Name: Marc Klarenz L.

Ocate

Section: HUMSS AM-3

Subject: Discipline and Ideas in Social Science

MODULE 1: DISCIPLINE AND IDEAS IN SOCIAL SCIENCE

The major social sciences are Anthropology, Archaeology, Economics,

Geography, History, Law, Linguistics, Politics, Psychology and Sociology.

A. Anthropology known as the 'science of humanity', anthropology covers a broad range

of topics – from human behaviour, to cultural relations, and how the evolution of humanity has
influenced society's structure. It's often described as being both scientific and humanistic,
meaning it's well-suited for anyone looking to indulge passions for both of these kinds of subject
– and, whilst focusing on history to an extent, there's plenty of chance to apply it in modern
contexts too!

Anthropology and many other current fields are the intellectual results of the comparative
methods developed in the earlier 19th century. Theorists in such diverse fields as anatomy,
linguistics, and Ethnology, making feature-by-feature comparisons of their subject matters, were
beginning to suspect that similarities between animals, languages, and folkways were the result
of processes or laws unknown to them then.

B. Archaeology sometimes spelled archeology, is the study of human activity through the
recovery and analysis of material culture. Archaeology is often considered a branch of socio-
cultural anthropology, but archaeologists also draw from biological, geological, and
environmental systems through their study of the past.

C. Economics is a social science concerned with the production, distribution, and

consumption of goods and services. It studies how individuals, businesses, governments, and
nations make choices Economics is the study of how people allocate scarce resources for
production, distribution, and consumption, both individually and collectively.

•Economics is the study of how people allocate scarce resources for production, distribution, and
consumption, both individually and collectively.

•Two major types of economics are microeconomics, which focuses on the behavior of
individual consumers and producers, and macroeconomics, which examine overall economies
on a regional, national, or international scale.

D. Geography is the study of places and the relationships between people and their
environments. Geographers explore both the physical properties of Earth's surface and the human
societies spread across it. ... Geography seeks to understand where things are found, why they are
there, and how they develop and change over time. There are five main themes of geography:
location, place, human-environment interaction, movement, and region.

E. Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It involves the analysis of language

form, language meaning, and language in context. Linguists traditionally analyse human
language by observing an interplay between sound and meaning. Linguistics also deals with the
social, cultural, historical, and political factors that influence language, through which linguistic
and language-based context is often determined.

F. History is the study of the past. Events occurring before the invention of writing
systems are considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term that relates to past events as
well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of
information about these events. History also includes the academic discipline which uses
narrative to describe, examine, question, and analyze a sequence of past events, investigate the
patterns of cause and effect that are related to them.

G. Law commonly refers to a system of rules created and enforced through social or
governmental institutions to regulate behavior, with its precise definition a matter of
longstanding debate. It has been variously described as a science and the art of justice. The law is
treated in a number of articles. For a description of legal training and a general background, see
legal profession, legal education, and legal ethics. Articles that delineate the relationship of law
to political structures are constitution; ideology; political party; and political system.

H. Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or
other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or
status. The academic study of politics is referred to as political science. A variety of methods are
deployed in politics, which include promoting one's own political views among people,
negotiation with other political subjects, making laws, and exercising force, including warfare
against adversaries.
 HISTORY & DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

Social science, any discipline or branch of science that deals with human behaviour in its
social and cultural aspects. The social sciences include cultural (or social) anthropology,
sociology, social psychology, political science, and economics. Also frequently included are
social and economic geography and those areas of education that deal with the social contexts of
learning and the relation of the school to the social order (see also educational psychology).
Historiography is regarded by many as a social science, and certain areas of historical study are
almost indistinguishable from work done in the social sciences. Most historians, however,
consider history as one of the humanities. It is generally best, in any case, to consider history as
marginal to the humanities and social sciences, since its insights and techniques pervade both.
The study of comparative law may also be regarded as a part of the social sciences, although it is
ordinarily pursued in schools of law rather than in departments or schools containing most of the
other social sciences. Beginning in the 1950s, the term behavioral sciences was often applied to
the disciplines designated as the social sciences. Those who favoured this term did so in part
because these disciplines were thus brought closer to some of the sciences, such as physical
anthropology and physiological psychology, which also deal with human behaviour.

