GSF231 : DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL

CHANGE
Mohan Kumar Bera
BITS-Pilani Goa Campus
Goa

9/29/2019 @ Mohan Kumar Bera, PhD, India 1

Sociological perspectives
 Ways of looking at events, forms and processes through
the experts

 Ways to verifying common sense and observation

 To look at critically at commonly held assumption about

ourselves and society

How does crowd turn into a mob?

How does free thinking individual becomes religious?
How do Muslim and Christian in India follow the age-old
tradition?

9/29/2019 @ Mohan Kumar Bera, PhD, India 2

 Sociological perspectives 1
 Human being live in a group and therefore their actions
are influenced by the group which they live
 Children follow local custom
 Social group determines our language and food
 Culture encourages to be individualistic, aggressive or
passive and cooperative

 It stresses the social context in which people live

 It enables us to see the connection between particular

and universal

 It teaches us to look beyond narrow social boundaries

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 Sociological perspectives 2
 Sociological perspective teaches us the social construction
of reality
 ‘Seeing is believing’
 Reality has nothing to do with what is empirically true or
false
 Traditional belief influence group’s thinking or behaviour
 Religious belief of chicken pox or Measles
 It teaches us to differentiate between reality and socially
constructed reality and interpreter them from a scientific
point of view

9/29/2019 @ Mohan Kumar Bera, PhD, India 4

 Sociological perspectives 3
 Sociological perspective inform us that reality has many layers
of meaning
 Concept of caste may not be based on foundation of purity and
pollution,
 but invented to serve the vested interest of higher caste

 Hindu attitude towards the cow as a sacred animal and the ban of beef
eating may be a very rational social invention

 Characteristics of the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ (1857) by the British and the

First War of Independence by Indian nationalists

 Sociologists probe layers of meaning underlying every incident

and reality
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 Sociological perspectives 3

 ‘Sociological imagination’ – C Wright Mills (1959)

 Sociology is concerned with ordinary and everyday life and
investigate people’s behaviour

 It can not depend on common sense explanation

9/29/2019 @ Mohan Kumar Bera, PhD, India 6