The type of sociology that I do is committed to uncovering how people make their lives and the lives of others meaningful. We are born into a world that already plunks a heap of meanings upon us - we become adult women and men in a context that tells us, from the moment of our birth, what it means to be who we are. Our culture has many ways to tell us what it means to be rich or poor, healthy or ill, young or old, knowledgeable or not, a racial minority or not, disabled or not, and so on and so on. Sociology studies these ready made identities and how they are connected to the ways some people are made marginal and others are made very powerful.
Conformity thus becomes our mode of reacting.
Sociology can help us study how people make the world something that ought not to be questioned. But there is more for sociology to study because human beings are more than mere containers for pre-existing cultural meanings. After all, we interpret and react differently to the meanings that other people and societal structures have plunked upon us. So, sociology can also study how people come to do more than conform to what their world has already given them. These new meanings are tied to new ways of questioning and interpreting everyday life.