The Culture of Society.

Thus far we’ve seen that, when thinking about the basic idea of human social behaviour, sociologists focus on the ideas of culture and learned behaviour.

However, even though we tend to reject the idea of instinct as the basis for human social organisation, (especially when it is used in a naive and unsophisticated way), we need, at this particular point, to develop explanations for two ideas.

Firstly, we need to think about how cultures develop and, secondly, we need to about why cultures develop in particular ways. In this respect we are starting to think about questions of cultural similarities (sometimes called "cultural universals") and cultural differences (or "cultural diversity") – ideas we will necessarily confront and develop in later sections.

As you might expect, sociologists have not been idle in either their speculations or research into these particular areas and while we do not, at present, need to examine such ideas, it would be useful to outline, for the purpose of illustration, one theory of social development that seeks to explain how and why cultures develop..