Macro-sociology

Macrosociology is an approach to sociology which emphasizes the analysis of social systems and populations on a large scale, at the level of social structure, and often at a necessarily high level of theoretical abstraction.Microsociology, by contrast, focuses on the individual social agency. Macrosociology also concerns individuals, families, and other constituent aspects of a society, but always does so in relation to larger social system of which they are a part. Macrosociology can also be the analysis of large collectivities (e.g. the city, the church). Human populations are considered a society to the degree that is politically autonomous and its members to engage in a broad range of cooperative activities. For example, this definition would apply to the population of Germany being deemed a society, but German-speaking people as a whole scattered about different countries would not be considered a society. Macrosociology deals with broad societal trends that can later be applied to the smaller features of a society. To differentiate, macrosociology deals with issues such as war, distress of Third World nations, poverty, and environmental deprivation, whereas microsociology analyses issues such as the role of women, the nature of the family, and immigration of people.

There are a number of theoretical strategies within contemporary macrosociology, but four of them stand out as major ones:

As globalization has affected the world, it has also affected historical macrosociology, leading to the development of two different branches. One is based mainly in comparative and historical sociology (CHS), and the other in political economy of the world-systems (PEWS). CHS bases its analysis on states, and searches for "generalizations about common properties and principles of variation among instances across time and space." PEWS, on the other hand, uses systems of states for analysis, and searches for "generalizations about interdependencies among a system's components and of principles of variation among systemic conditions across time and space." Despite the two schools' differences, both use historical knowledge to try and solve some of the problems seen in the field of macrosociology. As of recently, it has been argued that globalization poses a threat to the CHS way of thinking because it often leads to the dissolution of distinct states.

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