Sociology today and in the past

Ano: 2003 | Volume: 4 | Número: 1

Autores: Archibald O. Haller

Palavras-chave: sociology, history, stratification, power, structure, status

Resumo Inglês:

The paper presents the writer’s view of the main orighins and current state of today’s
Sociology as an empirical science. This view holds that the field may be seen as
composed of three overlapping areas: structural sociology (the analysis of power),
sociological psychology (the analysis of relations among persons, and between persons
and the societal structures they inhabit), and demography (the geographical
distributions of populations by age, gender, migration, etc). Within these are applied
subfields such as race, gender, organizational behavior, and social attitudes. Since its
earliest days (Ibn Khaldun, 14th Century) the core of the field has been concerned
with power differentials and with the related issue of variations in societal cohesion.
Key writings over the 19th and early 20th Centuries are discussed, leading to the
present theory of societal stratification. It holds that power relations are expressed
through four content dimensions, that the shape of each varies through time and
among societies by six structural dimensions, and that such structural states and their
changes have significant consequences for everyone. The special theory of status
allocation processes concerns how and why individuals’ power trajactories within
such structures, thus the courses of their life chances, are established and maintained.