SOCIOLOGY

The study of the development, structure, and functioning of human society. It is

the study of social problems Sociology is the scientific study of society,
including patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and culture. It is
a social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical
analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order, acceptance, and
change. Many sociologists aim to conduct research that may be applied directly
to social policy and welfare, while others focus primarily on refining the
theoretical understanding of social processes. Subject matter ranges from
the micro-sociology level of individual agency and interaction to
the macro level of systems and the social structure Social research
informs politicians and policymakers, educators, planners, legislators, administr
ators, developers, business magnates, managers, social workers, non-
governmental organizations, non-profit organizations, and people interested in
resolving social issues in general. There is often a great deal of crossover
between social research, market research, and other statistical field

Foundations of the academic discipline

The first formal Department of Sociology in the world was established

by Albion Small - at the invitation of William Rainey Harper - at the University
of Chicago in 1892, and the American Journal of Sociology was founded
shortly thereafter in 1895 by Small as well.  However, the institutionalization of
sociology as an academic discipline was chiefly led by Émile Durkheim (1858–
1917), who developed positivism as a foundation to practical social research.
While Durkheim rejected much of the detail of Comte's philosophy, he retained
and refined its method, maintaining that the social sciences are a logical
continuation of the natural ones into the realm of human activity, and insisting
that they may retain the same objectivity, rationalism, and approach to
causality. Durkheim set up the first European department of sociology at
the University of Bordeaux in 1895, publishing his Rules of the Sociological
Method (1895). For Durkheim, sociology could be described as the "science
of institutions, their genesis and their functioning

August Comte

 Was a French philosopher who founded the discipline of praxeology and the

doctrine of positivism. He is sometimes regarded as the first philosopher of
science in the modern sense of the term. Comte first described
the epistemological perspective of positivism in The Course in Positive
Philosophy, a series of texts published between 1830 and 1842. These texts
were followed by the 1848 work, A General View of Positivism (published in
English in 1865). The first three volumes of the Course dealt chiefly with the
physical sciences already in existence
(mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology), whereas the latter two
emphasised the inevitable coming of social science. Observing the circular
dependence of theory and observation in science, and classifying the sciences in
this way, Comte may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the
modern sense of the term. Comte was also the first to distinguish natural
philosophy from science explicitly. For him, the physical sciences had
necessarily to arrive first, before humanity could adequately channel its efforts
into the most challenging and complex "Queen science" of human society itself.
His work View of Positivism would therefore set out to define, in more detail,
the empirical goals of sociological method.

Émile Durkheim

 Was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and

—with Karl Marx and Max Weber—is commonly cited as the principal
architect of modern social science.  His first major sociological work was The
Division of Labour in Society (1893). In 1895, he published The Rules of
Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology,
becoming France's first professor of sociology.[4] In 1898, he established the
journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897),
a study of suicide rates in Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered
modern social research and served to distinguish social science
from psychology and political philosophy. The Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life (1912) presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and
cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies.

FORMATION OF SOCIETY

Societies are formed of our social groupings at varied levels, from small towns,

through countries, to broader cultural groupings such as a Western society.
Within such societies people tend to form particular cultures, formed of the
ideas, customs, and social behaviours that make one society distinct from
another. Society is a process in which people continuously interact with one
another, the key terms are negotiation, self other, reflexivity the implication
being that society is constituted and reconstituted in social interaction.