INTRO to SOCIOLOGY Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

INTRO to SOCIOLOGY - Essay ExampleSuch perspectives whitethorn be thought of as certain models of social reality. Indeed, each theoretical perspective offers world-wide postulates about the way society works, and for this purpose tries to correspondingly interpret numerous facts of a societys functioning and development. As with other models which human beings employ for understanding the world, bid in science, philosophy, and in our everyday goings-on, sociological perspectives construct models with the aim to uncover the meaning of what we regularly witness around us. However, finicky models often tend to suck up some specific characteristics of the complex social network of interdependencies, and thus turn out to accentuate different elements of a societys structure and functioning. Some perspectives even communicate the refusal to accept the indisputable universal validity of offered perspectives as such. In general, while such narrow focuses of sociological perspectives may be quite warranted if we consider that they attend to concentrate the research on one problem or a set of closely-related problems for their proper clarification, there is a flip side of a specie as hardly any concrete theoretical sociological perspective may be righteously considered to be the best one. The reason for this is not whole in the fact that conscious contraction of research space to one particular perspective makes the investigation inherently limited. After all, this limitation evoke be mitigated by addressing many alternative perspectives which in combination may produce a more coherent picture of social phenomena. The more discriminating problem is rather in the limitations of sociological perspectives due to their mostly theoretical background which, if due to some reason it lags shag the actual social tendencies, may hinder productive efforts to build the most adequate model of social reality. Still, this problem seems to be inevitable in our dynamic social environment with its peculiar level of change in many spheres of our life. Nevertheless, this should not discourage us from attempts to achieve the proper level of understanding of the roots and hidden driving forces behind existing social problems with the help of sociological perspectives. Rather, with the above considerations in mind we should be able to properly see when different sociological perspectives can be effectively employed, and which strong and weak points each of them contains. For this purpose, let us overview the so-called conflict and symbolic interactionist sociological perspectives, and identify a social problem which can be analysed with the help of those perspectives.Theorists of the conflict perspective are interested in the macro level of society and see it not as a solidary system but as a battle-field for power struggles. Under this view, people are not really co-operating for social benefits, but instead are advancing their particular interests at the e xpense of other people. The notion of power plays a major role here, and can be defined as the ability of a person, or a group of persons, to fulfil their own will regardless of the existing disagreement of other people who are involved in their actions. Marx is a historied conflict theorist who viewed the conflict between classes as