Sociological Perspective

SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
Sociological Perspective
Provides very general ways of conceptualizing the social world and its basic elements.
Provides a set of assumptions, interrelated concepts and statements about how various social phenomena are related to one another.

Sociology contains a large number of distinctive perspectives and they can be divided into two broad categories: micro and macro.
Functionalism
Functionalism is a macro perspective that examines the creation, maintenance, and alteration of durable social practices, institutions, and entire societies.
Assumptions of Functionalism
Functionalism assumes , that societies can be likened to problem solving entities.
Functionalist assumes that during the course of human history societies have developed many different answers to basic needs.
Functionalism presumes that the particular practices that arise in response to one problem have crucial repercussions fo the practices and institutions devised to address other problems.

Functionalism suggests that in contemporary societies containing scores of specialized institutions and hundreds of heterogenous sub-groups, societal integration is a recurring but manageable problem.
Functionalism asserts that deviance and conflict arise from social strains or contradiction within an institution or between institutions.
Conflict Perspective
Conflict Perspective is a macro sociological approach that examines the emergence, persistence and transformation of long standing practices, institutions and societies.
Assumptions
Society is an arena of struggle among different groups.
Conflicts among classes, status groups, and between those exercising authority and those subject to it supply the energy and the motivation for constructing and maintaining practices and institutions.

The conflict perspective characterizes on-going practices and institutions as structures of domination that promote the interest of a relatively powerful super ordinate group.
The conflict approach holds that significant social change usually reflects the efforts of groups mobilizing to advance their collective interests.
Symbolic Interactionism
This perspective tends to focus on the “micro order” of things.
Focuses on how an individual make sense of and interpret the world.
Five core ideas of SI
It assumes that human beings act in terms of the meanings they assign to objects in their environment.
It asserts that social action typically involves making a series of adjustments and readjustments as an individuals interpretation of the situation changes.

It assumes that the meanings imputed to an object are socially constructed.
It holds that in modern, heterogeneous societies, different groups often assign divergent meanings to the “same” object.
Established meanings are always subject to transformation, and Interactionist maintain that the emergence and diffusion of novel definitions of reality are critically important feature of society.