(a) From the viewpoint of growing importance of multidisciplarity, how do you relate sociology to other social sciences ? 20 (b)…

(a) Sociology and other social sciences in a multidisciplinary perspective Multidisciplinarity places different disciplines side by side, while interdisciplinarity integrates their concepts and methods. Sociology is a bridge discipline because it studies the social context of all human activity. C. Wright Mills's sociological imagination links personal biography to history and structure.

• Economics: sociology rejects the purely rational homo economicus. Polanyi and Granovetter showed that markets are embedded in social relations, giving economic sociology (and the study of trust, caste networks and informal economies).
• Political science: political sociology studies power, elites, class, parties and movements and not only formal institutions.
• Anthropology: the older divide between simple and complex societies has narrowed through shared ethnographic methods, as in village studies and the study of kinship and ritual in modern settings.
• Psychology: social psychology, with Mead's symbolic interactionism showing that the self is social.
• History: historical sociology (Weber, Moore, Skocpol) studies long-term structural change and not just events.
• Newer fields: demography, geography, law, science and technology, development and gender studies.

Multidisciplinary work helps sociology study complex problems such as migration, climate and digital change, while its own contribution remains the focus on social structure and relations.

(b) Positivism in sociology: justification and limits Justification: Comte and Durkheim held that social facts are external, general and open to empirical study. Durkheim's Suicide showed that suicide rates vary with social integration and regulation. Modern examples include Putnam's measurement of social capital to explain regional institutional performance, and large surveys (Census, NSSO, NFHS) that map poverty, literacy and health at scale. Quantification allows comparison, replication and policy use.

Limits:

• Humans give meaning to action, so Weber required Verstehen alongside causal explanation.
• Phenomenologists (Schutz), interactionists and ethnomethodologists show that social reality is constructed, so measured categories can be reified.
• Positivist categories can mislead. Colonial censuses fixed caste into rigid, ranked categories, whereas later field studies showed it to be fluid and context-dependent.
• Values influence the choice of problem, and social facts change when people know about them (reflexivity).

Sociologists are therefore justified in using positivism for patterns and large-scale comparison, but not as the only approach. Mixed methods work best.

(c) Sociology and common sense Common sense is unsystematic, untested, often contradictory and based on personal or local experience. Sociology uses systematic concepts, evidence, objectivity and comparison, and questions what is taken for granted.

Illustrations: common sense says urbanisation breaks up the joint family, but studies by A. M. Shah and Uberoi show diverse household forms and continuing functional jointness. Common sense treats communal riots as spontaneous, while Brass and Varshney explain them through organised local political networks and the presence or absence of cross-community civic ties.

The relationship is also two-way. Sociology begins from lay meanings, and Giddens's double hermeneutic shows that sociological ideas feed back into everyday understanding and change it.