ABSTRACT
Chapter overview Sociologists study many different topics such as education, crime, organizations, health, family, work, immigration, to name only a few. One way to introduce you to this variety of topics is to simply discuss each topic one by one. However, it is also fruitful for you to see some common patterns between this variety of topics. First, you can study any topic by relating it to overarching sociological themes. A theme emphasizes certain characteristics of a topic and it can be used as a perspective that helps you to see common patterns between topics. Second, you can study any topic by adopting a multilevel perspective, which is useful for understanding the interplay between social contexts and individuals. To introduce you to the themes and multilevel perspective, this chapter starts with a brief history of sociology (4.1). In the course of history, sociologists have developed different perspectives on what they consider key sociological themes. I briefly introduce you to three: culture, social relations and inequality (4.2). Subsequently, we will see that divergent perspectives have been developed with respect to the model of sociological explanation (4.3) and that nowadays sociologists often combine these divergent perspectives in a multilevel framework (4.4).
