Perspectives

The lenses — how each school sees the social world.

16 entries

Conflict Perspective→The perspective that treats society as an arena of competing interests and unequal power, in which order is the temporary outcome of domination and struggle rather than an expression of shared values.
Critical Theory→The Frankfurt School tradition of a social theory oriented to human emancipation rather than to prediction and control — diagnosing how reason itself has become an instrument of domination in culture, technology and administration, and how it might be recovered.
Dependency and World-Systems Perspective→The perspective that underdevelopment is not a stage a country has failed to leave but a condition produced by its subordinate position in a single global economy organised around the transfer of surplus.
Exchange Theory→The perspective that treats social interaction as a transaction of rewards and costs, and derives obligation, power, solidarity and social structure from the recurring imbalance between what people give and what they receive.
Feminist Perspective→The perspective that treats gender as a fundamental axis of social organisation and power, and argues that mainstream sociology has described a male world while claiming to describe the human one.
Indological Perspective→The textual or book-view approach that reconstructs Indian social structure and values from classical Sanskrit literature, treating scripture, law-book and epic as the primary evidence for how society is ordered.
Interpretive Sociology→The perspective that human action must be explained by recovering the meaning it holds for the actor, since social life consists of conduct oriented by interpretation rather than of behaviour caused from outside.
Marxist Sociology→The research programme that derives social structure, culture and politics from the way material production is organised, and treats class relations and their contradictions as the engine of historical change.
Modernisation Perspective→The mid-twentieth-century framework that treated development as a transition from traditional to modern society along a single path already travelled by the West, locating the obstacles to change inside the values and institutions of poor societies.
Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology→The paired traditions that treat the ordinary, taken-for-granted social world as a problem to be explained — phenomenology asking how it is constituted in consciousness, ethnomethodology asking how it is produced and sustained in the practical methods of everyday conduct.
Postcolonial Perspective→The analysis of how colonial rule reorganised knowledge, identity and institutions in the colonised world, and how its categories continue to structure thought, politics and social science long after formal independence.
Postmodernism→The perspective that the conditions of knowledge and social life have changed so far that the modern project of universal reason, unified selves and guaranteed progress is no longer credible — leaving a world of competing narratives, fragmented identities and images that increasingly stand in for the real.
Rational Choice Theory→The perspective that explains social outcomes as the aggregated result of choices made by individuals pursuing their preferences under constraints, treating institutions, norms and inequalities as things to be explained by choice rather than assumed behind it.
Structural Functionalism→The perspective that treats society as a system of interrelated parts, each of which is explained by the contribution it makes to the maintenance and continuity of the whole.
Subaltern Studies→The Indian historiographical and social-science project founded by Ranajit Guha to recover the autonomous political agency of the subordinated classes, written out of colonialist accounts as disorder and out of elite-nationalist accounts as mere following.
Symbolic Interactionism→The perspective that treats society as continuously produced and reproduced in everyday interaction, as actors interpret situations, act towards objects on the basis of the meanings those objects hold for them, and negotiate those meanings through shared symbols.