Concepts
Concepts
The core ideas, defined, situated and debated.
- Alienation→The condition in which human beings are estranged from their labour, their products, their fellow humans and their own nature — a central concept in Marx's early writings and in later sociology of work.
- Anomie→A condition of normlessness in which the norms regulating individual desires and conduct break down — introduced by Durkheim and later reworked by Merton in his strain theory.
- Social Fact→Durkheim's foundational concept: ways of acting, thinking and feeling that are external to the individual, general across a society, and exercise a constraining power over conduct.
- Verstehen→Interpretive understanding — Max Weber's method of grasping the subjective meanings actors attach to their conduct, central to interpretive sociology.