Ch 3Understanding Social Institutions — Class 11 Sociology, concept-first.

Earlier chapters of this book explored how individuals and society are bound together. Each of us occupies a place in society and carries a status along with one or more roles -- but these are not rol…

No social arrangement feels more 'natural' than the family we grow up in, and it is tempting to assume every family everywhere resembles our own.

A recurring debate in Indian sociology concerns whether the country's families are shifting from a joint pattern to a nuclear one.

It is easy, in everyday life, to think of the family as a private world set apart from public arenas such as the economy or politics.

The family is often assumed to treat all its members alike, but sociological evidence shows it does not.

Across societies and through history, marriage has taken an extraordinary range of forms and served differing functions -- there is no single, universal template.

Marriage can be classified along two different axes: how many partners a person may legitimately have, and the rules that govern who counts as an eligible partner in the first place.

Who decides whom a person will marry? Societies differ sharply on this question. In many societies, the choice of a marriage partner is not left to the two individuals concerned at all; instead, it is…

Every society places some limits on who can marry whom, but societies differ in how explicit and how strict those limits are.

Having looked at the variety of family and marriage forms, it helps to fix the basic vocabulary sociology uses to describe them precisely.

Ask a child what 'work' they hope to do when they grow up, and the answer will almost certainly describe paid employment -- a job.

Most of us, from childhood, are taught to think of 'work' as synonymous with paid employment -- the job someone eventually takes up.

In pre-modern societies, most people's work revolved around cultivating land or tending livestock. This picture has been transformed by industrialisation: in industrially developed societies, only a s…

Industrialisation did not stop at moving work out of the home; it also transformed the internal organisation of the work process itself.

Political institutions are concerned, at bottom, with how power is distributed across a society. Two ideas are central to understanding them: power and authority.

It is tempting to assume that social order requires a state -- a formal government with laws, courts, police and administrators.

A state exists wherever there is a political apparatus of government -- institutions such as a parliament or congress, together with a body of civil service officials -- that rules over a defined terr…

Religion has been reflected upon and studied for a very long time, but the sociological study of religion is distinct in important ways from a religious or theological study of it.

Education is a lifelong process that runs through both formal institutions, such as schools, and informal ones, such as the family or community.

This chapter introduces a number of technical terms that sociology uses to describe social institutions precisely, and it is worth holding them together in one place.