Sociology is the systematic study of human behavior occurring in a social context. It seeks to understand how and why people act the way they do across an enormous variety of settings. Two major influences are acknowledged to affect human social behavior: (1) cultural factors such as values and norms and (2) structural factors such
Many disciplines in the social sciences and humanities systematically study language, each having its own theoretical foundations, goals, and research traditions. The resulting landscape is a maze of paths that start and then split off either to reemerge as hybrids combined with other specialties or to reach a dead end. For instance, psychology and anthropology
In the broadest perspective, education refers to all efforts to impart knowledge and shape values; hence, it has essentially the same meaning as socialization. However, when sociologists speak of education, they generally use a more specific meaning: the deliberate process, outside the family, by which societies transmit knowledge, values, and norms to prepare young people
Sociology of family is the area devoted to the study of family as an institution central to social life. The basic assumptions of the area include the universality of family, the inevitable variation of family forms, and the necessity of family for integrating individuals into social worlds. Family sociology is generally concerned with the formation
The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is a field of sociology that started to take form in the early 1970s. Sociologists, historians, and philosophers who shared a common interest in studying the social underpinnings of science took as a joint focus the very content of scientific knowledge. Previously, a division of labor had existed between
The sociology of gender is one of the largest subfields within sociology and features theory and research that critically interrogates the social construction of gender, how gender interacts with other social forces in society, and how gender relates to social structure overall. The sociology of gender examines how society influences our understandings and perception of differences
The sociology of knowledge as a subfield in sociology deals with the social and group origins of ideas. In its brief history as a field of study, it has included the entire ideational realm (knowledge, ideas, theories, and mentalities), in an attempt to comprehend how that realm is related to particular social and political forces and
Diverse theoretical traditions have been influential in the development of the contemporary sociology of the body, such as philosophical anthropology, Marxist humanism, and phenomenology. However, Michel Foucault (1926–84) has been a dominant influence in late twentieth century historical and sociological approaches. His research on sexuality, medicine, and discipline gave rise to a general theory of
What is culture in sociology? To produce a definition of culture, one can examine the concept in the abstract, that is, explore the concept theoretically from a variety of standpoints and then justify the definition that emerges through deductive logic. Or one can explore how the concept is used in practice, that is, describe how