This document provides an introduction to sociology, outlining key concepts and the origins of sociology as an academic discipline. It discusses how sociology emerged in the 19th century due to industrialization, travel exposing Europeans to different cultures, and the success of the natural sciences. Auguste Comte is identified as the founder of sociology, coining the term in 1838. The document also summarizes the early contributions of other pioneers like Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber to the field.

1. Sociology
CHAPTER 1: An Introduction to
Sociology

2. Sociology
• Department name: Business Administration
• Teacher name : Ayesha Abid
• Subject Name: Sociology
• Topic: Introduction to Sociology
• Lecture no 1
• Week no 1
• Class BBA
• Semester 3rd
• Section

3. Recommended Books
• Kendall, Diana: Sociology in our Times.
Wadsworth
• Margaret L. Andersen and Howard F.
Taylor Sociology The Essentials.
• Henslin, James M. Sociology. Allyn &Bacon
• Brgjar. George J. & Soroka, Michael P.
Sociology. Allyn & Bacon

4. Learning Objectives
• What Is Sociology?
• Explain concepts central to sociology
• Understand how different sociological perspectives have
developed.
• The History of Sociology
• Explain why sociology emerged when it did?
• Describe how sociology became a separate academic
discipline

5. Introduction to Sociology
• Concerts, sports games, and political rallies can have very
large crowds.
• When you attend one of these events, you may know only the
people you came with. Yet you may experience a feeling of
connection to the group.
• You are one of the crowd.
• You cheer and applaud when everyone else does. You boo and
yell alongside them.
• You move out of the way when someone needs to get by, and
you say "excuse me" when you need to leave.
• You know how to behave in this kind of crowd.

6. Introduction to Sociology
• It can be a very different experience if you are traveling in a
foreign country and find yourself in a crowd moving down the
street.
• You may have trouble figuring out what is happening.
• Is the crowd just the usual morning rush, or is it a political
protest of some kind?
• Perhaps there was some sort of accident or disaster.
• Is it safe in this crowd, or should you try to extract yourself?
• How can you find out what is going on?
• Although you are in it, you may not feel like you are part of
this crowd.
• You may not know what to do or how to behave.

7. What Is Sociology?
• A dictionary defines sociology as the systematic study of
society and social interaction.
• The word “sociology” is derived from the Latin word socius
(companion) and the Greek word logos (study of), meaning
“the study of companionship.”
• While this is a starting point for the discipline, sociology is
actually much more complex.
• It uses many different methods to study a wide range of
subject matter and to apply these studies to the real world.

8. What Are Society and Culture?
• Sociologists study all aspects and levels of society.
• A society is a group of people whose members interact, reside
in a definable area, and share a culture.
• A culture includes the group’s shared practices, values, and
beliefs.
• One sociologist might analyze video of people from different
societies as they carry on everyday conversations to study the
rules of polite conversation from different world cultures.

9. What Are Society and Culture?
• Another sociologist might interview a representative sample
of people to see how texting has changed the way they
communicate.
• Yet another sociologist might study how migration determined
the way in which language spread and changed over time.

10. Studying Patterns: How Sociologists View
Society
• All sociologists are interested in the experiences of individuals
and how those experiences are shaped by interactions with
social groups and society as a whole.
• To a sociologist, the personal decisions an individual makes do
not exist in a vacuum.
• Cultural patterns and social forces put pressure on people to
select one choice over another.
• Sociologists try to identify these general patterns by
examining the behavior of large groups of people living in the
same society and experiencing the same societal pressures.

11. StudyingPatterns:HowSociologistsView Society
• The recent turmoil in the U.S. housing market and the high
rate of foreclosures offer an example of how a sociologist
might explore social patterns.
• Owning a home has long been considered an essential part of
the American Dream.
• People often work for years to save for a down payment on
what will be the largest investment they ever make.
• The monthly mortgage is often a person’s largest budget item.
Missing one or more mortgage payments can result in serious
consequences.

