Sociology | Class 11 | Research Methods in sociology

20 December 2022 · 4 min read

A short watch before you read on.

Introduction

Every person holds a unique place in the social structure and in the system of social stratification (see pages 28 to 35 of the NCERT textbook Introducing Sociology). This means that a person's access to social resources varies in both type and degree. Put simply, the socio-economic class a person belongs to shapes the choices open to them, including which school they attend or whether they attend school at all.

One of the main goals of the sociological approach is to understand the two way relationship between the individual and society. To make sense of this relationship, this chapter works through three key ideas: social structure, social stratification and social processes.

Social Structure

The phrase social structure refers to the way a society is organised, or structured, as a whole.
It describes the regular patterns of human behaviour and of relationships between people.
These patterns repeat across different times and places, which is why certain regularities appear again and again.
Because of this repetition, social structure is closely tied to social reproduction. In a school, for example, the admissions process, the dress code, the annual events, the daily assembly, the uniform and the school anthem are observed and repeated over time, and so become institutions.

The structure of these social institutions can change. Change comes either through cooperative behaviour or through open conflict caused by competition. Two main thinkers explain the patterns of behaviour connected to cooperation and conflict.

Emile Durkheim stressed that societies exert social control over the behaviour of their members. For Durkheim, society comes before the individual. Society has a firmness or solidity, much like structures in the physical world, and is far more than the sum of individual actions.
Karl Marx and other theorists stressed the limits that social structure places on people, while also highlighting human agency, the power of people to both maintain and change that structure.

Social Stratification

Social stratification refers to the systematic differences between social groups in who has access to material or symbolic rewards.

Stratification exists in every society, but modern societies are often marked by sharp differences in wealth and power. Class is the clearest form of stratification in modern countries, yet race and caste, region and community, tribe and gender remain important bases of stratification too.

Stratification follows a definite pattern of inequality. Inequality is not spread among people at random. It is systematically linked to membership of different social groups. Members of a group tend to share certain features, and if they hold a higher rank they usually take steps to pass their favoured position on to their children. So stratification means that society is divided into a regular pattern of unequal groups, a pattern that tends to last across generations.

The caste system is one form of social stratification. Its features include:

social and religious disabilities placed on certain groups,
restrictions on eating together and on living together,
restrictions on marriage between groups,
restrictions on the choice of occupation.

The basic advantages that privileged groups may enjoy include:

Life chances: the material benefits that improve a person's life, such as wealth, income, health benefits, job security and leisure time.
Social status: prestige or high standing in the eyes of others.
Political influence: the ability of one group to dominate others through its power to make decisions.

Social structure and social stratification together shape the opportunities and resources that people and groups have as they compete, cooperate and come into conflict.

How sociology studies social processes

Sociology tries to understand cooperation, competition and conflict through the real social structure of a society. Two broad perspectives, the conflict view and the functionalist view, both assume that people must work together to meet their basic needs and to reproduce themselves and their surroundings.

The conflict perspective

It stresses that ideas of cooperation have differed across history. In simple societies, where no surplus was produced, members cooperated. In a capitalist society, where a surplus is produced, the dominant class owns it, and the question of who controls the surplus gives rise to conflict and rivalry rather than cooperation.
It argues that the system of production relations places groups and people in unequal positions. A factory owner and a worker cooperate every day, yet a hidden conflict of interest can sit beneath that cooperation.
It focuses on how society is divided along lines of caste, class or patriarchy, so that some groups face discrimination and disadvantage.

The functionalist perspective

It stresses the needs that a society must meet in order to survive, sometimes called system requirements. These include integrating new members, a shared means of communication and ways of assigning tasks to people.
It assumes that different parts of society each have a role or function in keeping society working.
It treats cooperation, competition and conflict as universal features of all societies, whose links are often complex and hard to separate.

Social Processes

Social processes are the different actions people carry out while operating within a particular social organisation. Sociologists explain these processes by drawing on the real structure of society and on a plural understanding of society.

According to MacIver and Page, a social process is the constant change taking place in a definite manner within the social structure. Social processes, also called the process of social interaction, are therefore a product of social contact. Both Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim assume that, in order to meet basic wants and to reproduce themselves and their surroundings, humans must work together.

Cooperation

Cooperation is the continuous and shared effort of two or more people working together willingly and as equals towards a common goal. It is essential for the survival of human society and rests on several assumptions about how people behave.

Cooperation is a constant and universal activity. It involves sympathy and empathy for others, and its nature is unselfish. It matters at both the psychological and the social level. Without human cooperation, human life would struggle to survive. Cooperation helps meet basic social needs, and it is made possible by the division of labour in society. It is an associative process, one that brings people together.

Conflict

Conflict is a dissociative social process, which makes it different from cooperation.
Conflict is usually a conscious process, while cooperation can sometimes be unconscious.
Conflict arises when groups compete for access to and control over scarce resources in society.
Conflict has many causes. It may rest on caste or class, tribe or gender, ethnicity or religion.
Conflict differs from competition. Conflict is mainly a conscious process, whereas competition may be unconscious. Competition is driven mainly by the goal to be reached, while conflict is often driven by personal aims.
Conflict shows itself as open discord only when it is expressed in public, yet the absence of open struggle does not mean there is no conflict.
Conflict may go together with cooperation, and forced cooperation differs from voluntary cooperation. Think of the property rights of daughters in Indian society: if a daughter asks for her share she may be called greedy, and if she gives it up she may be called cooperative. Cooperative behaviour can therefore be the result of deep social strain.
Emile Durkheim argued that cooperation is needed to meet certain social goals, and the division of labour serves this purpose. Karl Marx argued that while people cooperate and adjust to one another, they also change society in the process.

