3. Answer the following questions on the text:

1. What definition can be given to 'a society' in a general way?

2. What types of societies are you familiar with?

3. What is ‘an institution’ in the sociological sense of the word?

4. What differs sociology from the other social sciences?

5. What does sociology focus on as a field of study?

6. Compare the definition of sociology on Pages 7-8 with the definition/s given in your sociology classes.

7. What social sciences do you know and what do they study?

8. Discuss the interaction of sociology and the other social sciences.

9. What are sociologists particularly interested in while investigating human behavior and human societies?

10. Speak about the two social scientists greatly contributed to the development of sociological thought.

11. What was Auguste Comte’s perspective on sociology?

12. Introduce Emile Durkheim’s opinion. How did Durkheim’s sociological views differ from those of Comte?

13. What types are all the sciences divided into?

14. In what two essential respects does sociology as well as the other social sciences differ from the natural sciences?

Comment on the following:

‘Prevoir pour pourvoir’. (Auguste Comte).

4. Match the words with their definitions:

   Notion emancipation image to be fashioned precisely tentative consideration loose to imply field (of study) to indicate

   to fit, to adopt reflection sphere, domain, realm concept to point out, to attract attention to suggest, to involve incarnation, personification exactly liberation, release experimental, indefinite free, unconnected, unleashed

5. Match the words from the left column with the words from the right one and make your own sentences with them:

Agrarian industrial social natural	society institution science system
to pinpoint to comprise to be fundamental to to coin to refer to to give rise to	the twin processes of revolution social life the term modes of belief and behavior a tiny number of individuals the field of study

Think of as many nouns used with the adjective ‘social’ as you can. Use them in sentences of your own.

6. Translate the following sentences from English into Russian:

1. Sociology came into being as those caught up in the initial series of changes brought about by the 'two great revolutions' in Europe sought to understand the conditions of their emergence, and their likely consequences.

2. Language is an example of such a form of institutionalised activity, or institution, since it is so fundamental to social life.

3. But many other aspects of social life may be institutionalised: that is, become commonly adopted practices which persist in recognizably similar form across the generations.

4. Such a use of the concept 'institution' , it should be pointed out, differs from the way in which the term is often employed in ordinary language, as a loose synonym for 'group' or 'collectivity' — as when, say, a prison or hospital is referred to as an 'institution'.

5. These considerations help to indicate how 'society' should be understood, but we cannot leave matters there.

6. Sociology is a social science, having as its main focus the study of the social institutions brought into being by the industrial transformations of the past two or three centuries.

7. It is important to stress that there are no precisely defined divisions between sociology and other fields of intellectual endeavour in the social sciences. Neither is it desirable that there should be.

8. Some questions of social theory, to do with how human behaviour and institutions should be conceptualized, are the shared concern of the social sciences as a whole.

9. Since Comte's time, the notion that sociology should be fashioned upon the natural sciences has been the dominant view of the subject — although it has certainly not gone unchallenged, and has also been expressed in various differing ways.

10. We cannot approach society, or "social facts", as we do objects or events in the natural world, because societies only exist in so far as they are created and re-created in our own actions as human beings.

11. This is misleading because it implies too static or unchanging an image of what societies are like: because it does not indicate that the patterning of social systems only exists in so far as individuals actively repeat particular forms of conduct from one time and place to another.

12. It follows from this that the practical implications of sociology are not directly parallel to the technological uses of science, and cannot be.

13. It is often precisely by showing that what may appear to those involved as inevitable, as unchallengeable — as resembling a law of nature — is, in fact, a historical product, that sociological analysis can play an emancipatory role in human society.

14. And our knowledge of history is always tentative and incomplete.