W3.2 blog for reading material

 1. Summary

This article is very important for beginners in society, emphasizing the importance of sociological theories in explaining social phenomena. However, in my opinion, these theories are more like a framework for explaining various social phenomena, just like when people do mathematical problems, they can draw conclusions by inputting parameters into formulas. However, just as we have many mathematical formulas, sociology also has many different theories to deal with social phenomena in different scenarios. For a beginner, remembering these theories and learning how to apply them will be the first challenge in learning sociology.

This article also mentions many important sociological theories and tells us their limitations.

Structural-Functionalism emphasizes the interaction between social institutions, social needs, and social cohesion, and they balance each other to form a stable social structure. The limitation of structural functionalism is that it cannot explain social change.

The Conflict Theory focuses on the social conflicts caused by class inequality, approaching a zero sum game thinking approach. The article mentions three assumptions of modern conflict theory, viewing limited resources as the fundamental factor for the occurrence of conflicts between different classes.

In fact, if we can combine the two theories mentioned above, we can gain a more comprehensive perspective in analyzing social phenomena.

The Symbolic Interactionism Theory has a different perspective from the above two theories. It focuses more on the interaction between people and society, as well as the release and communication of social information. It is obvious that this theory cannot be used as a tool for predicting social development tendencies, and is more used to explain interpersonal communication rather than the overall changes in society.

2. Interesting

It is worth mentioning Feminist Theory. It is obvious that Feminist Theory¸ is different from other theories. Other theories are tools and means used by sociologists to observe society, while Feminist Theory is a result of social observation. As the theory progresses, this result is used to reflect on the observer themselves, more like a review mechanism.

3. Discussion

If the first few theories have a relatively singular perspective, then Integration Theory brings them together to form a more systematic analytical model. 

There are so many sociological theoretical models in the world, can we distinguish them? Can they be classified into different categories through feature analysis? This way we can access it anytime we need it.