Cultivation of land through the plough as this invention enabled the people to make a great leap forward in food production. It increased the productivity of land through the use of animals and bringing to the surface the nutrients of the soil. Combining irrigation techniques with the use of the plough increased the productivity and the crop yield. It also brought fallow land under cultivation. The size of the agricultural societies increased as it lessened the burden of large number of people who engaged themselves in other activities. Agricultural societies lead to the establishment of more elaborate political institutions like formalized government bureaucracy assisted by the legal system. It also leads to the evolution of distinct social classes -those who own the land and those who work on the other's land. Land is the major source of wealth and is individually owned. This creates major difference between the social strata. Agricultural societies provide the basis for the establishment of economic institutions. Trade becomes more elaborate and money is medium of exchange. It also demands the maintenance of records of transaction, crop harvest, taxation, governmental rules and regulations. Religion becomes separate institution with elaborate rituals and traditions. The agricultural societies support the emergence of arts and cultural artifacts due to surplus food production people tend to divert their attention to other recreational activities. There is far more complex social structure. According to Ian Robertson the number of statuses multiplies, population size increases, cities appear, new institutions emerge, social classes arise, political and economic inequality becomes inbuilt into the social structure and culture becomes much more diversified and heterogeneous.
Characteristics of Industrial Society
Industrial society is associated with the emergence of industrialization which transformed much of Europe and United States by replacing essentially agriculture based societies with industrial societies based on the use of machines and non-animal sources of energy to produce finished goods. Industrial societies are in a continual state of rapid change due to technological innovations. The high level of productivity in industrial societies further stimulates population growth where people start living in cities and urban areas. New medical technologies and improved living standards serve to extend life expectancy. The division of labor becomes complex with the availability of specialized jobs. The statuses are achieved rather than ascribed. The family and kinship as social institutions are relegated to the background. It is becomes a unit of consumption. There is breakup of joint family system and nuclear family units become prominent. The influence of religion diminishes as people hold many different and competing values and beliefs. State assumes central power in the industrial societies. Industrialism is associated with the widening gap between two social classes of 'haves' and 'have nots'.The rich or the capitalist class is seen as exploiting class and the poor class known as working class is seen as exploited. However in most of the industrial societies there is steady reduction in social inequalities. Industrial societies have given rise to number of secondary groups such as corporations, political parties, business houses and government bureaucracies, cultural and literary associations. The primary groups tend to lose their importance and secondary groups come to the prominence.
Post-industrial society is a concept in economics describing when the service sector produces more wealth than the industrial or manufacturing sector in some countries.
The concept was popularized by Daniel Bell, and is closely related to similar concepts such as post-Fordism, information society, knowledge economy, post-industrial economy, liquid modernity, and network society.
28) Marriage: types and norms, marriage as contract, and as a sacrament.
Marriage is a social union or legal contract between people called spouses that establishes rights and obligations between the spouses, between the spouses and their children, and between the spouses and their in-laws. The definition of marriage varies according to different cultures, but it is usually an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged. When defined broadly, marriage is considered a cultural universal. In many cultures, marriage is formalized via a wedding ceremony. People marry for many reasons, including: legal, social, libidinal, emotional, financial, spiritual, and religious. Marriages can be performed in a secular civil ceremony or in a religious setting. The act of marriage usually creates normative or legal obligations between the individuals involved. Some cultures allow the dissolution of marriage through divorce or annulment. Polygamous marriages may also occur in spite of national laws. Marriage can be recognized by a state, an organization, a religious authority, a tribal group, a local community or peers. It is often viewed as a contract. Civil marriage is the legal concept of marriage as a governmental institution irrespective of religious affiliation, in accordance with marriage laws of the jurisdiction. Forced marriages are illegal in some jurisdictions.
