Introducing Society 1 · Section 2

The needs of the economy are again determined by the economic and political policies pursued by the government. The chances of the individual student are affected both by these broader political and economic measures as well as by the social background of her/his family. This gives us a preliminary sense of how sociology studies human society as an interconnected whole. And how society and the individual interact with each other.

The problem of choosing subjects in the senior secondary school is a source of personal worry for the individual student. That this is a broader public issue, affecting students as a collective entity is self evident. One of the tasks of sociology is to unravel the connection between a personal problem and a public issue. This is the first theme of this chapter.

We have already seen that a ‘good job’ means different things to different societies. The social esteem that a particular kind of job has or does not have for an individual depends on the culture of his/her ‘relevant society’. What do we mean by ‘relevant society’? Does it mean the ‘society’ the individual belongs to?

Which society does the individual belong to? Is it the neighbourhood? Is it the community? Is it the caste or tribe?

Is it the professional circle of the parents? Is it the nation? Second, this chapter therefore looks at how the individual in modern times belongs to more than one society. And how societies are unequal.

Third, this chapter introduces sociology as a systematic study of society, distinct from philosophical and religious reflections, as well as our everyday common sense observation about society. Fourth, this distinct way of studying society can be better understood if we look back historically at the intellectual ideas and material contexts within which sociology was born and later grew. These ideas and material developments were mainly western but with global consequences. Fifth, we look at this global aspect and the manner in which sociology emerged in India.

It is important to remember that just as each of us have a biography, so does a discipline. Understanding the history of a discipline helps understand the discipline. Finally the scope of sociology and its relationship to other disciplines is discussed. II THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION: THE PERSONAL PROBLEM AND THE PUBLIC ISSUE We began with a set of suggestions that drew our attention to how the individual and society are dialectically linked.

This is a point that sociologists over several generations have been concerned with. C. Wright Mills rests his vision of the sociological imagination precisely in the unravelling of how the personal and public are related.