Edinburgh University Sociology Society

 The department of Sociology at Edinburgh (founded in 1964 by Tom Burns) is one of the UK’s leading Sociology Departments, highly regarded for its record of persuasive unique examination and teaching. Edinburgh Sociology has been rated as first in the UK for the quality and breadth of its exploration in the Research Excellence Framework 2014 (REF2014). We have a longstanding responsibility to original empirical and hypothetical work on society, and on the production of cultural and scientific knowledge. Our methodology is shaped by a sociological comprehension of the importance of the link between biography and history, private difficulty and issues, the micro social worlds of individuals and wider social universes.

Sociology is centered on the social world of human activity, every aspect of the social world, from face-to-face personal individual connections to the global flows of money markets. Our focus is on research-led but student-focused teaching. The Subject Group offers a wide scope of courses and undergraduate and postgraduate training and a few undergrad joint degrees.  We have a flourishing and cosmopolitan community of students studying for the degrees of PhD, MPhil and MSc by research and also on showed undergraduate and Master’s programmes. The Department of Sociology started in 1964 when Tom Burns (1913-2001) was selected the first Professor. Sociological research and some teaching had taken place here for quite a long before that - perhaps represented most notably by two famous monographs, Burns's own The Management of Innovation (composed by George Stalker) distributed  in 1961 and Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life which was intially published in Edinburgh in 1956. Burns published his acclaimed Erving Goffman in 1992.

The Science Studies Unit changed from the Science Faculty into Sociology in 1990; the Research Centre for Social Sciences joined Sociology in 1998. In the midyear of 2001, the Department of Sociology became a subject area of the School of Social and Political Science, which also includes subjects like Politics, Social Policy, Social Anthropology and Social Work.