Sociology | Class 11 | Terms, Concepts and their Use in Sociology

20 December 2022 · 8 min read

A short watch before you read on.

Introduction

Every person has a unique place in society and in its system of social stratification. This means that a person's access to social resources, such as money, respect and opportunity, varies in both type and degree. To put it simply, the socio-economic class a person is born into often 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, or dialectical, relationship between the individual and society: society shapes us, and we in turn shape society.

To grasp this relationship, this chapter works with three key ideas: social structure, social stratification and social processes. These notes build on the earlier chapter, Introducing Sociology, and sit alongside our other Class 11 Sociology notes.

Social Structure

The phrase social structure refers to the way in which society is organised, or structured.
It describes the regular patterns of human behaviour and of the relationships between people.
There are underlying patterns in how people behave when they interact with one another. Because these patterns repeat across different times and places, we can speak of regularities in social life.
For this reason, social structure is closely tied to social reproduction, the way a society passes its patterns on. In a school, for example, admissions, the dress code, the annual functions, the daily assembly, the uniform and the school song are all observed and repeated over time until they become institutions.

Social institutions can also change. Change can come from cooperative behaviour, or from serious conflict brought on by competition.

Two major thinkers explain the patterns of behaviour linked to cooperation and conflict in different ways.

Emile Durkheim stressed that society exerts social control over the behaviour of its members. For Durkheim, society comes before the individual. Society has a firmness or solidity, rather like the structures of the physical world, which makes it far more than the sum of individual acts.
Karl Marx and other thinkers emphasise the constraints that social structure places on people, while also stressing human creativity, or agency, which can both keep social structure going and change it.

Social Stratification

Social stratification refers to systematic differences between social groups in who gets access to material rewards, such as wealth, or symbolic rewards, such as status.

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

Stratification also follows a definite pattern of inequality within the wider social structure. Inequality is not scattered randomly among individuals. It is systematically linked to membership of different social groups. Members of a group tend to share similar life conditions, and a group in a higher position will usually take steps to pass its advantages on to its children. So the term stratification points to the idea that society is divided into a regular pattern of unequal groups, and that this pattern tends to persist across generations.

The different strata, or layers, are also connected to the needs of social life, because nobody can meet all of their needs entirely on their own.

The caste system is one form of social stratification. It has included features such as:

social and religious disabilities placed on certain groups;
restrictions on eating together and on the kind of food that may be shared;
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 standing in the eyes of others.
Political influence: the ability of one group to dominate others through its power to make decisions.

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

Methods used in sociology to study social processes

Looking through the lens of the real social structure of society, sociology tries to understand the processes of cooperation, competition and conflict. Two broad perspectives help here, and both assume that human beings have to work together in order to meet their basic needs and to reproduce themselves and their world.

The conflict perspective highlights the following:

Ideas of cooperation have differed from one historical society to another. In simple societies, where no surplus was produced, members cooperated to survive. 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 competition rather than pure cooperation.
The system of production places groups and individuals in unequal positions. A factory owner and a worker cooperate every day, yet there can be a hidden conflict of interest between them.
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 highlights the following:

It points to certain basic requirements, or system needs, that any society must meet in order to survive, such as integrating new members, having a shared means of communication, and having ways of assigning tasks and responsibilities to people.
It assumes that the different parts or organs of society each have a role to play in keeping society running.
For functionalists, cooperation, competition and conflict are found in all societies, and the links between them are often complex and hard to separate.

Social Processes

Social processes are the different kinds of action people take while living within a particular social structure.

Using the real social structure of society, and a many-sided view of it, sociologists try to explain these processes. 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 known as processes of social interaction, arise out of social contact. Both Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim assumed that, in order to meet their basic needs and to reproduce themselves and their environment, human beings must work together.

Cooperation

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

Cooperation is a constant and universal activity. It involves both sympathy and empathy for others, and it is unselfish in nature. It matters at both a psychological and a social level.

Without human cooperation, it is thought, 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 also involves the ability to think in an associative way, connecting one's own effort to the efforts of others.

Conflict

Conflict is a dissociative social process, which makes it distinct from cooperation.
Conflict is usually a conscious process, whereas cooperation can sometimes be unconscious.
Conflict arises when groups compete for access to, and control over, the scarce resources of society.
Conflict has many causes. It may be based on caste or class, tribe or gender, ethnicity or religion.
Competition is different from conflict. Competition may be an unconscious process, while conflict is mainly a conscious one.
Conflict is usually driven by direct personal or group aims, whereas competition is driven mainly by the wish to reach a goal.
Conflict becomes visible as open disagreement or a clash only when it is expressed openly. The absence of open action, however, does not mean there is no conflict at all.
Conflict may go along with cooperation, and forced cooperation differs from voluntary cooperation. Think of a daughter's right to family property in Indian society. If she claims her right, she may be called greedy, and if she gives it up out of pressure, she may be called cooperative. So even cooperative behaviour can be the result of deep social strife.
Emile Durkheim argued that cooperation is needed to meet certain social ends, and that the division of labour serves this purpose. Karl Marx argued that although people cooperate and adjust to one another, they also change society in the process.