The type, functions, and characteristics of marriage vary from culture to culture, and can change over time. In general there are two types: civil marriage and religious marriage, and typically marriages employ a combination of both (religious marriages must often be licensed and recognized by the state, and conversely civil marriages, while not sanctioned under religious law, are nevertheless respected). Marriages between people of differing religions are called interfaith marriages, while marital conversion, a more controversial concept than interfaith marriage, refers to the religious conversion of one partner to the other's religion for sake of satisfying a religious requirement.
29. Family: types, functions and changes.
The two related questions pursued in the study being reported in this paper are the following: (1) What changes have occurred in family types and functions among the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria in the past 50 years? (2) How significant are the changes to children's well-being? Since it is a monolithic group, the sample was small (N = 551), but it spread across the group's geographical location, and comprised male, female, Christian, and Muslim people, all older than 55 years of age. The questionnaire that they responded to requested they indicate on a scale how common some family types and functions were before 1960, 1961 to 1980, 1981 to 2000 and are since 2001 to the present. It was found that the extended family form has been decreasing only slowly. Polygamous marriage shows marginal decreases and monogamous marriage shows marginal increases. Unmarried parents and single parents are increasing fast. Educational and socialization functions of the family have reduced significantly but companionship is enduring satisfactorily.
Family structure, like society at large, has undergone significant changes. Most of the time when a person imagine of the definition of a family, the figure of a mother, father and children is what comes into the mind. The form or structure does not show how healthy the it is or how they function.
Structures are the substantial makeup of the members in relationship to each other without respect to roles and function. There are famous four types of a families structure; Nuclear, Single Parent, Extended, and Childless. These four types of family structure give the variety of forms they may appear to.
The first structure from the four types of is Nuclear. A nuclear family consists of a mother, father, and their biological or adoptive descendants, often called the traditional family. This was the most admired from the four types of structure. It can be can be a fostering environment in which to hoist children as long as there is love, time spent with children, emotional support, low stress, and a constant economic upbringing.
The second structure from the four types of family structure is the Single Parent. Its one most outstanding transform from the four types of family structure was the amplified of Single Parent. Children are most likely to live in a single parent structure for reasons other than the death of a parent.
One in four children is born with their mothers not married, usually teenage mothers. One of the most luxurious things for a single parent is child care. Single families frequently have less pressure compared to the pressure in families before divorce. Usually parents and children are more eager to work together with each other to find solutions to solve household chores in single parent families.
The third structure from the four types of structure is the Extended Family. Extended family is two or more adults from unlike generations of a family, who share a household. It consists of more than parents and children; it may be a family that includes parents, children, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, foster children. At times children are raised by their grandparents when their biological parents have died or no longer can take care of them. Extended families can be found all over the world in different communities and countries. In the four types of structure nuclear family is more probable to become an extended family than any other family type.
The fourth and last structure from the four type of family structure is the Childless Family. A childless family is basically a group of people from all variety of backgrounds and all walks of life who, for whatever reason, have never had children. Others will perhaps have children at sometime in the future, but are not prepared just yet, and some sought to have children but were unable to because of a variety of social and/or biological forces that obstruct and result in unplanned childlessness. To replace children, childless families usually have pets as a substitute.
30 Kinships: terms and usages, rules of residence, descent, inheritance.
All human beings are connected to others by blood or marriage. Connections between people that are traced by blood are known as consanguineal relationships. Relationships based upon marriage or cohabitation between collaterals (people treated as the same generation) are affinal relationships. These connections are described by genealogies and/or academic kinship charts, which trace the consanguineal and affinal relationships among individuals. Theoretically, the kinds of relationships that these charts and genealogies describe are the same for all individuals in all cultures—that is, any person can in principle trace a relationship to a spouse, children, children's children, parents, parents' siblings, the spouses and children of parents' siblings, and so on. However, people in different societies customarily calculate genealogical connections differently, recognizing some kinds of relationships and ignoring others. The culturally determined genealogies turn objective relationships of blood and marriage between people into kinship. In no culture are all genealogical relationships recognized as kin relations. All people have kin relations about whom they know nothing, and everyone knows of relatives who have no importance in their lives. Genealogical relationships that have no social significance, either because the individuals whom they designate are unknown or because they are known but ignored, are not kin in the social sense. Genealogical ties that a culture chooses to recognize are what constitute an individual's kin.
