We live in great times - if you are as fascinated about learning as I am. The last week I have made it my task to do some shallow reading/listening/watching of (some) basic concepts of sociology. This post is simply an attempt to output and organize my current understanding of the field.

Sociology is about modelling and analyzing society. The problem is “society” is a very vague and fluent thing. Society has many dimensions to it - and that is probably why there are a multitude of ways of thinking about society in sociology. I thought of them as different “lenses” to think about the world. The main ones are: “Functional Structuralism”, “Conflict Theory” and “Symbolic Interactions”. Functional Structuralism and Conflict Theory are both “zoom out theories” - they look at a society from way above and try to find patterns. Functional Structuralism tries to model a society like an organism, where every different part has its own function and the parts work together in harmony. In contrast, Conflict Theory sees society as several groups in tension with each other and revolutions now and then causing changes in the structure of society. Symbolic Interactions zoom in to individuals and how they behave and interact with each other (I am not so familiar with that one yet)

The particularly interesting thing about Sociology in my opinion is the “Sociological Perspective”: This is the mindset to look at society from a birds-eye view and see the patterns and strangeness in our way of living. This mindset is exactly what is needed to stop and reflect “Wait, why exactly are we doing it like that?” or “That what I am doing right now is quite weird that I think about it”.

Reading about Sociology reminded me a lot of systems thinking. I think a lot of the concepts of systems thinking can be (and maybe are?) useful for Sociology. For example the underlying rules or values causing structures is exactly something that is also used in Sociology.

Something that I found quite intriguing was that Weber thought that Rationalization would lead to mindless rules. As far as I understood, according to Weber rationalization causes rules to be introduced to society - but at some point updating those rules is neglected. This causes the rules to exist because “that’s what we always did”, constraining the people living in that society. That problem is something that I think applies to big organizations, too. When the “why” of a rule is lost it makes it hard to both update and abolish the rule. This is probably something that happens a lot with in-house processes that if left unchecked tend to grow and grow and finally leave employees with no time to actually do meaningful work.

People create structures to make their lives easier. Those structures then shape how we live. However, some of those man-made structures might be designed in a wrong way causing harm to the people living under them. In those cases these structures should be updated. But if you are born into structures it is very easy to become blind to their existence. Sociology is a set of glasses you can put on to make the invisible visible - which is then the first step of finding and solving structural problems.