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Sociological Traditions

The purpose of this research is to examine two journal articles from the professional literature, to explain how each fits into, is a part of, reflects, or is based on one of the four sociological traditions presented by Randall Collins in Four Sociological Traditions (1994). The plan of the research will be to set forth Collins's thesis about the principal sociological frames of reference, and then to discuss the pattern of ideas in each article, to see how sociological tradition informs the means by which the ideas are elaborated. As appropriate, reference will be made to ways in which the articles both rely on and depart from sociological traditions as Collins describes them.

Collins's text sets forth four intellectual traditions that make up the discipline of sociology: the conflict tradition, which looks at processes whereby disruption or revolution might have the effect of re-forming, reinstitutionalizing, or otherwise reconstituting society; the rational/utilitarian tradition, which looks at social structure as a process of rational calculus, with self-interested individual participants or groups engaging competitively with others and arriving by way of such engagement (for good or ill) at the form that a society takes; Durkheimian tradition, which considers the mechanisms by which social rituals (whether rational or irrational) taking place in face-to-face groups produce social solidarity; and the microinteractionist tradition, which in a variety of elaborations "concerns the human subject and builds the social world out of human consciousness and human agency" (Collins, 1994, p. 242). The last-named tradition, as Collins shows, has several competing viewpoints, but what they share is a focus on the subjective experience of the world as its determinant or as the locus of making meanings in the world, rather than on the world as a determinant of subjective experience.

An example of a Durkheimian perspective of social analy...

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Sociological Traditions. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:08, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1702664.html