Similarities Between Modernism and Postmodernism - Essay Example

These social topics are studied through complex theoretical and methodological frameworks that address a broad range of concepts like positivism and anti-positivism, social structure, individual agency, materialism, globalization, modernity, post-modernity, etc. The social theories aid back to the ancient Greek civilizations. Social theorizing aided the Greeks in making sense of their lives, and in questioning the value and meaning of things around them. However, in the 20th century, social theories appeared as a distinct discipline and involved critical thinking in order to gain knowledge of social behaviors through posterior methods of discovery rather than a priority method of tradition.

In order to explain social phenomena, sociologists developed several theories. Sociological theories range from grand theories to middle-range and highly specific micro-range theories. It is extremely difficult to cover the aspects of this broad range of theories, therefore in the later sections of this report; I will broadly give an outline of the dominant sociological theories and critically discuss two sociological theories in detail. i. Functionalism: functionalism is the oldest and the most dominant approach which has served as a building block in the development of sociology as a distinct discipline.

The functionalist movement was most popular from the 1940’s-the 1950 but reached its decline in the 1960s. Overall, this theory talks about two main aspects: Scientific methods should be applied to understand the “objectivity” of the social world. It says that social sciences can be learned in the same manner as natural sciences. Functionalists view this world as “objectively real”. Therefore, they emphasized that scientific methods and statistical techniques can be applied to research social phenomena.