Although, strictly speaking, the social sciences do not precede the 19th century—that is,
as distinct and recognized disciplines of thought—one must go back farther in time for the
origins of some of their fundamental ideas and objectives. In the largest sense, the origins go all
the way back to the ancient Greeks and their rationalist inquiries into human nature, the state, and
morality. The heritage of both Greece and Rome is a powerful one in the history of social
thought, as it is in other areas of Western society. Very probably, apart from the initial Greek
determination to study all things in the spirit of dispassionate and rational inquiry, there would be
no social sciences today. True, there have been long periods of time, as during the Western
Middle Ages, when the Greek rationalist temper was lacking. But the recovery of this temper,
through texts of the great classical philosophers, is the very essence of the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment in modern European history. With the Enlightenment, in the 17th and 18th
centuries, one may begin.
 MAJOR THEORIES & PROPONENTS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

 Classical social theory Adam Ferguson, Montesquieu, and John Millar, among others, were
the first to study society as distinct from political institutions and processes. In the nineteenth
century, the scientific method was introduced into study of society, which was a significant advance
leading to development of sociology as a discipline. In the 18th century, the pre-classical period of
social theories developed a new form that provides the basic ideas for social theory, such as
evolution, philosophy of history, social life and social contract, public and general will, competition
in social space, organismic pattern for social description. Montesquieu, in The Spirit of Laws,
which established that social elements influence human nature, was possibly the first to suggest a
universal explanation for history. Montesquieu included changes in mores and manners as part of
his explanation of political and historic events.

 Ethnocentrism. The term ethnocentrism passed from social science theory into common English
usage during the twentieth century. In present usage it means the belief that one's culture is
superior to others the use of a frame of reference derived from one's own culture to judge the
arrtibutes of another culture, often in disparaging terms. The term was apparently invented in
1906 by the sociologist William Grham Sumner, who conceptualized it as a means of
promoting solidarity within what he called ‘ingroups’ and antagonism toward ‘outgroups.’

 Environment and Anthropology. The Environment as a Political Agenda

The development of anthropological and social science theories of human ecology over the last
30 years has taken place against the backdrop of an emerging political agenda, one which has
intruded into ecological theorizing, as in discussions on ‘indigenous environmental knowledge’
(Milton 1996) (see Ecology, Political). Under the guidance of figures such as Garrett Hardin and
Kenneth Boulding, economic thinking has been placed in a more biospheric context, and the
‘growth model’ rejected both in relation to advanced industrial and developing societies.
Practical concern for environmental degradation, the profligate use of finite resources, the
calculated advantages of ‘alternative’ technologies, and anxieties about biodiversity conservation
have spawned theories of sustainable development

 Human Behavioral Ecology. Relationship to Traditional Social and Behavioral Sciences

Behavioral ecology is distinguished from traditional anthropological and social science theory in
its emphasis on the individual as the unit of selection and the idea that much of the content of
culture is a consequence of decisions by individuals to enhance their inclusive fitness. Ever since
its founding as a discipline, anthropologists have argued that individuals sacrifice themselves to
enhance the integration or survival of the social systems in which they participate or are much
like puppets or robots manipulated by culture

 Agency Theory. Agency theory (also called principal-agent theory), a classic theory in the
organizational economics literature, was originally proposed by Ross (1973)4 to explain two-party
relationships (such as those between an employer and its employees, between organizational
executives and shareholders, and between buyers and sellers) whose goals are not congruent with
 each other. The goal of agency theory is to specify optimal contracts and the conditions under
which such contracts may help minimize the effect of goal incongruence. The core assumptions of
this theory are that human beings are self-interested individuals, boundedly rational, and risk-
averse, and the theory can be applied at the individual or organizational level.

The two parties in this theory are the principal and the agent; the principal employs the agent
to perform certain tasks on its behalf. While the principal’s goal is quick and effective completion
of the assigned task, the agent’s goal may be working at its own pace, avoiding risks, and seeking
self-interest (such as personal pay) over corporate interests. Hence, the goal incongruence.
Compounding the nature of the problem may be information asymmetry problems caused by the
principal’s inability to adequately observe the agent’s behavior or accurately evaluate the agent’s
skill sets. Such asymmetry may lead to agency problems where the agent may not put forth the
effort needed to get the task done (the moral hazard problem) or may misrepresent its expertise or
skills to get the job but not perform as expected (the adverse selection problem). Typical contracts
that are behavior-based, such as a monthly salary, cannot overcome these problems. Hence, agency
theory recommends using outcome-based contracts, such as a commissions or a fee payable upon
task completion, or mixed contracts that combine behavior-based and outcome-based incentives.
An employee stock option plans are is an example of an outcome-based contract while employee
pay is a behavior-based contract. Agency theory also recommends tools that principals may
employ to improve the efficacy of behavior-based contracts, such as investing in monitoring
mechanisms (such as hiring supervisors) to counter the information asymmetry caused by moral
hazard, designing renewable contracts contingent on agent’s performance (performance
assessment makes the contract partially outcome-based), or by improving the structure of the
assigned task to make it more programmable and therefore more observable.

