Download Sociology: A Definition: Part One

Sociology: A Definition: Part One
Why are you taking this course?
I suspect it is simply because someone, perhaps a counselor or academic advisor, told you
that you had to have one, or more, social science courses to complete your program of
study or to transfer or to graduate or to earn your degree or certificate. Somebody told
you that you collegiate ticket had to be punched, at least, one time in the social science
section.
And, if you look at almost any college catalog in this entire United States, you are going
to find the same kind of requirement. In order to get a degree, you have to take one, or
more, courses in what are called the social sciences.
Sociology is just one of the courses that you could have taken; it is just one of the social
sciences. The others include psychology, anthropology, economics, history, geography.
This list varies a bit from school to school.
Now, what do all these have in common . . . well, a number of couple of things.
First, they all look at, study, seek to understand, some aspect of human behavior. So, the
general subject matter of the social sciences is human behavior. What do we human
beings do and why do we do it.
Certainly, other disciplines study human behavior, too. When you take a human biology
class, you clearly are learning much about human behavior. Much of what we do and
why we do it comes from the fact that we are a particular life form, a particular species,
with particular physical (biological) characteristics. And, as we will see later, there is a
continuous and quite intense debate about just how much of human behavior is actually
biological and how much of it is social.
So, generally speaking, social sciences do not look for the causes of human behavior in
biology or chemistry. Instead they seek to find and understand those causes of human
behavior that rest on the fact that we live together and interact with one another. They
look for the "social" causes and explanations of human behavior.
Each of the specific social science disciplines focuses on a relatively narrow and limited
aspect of that broader subject. For example, and with considerable oversimplification,
economics focuses on human behavior as it relates to the way we distribute goods and
services; history focuses on human behavior in the past, at least that part of the past for
which there are written records. When you get deep enough in the past, history turns into
another social science, archaeology and/or physical anthropology. Cultural anthropology
seeks to describe and understand the broad range of possible human behavior and,
generally is limited to the current time period, give or take a few decades. Quite
honestly, there is a huge overlap between sociology and cultural anthropology. The
topics and the terminology of both disciplines are quite similar. There was time when
you might distinguish between the two by saying that cultural anthropologists focused on
non-Western, non-industrial people and their ways of life and sociologists focused on
contemporary, Western (European), industrial scene. Cultural anthropologists studied
"them", while sociologists studied "us." That distinction probably can be made no
longer.
Psychology is, perhaps, the least social of the social sciences because it seeks to locate
the roots of human behavior in our thought processes.
Where does sociology fit in the social sciences? Well, it is the most "social" of them all.
Sociology seeks to understand and explain human behavior as a result of human
interaction.
A little mind game: try to think of anything that you do, i.e. any aspect of your behavior,
that is not in some way caused and/or influenced by your interaction with another human
being (or other human beings). Email an answer, if you think you have one!
Sociology seeks to understand and explain human behavior as a result of human
interaction, more specifically, sociology seeks to understand and explain human behavior
as a result of the groups to which we belong. In a way it is the same thing, if you define
a group (as your textbook does) as two or more human beings who interact with another
on a regular and continuous basis.
A second version of the aforementioned mind game: try to think of anything that you do,
i.e. any aspect of your behavior, that not in some way caused and/or influenced by some
group to which you belong. Email an answer, if you think you have one!!
So, sociology is the study of the social causes of human behavior, i.e. the cause of human
behavior that flow from human interaction and/or membership in groups.
Another clue is the derivation of the term "sociology" itself (see your textbook).