Introduction

This chapter builds directly on the previous one's discussion of how the individual and society shape each other. Having established that people never exist as isolated units but are always embedded in collectivities — families, tribes, castes, classes, nations — the chapter now turns to the question of how society itself actually works: what kinds of groups people form, how those groups get arranged into unequal orders or systems of stratification, how society keeps its members in line through social control, and what positions (status) and expected behaviours (roles) individuals occupy within all of this. Before going further, though, it is worth pausing on a puzzle: why does sociology need a special vocabulary at all, when ordinary people already use words like 'status', 'role' and 'social control' in everyday conversation?

For a subject like nuclear physics, which studies things far outside common experience, it is obvious that new technical words have to be invented, because ordinary language simply has no equivalent. Sociology's situation is almost the opposite, and in a way more demanding: it studies exactly the institutions we are most familiar with — the family, the neighbourhood, the school, the peer group — so familiar that we rarely see them clearly or examine them with precision. Because we grow up inside families, we assume we already understand 'the family' completely; but that everyday familiarity is exactly what Chapter 1 called common-sense or naturalistic explanation, and it is not the same as a disciplined sociological understanding.

Sociology's key terms also carry their own history. Many of them were coined by early sociologists trying to make sense of the transition from small, traditional, face-to-face societies to large, modern, impersonal ones — which is why we get paired ideas like primary versus secondary groups, or community versus society. Other terms, like stratification, were developed to describe the structured inequalities that exist between groups. And because sociologists themselves have never agreed on a single way of seeing society, the same social reality attracts competing concepts: Marx foregrounded class and conflict, Durkheim emphasised social solidarity and a shared collective conscience, post-war structural-functionalists pictured society as a harmoniously functioning organism, and conflict theorists insisted it was fundamentally riven by inequality. Some sociologists start their analysis from the individual — status, role — while others start from larger structures such as class, caste or the state — stratification, social control.

The right way to think about all these terms is as tools, not final truths: they are keys meant to open a lock, and when a particular key stops fitting the reality it was meant to explain, sociologists revise or replace it rather than force it. This is why sociology tolerates, and even needs, multiple competing definitions of the same phenomenon — that disagreement is itself part of how the discipline keeps its concepts honest.