Sociology NCERT Notes | Class 11 - Book 1

Team Shashank Sajwan

According to the 86th Constitutional amendment act,2002, free & compulsory education
for all children in the 6–14-year age group is now a Fundamental Right under Art.21A of
the constitution. "Education is neither a privilege nor favour but a basic human right to
which all girls & women are entitled”

SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIETY

● Sociology studies human society as an interconnected whole. And how society &
the individual interact with each other.
● Sociology is a systematic study of society, distinct from philosophical & religious
reflections, as well as our everyday common-sense observation about society.
● The Indira Awas Yojana, operationalized from 1999-2000 is a major scheme by the
government's Ministry of rural Development & Housing & Urban Development
Corporation (HUDCO) to construct houses free of cost for the poor & the homeless.
● Sociology is the study of human social life, groups & societies. Its subject matter is
our own behaviour as social beings.
● Sociology has from its beginnings understood itself as a science.
● The common-sense explanations are generally based on what may be called
‘naturalistic' &/or individualistic explanation.
● Sociology thus breaks from both common-sense observations ideas as well as from
philosophical thought.
● Sociology has a body of concepts, methods & data, no matter how loosely
coordinated.
● The line of descent inheritance passes from father to son. This is understood as a
patrilineal system.
● Society was often compared with living organisms & efforts were made to trace its
growth through stages comparable to those of organic life.
● Auguste Comte, the French scholar (1789-1857), considered to be the founder of
sociology, believed that sociology would contribute to the welfare of humanity.
● The industrial revolution was based upon a new, dynamic form of economic
activity-capitalism.
● Enslavement is a graphic example of how people were caught up in the
development of modernity against their will. Between the 17th&19th centuries an
estimated 24 million Africans were enslaved.
● Colonialism was an essential part of modern capitalism and industrialization.
● Sociology is a social science.

SOCIOLOGY & ECONOMICS

● Economics is the study of production and distribution of goods & services.

Shashank Sajwan | 1
 ● The sociological approach looks at economic behaviour in a context of social norms,
values, practices & interests.
● The defined scope of economics has helped in facilitating its development as a highly
focused, coherent discipline.
● Economists’ predictive abilities often suffer precisely because of their neglect of
individual behaviour, cultural norms and institutional resistance which sociologists’
study.

SOCIOLOGY & POLITICAL SCIENCE

● Sociology is devoted to the study of all aspects of society, whereas conventional
political science restricted itself mainly to the study of power as embodied in formal
organisation.

SOCIOLOGY & HISTORY

● History studies concrete details while the sociologist is more likely to abstract from
concrete reality, categories is & generalise.

SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY

● Psychology is often defined as the science of behaviour. It involves itself primarily
with the individual.
● Sociology attempts to understand behaviour as it is organised in society, that is the
way in which personality is shaped by different aspects of society.

SOCIOLOGY & SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

● Sociology is deemed to be the study of modern complex societies while social
anthropology is deemed the study of simple societies.
● Social anthropology tended to study in all their aspects, as whole.

TERMS, CONCEPTS AND THEIR USE IN SOCIOLOGY

● Passengers waiting at a railway station or airport or bus stop or a cinema audience
are examples of aggregates.
○ Such aggregates are often termed as quasi groups.
● A social group thus refers to a collection of continuously interacting persons who
share common interest, culture, values & norms within a given society.
● The team primary group is used to refer to a small group of people connected by
intimate & face-to-face association & co-operation.
○ The primary groups are person- oriented.
● Secondary groups are relatively large in size, maintain formal impersonal
relationships.
○ Secondary groups are goal oriented.
● ’Society' or association refers to everything opposite of Community!
● A sense of society thus functioning marks an in-group.

Shashank Sajwan | 2
 ● An out-group on the other hand is one to which the members of an in-group do not
belong.
● The groups whose lifestyles are emulated are known as reference groups.
● Peer groups are a kind of primary group. Peer pressure refers to the social pressure.
● Social Stratification refers to the existence of structured inequalities between
groups in society, in terms of their access to material or symbolic rewards.
● Historically four basic systems of stratification have existed in human societies;
slavery, caste, estate & class.
● In the Marxist theory social classes are defined by what relation they have to the
means of production.
● Weber used the term life-chances, which refers to the rewards & advantages
afforded by market capacity.
● Status & Role, the two concepts are often seen as twin concepts. A status is simply a
position in society or in a group.
● A role is the dynamic or the behavioural aspect of status. We may say that a status
is an institutionalised role.
● An ascribed status is a social position, which a person occupies because of birth, or
assumes involuntarily.
● Status & prestige are interconnected terms.
● The kind of value attached to the status or to the office is called Prestige.
● Role conflict is the incompatibility among roles corresponding to one or more
status.
● Role stereotyping is a process of reinforcing some specific role for some member of
the society not just with roles & status but also with social control.

