Key Sociological Perspectives

Key Sociological Perspectives

Postmodernism
Postmodernism looks at social rapid change and how many institutions are unstable due to social uncertainty and sudden changes. It looks at how the rapid change of society has affected all social expectancies, and how the social norms that we once understood and expected are no longer valid, as the society around us is changing so much. This includes the stratification of society, as well as social roles and the norms, the intermixing of cultures, the changing of social class, and the difficulty of social mobility. It looks at social stratification, as due to the many changes in technology, work and way of life, the layers of society have changed greatly. This also reflects social classes and
It is believed that our behaviour is determined by how we interpret situations and relationships; in education for example, the teacher-pupil relationship would be assessed, and then compared to exam results to find a correlation between the relationship and how it affected the student’s studies. It works largely on personal socialisation, as it determines how our primary, secondary and tertiary socialisation affects the way we behave in society, through communication, body language, and reactions to situations. It also looks at the nature/nurture argument – the debate whether genetics in a person are dominant in determining how that person behaves and acts, or whether it is the influence of the environment and the family institution that makes someone develop the way they do, though the interactionism theory favours the nurture
Marxism is a conflict model, as it suggests that the functionalist theory is not true, and instead that social stratification and class is used as a way of exploiting workers – the hard workers in society are not working towards the greater good of all, but instead they work purely to benefit their employers, as a form of social control by forcing individuals to conform to the norms of society through their need to earn money. It also highlights the problems many people face in society, in terms of social mobility, as it suggests that because of the fact that individuals work for the benefit of the higher classes, they are unable to support themselves in moving up the hierarchy of