Social Accommodation

Accommodation is a form of interaction between two or more people or groups that aims to avoid, reduce or end conflict.
Cooperation and accommodation are distinct but related processes. Both help group life to develop and both support integration, assimilation and social harmony.
Assimilation is a social process in which two or more people or groups accept and take on each other's patterns of behaviour.
Accommodation and assimilation mark different stages within the wider process of cooperation, while cooperation deals with the relationships people or groups build to reach a shared goal.

Cooperation and the Division of Labour

Cooperation aids human survival. It makes goals easier to reach, brings people together and widens the chances to learn, all of which matter a great deal in economic life.
Understanding cooperation calls for Durkheim's idea of solidarity. Durkheim distinguished between mechanical and organic solidarity, and both are forms of social cooperation.
The division of labour, which calls for cooperation, exists to meet particular social needs.
Both Marx and Durkheim stress cooperation, yet they also differ.
Marx argues that in a class based society cooperation is not truly voluntary, because it has grown out of class relations rather than free choice. Workers lose the power to plan their own labour and to decide the reward they receive for it. A worker whose whole day is spent pressing a single button gains little of the satisfaction that a weaver, a potter or a smith once drew from creative work.

Mechanical Solidarity

A form of togetherness found in simple or traditional societies.
People are bound together by shared beliefs, sentiments and a common way of life, for example a family engaged in farming.

Organic Solidarity

A form of togetherness based on interdependence and the division of labour, typical of modern societies.
As people specialise in different tasks they come to depend more and more on one another, for example the many workers in a clothing or car manufacturing company.

Competition as an Idea and a Practice

Competition is a struggle between two or more parties to obtain a good or service that is relatively scarce. Like cooperation, it is a common and natural social process found in every human society, and in the modern world it has become a widely held belief and a habit of everyday life.

Modern capitalism aims above all to expand trade, and it places heavy stress on large scale production in factories that employ many people. Both Marx and Durkheim noted the rise of individualism and competition in modern societies. In a capitalist society, higher efficiency and greater profit are stressed.

The ruling idea under capitalism is competition. Its logic holds that the market works to ensure the greatest efficiency, for example through contests that promise entry to leading universities and the best jobs for those with the best marks or records.

This idea assumes that everyone competes on an equal footing. Yet stratification and inequality show that people stand in very different positions in society, which in the end leads to conflict. Because conflict is often not openly expressed, weaker groups, such as women or peasants, develop different ways of coping in order to manage conflict and keep cooperation going. Sociological study shows that hidden conflict alongside open cooperation is very real and very common.

Why it still matters

Stratification is not just a chapter in a textbook. It is a live debate in India right now. In 2025 the Union government announced that the next Census, to be carried out in two phases with reference dates of 1 October 2026 and 1 March 2027, will count caste for the first time since 1931. Supporters say a fresh caste count will finally give real numbers for the unequal groups this chapter describes, so that policy can rest on evidence rather than guesswork. That is social stratification being measured in front of us.

Class inequality is just as sharp. In March 2024 the World Inequality Lab published a study titled Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922 to 2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj. It found that by 2022 to 2023 the richest 1 percent of Indians held about 40 percent of the country's wealth and earned close to 23 percent of all income, among the highest shares anywhere in the world. The same body of research showed that the great bulk of billionaire wealth sits with a small number of upper caste families, which is exactly the overlap of caste and class that Durkheim and Marx wrote about. So when you next read about a caste survey or a wealth report in the news, you are watching social structure, stratification and social processes play out in real life. You can see how these ideas connect across subjects on the Learnacy Hub, revise related chapters in our Class 11 Sociology notes, and browse more study guides in the resources library.

Important terms

Altruism: acting for others without regard for one's own selfish interest.
Alienation: the condition in which workers no longer control the nature of their work or its final products.
Anomie: in Durkheim's view, a social condition in which the rules that guide behaviour break down, leaving people without clear social guidance.
Accommodation: a form of interaction that aims to prevent, reduce or remove conflict.
Assimilation: the process by which two or more people or groups take on a shared style of behaviour.
Capitalism: the production of goods using wage labour for sale, exchange and profit, rather than to meet the immediate needs of the producers.
Conflict: a dissociative process in which people or groups challenge one another directly to reach their goals.
Cooperation: an associative process in which people work together to reach a common goal.
Competition: a dissociative process of striving hard to reach a goal that is too scarce to satisfy everyone.
Structure: the organised frameworks and patterns that guide or shape human behaviour.
Culture: a group's way of life, the set of beliefs and practices that members learn and pass on from one generation to the next.
Stratification: the system of social ranks that places people or groups in higher or lower positions.
Modernity: the newness, complexity and speed of the social changes that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and marked a clear break from earlier ways of life.
Social constraints: the way our behaviour is shaped by the groups and cultures we belong to, a key feature of what Durkheim called social facts.

Sources

Government of India, News Services Division (All India Radio News): Population Census 2027 to be conducted in two phases with caste enumeration. https://www.newsonair.gov.in/govt-to-conduct-population-census-2027-in-two-phases-with-caste-enumeration
World Inequality Lab: Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922 to 2023, The Rise of the Billionaire Raj (19 March 2024). https://wid.world/news-article/inequality-in-india-the-billionaire-raj-is-now-more-unequal-than-the-british-colonial-raj/
Business Standard: Inequality surges in India, upper castes hold 90 percent of billionaire wealth (27 June 2024). https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/inequality-surges-in-india-upper-castes-hold-90-of-billionaire-wealth-124062700343_1.html

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