A New Approach to Sociology?

Abstract

In Chapter 1, sociology was described as a discipline ‘characterised by particular kinds of perspectives and particular kinds of rules about the acceptability of evidence’. That is to say, in doing sociology, we make certain assumptions, and formulate particular concepts as tools for the interpretation and analysis of observations about the world, and we use particular methods to gather and assess our evidence. Different sociological perspectives have been explored in this volume, in the examination of various parts of the social world. Some chapters have critically evaluated major perspectives such as functionalism or Marxism, and most have explicitly introduced feminist perspectives as critiques of what might be referred to as ‘malestream’ sociology.