OPTIONAL SOCIOLOGY
Sociology Optional Course Key features
Sociology courses at IAS VISION offers students following advantages,
- Coverage of the complete syllabus,
- debates to help students achieve conceptual clarity,
- Round the year personal interaction to clarify doubts,
- Emphasis on answer writing, UPSC patternย Mock Tests series,
- updated Study Material,
- Round the clock Doubts Clearing,
- Personal Attention to every student,
- highlighting of linkages withย current affairs,
- Emerging latest studies & reports
Students are encouraged to think coherently & , develop powers to arrive at logical conclusions and focus on clarifying their concepts and to continuously engage in debate and discussion. Classes provide enough opportunity deliberative & adequately interactive.
UPSC Civil Service Syllabus
UPSC Optional Paper Syllabus for Sociology – Paper I (Fundamentals of Sociology)
- Sociology โ The Discipline
- Modernity and social changes in Europe and the emergence of sociology.
- Scope of the subject and comparison with other social sciences.
- Sociology and common sense.
- Sociology as Science:
- Science, scientific method and critique.
- Major theoretical strands of research methodology.
- Positivism and its critique.
- Fact value and objectivity.
- Non- positivist methodologies.
- Research Methods and Analysis:
- Qualitative and quantitative methods.
- Techniques of data collection.
- Variables, sampling, hypothesis, reliability and validity.
- Sociological Thinkers:
- Karl Marx- Historical materialism, mode of production, alienation, class struggle.
- Emile Durkheim- Division of labour, social fact, suicide, religion and society.
- Max Weber- Social action, ideal types, authority, bureaucracy, protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.
- Talcolt Parsons- Social system, pattern variables.
- Robert K. Merton- Latent and manifest functions, conformity and deviance, reference groups.
- Mead โ Self and identity.
- Stratification and Mobility:
- Concepts- equality, inequality, hierarchy, exclusion, poverty and deprivation.
- Theories of social stratification- Structural functionalist theory, Marxist theory, Weberian theory.
- Dimensions โ Social stratification of class, status groups, gender, ethnicity and race.
- Social mobility- open and closed systems, types of mobility, sources and causes of mobility.
- Works and Economic Life:
- Social organization of work in different types of society- slave society, feudal society, industrial /capitalist society.
- Formal and informal organization of work.
- Labour and society.
- Politics and Society:
- Sociological theories of power.
- Power elite, bureaucracy, pressure groups, and political parties.
- Nation, state, citizenship, democracy, civil society, ideology.
- Protest, agitation, social movements, collective action, revolution.
- Religion and Society:
- Sociological theories of religion.
- Types of religious practices: animism, monism, pluralism, sects, cults.
- Religion in modern society: religion and science, secularization, religious revivalism, fundamentalism.
- Systems of Kinship:
- Family, household, marriage.
- Types and forms of family.
- Lineage and descent.
- Patriarchy and sexual division of labour.
- Contemporary trends.
- Social Change in Modern Society:
- Sociological theories of social change.
- Development and dependency.
- Agents of social change.
- Education and social change.
- Science, technology and social change.