Two Families
Structuralist and Social-Action Theories
You'll remember from Lecture 3.2 that the sociological theories we are discussing this week can be broken into two families: structuralist theories and social action theories. Social action theories are very different from the two structuralist theories we examined last time. Social action theories look at society from a micro-perspective: in other words, they focus on the individuals within a society. These social action theories tend to take a bottom-up approach: they assume that a society's norms and rules are dynamic and are formed by the interactions that happen between people. Today, we'll focus on the two social action theories: critical and critical feminist theories.