Kinship relations have routinely captured the attention of students of human culture. This is especially true of anthropologists, whose major focus has traditionally been upon kin-based societies. Kinship, once a primary focus of cultural anthropology, has faded in centrality since the 1970s as many traditional societies have been drawn into the world system. The significance of kin relations begins to diminish only in large societies with mobile populations and money-based economies. By contrast, kin relations in most nonindustrial cultures underlie such critical domains as place of residence, inheritance customs, religious obligations, political power, economic relations, domestic life, and choice of spouse. People across cultures are more likely to turn to kin than to nonkin for help and are more likely to give aid and comfort to kin than to nonkin (Broude 1994).
If kin relations are the result of the selective interpretation of genealogies by cultures, how do societies accomplish this transformation of biological fact into social reality? The transformation is achieved in part by the way in which a particular culture establishes recognized kin groups and in part by the way in which a society comes to label relatives with respect to some target person. Recognized kin groups are established by and reflected in what are called descent rules. The labeling of relatives is described by a culture's kinship terminology. Further, in all societies, human beings often reside near or with kin. Different cultures, however, follow different rules regarding which kin will live with whom. The three major elements of kinship are rules of descent, kinship terminology, and residence rules. The incest taboo, rules governing marriage choice, and family structure are also important (Fox 1967).
31. What is the difference between micro-sociology and macro-sociology?
Macro and micro sociology focus exclusively on human societies and understanding them at various levels and through their participation in different social constructs. The social world of animals, for example, isn't a part of macro or micro sociology.
Sociology is the social science that seeks to understand the complexities of human society. You can use two of its subdisciplines, macro sociology and micro sociology, to gain a deeper understanding of social institutions, rituals and cultural differences between social groups. Macro sociology looks at society from a large-scale perspective while micro sociology goes into great detail to examine society at the individual, behavioral level. While you may think the two disciplines are very different, they actually have many elements in common.
Macrosociology is a sociological approach that analyzes societies, social systems or populations on a large scale or at a high level of abstraction.] It is considered one of the main foundations of sociology, alongside microsociology and mesosociology. Microsociology focuses on the individual social activities, while macrosociology studies society as a whole. Macrosociology is concerned with individuals, families, classes, social problems, and all of the other part and features of a society, but it analyzes these features in relation to the larger social systems of which they are part. Macrosociology can also be the analysis of large collectivities (eg. the city, the church) Lenski[ defines macrosociology simply as "concerned with human societies". Human populations are considered a society to the degree that is politically autonomous and its members to engage in a broad range of cooperative activities. For example, this definition would apply to the population of Germany being deemed a society, but German-speaking people as a whole scattered about different countries would not be considered a society. Macrosociology deals with broad societal trends that can later be applied to the smaller features of a society. To differentiate, macrosociology deals with issues such as war, distress of Third World nations, poverty, and environmental deprivation, whereas microsociology analyses issues such as the role of women, the nature of the family, and immigration
Microsociology is one of the main branches of sociology (contrast with macrosociology and mesosociology) which concerns itself with the nature of everyday human social interactions on a small scale. At the micro level, social statuses and social roles are the most important components of social structure. It is usually based on observation rather than statistics. It is based on the philosophy of phenomenology and includes symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. Ethnomethodology in particular has led to such academic sub-divisions and studies as micro-linguistical research and other aspects of human social behaviour. It was conceived by Harold Garfinkel (and later expanded upon by others) to inquire into the methods people use to make sense of their social world. It also provided an extra dimension between the studies of social psychology and sociology - focusing more on individual interaction and thinking within groups, rather than just large social group/societal behaviour. It has become important in many fields of study, including modern Psychosocial Studies; Conversational Analysis and Human Computer Interaction.
