Sociology and Society

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Sociology Class XI (Introducing Sociology), Chapter 1.

Who really chose your subjects?

Think about the advice you got when you picked your Class XI stream. "Study hard and you will do well." "Take this combination, it has better job prospects." "Is that practical for a girl?" "You will join the family shop anyway, so why this subject?" The first piece of advice puts everything on you. The other three quietly bring in the job market, your gender and your family. Sociology begins at exactly this point: your effort matters a great deal, but the final outcome is shaped by forces that no single student controls.

Notice the chain. The job market depends on what the economy needs. The economy depends on the policies of governments. Your family's background decides how much risk you can afford to take. One student's worry about subjects is, at the same time, a worry shared by thousands of students. This chapter shows how sociology studies that connection.

The sociological imagination: personal trouble or public issue?

C. Wright Mills, an American sociologist, gave sociology its best known tool in his 1959 book. The sociological imagination is the ability to see the link between history and biography, that is, between the story of one life and the story of the society in which it is lived. Mills's most useful distinction is between two kinds of problems.

Why it matters. Take unemployment. When one person in a town is jobless, that is a personal trouble, and you look at that person's skills and efforts. When millions are jobless, it is a public issue, and no amount of personal effort can fix it. The state's rural housing scheme, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Gramin), operationalised from 2016 by the Ministry of Rural Development, is the standard example of a personal problem (a homeless family) being treated as a public issue that needs a collective answer.

Pause and predict: a student fails Class XII because the only school within 20 km has no science teacher for two years. Is this a personal trouble or a public issue?

Check your answer: both, but the explanation that matters is the public issue. The student feels it as personal, yet the same thing happens to every student in that area, and the cause lies in how schooling is staffed and funded. Spotting this is the sociological imagination at work.

Which "society" do we mean?

When you say "our society", you may mean India (if you are talking to foreigners), or your language group, your religion, your caste or tribe, or your neighbourhood. In modern times every person belongs to more than one society at once, so even deciding what to study is a hard question. Satyajit Ray, the film-maker, faced the same puzzle when he asked what to put in a film: a peaceful village, a mythical past, or the crowded modern city?

Societies are also unequal. Three voices side by side show it.

Sociology, philosophy and religion: what is versus what ought to be

People have always reflected on society. Philosophers, religious teachers and law-makers wrote about what is moral, and about how people should live. Sociology also studies norms (rules of behaviour) and values (ideas about what is good or desirable). But it asks a different question: how do these norms and values actually work in real societies? It observes and records findings even when the researcher does not like them.

Peter Berger compared the sociologist to a spy. A spy whose reports are coloured by his superiors' ambitions is useless to everyone, so good intelligence must be free of bias. In the same way, a sociologist must report as accurately as possible. This does not mean a sociologist has no social responsibility. It means that asking how findings will be used is a question for a citizen, not a sociological question, just as a biologist's knowledge can heal or harm without that being a biological question.

Sociology has always seen itself as a science, bound by rules of evidence that allow others to check or repeat its findings. Whether it should use numbers (quantitative research) or meanings (qualitative research) is debated within the subject, but the rule that findings must be checkable is not.

Sociology versus common sense

You already have ideas about why people are poor, why marriages break down, why some neighbourhoods are unsafe. That is common sense, and sociology is different from it for two reasons. Common sense is unreflective: it never asks "why do I believe this?" And it usually gives naturalistic or individualistic explanations, which assume there are "natural" reasons for how people behave.

Unintended consequences. Sociology also uncovers connections nobody expected. After the Kargil War, the government decided that compensation for a soldier's death should go to his widow, so that women, who often lack property rights in patrilineal systems (where descent and inheritance pass from father to son), would be provided for. An unplanned result followed: in some cases widows were pushed into marriage with the dead man's brother so that the money would stay in his family. The lesson is that a well-meant state measure can have effects its makers never foresaw.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: common sense is unreflective and naturalistic, and sociology is systematic and questioning. In reality: common sense is not always wrong. "Poor people have fewer opportunities" is a common-sense belief that sociology confirms. The difference is that sociology tests the belief against evidence, so it can also catch the beliefs that are false. Why it matters: never write that common sense is "false" in an answer. Write that it is untested.

How sociology was born: ideas

Sociology emerged in the 19th century from two sets of forces, one of ideas and one of material change. Here are the ideas.

