Introducing Sociology is the first of NCERT's two Class XI Sociology books. It introduces the discipline itself: what sociology is and where it came from, the terms it thinks with, the institutions it studies, how culture is learnt, and how sociologists gather evidence. (The companion book, Understanding Society, covers social structure and change, environment and society, and the Western and Indian sociologists.) As Class 11 Sociology NCERT notes for UPSC, it supplies the concepts that GS1 Indian Society answers rely on.

The book has five chapters. The NCERT reprint of 2026-27 keeps the 2021-22 text (two one-word corrections aside), so nothing has been dropped; where the textbook's figures or statements have dated since it was written (Census figures, the census and survey box in chapter 5), the chapter pages give the current position beside NCERT's.

What the book covers, by theme:

  • The discipline: the sociological imagination (Mills), plural and unequal societies, sociology versus philosophy and common sense, the intellectual and material roots of sociology in Europe, its different growth in colonial India, and its relation to economics, political science, history, psychology and social anthropology (ch. 1).
  • Concepts: aggregates, quasi groups and social groups; primary and secondary groups, community and association, in-groups, peer and reference groups; stratification by slavery, caste, estate and class; status and role; social control and deviance (ch. 2).
  • Institutions: family, marriage and kinship; work and economic life; power, authority, the state and citizenship rights; religion and secularisation; education (ch. 3).
  • Culture and socialisation: the cognitive, normative and material dimensions of culture, culture lag, ethnocentrism and cosmopolitanism, cultural change, and the agencies of socialisation (ch. 4).
  • Method: objectivity and reflexivity, participant observation and village studies, the survey and sampling, the census and official surveys, and the interview (ch. 5).

Each chapter page carries wide figures drawn from NCERT's text and from dated official data: the student's subject choice as a personal problem and public issue, the making of sociology, sociology's neighbouring disciplines, types of groups, systems of stratification, social control, forms of marriage, India's sex ratio and child sex ratio since 1961, power and the modern state, Weber's Protestant ethic, the dimensions of culture, socialisation's agencies, three research methods compared, what a fieldworker does, and the child sex ratio by State.

For UPSC, this book feeds GS1 (Indian Society: caste, family, marriage, women, culture and globalisation), supports GS2 (citizenship rights, women's reservation) and GS4 (socialisation and value formation), and grounds the reading of the Census, NFHS, SRS and PLFS figures used across the syllabus.