THEORIES AND PERSPECTIVES

IN SOCIOLOGY
Theory
• A general statement about how some parts of the world fit together
and how they work.
• It is an explanation of how two or more facts are related to one
another.
• Macro level – relates to large-scale issues and large groups of people
• Micro-level – looks at very specific relationships between individuals
or small groups
• Paradigms – philosophical and theoretical frameworks used within a
discipline to formulate theories, generalizations, and the experiments
performed in support of them.
Symbolic-Interactionism
• A micro-level theory that focuses on the relationships among individuals within a
society.
• Communication - exchange of meaning through language and symbols – is
believed to be the way by which people make sense of their social worlds.
• Symbols – things to which we attach meaning and that make social life possible
• People use symbols to encapsulate their experiences.
• Meanings attached to symbols come from interaction with members of the
society.
• Even the self is a symbol for it consists of ideas that we have about who we are.
And it is a changing symbol, for as we interact with others, we constantly adjust
our views of the self based on how we interpret the reactions of others.
• Changes in meanings result in social conflict.
Proponents
• George Herbert Mead – the social construction of reality
• Herbert Blumer coined the term “symbolic-interactionism”
• Erving Goffman – Dramaturgy
• Constructivism – an extension of symbolic interactionism which
proposes that reality is what humans cognitively construct it to be.
We develop social constructs based on interactions with others, and
those constructs that last over time are those that have meanings
which are widely agreed-upon or generally accepted by most within
the society.
Application
Issue: Increasing rate of divorce
• Emotional satisfaction
• The love symbol
• Meaning of children
• Meaning of parenthood
• Marital roles
• Perception of alternatives
• Meaning of divorce
• Changes in law
Structural-Functionalism
• Sees the society as a structure
with interrelated parts designed health family

to meet the biological and social

needs of individuals in the civil society government

society.
mass media school

market church
Proponents
• Herbert Spencer - Social Institutions
• Emile Durkheim – social institutions work together to maintain
stability
• Alfred Radcliffe Brown – function
• Talcott Parsons – equilibrium, “normal” and “pathological”
• Robert Merton – manifest and latent functions, dysfuntions
Application
Issue: Industrialization and urbanization degenerates the traditional
functions of family
• Economic production
• Socialization of children
• Care of the sick and elderly
• Recreation
• Sexual control of members
• Reproduction
Conflict Theory
• Looks at the society as a
competition for limited
resources.
• This macro-level approach views
the society as made up of
individuals in different social
classes who must compete for
social, material, and political
resources such as food, housing,
employment, education, and
leisure time.
Proponents
• Karl Marx – social conflict
• Ludwig Gumplowicz – war and conquest are the basis of civilization
• Max Weber – in addition to economic inequalities, inequalities in of
political power and social structure cause conflict. Rates of social
mobility and perception on legitimacy of power are factors of conflict.
• Georg Simmel - conflict can help integrate and stabilize the society.
• Frankfurt School – developed the critical theory as an attempt to
address structural issues causing inequality. It explains what’s wrong
in the current social reality, identify the people who can make
changes, and provide practical goals for social transformation.
Postmodernism
• Designates a new condition which contemporary advanced industrial
societies alleged to have reached.
• Argues that it offers related perspectives on the shortcomings of
positivism as well as new ways to theorize and study contemporary
societies.
Other perspectives
• C. Wright Mills and Sociological imagination – seeing the strange in
the familiar and seeing the general in the particular
• Max Weber and Verstehen – to grasp by insight
• Emile Durkheim and Social facts – we use social facts to interpret
other social facts
• Auguste Comte and Positivism – to understand the world based on
science
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