The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the discipline of sociology:
Manuel Castells Oliván is a Spanish sociologist. He is well known for his authorship of a trilogy of works, entitled The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. He is a scholar of the information society, communication and globalization.
Social control is a concept within the disciplines of the social sciences. Social control is described as a certain set of rules and standards in society that keep individuals bound to conventional standards as well as to the use of formalized mechanisms. The disciplinary model was the forerunner to the control model.
Georg Simmel was a German sociologist, philosopher, and critic.
Ferdinand Tönnies was a German sociologist, economist, and philosopher. He was a significant contributor to sociological theory and field studies, best known for distinguishing between two types of social groups, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. He co-founded the German Society for Sociology together with Max Weber and Georg Simmel and many other founders. He was president of the society from 1909 to 1933, after which he was ousted for having criticized the Nazis. Tönnies was regarded as the first proper German sociologist and published over 900 works, contributing to many areas of sociology and philosophy. Tönnies, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel are considered the founding fathers of classical German sociology. Though there has been a resurgence of interest in Weber and Simmel, Tönnies has not drawn as much attention.
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist, a professor at Harvard University, and an author of works on urban sociology, race, and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
Zygmunt Bauman was a Polish-born sociologist and philosopher. He was driven out of the Polish People's Republic during the 1968 Polish political crisis and forced to give up his Polish citizenship. He emigrated to Israel; three years later he moved to the United Kingdom. He resided in England from 1971, where he studied at the London School of Economics and became Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, later Emeritus. Bauman was a social theorist, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity.
Fictive kinship is a term used by anthropologists and ethnographers to describe forms of kinship or social ties that are based on neither consanguineal nor affinal ties. It contrasts with true kinship ties.
Mihailo Đurić was one of Serbia's most prominent philosophers. He was a professor at the University of Belgrade's Law School and member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Gillian Rosemary Rose was a British philosopher and writer. Rose held the chair of social and political thought at the University of Warwick until 1995. Rose began her teaching career at the University of Sussex. She worked in the fields of philosophy and sociology. Her writings include The Melancholy Science, Hegel Contra Sociology, Dialectic of Nihilism, Mourning Becomes the Law, and Paradiso, amongst others.
Charles Tilly was an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who wrote on the relationship between politics and society. He was a professor of history, sociology, and social science at the University of Michigan from 1969 to 1984 before becoming the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University.
Randall Collins is an American sociologist who has been influential in both his teaching and writing. He has taught in many notable universities around the world and his academic works have been translated into various languages. Collins is currently the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology, Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a leading contemporary social theorist whose areas of expertise include the macro-historical sociology of political and economic change; micro-sociology, including face-to-face interaction; and the sociology of intellectuals and social conflict. Collins's publications include The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998), which analyzes the network of philosophers and mathematicians for over two thousand years in both Asian and Western societies. His current research involves macro patterns of violence including contemporary war, as well as solutions to police violence. He is considered to be one of the leading non-Marxist conflict theorists in the United States, and served as the president of the American Sociological Association from 2010 to 2011.
The sociology of law, legal sociology, or law and society is often described as a sub-discipline of sociology or an interdisciplinary approach within legal studies. Some see sociology of law as belonging "necessarily" to the field of sociology, but others tend to consider it a field of research caught up between the disciplines of law and sociology. Still others regard it as neither a subdiscipline of sociology nor a branch of legal studies but as a field of research on its own right within the broader social science tradition. Accordingly, it may be described without reference to mainstream sociology as "the systematic, theoretically grounded, empirical study of law as a set of social practices or as an aspect or field of social experience". It has been seen as treating law and justice as fundamental institutions of the basic structure of society mediating "between political and economic interests, between culture and the normative order of society, establishing and maintaining interdependence, and constituting themselves as sources of consensus, coercion and social control".
John Richard Urry was a British sociologist who served as a professor at Lancaster University. He is noted for work in the fields of the sociology of tourism and mobility.
Scott Lash is a professor of sociology and cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Lash obtained a BSc in Psychology from the University of Michigan, an MA in Sociology from Northwestern University, and a PhD from the London School of Economics (1980). Lash began his teaching career as a lecturer at Lancaster University and became a professor in 1993. He moved to London in 1998 to take up his present post as Director for the Centre for Cultural Studies and Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College.
Sylvia Theresa Walby is a British sociologist, currently Professor of Sociology, Director of the Violence and Society Centre at the City University of London. She has an Honorary Doctorate from Queen's University Belfast for distinction in sociology. She is noted for work in the fields of the domestic violence, patriarchy, gender relations in the workplace and globalisation.
The sociology of film deals with the sociological analysis of film. According to a university class in it, the field includes "Contemporary cinema as a culture clue to social change; an introduction to the social forces involved in film-making in the United States and other cultures; the influence of films on mass and select audiences." According to another university course, it covers "social aspects causes and consequences of the production, distribution, content, form and reception of film."
Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. In simple words sociology is the scientific study of society. It uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order and social change. While some sociologists conduct research that may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, others focus primarily on refining the theoretical understanding of social processes and phenomenological method. Subject matter can range from micro-level analyses of society to macro-level analyses.
Robert MacArthur Shields is a Canadian sociologist and cultural theorist. He is Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Endowed Research Chair at University of Alberta. Shields directs the City Region Studies Centre in the Faculty of Extension. From 1991 to 2004 he rose to Professor of Sociology and Directed the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa Canada, with an interlude in 1995-97 as a lecturer in Culture and Communications at Lancaster University, Lancaster UK.
Katrina Roen is a New Zealand psychology / sociology academic, and as of 2019 is a full professor at the University of Waikato. She was formerly a visiting researcher at the University of Oslo.