The Enlightenment turned poverty into a "social problem". Before, poverty was seen as natural, like the weather. Enlightenment thinkers argued it was caused by human ignorance or exploitation, so it could be studied and fixed. One way to study it was the social survey, which assumes human phenomena can be classified and measured. Auguste Comte (French, 1789 to 1857), regarded as the founder of sociology, believed that sociology would add to human welfare.

Two views. For the exam: Auguste Comte is the founder of sociology. Another reading: Comte coined the name and set the programme, but many scholars credit Emile Durkheim with giving sociology its method and its place as a university discipline. Both claims are common in scholarship, so answer "Comte" when the question says "founder".

The evolutionary vision had a hidden flaw. It assumed Western societies were the most advanced and that non-Western societies were backward. Indian sociology grew up in the shadow of this idea, which is one reason it has been so thoughtful about its own practice.

How sociology was born: material changes

The material cause was the Industrial Revolution, driven by capitalism: a system of production for sale in markets, resting on private ownership of capital. Under capitalism, entrepreneurs pursued profit in a sustained, systematic way, and goods, services and even labour became commodities whose use was decided by rational calculation. England was the centre. The table shows how much changed.

The 1956 Hindi film song from C.I.D. about Bombay ("yeh hai Bombay meri jaan") captures the same city life: buildings, trams and mills, but "everything except a human heart". For Karl Marx, the factory was oppressive but also potentially liberating, because workers learnt to act collectively and press for better conditions. And with the clock, "time is now money: it is not passed but spent."

Pause and predict: your phone alarm, school bell and office shift timings all run on the clock. Which social change is this linked to?

Check your answer: factory production under industrial capitalism. Before it, work followed daylight and tasks. Factories needed workers to start together and work at a steady pace, so clock-time became a basis of social organisation.

Why start with Europe? Colonialism links the story to India

Britain became urban very fast: about 20 per cent of its people lived in towns in 1810 and about 80 per cent in 1910. India did not follow the same path. Cheap machine-made British goods ruined Indian handicraftsmen, and since there were no widely developed local industries to absorb them, most took to agriculture to survive (A.R. Desai). The same process of capitalism therefore had different effects in India.

Capitalism also spread across the world unevenly and often violently. An estimated 24 million Africans were enslaved between the 17th and 19th centuries, of whom about 11 million survived the voyage to the Americas. After slavery declined in the 1800s, indentured labour from India was taken on ships to work on cotton and sugar plantations in places such as Surinam, the West Indies and Fiji. The writer V.S. Naipaul was a descendant of such labourers. R.K. Laxman's travelogue on Mauritius, where a man with a Tamil face and name speaks only French-accented English, shows how far this history reaches.

Sociology in India

Colonial rule shaped how Indian society was written about. Marx observed that India, once a great workshop of cotton cloth for the world, was flooded with English cotton goods. Western scholars also portrayed the Indian village as unchanging, a leftover from "the infancy of society", which fitted the evolutionary idea that colonies showed Europe's own past.

This colonial history explains a difference in the disciplines.

Two views. For the exam: in India there is no rigid divide between sociology and social anthropology. Another reading: the divide has been blurring in the West too. Anthropologists now study the state, markets and globalisation, and sociologists use fieldwork, so scholars increasingly ask whether the "simple versus complex society" distinction still makes sense anywhere. Delhi has villages inside it and small towns serve overseas call-centre clients.

The scope of sociology and its neighbours

Sociology can study a shopkeeper and customer, a national issue such as unemployment or tribal forest rights, or a global process such as the effect of foreign universities on education. What defines it is not what it studies but how it studies. The social sciences overlap, so the boundaries are somewhat arbitrary.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: sociology is distinct from economics because it looks at norms and values, not just prices. In reality: economics has itself moved closer to sociology. Feminist economics asks how unpaid work at home supports the paid economy, and Pierre Bourdieu argued for an "economics of happiness" that counts the social costs of precarious work. Why it matters: disciplinary boundaries are not a straitjacket, so expect questions on overlap.

Timeline: key dates in the chapter

Who said what

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Next: Terms, Concepts and Their Use in Sociology turns the idea of society as an interconnected whole into working concepts such as groups, status, role and social control.
• Later in Class XI: Introducing Western Sociologists takes up Comte, Marx, Durkheim and Weber in detail, and Indian Sociologists takes up Srinivas and Desai.
• Class XII link: Introducing Indian Society continues the story of colonialism and its effect on Indian society.