32 Why does this course focus exclusively on macro-sociology?
In studying phenomena, natural scientists may use microscopes or telescopes, depending on the nature of the task. Similarly, sociologists employ different ″lenses″ when they focus on society. Sociological studies can therefore be distinguished by their level of analysis. Macrosociology concentrates on large-scale phenomena or entire civilizations. Thus, Emile Durkheim’s cross-cultural study of suicide rates is an example of macrosociology. They focus on this level because Sociology is the objective study of human society and social interaction. The discipline of sociology enables us to look beyond our limited view of the world to society as a whole – the values and ideas shared by its members, the groups and institutions that compose it, and the forces that change it. And this science study behavior between people in the world. It does not limited with small groups, it includes all of the human.
33 What is a paradigm in Sociology?
A paradigm is a description of the world of human behavior; it is a description of society. A paradigm is a description of the interactions of human beings within any society. Paradigms are broad viewpoints or perspectives that permit social scientists to have a wide range of tools to describe society, and then to build hypotheses and theories. Paradigms don't do anything but DESCRIBE! They analyze based on their descriptions. That is all they do. They are scientific tools. Paradigms cannot occur or happen! Societies are not Conflictualist, Functionalist, or Symbolic Interactionist. People and social events are not based on paradigms: a paradigm is a viewpoint, a perspective, a guiding principal, a belief system. Paradigms cannot be proven or disproven, but they lead to the development of theories which are provable.
34 Of what use is social theory?
In sociology, a theory is a statement or series of statements that uses concepts to explain problems, actions, or behavior. An effective theory will have both explanatory and predictive power. That is, it will help us to develop a broad and integrated view of seemingly isolated phenomena and to understand how one type of change in an environment leads to others. An essential task in building a sociological theory is to examine the relationship between bits of data, gathered through research, that may seem completely unrelated.
35 What is positivism?
Positivism is a philosophy of science based on the view that in the social as well as natural sciences, data derived from sensory experience, and logical and mathematical treatments of such data, are together the exclusive source of all authoritative knowledge. Obtaining and verifying data that can be received from the senses is known as empirical evidence. This view holds that society operates according to laws like the physical world. Introspective and intuitional attempts to gain knowledge are rejected. Though the positivist approach has been a recurrent theme in the history of Western thought, the concept was developed in the modern sense in the early 19th century by the philosopher and founding sociologist, Auguste Comte. Comte argued that society operates according to its own laws, much as the physical world operates according to gravity and other laws of nature.
36, What was Comte’s favored (principal) method of inquiry?
Like G. W. F. Hegel, Comte believed that historical development revealed a matching movement of ideas and institutions. In the COURSE OF POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY, Comte attempted to demonstrate that each science is necessarily dependent on the previous science, that is, science can only be understood historically as the process of greater perfection. For example, before there can be an effective physics, there must be astronomy. Furthermore, the history of the sciences reveals the law that as the phenomenon become more complex, so to do the methods of those sciences. In contrast to Descartes who saw only one right method of inquiry -- the geometrical method -- Comte believed that each science develops by a logic proper to itself, a logic that is revealed only by the historical study of that science. Comte, of course, claimed to go beyond Descartes -- after all, hadn¡¯t everybody else done the same thing? Like Vico, Herder, Hegel and Condorcet, Comte studied the mind historically. The mind can only be explained in terms of what it has done in the past. The final science which Comte claimed to have discovered and one which had not yet entered its positive stage, was sociology. It was sociology, he claimed, that would give ultimate meaning to all the other sciences -- it was the one science which held the others together. Only sociology would reveal that man is a developing creature who moves through three stages in each of his sciences. With this profound assertion, Comte argued that we could finally understand the true logic of mind. And in the 47th lesson of the fourth volume of the Course of Positive Philosophy, Comte proposed the word sociology for this new science rather than the current expression, physique sociale (or social physics).
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