12. StudyingPatterns:HowSociologistsView Society
• The lender may foreclose on the mortgage and repossess the
property.
• People may lose their homes and may not be able to borrow
money in the future.
• Walking away from the responsibility to pay debts is not a
choice most people make easily

13. The History of Sociology
• How did sociology begin?
• Sociology emerged in the middle of the nineteen (19) century
in Europe
• Three factors led to the development of sociology
1.Industrial Revolution
2.Travel
3.Success of Natural Sciences

14. Industrial Revolution
• The first was the Industrial revolution.
• • By the mid 19th century Europe was changing from
agriculture to factory production. There was the emergence
of new occupations as well as new avenues of employment
away from the land.
• • Masses of people migrated to cities in search of jobs. Pull
and push factors were instrumental in such migrations. In the
countryside, due to the nature of agricultural society, there
were no occupations that could be alternatives to agriculture.
Hence people got pushed to look for new places whereas the
urban/industrial places with new job opportunities provided a
pull to the same population.

15. Industrial Revolution
• • At the new places there was anonymity, crowding, filth, and
poverty. Ties to the land, to the generations that had lived there
before them, and to the ways of their life were abruptly broken.
Eventually the urban life brought radical changes in the lives of
people.
• The city greeted them with horrible working conditions: low pay;
long and exhausting working hours; dangerous work; foul
smoke; and much noise. To survive the vagaries of life, families
had to permit their children to work in these uncongenial
conditions.
• • People in these industrial cities developed new ideas about
democracy and political rights. They did not want to remain tied to
their rulers. Therefore the ideas about individual liberty, individual
rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness emerged, which
actually laid the foundation to future political revolution.

16. Travel
• As Europeans moved beyond exploration and into
colonization of the Americas, they brought changes to
virtually every aspect of the land and its people, from trade
and hunting to warfare and personal property.
• Their colonial empires exposed them to radically different
cultures
• Startled by these contrasting ways of life, they began to ask
questions why cultures differed.
• The second factor that stimulated the development of
sociology was imperialism. Europeans successfully conquered
many parts of the world. They were exposed to radically
different cultures. Startled by these contrasting ways of life,
they began to ask why cultures differed.

17. Success in natural sciences
• The third impetus for the development of sociology was the
success of the natural sciences.
• People moved to question fundamental aspects of their social
world.
•
• They started using the scientific method (systematic
observation, objectivity) to the study of human behavior.

18. The Father of Sociology
• Auguste Comte (1798-1857)
• The new social science that Comte sought to establish was
first called social physics but he coined the word sociology ,
a hybrid term compounded of Latin and Greek parts
• Socio-Logy- Logy: indicating the science or study of
• Comte first used the term sociology in print in 1838

19. The Father of Sociology
• August Comte’s philosophy based on his conclusion that an
intellectual discipline progresses only to the degree that it is
grounded in facts and experience, i.e., rests on information
about which one can reasonably make positive statements.
• The idea of applying the scientific method to the social world,
known as positivism, was apparently first proposed by
Auguste Comte (1798-1857). He was French. He migrated
from a small town to Paris. The changes he himself
experienced, combined with those France underwent in the
revolution, led Comte to become interested in the two
interrelated issues: social order (social static) and social
change (social dynamics). What holds the society together
(Why is there a social order)? And once the society is set then
what causes it to change? Why its directions change?

20. August Comte’s philosophy
• Comte concluded that the right way to answer such questions
was to apply the scientific method to social life. There must be
laws that underlie the society. Therefore we should discover
these principles by applying scientific method to social world.
Once these principles discovered then we could apply these
for social reform.
• He advocated for building new societies on twin foundations
of science and industry rather than on religion and landowner-
serf relationship.
• This will be a new science and Comte named it as Sociology
(1838) – the study of society. Comte is credited with being the
founder of sociology.