 Theory of Planned Behavior. Postulated by Azjen (1991)5, the theory of planned behavior
(TPB) is a generalized theory of human behavior in the social psychology literature that can be
used to study a wide range of individual behaviors. It presumes that individual behavior represents
conscious reasoned choice, and is shaped by cognitive thinking and social pressures. The theory
postulates that behaviors are based on one’s intention regarding that behavior, which in turn is a
function of the person’s attitude toward the behavior, subjective norm regarding that behavior, and
perception of control over that behavior (see Figure 4.2). Attitude is defined as the individual's
overall positive or negative feelings about performing the behavior in question, which may be
assessed as a summation of one's beliefs regarding the different consequences of that behavior,
weighted by the desirability of those consequences. Subjective norm refers to one’s perception of
whether people important to that person expect the person to perform the intended behavior, and
represented as a weighted combination of the expected norms of different referent groups such as
friends, colleagues, or supervisors at work. Behavioral control is one's perception of internal or
external controls constraining the behavior in question. Internal controls may include the person’s
ability to perform the intended behavior (self-efficacy), while external control refers to the
availability of external resources needed to perform that behavior (facilitating conditions). TPB
also suggests that sometimes people may intend to perform a given behavior but lack the resources
needed to do so, and therefore suggests that posits that behavioral control can have a direct effect
on behavior, in addition to the indirect effect mediated by intention.

COMMON METHODS BEING UTILIZED IN SOCIAL SCIENCE

A. SURVEY a research method, a survey collects data from subjects who respond to a series
of questions about behaviors and opinions, often in the form of a questionnaire. The
survey is one of the most widely used scientific research methods. The standard survey
format allows individuals a level of anonymity in which they can express personal ideas.

B. INTERVIEW a one-on-one conversation between the researcher and the subject, and it
is a way of conducting surveys on a topic. Interviews are similar to the short-answer
questions on surveys in that the researcher asks subjects a series of questions. However,
participants are free to respond as they wish, without being limited by predetermined
choices. In the back-and-forth conversation of an interview, a researcher can ask for
clarification, spend more time on a subtopic, or ask additional questions. In an interview,
a subject will ideally feel free to open up and answer questions that are often complex.
There is no right or wrong answers. The subject might not even know how to answer the
questions honestly.

C. FIELD RESEARCH The work of sociology rarely happens in limited, confined spaces.
Sociologists seldom study subjects in their own offices orlaboratories. Rather,
sociologists go out into the world. They meet subjects where they live, work, and play.
Field research refers to gathering primary data from a natural environment without doing
a lab experiment or a survey. It is a research method suited to an interpretive framework
rather than to the scientific method. To conduct field research, the sociologist must be
willing to step into new environments and observe, participate, or experience those
worlds. In field work, the sociologists, rather than the subjects, are the ones out of their
element.

D. PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION In 2000, a comic writer named Rodney Rothman

wanted an insider’s view of white-collar work. He slipped into the sterile, high-rise
offices of a New York “dot com” agency. Every day for two weeks, he pretended to work
there. His main purpose was simply to see whether anyone would notice him or challenge
his presence. No one did. The receptionist greeted him. The employees smiled and said
good morning. Rothman was accepted as part of the team. He even went so far as to claim
a desk, inform the receptionist of his whereabouts, and attend a meeting. He published an
article about his experience in The New Yorker called “My Fake Job” (2000). Later, he
was discredited for allegedly fabricating some details of the story and The New Yorker
issued an apology. However, Rothman’s entertaining article still offered fascinating
descriptions of the inside workings of a “dot com” company and exemplified the lengths
to which a sociologist will go to uncover material.
 E. ETHNOGRAPHY is the extended observation of the social perspective and cultural
values of an entire social setting. Ethnographies involve objective observation of an entire
community.

Link references:

https://www.postgrad.com/subjects/social_sciences/overview/#:~:text=The%20major%20social
%20sciences%20are,%2C%20Politics%2C%20Psychology%20and%20Sociology.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-science

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/social-science-theory

https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Social_Work/Book%3A_Social_Science_Research_-
_Principles_Methods_and_Practices_(Bhattacherjee)/04%3A_Theories_in_Scientific_Research/
4.05%3A_Examples_of_Social_Science_Theories

https://artvoice-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/artvoice.com/2020/06/21/what-is-the-most-
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https://www.theclassroom.com/common-used-social-science-research-5664402.html

https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Social_Work/Book%3A_Social_Science_Research_-
_Principles_Methods_and_Practices_(Bhattacherjee)/04%3A_Theories_in_Scientific_Research/
4.05%3A_Examples_of_Social_Science_Theories