Social Accommodation

Accommodation is a form of social interaction between two or more people or groups that aims to avoid, reduce or remove conflict.
Cooperation and accommodation are two distinct processes, yet they are also related. Both help build group life, integration, assimilation and social harmony.
Assimilation is a social process in which two or more people or groups take on and share each other's patterns of behaviour.
Accommodation and assimilation mark different stages in the wider process of cooperation, which deals with relationships between individuals or groups working towards a common goal.

Cooperation and the Division of Labour

Cooperation helps human survival. It makes goals easier to reach, brings people together and widens chances to learn, all of which matter greatly in economic life.
Understanding cooperation calls for understanding Durkheim's idea of solidarity. Durkheim distinguished between organic and mechanical solidarity, and both are forms of social cooperation.
The division of labour, which calls for cooperation, exists to meet the particular needs of society.
Karl Marx and Durkheim both stress cooperation, yet they also differ.
Marx argued that in a class-based society, cooperation is not fully voluntary, because it arises from the structure of class rather than from free choice. Workers can lose control over how they work and over what they receive in return. A factory worker whose whole day may be spent pressing a single button is very different from a weaver, potter or ironsmith who once took satisfaction and pleasure from creative work.

Organic Solidarity

A form of togetherness based on interdependence and the division of labour.
People become more and more dependent on one another as they specialise, for example the many workers in a clothing or car manufacturing company.

Mechanical Solidarity

A form of togetherness based on similarity of lifestyle, with little specialisation or division of labour.
People are held together by shared beliefs, feelings and consciousness, for example a family engaged in farming.

Competition as an idea and a practice

Competition can be described as a contest between two or more parties who are trying to obtain a good or service that is relatively scarce. It is a common and natural social process found in every human society, and in modern culture it is also a widely held belief and a way of behaving.

Like cooperation, competition is a universal and natural social process, but the social explanation of it differs from purely naturalistic explanations.

In the modern era, the idea of competition is dominant, and it is hard to imagine a society in which competition is not a driving principle. The growth of trade is a central goal of modern capitalism, which places great emphasis on large-scale production in factories that employ many people.

Both Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim observed the rise of individuality and competition in modern societies. Both are basic to the working of modern capitalism, in which higher efficiency and greater profit are stressed.

The dominant worldview under capitalism is one of competition. According to this way of thinking, the market works so as to ensure maximum efficiency, for example through contests that decide who gains admission to leading universities and the best professions on the basis of the best grades.

This worldview assumes that everyone competes on an equal footing, that is, that everyone stands in the same position in the race for resources, jobs or education. Yet stratification and inequality show that people are placed very differently in society, and this can finally lead to conflict.

Because conflict is often not expressed openly, less powerful groups, such as women or peasants, develop different ways of coping and of keeping cooperation going. Sociological research shows that hidden conflict and open cooperation are both very real and very common in societies.

Important terms

Altruism: the idea of acting without regard for one's own selfish interest.
Alienation: the condition in which workers no longer control the nature of their work or the products of their labour.
Anomie: in Durkheim's view, a social condition in which the rules that guide behaviour break down, leaving people without clear social restraint or direction.
Accommodation: a form of social interaction between people or groups that aims to prevent, reduce or remove conflict.
Assimilation: the social process by which people or groups take on and practise a different style of behaviour.
Conflict: a dissociative social process in which people or groups challenge an opponent directly in order to reach their goals.
Capitalism: the production of goods using wage labour for sale, exchange and profit, rather than to meet the immediate needs of the producers.
Cooperation: an associative social process in which people work together to reach a common goal.
Competition: a dissociative social process in which people make a strong effort 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, a set of beliefs and practices that members learn and pass on from one generation to the next.
Stratification: the system of social layers that places people or groups in higher or lower positions.
Modernity: the distinctness, complexity and dynamism of the social processes 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. For Durkheim, this is a defining feature of social facts.

Why it still matters

The words in this chapter are not just terms to memorise. They describe how India is organised right now, and two live developments show it clearly.

First, take stratification and the caste system. On 30 April 2025 the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs decided that the next Census of India will record every person's caste. This will be the first full count of caste since 1931. The Census is being carried out in two phases, with a main reference date of 1 March 2027, and it is also India's first digital Census. In other words, the state is now trying to measure exactly how the country is divided into groups, so that policy can respond. That is the abstract idea of social stratification turning into a real, national exercise. You can trace how this theme connects to law, economics and politics in the sociology field of the Learnacy Hub.

Second, take the idea that rewards are shared unequally. The World Inequality Report 2026, produced by the World Inequality Lab, found that India's richest 1 per cent now hold about 40 per cent of the country's wealth, and the top 10 per cent hold roughly 65 per cent, while the poorest half of the population owns only a little over 6 per cent. This is precisely the systematic difference in access to rewards that Durkheim and Marx wrote about, only now it is measured in rupees today.

Put the two together and the chapter comes alive. Cooperation, competition and conflict are not just old debates: they are visible in who gets counted, who owns what, and who gets to decide. For more study notes that link the syllabus to the real world, browse the OYI Resources library.

Sources

2027 Census of India, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2027_census_of_India
Caste count returns to Census after 1931 as Centre notifies 40 questions, Business Standard: https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/caste-count-returns-to-census-after-1931-as-centre-notifies-40-questions-126081401765_1.html
Inequality in India Among Highest in the World, Top 1% Holds 40% National Wealth (World Inequality Report 2026), The Wire: https://m.thewire.in/article/political-economy/in-charts-world-inequality-report-2026

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