21. Positivism
• Seeks to describe only what “obviously” is, what one can
really be positive about, that is, sense data. A strict positivist,
seeing a black sheep on a field could not say, “There is a black
sheep.” He could only say, “I see a sheep, one side of which is
black.”
• Comte named the scientific study of social patterns positivism.
• He described his philosophy in a series of books called The
Course in Positive Philosophy (1830–1842) and A General
View of Positivism (1848).
• He believed that using scientific methods to reveal the laws by
which societies and individuals interact would usher in a new
“positivist” age of history.
• While the field and its terminology have grown, sociologists
still believe in the positive impact of their work.

22. August Comte: scientific
methods
• Comte hoped that sociologists would use scientific methods to
gain knowledge of the social world
• Then they would advise people about how life ought to be
lived
• This would the cure from social chaos
• Comte originally studied to be an engineer, but later became a
pupil of social philosopher Claude Henri de Rouvroy Comte de
SaintSimon (1760–1825).

23. August Comte: scientific
methods
• They both thought that society could be studied using the
same scientific methods utilized in natural sciences.
• Comte also believed in the potential of social scientists to
work toward the betterment of society.
• He held that once scholars identified the laws that governed
society, sociologists could address problems such as poor
education and poverty (Abercrombie et al. 2000).

24. Karl Max
• Karl Marx was one of the founders of sociology. His ideas
about social conflict are still relevant today
• Marx rejected Comte's positivism.
• He believed that societies grew and changed as a result of the
struggles of different social classes over the means of
production.
• At the time he was developing his theories, the Industrial
Revolution and the rise of capitalism led to great disparities in
wealth between the owners of the factories and workers.
• Capitalism, an economic system characterized by private or
corporate ownership of goods and the means to produce
them, grew in many nations.

25. Karl Max
• Marx predicted that inequalities of capitalism would become
so extreme that workers would eventually revolt.
• This would lead to the collapse of capitalism, which would be
replaced by communism.
• Communism is an economic system under which there is no
private or corporate ownership: everything is owned
communally and distributed as needed.
• Marx believed that communism was a more equitable system
than capitalism.
• While his economic predictions may not have come true in
the time frame he predicted, Marx’s idea that social conflict
leads to change in society is still one of the major theories
used in modern sociology

26. Karl Max
• The different approaches to research based on positivism or
anti-positivism are often considered the foundation for the
differences found today between quantitative sociology and
qualitative sociology.
• Quantitative sociology uses statistical methods such as surveys
with large numbers of participants.
• Researchers analyze data using statistical techniques to see if
they can uncover patterns of human behavior.
• Qualitative sociology seeks to understand human behavior by
learning about it through in-depth interviews, focus groups,
and analysis of content sources (like books, magazines,
journals, and popular media).

27. Herbert Spenser (1820-1903)
• Other early pioneer names are:
• He was an Englishman and is sometimes called second
founder of sociology. He too believed that society operates
under some fixed laws. He was evolutionary and considered
that societies evolve from lower to higher forms. In this way
he applied the ideas of Darwin to the development of human
society, and hence this approach may be called as Social
Darwinism.
• By following the basic principle of Social Darwinism Spenser
advocated that ‘let the fittest survive’. There should be no
reform because it will help in the survival of lower order
individuals. (Charity and helping the poor were considered to
be wrong). Spenser was a social philosopher rather than a
social researcher.

28. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)
• He was French. His primary goal was of getting sociology
recognized as a separate academic discipline. His systematic
study comparing suicide rates among several countries
revealed an underlying social factor: People were more likely
to commit suicide if their ties to others in their communities
were weak. He identified the key role of social integration in
social life.

29. Max Weber (1864-1920)
• Max Weber was a German. He used cross-cultural and
historical materials in order to determine how extensively
social groups affect people’s orientations to life.

30. Assignment
• Read History of Sociology carefully …
• Write down the names and contributions of different
sociologists.
• 1. Auguste Comte (1798–1857)
• 2. Harriet Martineau (1802–1876)—the First Woman
Sociologist
• 3. Karl Marx (1818–1883)
• 4. Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)
• 5. Georg Simmel (1858–1918)