Macrosociologists will ask the big questions that often result in both research conclusions and new theories, like these:. Microsociologists tend to ask more localized, focused questions that examine the lives of smaller groups of people.
For example:. Macrosociologists Feagin and Schor, among many others, use a combination of historical and archival research, and analysis of statistics that span long periods in order to construct data sets that show how the social system and the relationships within it have evolved over time to produce the society we know today.
Additionally, Schor employs interviews and focus groups, more commonly used in microsociological research, to make smart connections between historical trends, social theory, and the way people experience their everyday lives. Microsociologists—Rios, and Pascoe included—typically use research methods that involve direct interaction with research participants, like one-on-one interviews, ethnographic observation, focus groups, as well as smaller-scale statistical and historical analyses.
To address their research questions, both Rios and Pascoe embedded in the communities they studied and became parts of the lives of their participants, spending a year or more living among them, seeing their lives and interactions with others firsthand, and speaking with them about their experiences.
Conclusions born of macrosociology often demonstrate correlation or causation between different elements or phenomena within society. For example, Feagin's research, which also produced the theory of systemic racism , demonstrates how White people in the United States, both knowingly and otherwise, constructed and have maintained over centuries a racist social system by keeping control of core social institutions like politics, law, education, and media, and by controlling economic resources and limiting their distribution among people of color.
Feagin concludes that all of these things working together have produced the racist social system that characterizes the United States today. Microsociological research, due to its smaller-scale, is more likely to yield the suggestion of correlation or causation between certain things, rather than prove it outright.
What it does yield, and quite effectively, is proof of how social systems affect the lives and experiences of people who live within them. Though her research is limited to one high school in one place for a fixed amount of time, Pascoe's work compellingly demonstrates how certain social forces, including mass media, pornography, parents, school administrators, teachers, and peers come together to produce messages to boys that the right way to be masculine is to be strong, dominant, and compulsively heterosexual.
Though they take very different approaches to studying society, social problems, and people, macro- and microsociology both yield deeply valuable research conclusions that aid our ability to understand our social world, the problems that course through it, and the potential solutions to them.
Moreover, the subjects like social psychology , social anthropology can be considered as subdivisions of micro sociology. These subject fields focus more on individuals, thinking patterns in a smaller scale. Though the micro social analysis is important in understanding micro social interactions, it has its drawbacks as well. For example, we cannot determine the larger forces that might influence on individual behavior and interactions. However, micro sociology has been developed as a significant field in Sociology.
This study area focuses on the social structure on a larger scale. Usually, macro sociology analyzes the social system as a whole and also it focuses on the whole population as well. These shifts illustrate the fact that it is no longer possible to study social life without thinking globally. Contemporary societies have become so porous and interconnected a process that scholars have termed globalization that to ignore the global patterns would be to present an incomplete picture of any social situation.
Globalization : Global processes touch all corners of the world, including this mall in Jakarta, Indonesia, where the fast-food business model originating in the United States is now a part of everyday life.
Thinking globally in sociology could entail a variety of different approaches. Some scholars use world systems theory. World systems theory stresses that the world system not nation states should be the basic unit of social analysis. The world-system refers to the international division of labor, which divides the world into core countries, semi-periphery countries, and the periphery countries.
Core countries focus on higher-skill, capital-intensive production, and the rest of the world focuses on low-skill, labor-intensive production, and the extraction of raw materials.
This constantly reinforces the dominance of the core countries. Nonetheless, the system is dynamic, and individual states can gain or lose their core semi-periphery, periphery status over time. For a time, some countries become the world hegemon; throughout the last few centuries, this status has passed from the Netherlands to the United Kingdom and, most recently, to the United States.
The most well-known version of the world system approach has been developed by Immanuel Wallerstein in s and s. Wallerstein traces the rise of the world system from the 15 th century, when the European feudal economy suffered a crisis and was transformed into a capitalist one. Europe the West utilized its advantages and gained control over most of the world economy, presiding over the development and spread of industrialization and the capitalist economy, indirectly resulting in unequal development.
Other approaches that fall under world systems theory include dependency theory and neocolonialism. Dependency theory takes the idea of the international division of labor and states that peripheral countries are not poor because they have not adequately developed, but rather are poor because of the very nature of their relationship with core countries. This relationship is exploitative, as the resources needed by peripheral countries to develop are funneled to core countries.
Poor countries are thus in a continual state of dependency to rich countries. Dependency Theory : According to dependency theory, unequal exchange results in the unequal status of countries. Core countries accumulate wealth by gathering resources from and selling goods back to the periphery and semi-periphery. Neocolonialism also known as neoimperialism also argues that poor countries are poor not because of any inherent inadequacy.
Neocolonialism emphasizes the unequal relationships between former colonizing countries and colonized regions. Domination not just economic, but also cultural and linguistic still continues to occur even though poor countries are no longer colonies.
The top-down approach is not only used to study the global economy, but also social norms. Sociologists who are interested in global social norms focus their attention on global institutions, such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund, or various other international organizations, such as human rights groups. John Meyer, a Stanford sociologist, is one of these. These norms form a global civil society that operates independently of individual nations and to which individual nations often strive to conform in order to be recognized by the international community.
Another approach to studying globalization sociologically is to examine on-the-ground processes. Some sociologists study grassroots social movements, such as non-governmental organizations which mobilize on behalf of equality, justice, and human rights.
Others study global patterns of consumption, migration, and travel. Still others study local responses to globalization. Two ideas that have emerged from these studies are glocalization and hybridization. Glocalization was a term coined by a Japanese businessman in the s and is a popular phrase in the transnational business world. It refers to the ability to make a global product fit a local market.
Hybridization is a similar idea, emerging from the field of biology, which refers to the way that various sociocultural forms can mix and create a third form which draws from its sources, but is something entirely new. The possibilities for thinking globally in sociology are as varied as the world we live in: global finance, global technology, global cities, global medicine, global food.
The list is endless. If we examine any social situation closely, the global patterns and linkages behind it will undoubtedly emerge. Privacy Policy. Real quick, conflict theory is the idea that societies are made up of institutions that benefit the powerful and create inequalities, and large groups of people are at odds with each other until the conflict is resolved and a new social order is created with equally distributed power.
Okay, so that's the big picture perspective. Let's go to the other extreme and check out microsociology. Kind of sounds like microscope, right? With a microscope you can look at individual cells or really tiny things.
Well, in microsociology you're looking at the small scale every day, face to face social interactions between individuals or maybe small groups.
You're looking at families and schools and other small social interactions. Unlike macrosociology, in microsociology you don't have the same large test group.
So microsociology is more of an interpretive analysis of the society. You look at a sample of your society and interpret how those individual interactions would affect the larger patterns of the society, like institutions and social structures. You can look at how the expectations of a teacher will affect a student's grades, or you can look at doctor-patient interactions, or how family dynamics affect the expression of prejudiced attitudes.
So you can get an idea of microsociology in practice, you can look at symbolic interactionism, which is a social theory that is a microperspective. Symbolic interactionism focuses on the individual and the significance or meaning they give to objects, events, symbols and other things in their life.
Cool, so you have macrosociology starting from the big picture and seeing how it affects the individual.
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