Author Description

The book’s title tells the reader what to expect once the first page is turned. This textbook concentrates on basic, fundamental, vital sociological concepts, theories, and ideas. From the very beginning of Sociology as a separate discipline within the broader family of Social Sciences, concepts of power, authority, social integration, socialization, interaction, community, civil society were among the stepping stones that led to exploration and discovery of specifically sociological issues. Among those issues, which other social sciences are not prepared to investigate while Sociology is uniquely suited to analyze and explore, are the questions of social change and social integration. These two questions are dealt with from the very beginning of this book as we discuss theories of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, and other sociological thinkers who devoted their intellectual energy to find out what makes societies to change and what keeps societies together. In this book we also establish the place of Sociology among other social and behavioral sciences. In our discussion of Symbolic Interactionism and Dramaturgical Perspective, we invite the reader to explore connections between Sociology and Psychology. As social processes, themselves vaguely structured and not easy to observe, take place in the context of economic and political systems which are much more structurally precise, we investigate connections between state and society and economy and society. While an introductory level textbook, Basic Sociology opens the door into complex and important theoretical reasoning and analytical process which makes Sociology a useful scholarly discipline.