Welcome to the Sociology Programme

Our aim is to teach and research the structures and processes of societies including our own. We hope you will find the Sociology courses challenging and exciting, and useful in learning to understand both your own and other societies.

This site will help you find out about the range of papers we teach and various ways in which they can be combined, plus a little about us, and what we expect of you as students in this programme. We also include information about the occupations for which a Sociology degree equips you.

The Sociological Perspective

Sociology originated in Western Europe in the early nineteenth century, with attempts to understand the structure and dynamics of the industrialisation process, and to resolve its concomitant social problems, like high levels of crime. It is concerned largely with urban societies, and seeks to understand how individuals fit into mass society, how inequalities based on race, gender and class arise and are perpetuated, how bureaucracies work.

Sociology involves the critical analysis of how people organise and participate in group or collective behaviour, and how societies change over time. Sociological analysis is both scientific and humanist in its orientation.

One of our strengths in Sociology is that we ask questions about society which challenge what is normally taken for granted, in order to lead to new insights. Take as an example your own beliefs about society. How did you acquire these beliefs, and how do they differ from the beliefs others hold who are in different social groups? What do different social groups perceive social reality to be and how does everyone come to know it? How and what do people learn from their parents, peers, elders, teachers, television? Why does conflict occur in some societies? Who decides what is acceptable behaviour and what is deviant? What approach best understands the way societies change? This kind of questioning approach is fundamental to the sociological approach in at least four distinct ways:

1. It stresses relativity - that the world each of us sees and explains depends on our own positions in it;

2. It breeds scepticism of what 'everyone knows' as 'fact';

3. It encourages comparison of our own with other societies, in order to understand and appreciate both our differences and our similarities as human beings;

4. It engenders a cosmopolitan appreciation of feeling familiar with, rather than scared of and threatened by what is different from what we know.

This questioning 'sociological perspective' is fundamental to our programme, and you must expect to encounter it again and again in our different courses. The insights we offer can be unsettling. They challenge the world we take for granted, and replace old certainties with new - often initially unanswerable - questions. And, as professionals, we ourselves live in this world which is both subject and object of our studies. Sociological research and analysis can contribute to resolving social problems and social reform. This is reflected in the many careers open to you when you have gained your sociology degree.