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Sociology as the study of society
A) either the study of any one part or the study of the whole
B) Special discipline in which takes society as its unit of analysis.

its purpose then:1) discover how the institutions which make up a society are related to another in different social systems 2) the specialist government, may study types of government, asking how the legislative, judicial and administrative functions are allocated, how the units which perform these functions are related ton one another, what consequences follow from centralizing administration while leaving the legislative power diffuse 3) Just so, there may be a branch of learning which concentrates on a society would have at least two main divisions
A) one more concentrated with internal differentiation o particular societies
B) The other treating all societies as a population having certain identifiable external characteristics such as: 1) is there any evidence that particular types of society, say the great empires, tend to endure for any specific period of time?

2) Do society go through definite stages of development?

3) Questions of this order once dominated sociological thought, especially in the form of the evolutionary theory of social development.

The discrediting of the evolutionary theories tended to discourage further efforts along this line

Sociology as the study of institutions
The idea that the distinctive unit of sociological analysis is society, more specially the relations between the elements which compose it, is old and widely held
1) Institutions( family, church, school, political party) are more distinctive subject matter for sociology because society as whole is already the unit of analysis in the field of history and anthropology.

2) The questions by discipline devoted to institutions are of this order
a) What features do all institutions have in common
b) What are the dimensions on which they are distinguishable
c) How these dimensions vary when one compares institutions that perform different functions
d) Do institutions (regardless of their function) come to share certain other features by virtue of being alike in size, in degree of specialization, in amount of autonomy and so on
e) Durkheim, sociology can be defined as the science of institutions.

Growing importance in the modern world of one type of institution: a) The Large-Scale Organization, led to renewed interest in and research on the general properties of institutions

II
The sociological perspective

28 octobre: Journ

Edner Saint-amour, November 29 2010, 11:57 AM

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