SOCIETY & SOCIAL CONTROL

● Social control is one of the most generally used concepts in sociology. It refers to the
various means used by a society to bring its recalcitrant or unruly members back
into line.
● Social control may be informal or formal.
● A sanction is a mode or reward or punishment that reinforces socially expected
forms of behaviours.
● Social control can be positive or negative.

UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

● A patriarchal family structure exists where the men exercise authority &
dominance, & matriarch where the women play a major role in decision making in
the family.
● We have two forms of marriage, namely, monogamy & polygamy.
○ Monogamy restricts the individual to one spouse at a time.
○ Polygamy denotes marriage to more than one mate at one time.
● Marriage based on rules governing eligibility/ineligibility of mates is classified as
endogamy & exogamy.

Shashank Sajwan | 3
 ● Endogamy requires an individual to marry within a culturally defined group of
which he or she is already a member.
● Exogamy, the reverse of endogamy, requires Individual to marry outside of his/her
own group.
● When two people marry, they become kin to one another.
● The family of birth is called family of orientation & the family in which a person is
married is called the family of procreation.
○ The kin who are related through 'blood' are called 'consanguineal kin' while
the kin who are related through marriage are called ‘affines’.
● 'Work' here quite clearly refers to paid employment.
● One of the main features of modern societies is an enormous expansion of
economic interdependence.
● Power is the ability of individual groups to carry out their will even when opposed
by others.
○ Power is exercised through authority.
○ Authority is that form of power, which is accepted as legitimate, that is, as
right and just. It is institutionalised because it is based on legitimacy.
● Sovereignty refers to the undisputed political rule of a state over a given territorial
area.
● Citizenship rights include civil, political & social rights.
● Nationalism can be defined as a set of symbols & beliefs providing the sense of
being part of a single political community.
● Religion is not just a matter of the private belief of an individual but it also has a
public character.
● A pioneering work by Max Weber (1864-1920) demonstrates how sociology looks at
religion in its relationship to other aspects of social & economic behaviour.
○ Weber argues that Calvinism (a branch of Protestant Christianity) exerted an
important influence on the emergence & growth of capitalism as a mode of
economic organisation.
○ The Calvinists believed that the world was created for the glory of God.
● Education is a life-long process, involving both formal & informal institutions of
learning.

CULTURE AND SOCIALISATION

● Culture is the common understanding which is learnt & developed through social
interaction with others in society.
● Often the term 'culture' is used to refer to the acquiring of refined taste in classical
music, dance forms, painting.
● One early anthropological definition of culture comes from the British scholar
Edward Tylor: "Culture or civilization taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that
complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom other
capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."(Tyler 1871)

Shashank Sajwan | 4
 ● The founder of the "functional school" of anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski of
Poland (1884-1942) wrote: "Culture comprises inherited artefacts, goods, process,
ideas, habits & values".

CULTURE IS
a) A way of thinking, feeling, believing.
b) The total way of life of a people
c) An abstraction from behaviour.
d) Learned behaviour
e) A storehouse of pooled learning.
f) The social legacy the individual acquires from his group.
g) A set of standardised orientations to recurrent problems.
h) A mechanism for the normative regulation of behaviour.
● Three dimensions of culture have been distinguished:
○ Cognitive (how we learn to process)
○ Normative (rules of conduct)
○ Material (means of material)
● Norms care implicit rules, laws are explicit rules.
● A law is a formal sanction defined by the government as a rule of principle that its
citizens must follow.
● Ethnocentrism is the application of one's own cultural values in evaluating the
behaviour & beliefs of people from other cultures.
● Ethnocentrism is the opposite of cosmopolitanism, which values other cultures for
their differences.
● Socialisation can be defined as the process whereby the helpless infant gradually
becomes a self-aware, knowledgeable person, skilled in the ways of the culture
into which she is born.

DOING SOCIOLOGY: RESEARCH METHODS:

● Objectivity & Subjectivity in Sociology:
○ The word 'objective’ means unbiased-neutral, or based on facts alone.
○ The word 'subjective’ means something that is based on individual values &
preferences.
● Participant Observation is often called 'field work’.
● The survey's main advantage as a social scientific method is it allows us to generalise
results for a large population while actually studying only a small portion of this
population.
● An interview is basically a guided conversation between the researcher & the
respondent.

Shashank Sajwan | 5