The Origins of Sociology The works of Marx, Durkheim and Weber were primarily European. However, the discipline has rooted in all the world and some of the most important contributions have come from the …show more content…
The work of the linguist Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) was the first and more important source of ideas for structuralism. Although Saussure only wrote about the language, the ideas that developed were later incorporated into numerous disciplines in both the social sciences and humanities. Prior to the work of Saussure, the study of language basically consisted of changes in the mode of using words. According to Saussure, this procedure ignores the central feature of the language. In any case we can identify the basic features or structures of the language by looking only at the words that people use when they talk. The language consists of a set of rules of grammar and meaning of the words. In fact, the work of Linguistics is made evident it only refers to being able to use the language in practice. The structuralism approach has been most used in anthropology to sociology, particularly in the United States. Following the line of Lévi-Strauss, that popularized term structuralism. This type of analysis has been applied to the study of the kinship, the myth, the religion and to other areas. However, numerous theories of the sociology will have seen influenced by various concepts. Structuralism presents a series of weaknesses that limit its attractive as marco theoretical general in sociology. It was born from the study of the language and has proven be more relevant for the analysis of certain aspects of the human behavior rather than of others. It is very useful to study communication and culture, but its application is less to more practical aspects of social life as economic and political activity. Symbolic interactionism pays more attention to the active and creative individual than the theoretical approach. Many theories have developed since the time of Mead and in the United States it has been the