Sociologies – Micro and Macro

Abstract

Sociology is a natural discipline for us to pass through in considering the many important contributions to contemporary social constructionism that took form there. If you accept that sociality is our primary reality in being human, then accounting for social life is critical to knowing who we are and why we think and act the ways we do. The diversity of social life points out how differently we can be human, even within our own lives for differences expected in how we are to think and act in different social arenas. Do these various social contexts determine what we think and do? No, but it is hard to suggest that they (or, rather, the people in them) do not influence our thoughts and actions. While we will deal with constructionist conceptions of the self in greater detail elsewhere, here we will consider some conceptions of social life where social and individual life are reconciled, without making either recede into the background. Sociology has been home to a macro/micro debate that continues to cleave constructionists into distinctive camps, particularly when it comes to practice. At the heart of this debate are conceptions of people shaping or being shaped by their social surroundings or their embeddedness in others' lives. The debate itself reflects the binary thinking over whether humans shape or are shaped by their social circumstances. Sartre, for example, once wrote ‘Hell is other people’ while members of the labour movement speak of ‘solidarity forever’.