., their forms in their abstract nature, and not in any concrete situation. A comparison is drawn between the forms of social relationships and a bottle. A bottle may be either of plastic or any other material. It may contain milk; water etc. but the contents of the bottle do not change the form of bottle. Similarly, the forms of social relationships do not change with the change in the content of social relationships.

Critiques of this School of thought:

It is a narrow concept.

It is impractical.

It has not been adequately explained.

Synthetic School

It argues that sociology is a general science and it can not be confined into a particular field. The supporters of this school of thought-Durkheim, Hob-house, Ginsberg, and Sorokin. The main arguments presented by the supporters of Synthetic School’s supporters are:

Durkheim: According to Durkheim, Sociology has three principal divisions, viz.,

(i)Social Morphology: It is concerned with geographical or territorial basis of the life of people and its relation to types of social organisations and the problems of populations such as its volume and density, local distribution and the like.

(ii) Social Physiology: It is divided into a number of branches such as Sociology of Religion, of Morals, of Laws, of Economic life, of Language etc. Every one of these branches of Sociology deals with a set of social facts, that is activities related to the various social groups.

(iii) General Sociology: It is to discover the general character of these social facts and to determine whether there are any general social laws of which the different laws established by the special social sciences are particular expressions.

b. Sorokin: According to Sorokin, the subject matter of Sociology includes:

(i) The study of relationship between the different aspects of social phenomena;

(ii) The study of relationship between the social and non-social;

(iii) The study of general features of social phenomena.

c.Ginsberg: Ginsberg has summed up the chief functions of sociology as follows.

i. Sociology seeks to provide a classification of types and forms of social relationships especially of those which have come to be defined institutions and associations.

ii. It tries to determine the relation between different parts of factors of social life, for example, the economic and political, the moral and the religious, the moral and the legal, the intellectual and the social elements.

iii. It endeavors to disentangle the fundamental conditions of social change and persistence and to discover sociological principles governing social life.

Some parts are adopted from: https://www.sociologydiscussion.com/sociology/sociology-definition-development-and-its-scope/2184