Society Unfolded Exploring Theories, Realities, and Shifting Trends

Book Abstract

This Book ?Society Unfolded Exploring Theories, Realities, and Shifting Trends? More than the usual academic textbook, the present volume presents sociology as terrain that one can virtually traverse and experience. Each version of the sociological imagination captured by the chapter essays takes the readers to the realm of the taken-for-granted (such as zoological collections, food,education, entrepreneurship, religious participation, etc.) and the extraordinary(the likes of organizational fraud, climate change, labour relations, multiple modernities, etc.) - altogether presumed to be problematic and yet possible.Using the sociological perspective as the frame of reference, the readers are invited to interrogate the realities and trends which their social worlds relentlessly create for them, allowing them in return, to discover their unique locations in their cultures? social map. Phases in the development of sociological theory concerning social structure has been described in the references just noted. Many early accounts of social structure depicted a sequence of three or four successive types beginning with hunter-gatherer bands and encompassing empires, and civilisations, together with the unique features of Western modernity. As empirical sociology developed with the work of the Chicago school (and more generally in community studies) in the interwar years more empirically based(but still dynamic) accounts were developed. Immediately before, during and after the world war 2 period the functionalist approach (partially adapted by Merton from anthropological models to better ?t with more complex societies)switched attention from over-time change to understandings of how social structures ?tted together and how they worked as structures. In particular,structures were seen as often operating ?behind the backs? of the people in them and were laced together in considerable part through ?latent functions? that were not always immediately obvious.