An attempt to understand the emergence of the
modern world.
Challenges the things we take for granted.
Does it have to be this way? Is there a better way?
Systematic, skeptical and critical study of
the social. It is the study of human society.
Avoids ethnocentrism.
Analyzing and interpreting the links
between individuals and society.
Three types of approaches: functionalism, symbolic
interactionism, conflict theory.
Pierre Bourdieu organises much of his work on
contemporary social life around the concept of culture,
approaching the symbolic realm of language and
meaning as central to the sociological analysis of
power, inequality and social change.
Emile Durkheim (1912) – Culture shapes our view of the
world – He noted that every culture makes assumptions
about fundamental phenomena such as relations of time,
space and number.