The discipline of sociology has been closely associated with the study of religion ever since sociology emerged as a distinct field in the mid-nineteenth century; only psychology is similarly close. Indeed, Auguste Comte, the social philosopher who...

More intimately than any other discipline that investigates the patterns of human interaction, sociology is associated with the advent of modernity, and this for several reasons. First, perhaps the only common denominator of the great number of schools...

Explicit analytic attention to time and space as the context, cause, or outcome of fundamental social processes distinguishes comparative-historical analysis from other forms of social research. Historical processes occurring in or across geographic,...

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz. As with so many other phenomena that define our civilization, we owe the idea of energy—from en(in) and ergon (work)—to ancient Greeks. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle gave the term a primarily kinetic...

There is no doubt that central and eastern European sociologies have similar intellectual, historical, and political roots and can be treated as one block, in contrast to western European sociologies, which are not characterized by uniformity...

Used as a category to identify social scientific research that constructs or illustrates theory by careful attention to culturally, geographically, and temporally located facts, historical sociology (or, from the historian's vantage point,...

Clinical sociology is a humanistic, multidisciplinary specialization that seeks to improve the quality of people's lives. Clinical sociologists assess situations and reduce problems through analysis and intervention. Clinical analysis is the...

Sociology, or the scientific study of society, social institutions, and social relationships, is one of the most important social sciences and may include in its concerns anthropology, economics, history, political science, and psychology. As a field...

In a global age, the concept of British sociology poses an interesting question with regard to the viability of national sociologies. Neither academic disciplines nor the subjects studied fit easily into national boundaries. An academic's...

a social science that studies human societies, their interactions, and the processes that preserve and change them. It does this by examining the dynamics of constituent parts of societies such as institutions, communities, populations, and gender,...

Sociology was involved in debates about gender relations from the time it was conceived as a branch of human knowledge, in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. The position of women was often considered a touchstone of social...

Even though sociology is a varied discipline, there are some general intellectual attributes that distinguish it from anthropology. I have already noted one, its concern with the nature of modern societies. Also striking are its social meliorism and...

Sociology is so varied a discipline that it can be identified only very loosely as the study of social relationships, institutions and structures. Not only is this definition loose, it is also negative, for ‘social’ often means, in effect,...

Science of society, social institutions, and social relationships, and specifically the systematic study of the development, structure, interaction, and collective behaviour of organized human groups. It emerged at the end of the 19th century through...

Sociology (from Latin: socius, "companion"; and the suffix -ology, "the study of", from Greek λÏγος, lógos, "knowledge" [1]) is the scientific study of society, including patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and culture[2]. Areas...