Paper Topic:

Sociological Theory

Adams Smith identified four principal factors that contribute to a nation 's economic growth . The size of its labor force , the degree of labor specialization or the division of labor , the size of its capital stock and the level of its technology that is to say if more people are employed , more goods and services are produced so the more people the better . If people are better educated , they can produce more goods and services . If they use more capital , the goods and services they produce increase even more . And the more advanced

the level of technology , the higher their productivity . Population growth is needed to increase economy . Smith believes that only the production of goods that promote economic growth should be regarded as contributing to the economics of a country , because having and using the goods allow people to reproduce those goods and more . The invisible hand Smith refers to is nothing more than the market . With its main weight in consumer sovereignty , the product market guides producers to produce precisely those goods that consumers want and in this way transform producer 's private interest into our public interest

But rapid population growth alarmed Thomas Malthus he saw this as a sign of imminent doom . In An Essay on the Principle of Population Malthus proposed the Malthus theorem . He argued that although population grows geometrically , from 2 to 4 to 8 and that the food supply only increases arithmetically , 1 to 2 to 3 . This means that if births go unchecked , the population of a country or even the world will outstrip its food supply . As the world 's population grows the question of will the earth continue to produce enough food is at the front of this argument and it looks as if only time will tell

In a sociological perspective Durkheim stressed the importance of combining in an analysis two different but complementary methods of investigation . Those of social statistics on one hand and those of case oriented historical inquiry . Durkheim points out two problems with this how rules of conduct are established in the course of time , that is what were the causes that give rise to them and the useful ends they serve and the way in which they operate in society , or how they are applied by individuals . Durkheim calls for the separation in the union of historical and sociological analysis , the causes that social actors attribute to events or the conscious motives of the participants themselves . Durkheim rejects all versions of historical determinism that portrays cultural and institutional development as inevitable and in a sequence of stages

Durkheim wanted to show how social forces affect people 's behavior when he wrote Atomic Suicide . He compared the suicide rates of several European Countries and found that each country 's suicide rate was different and that each remained remarkably stable year after year . He also found that different groups within a country had different suicide rates and that these too remained stable year to year...

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