Chapter 1: Sociology and SocietyClass 11 Sociology — summary, notes, extra questions & MCQ quiz

Summary

Sociology is the systematic study of human society, of social groups and of the way individuals and society shape one another. The chapter opens with the everyday worry of choosing school subjects to show how a private trouble is tied to public issues: the job market, the family's social background and gender all structure an individual's chances. Drawing on C. Wright Mills, it presents the sociological imagination as the ability to grasp the link between biography and history, between the personal troubles of the individual and the public issues of social structure. Modern individuals belong to more than one society at once — neighbourhood, caste, religion, region, nation — and these societies are marked by deep plurality and inequality. Sociology differs from common sense, philosophy and religion because it follows scientific rules of evidence and observes how norms and values actually function rather than how they ought to be. The discipline itself has a biography: it grew out of the European Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, with capitalism, urbanisation and clock-time as material backdrops, and the early ideas of Comte, Marx, Spencer and Durkheim. In colonial India the boundary between sociology and social anthropology blurred. Sociology is one of the social sciences and shares concerns with economics, political science, history, psychology and social anthropology, yet is distinguished by how it studies its chosen field.

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