Factual questions ask what happened. Comparative questions ask whether this happened in other places, too. Developmental questions ask whether it is repeated in time. Theoretical questions ask what lies beneath this.
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EARLY DEVELOPMENTS IN SOCIOLOGY
Saint-Simon (1760-1825): It is emphasized that the most significant contribution of Saint-Simon to the development of sociology is the term industrial society, which successfully influenced both the radicals like Marx and conservative theoreticians like Comte at same time by reflecting both socialist and
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CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY
Karl Marx (1818-1883): Karl Marx developed a theory called historical materialism. "the importance of economic factors rather than thoughts and values" According to Marx social relations of production have critical roles in understanding historical development. Marx suggests that all societies except those he
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Among these general approaches (of modern sociology) are a) Functionalism, b) Marxism and Conflict Theory and c) Symbolic Interactionism.
Functionalism has an important place in modern sociology and was initially influenced by Durkheim’s works in sociology in the 19th century. Functionalism deals with society as a system consisting of
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Durkheim suggests four ideal types of suicide. Two of these are altruistic and fatalistic suicides, which arise due to over-integration and over-regulation respectively, and are more specific to traditional societies. The other two are egoistic and anomic suicide that arise due to low integration and lack of social regulation respectively, and are more specific to modern societies.
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Parsons defines the four basic requirements that must be met in order for a social system to survive as adaptation (A), goal attainment (G), integration (I), and latency (L), or pattern maintenance.
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The economy of the pre-modern society, in which production and consumption were materialized at the house level, was the livelihood economy. In the modern society, production, variation, circulation, sharing and consumption relations actualize in the market by going out of the house.
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The field of study of economy as a sub-discipline of social sciences is based on some suppositions. The first hypothesis is that the sources are limited. The second is based on an assumption that human needs are infinite. The third presumes that people act rationally while they fulfill their needs on choice and preferance. Scarcity and choice are the two main concepts of the economics discipline. The analysis unit of economy is market. It only analyses the relations of economical providence, actions and production, circulation, distribution and consumption for two actors. To put it differently, actors of economic activity are the producer (firm) and the consumer (household).
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Economic sociology analyses attitude and behaviours, economic structure and relations that are the subjects of the economy considering social, cultural, and political facts, which are excluded from analyses by the discipline of economics.
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Smith is the first critic of the mercantilist doctrine. According to the economics theory that he based on a criticism of Mercantilism, a nation’s prosperity depends on the nation’s production power, whereas Mercantilists think that a nation’s prosperity depends on the mines the nation has. Production power is connected with the development of work sharing at both the social level and production process. Work sharing at the social level is connected with the level of society’s vocational specialization. He advocates that money is just a tool for exchanging, and labour is the main element for the development of production power. Smith wanted to remove the custom taxes and regulations that prevent international trade from expanding the market and increasing the production. He believed that the government should politically incentivise economy, and protested monopolisation on economy by the government, constant custom taxes and the tendentiousness of economy in some sectors. (...) Entrepreneurs who always have to compete against each other are always going to struggle to excel and buy the goods and services they produced in the condition of fully competitive market standards. In this sense, the entrepreneurs join the market under some risks. An actor who could not sell its product is kept out of the market. So, one of the main conditions ensuring superiority in the competition is producing qualified goods and selling them cheaply.
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