SOCI1513 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Contemporary Sociology, Social Stratification, American Sociological Association
Document Summary
Although sociology emerged from comte"s vision of a discipline that would subsume all other areas of scientific inquiry, that was the future of sociology. Far from replacing the other sciences, contemporary sociology has taken its place as a particular perspective for investigating human social life. The traditional focuses of sociology have included social stratification, social class, culture, social mobility, religion, secularization, law, and deviance. The range of social scientific methodology has also expanded. Social researchers draw upon a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques. The linguistic and cultural turns of the mid-twentieth century led to increasingly interpretative, hermeneutic, and philosophic approaches to the analysis of society. Conversely, recent decades have seen the rise of new analytically, mathematically, and computationally rigorous techniques such as agent- based modelling and social network analysis. Presently, sociological theories lack a single overarching foundation, and there is little consensus about what such a framework should consist of.
