Our contemporary theorists are standing on the shoulders of the giants of sociology, but they are in turn expanding the horizons of our discipline at the macrostructural, microinteractional and interpretive levels of analysis. There are five major perspectives of contemporary sociology: functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism, phenomenology and theories of rational choice. Social interactions of people and their consequences are the subject of sociology studies. ... An analysis is a critical evaluation, usually made by breaking a subject (either material or intellectual) down into its constituent parts, then describing the parts and their relationship to the whole. ... Functionalism is a term with several senses: For functionalism in sociology, see Functionalism (sociology). ... In sociology and biology, conflict theory states that the society or organization functions so that each individual participant and its groups struggle to maximize their benefits, which inevitably contributes to social change such as changes in politics and revolutions. ... Symbolic interactionism is a sociological perspective which examines how individuals and groups interact, focusing on the creation of personal identity through interaction with others. ... Phenomenology is a current in philosophy that takes intuitive experience of phenomena (what presents itself to us in conscious experience) as its starting point and tries to extract the essential features of experiences and the essence of what we experience. ... Rational choice theory is a way of looking at deliberations between a number of potential courses of action, in which rationality of one form or another is used either to decide which course of action would be the best to take, or to predict which course of action actually will...

Sociological theories do not comprise a world of formal, empty boxes, irrelevant tot the world of work and family, power, freedom, discrimination and oppression. Far from it. They have everything to do with that world- how we see it, understand it, and explain it, as well as how we act in it and thus what it becomes. In physics, work is defined as the integral of dot product of force times infinitesimal translation: In project management, work is the effort applied to produce a deliverable or accomplish a task. ... A family of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso in 1997 A family is a domestic group of people, or a number of domestic groups, typically affiliated by birth or marriage, or by comparable legal relationships including domestic partnership, adoption, surname and in some cases ownership (as was the case in the Roman... The concept of power occurs in multiple areas. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ... To discriminate is to make a distinction. ... Oppression is the negative outcome experienced by people targeted by the arbitrary and cruel exercise of power in a society or social group. ...

Major dimensions along which soc. Theories differ: methodology, subject matter, assumptions, types of questions. Methodology: inductive vs. deductive. A deductive approach begins with explanatory hypotheses and logically deduces its empirical implications, as with an inductive approach scientists instead begin by immersing themselves in the data, and gradually build up a theory of what is going on. Subject matter: macro vs. micro, the former being concerned with the large-scale characteristics of social structure and roles, the latter being concerned with person-to-person encounters and the details of human interaction and communication. Assumptions: whether they view human behavior as essentially determined and so predictable, or whether they emphasize human creativity. Perspectives also differ on the question whether behavior is motivated primarily by interests or values. The term induction has more than one meaning in the English language. ... Deductive reasoning is the process of reaching a conclusion that is guaranteed to follow, if the evidence provided is true and the reasoning used to reach the conclusion is correct. ... A hypothesis (= assumption in ancient Greek) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. ... For a List of scientists, see: List of anthropologists List of astronomers List of biologists List of chemists List of computer scientists List of economists List of engineers List of geologists List of inventors List of mathematicians List of meteorologists List of physicists Scientist pairs List of scientist pairs See... A macro in computer science is an abstraction, whereby a certain textual pattern is replaced according to a defined set of rules. ... ... Binomial name Homo sapiens Linnaeus, 1758 Subspecies Homo sapiens idaltu (extinct) Homo sapiens sapiens For other uses, see Human (disambiguation). ...

Types of questions: whether theorists aim at describing or explaining or when predicting things. Explanation and prediction are not the same: explanations that refer back to general principles may not permit much in the way of prediction (i.e. Evolution theory). Conversely the ability to predict can rest simply on statistical correlation and not on much understanding at all. The fact that soc. Theory does not form a cumulative body of knowledge does not mean we have an impasse or that theories are merely contradicting each other. The test of a theory is ultimately whether it helps us understand reality and each soc theory does just that by shedding light on a different aspect of human society. In Popper’s words they are all “nets to catch what we call ‘the world’ – to rationalize, to explain and to master it.” This article is about biological evolution. ...

(Wallace & Wolf, Contemporay Sociological Theory)