The discipline of sociology studies societies and social life.
The object “society” means a group of people living in a bounded territory who share common cultural features such as language, values, basic behavioural norms, institutions, and the relationships between them.
As the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1991) put it:
The difficulty, in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood.
Sociological theory and complexity theory are compatible in that both assert that interactions between people / social agents produces emergent macro level patterns and structures. (See structuration theory.)
LINKS
- Crossman, A. (2019). Introduction to Sociology. ThoughtCo.
- Giddens, A. and Sutton, P.W. (2021). Sociology. 9th edition. Wiley.
