Sociological Paradigms

 by Annabel Heaton

Sociology is a huge area of social science where there is a huge focus on society, human social behaviours, patterns of social relationships and aspects of culture in association with day to day life. Paradigms coincide with this topic of societal and social observation, essentially being how one thinks about things, a set of concepts and theories that frame your perspective of a specific topic. These paradigms are fundamental assumptions sociologists have about the social world, guiding their thinking and research. Sociology looks at society at all levels and all scales, from the huge to the smaller aspects. There are three main sociological paradigms: Structural functionalism, Symbolic interactionism and Conflict perspective. 

Firstly, structural functionalism, orientated from french sociologist Emile Durkheim, who believed society was an organism consisting of different parts that all worked together to function properly and well. So, in theory, from a structural functionalism perspective, this means that society is seen as a complex system whos parts work together to promote stability and social order, with these different “parts'' of society are social structures, relatively stable patterns in social behaviour, effectively being the oil for the cog that is society. For example, Durkheim was particularly interested in how work was divided up in society, these structures are fulfilling certain social functions. For example, a family fulfills the function of socialising children- teaching them how to behave and live in society. These social functions come in two types: manifest and latent functions, an example of a manifest function would be a child gathering knowledge from their education, yet a latent function would be schools helping to socialise pupils together. School has also had an additional purpose, historically and arguably now too, to create workers who listen to authority and keep to deadlines, this is also a latent function. 

In contrast to structural functionalism, conflict theories imagine society being composed of different groups that struggle over limited resources, like power, money, food and status. The first conflict theory in sociology was advanced by Karl Marx, also known as the theory of Class conflict. This theory imagines society as having different classes based on their relationships to the means of production, like factories and raw materials. In this example, the two classes here were the capitalists and the bourgeoisie, who owned the means of labour whereas the proletariat and workers were selling their labour as their means to survive. Marx saw this conflict between classes as the central conflict in society and the source of social inequality and wealth, shown in a famous quote, “The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles”. But there are other conflict theories that focus on different kinds of groups, such as race conflict theory, which was first stated by W.E.B. DuBois, another major founder of sociology. It understands social inequality as a result of conflict between different two racial and ethnic groups. Whereas the likes of gender conflict theory focuses on social inequalities between men and women. The perspective of all three conflict theories are important from English and American history to this current day, yet these paradigms I have spoken about are essentially macro approaches. 

“Structural functionalism focuses on how large structures fit together, and conflict theories look at how society defines sources of inequality and conflict”. But then there is symbolic interactionism, which is built to deal with micro questions, which first appeared under sociologist Max Weber and his theory of “understanding”. Weber believed sociology needed to focus on people's individual situations and the meaning they had attached to them, therefore symbolic interactionism understands society as a product of everyday social interactions. For symbolic interactionism there is no “big truth”, instead it looks at the world we create when we assign meaning to interactions and objects, for example: a handshake is only a greeting because that's what we have agreed that it is. Obviously, these three different paradigms have provided different ways of how we look at the social world, due to them grasping at different parts of it. These paradigms just give us different perspectives of how to see the world, whether that's from one perspective or another.