Marx explains the economic structure by its relations with the political, ideological, and cultural structures, which are elements of the social structure other than market relations which are abstracted from social relations, having a different and autonomous organisation. Marx argues that the mode of production of a society should be looked in order to understand the society. A mode of production is made up of two elements: productive forces and relations of production. Productive forces include physical tools like technology, which are needed to organise economic activities in the production process. Political, legal, ideological, religious, and cultural structures constitute the superstructure of the society.
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A theory is a system of a logically interrelated set of concepts and propositions which aims to explain the empirical reality and the casualty among observable facts.
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Types of society
In the most general level, societies before the 18th century are called “traditional societies”. In the Western world, the majority of the traditional societies transformed through Enlightenment, Scientific and Political Revolutions and the Industrial Revolution, and a new society emerged. This new type of society is called
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There are three main methodological approaches in social sciences. These are the Positivist, the Interpretive and the Critical approaches. In addition to these, there are Feminist and Postmodern approaches. However, the three main approaches are the most commonly used approaches. (...) Although there are fundamental differences among them, all of
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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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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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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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(A) social group is a set of people who share common goals and interests, who are interrelated and who have a continuous interaction for a while. (...) The groups may be permanent or temporary. (...) Social groups have control over their members. This control is often exercised by group norms.
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Social facts are created collectively by society. They are exterior, inevitable and limiting for the individuals. In other words, the social facts are the acting, thinking and feeling patterns which are out and above of the individuals and have the power to force themselves to the individuals. (...) Because the social facts impose themselves upon individuals, deviation from social facts can result in various types of sanctions. (...) They are the creation of human activities or actions, however, they are not the product of conscious intentions, and they are the unanticipated consequence of human agency. Examples of the social facts are the social institutions, statuses, roles, laws, beliefs, population distribution, urbanization, language, religion etc. For example, violence against women is a social fact. Poverty, marriage, urbanization, class structure, subcultures are also examples of social facts.
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Although the concept of society is often used to refer to a nation, they are different concepts. The concept of nation is a political category, and refers to a pretended unity which involves official recognition. As a political category, a nation cannot subsist on its own; nations generally subsist through the agency of their states. Society, on the other hand, is a praxis, which is established by mutually bounded social relations. Societies are not political units; they are not administered by the politicians. Societies administer themselves, they can subsist on their own, they do not need any agency. (...) Every nation is a society, but not every society is a nation. Society is not the totality of people; it is the totality of the mutual relationships among a community of people who share a specific territory, a specific culture and common social institutions.
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Sociology as a social science has its origins in the effort to understand the transformation from the traditional society to the modern society.
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(...) suicide rates are higher in times of peace than times of war; and higher in times of economic crisis than times of economic welfare.
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The statistics indicate that the number of people who commit suicide every year is approximately 3 thousand in Turkey.
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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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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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