What is Sociological Perspective?[1]
“The perspective of sociology involves seeing through the outside appearances of people’s actions and organizations” (Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 1963). It is the way of looking at the society and the social behaviour—the subject matter of sociology. It goes beyond identifying patterns of social behaviour. It also attempts to provide explanations for such patterns.
Thus, the broad societal forces become a central consideration of sociology. Sociologists are not interested in individual personalities, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela or Ravi Shanker, rather they try to identify the shared traits and behaviour and the underlying patterns in those traits and behaviour of millions of human beings. One major goal of sociological perspective is to identify and interpret patterns underlying the recurrent regular aspects of social life and also to investigate the influences on social behaviour.
Now, we will attempt to highlight the main focus of sociological perspective in brief as under:
1. Sociology is a scientific endeavor with a strong humanistic bent:
The old nation that whether sociology is scientific or humanistic has been replaced by the modem view that it is scientific and humanistic both. As a scientific discipline, it aims at value-free and objective causal analysis of social phenomena.
It tries to generate general laws and make predictions. Humanistic perspective, on the other hand, tries to emphasize on Verstehen (understanding) through reflexivity the humanistic ethos and cultural creativity of all forms of social existence rather than on predictions. Such an image of sociology comes close to what Peter Berger (1963) calls “sociology as a form of consciousness”.
2. Sociology views society or social relations as structured, constituting a reality that transcends individuals:
Like psychology, sociology is not interested in behaviour of an individual (suicide by a single person) but in the patterns of behaviour (suicide patterns) or the behaviour of group of persons. Sociology is concerned with how the structure of society is created, maintained and changed.
3. Sociology tries to investigate the processes through which society shapes the individual and in turn individuals create the structure of society:
In the words of Giddings, “it investigates the connections between what society makes of us and what we make of ourselves”.
4. Sociology studies social phenomena from holistic and relational points of view both:
This perspective enables sociologists to identify underlying recurrent patterns of and influences on social behaviour.
5. Sociology studies human behaviour in group context:
For a sociologist, a man/woman and his/her particular act or activity is not important but his/her status and role in which the activity is performed is important.
6. Sociological perspective is neither Utopian (what is desirable), nor fatalistic (inevitability of existing state of affairs), hut scientific (what it is, how it is and why it is):
But at times, it sometimes goes beyond the questions of what, how, why and where and assumes the role of an applied science. Thus, sociological perspective is neutralistic (pure scientific) and interventionist (applied or social engineering) both.
Early sociologists were positivists, emphasized its naturalistic character, but modem sociologists (humanists) argue that sociologists should adopt the role of an interventionist (wherever is necessary) along with his traditional role of a scientist. In the interventionist conception of sociology, the discipline is treated as a problem solving craft. Recently, this approach was much emphasized by Alain Touraine (The Return of the Actor, 1988).
7. Sociological perspective involves the investigation of the problem on micro and macro levels both:
At micro level, sociology studies how individuals behave in social situations—at work, at play, at home, or in school, or in small and large groups. It deals with people’s everyday interactions (social interactionist, ethno methodological and phenomenological approaches of study).
At macro level, sociology focuses on patterns of behaviour and forms of organization that characterize entire societies (classical and grand theorist’s approaches). At this level, sociology deals with large-scale structures (such as bureaucracy), broad social categories, institutions, social systems, and social problems such as war, unemployment, poverty, corruption, and solutions to these problems are sought at the structural or organizational level. In their studies, sociologists utilize both approaches of study, i.e., qualitative (introspective-participant method) and quantitative (statistical, interview and survey techniques).
[1] Rawat, H. K. (2015). Sociology Basic Concepts. New Delhi: Rawat Publications. p. 44-46
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