Читать книгу Our Social World - Kathleen Odell Korgen - Страница 48

Think about the different groups you depend on and interact with daily. You wake up to greet members of your family or your roommate. You go to a larger group—a class—that exists within an even larger organization—the college or university. Understanding sociology and the approach of this book requires a grasp of levels of analysis—that is, social groups from the smallest to the largest. It may be relatively easy to picture small groups such as a family, a group of friends, a sports team, or a sorority or fraternity. It is more difficult to visualize large groups, such as corporations—Target, Nike, Apple, General Motors Company, Starbucks, Google, or Facebook—or organizations such as local or state governments. The largest groups include nations or international organizations, such as the sprawling networks of the United Nations or the World Trade Organization. Groups of various sizes shape our lives. Sociological analysis involves an understanding of these groups that exist at various levels of analysis and the connections among them.

The social world model helps us picture the levels of analysis in our social surroundings as an interconnected series of small groups, organizations, institutions, and societies. Sometimes these groups are connected by mutual support and cooperation, but other times there are conflicts and power struggles over access to resources. What we are asking you to do here and throughout this book is to develop a sociological imagination—the basic lens used by sociologists. Picture the social world as connected levels of increasingly larger circles. To understand the units or parts of the social world model, look at the model shown here (and at the beginning of each chapter).

Description

We use this social world model throughout the book to illustrate how each topic fits into the big picture: our social world. The social world includes both social structures and social processes.