Editing Content :: Admin Scraper

Chapter

Content type

Position

Value

INTRODUCING WESTERN SOCIOLOGISTS 77 Activity 3 Try to compare what Durkheim and Marx say about the social division of labour. They both agree that as society evolves, the social organisation of production grows more complex, the division of labour becomes more detailed, and this creates unavoidable interdependencies among different social groups. But where Durkheim emphasises solidarity, Marx emphasises conflict. What do you think about this? Can you think of reasons why Marx may be wrong about modern society? For example, can you think of situations or examples where people are joining together to form groups or collectivities despite being from different class backgrounds and having conflicting interests? What counter arguments could you give to persuade someone that Marx may still have a point? Can you think of reasons why Durkheim may be wrong about modern society giving more freedom to the individual? For example, isn’t it true that the spread of mass communication (specially through television) has tended to standardise popular fashion in things like clothes or music? Today, young people in different social groups, different countries, states or regions are now more likely to be listening to the same music, or wearing the same kind of clothes than ever before. Does this make Durkheim wrong? What could be the arguments for and against in this context? Remember, sociology is not like mathematics where there is usually only one right answer. In anything to do with society and human beings, it is possible that there are many right answers, or that an answer is right in one context but wrong in another, or that it is partly right and partly wrong, and so on. In other words, the social world is very complex, and it changes from time to time and from place to place. This makes it all the more important to learn how to think carefully about the reasons why a particular answer may be right or wrong in a particular context. Max Weber was one of the leading MaxWeberandInterpretiveSociology German social thinkers of his time. Weber argued that the overall objective Despite long periods of physical and of the social sciences was to develop an mental ill health, he has left a rich ‘interpretive understanding of social legacy of sociological writing. He wrote action’. These sciences were thus very extensively on many subjects but different from the natural sciences, focused on developing an interpretive which aimed to discover the objective sociology of social action and of power ‘laws of nature’ governing the physical and domination. Another major world. Since the central concern of the concern of Weber was the process of social sciences was with social action rationalisation in modern society and and since human actions necessarily the relationship of the various religions involved subjective meanings, the of the world with this process. methods of enquiry of social science Reprint 2026-27