Sociology can be approached from two schools of thought - the German formalistic school and the French synthetic school. The formalistic school aims to narrowly define sociology's scope to include only social institutions, groups, and interactions. The synthetic school believes sociology should broadly study all aspects of society, including social structures, systems, norms, and emerging issues. Both schools agree that sociology should comprehensively examine social life but do so scientifically and methodically.

1. BASIC CONCEPT OF SOCIOLOGY
SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY

2. SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY
• Major two schools of thoughts have given
their own opinions to:
- Confine the research areas and domain of
investigation
- Demarcates the boundary for comprehensive
understanding of the issue
- Systematize the boundary of research with
concrete methodology.

3. 1. German specialist/ Formalistic school of thoughts
• This thought was established by George Simmel, Max,
Vierkandt etc.
• It aims to confine the areas by including social
institutions, facts, dynamics, actions, interactions,
process, labor classes, group behavior, and system.
• Sociology is pure understanding and independent
science.
• Sociology should interpret social behavior through
cause and effect relationship- Max Weber.
• They wanted to study limited contents in depth to
make sociological research more scientific.

4. 2. French synthetic/informal school of thought
• It was founded by Emile Durkheim, sociologist his
followers are; Ginsberg, Hob House and P.A. Sorokin.
• Their conclusion is that sociology should be
encyclopedic in character.
• Sociology should include all type of phenomena that
exist in society.
• Sociological contents can be of vivid, bizarre, formal
and informal but the perspective, tools, technique
and methodology should be best to make result
rational and trustworthy.

5. a) Social morphology
• It studies the social structure and groups,
people’s life, organization and population
problems.
• The territorial life of the community is studied
in depth like High Himalayan ‘sherpa’
mountain ‘magar’ and plain indigenous
‘Tharu’.
• Ethnography is produced by researcher here.

6. b) Social physiology
• Social physiology means; social institutions;
marriage, family, kinship, religion, academia,
political institutions, economical institutions,
socio-cultural entities, laws, language, values,
practice, structures, systems are studied
sociologically.
• According to Emile social structure, systems
and its dynamism are basic unit of
investigation for sociology.

7. c) General sociology
• It is regarded as philosophical part of sociology.
• It aims to discover general social facts, including,
values, norms, practices, morals, ethics, and laws.
• It also studies emerging issues like poverty, crime,
juvenile delinquency, depression, and
disequilibrium of society.
• Ginsberg argues there should be contents like
pathology, social process, change, structure,
system, control, associations, organizations,
historical fact and factors of social life are
hardware and software of society.

8. Conclusion
• So both schools of thought seems different to
each other but in deep they are
supplementary to each other. Most of the
scholars agreed that sociology should be
encyclopedic in nature and do study the entire
social life. But methodology should be
concrete and scientific.