What Is Sociology

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Nikole Scholes
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Words - 835 What is Sociology?
Sociology can be described as the study of human social relationships and foundations. It is the study of social behaviour or society including the origins, development and organisations. Macionis and Plummer (2012) defined sociology to be the “critical study of society, its studies the way people do things together” (Macionis and Plummer, 2012). Sociology offer a distinctive and educative way of seeing and understanding the social world. Sociology research aims to gain a deeper understanding and develop a broader knowledge of society that will help humans to understand the world in order to advance it. Here we address the history of sociology and its influential
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Sociological perspective is the concepts of ontology and epistemology, this is way we know things vs what things are. Sociologist have used quantitative and qualitative methods to study sociology in order to determine economic function and shifts in society. For example, the shift during the 18th century from feudalism to capitalism, this had a large impact on the aspects of sociology where social integration, social inequality and social reproduction began to be investigated. Macionis and Plummer identified three major innovators in historical comparison and aimed to explain the concept of modern society these are; Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber (Macionis and Plummer, 2012).
Karl Marx saw a flow of conflict between groups that be believed lead to the exploitation and suffering of the
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Marx believed that upper or capitalist class use the power of state to control social structure, meaning that social reproduction of division class benefiting only the capitalist class allowing them to continue to succeed. We can see this reinforcement in the state and power’s control of education, technology and religion essentially creating social inequality. These example support Webers social action theory where, human actions impact and shape another person’s actions. We to can see state and power in the production of medicine and health systems seeing the lower class with less vaccines and medicine due to their economic status. We can see through the current Australian health system that those in an upper class can afford private health care leading them to be able to gain better health cover and extras then a lower class citizen. This allows the upper class to remain generally healthier and live longer (How social class affects health,

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