Understanding Society is the NCERT Class 11 Sociology textbook (Part 2). It moves from the concepts of Introducing Sociology to how Indian society works: how structure and stratification shape cooperation, competition and conflict, how societies change and resist change, how environment and society shape each other, and how the classical western and Indian sociologists understood all this. As Class 11 Sociology NCERT notes for UPSC, it builds the conceptual base for the GS1 society syllabus.

The book has five chapters, the same in the 2019-20 edition and in the rationalised Reprint 2026-27 (which trims only a few illustrative passages in chapters 1 to 3):

  • 1. Social Structure, Stratification and Social Processes in Society: structure as pattern, stratification and its three advantages, and how cooperation, competition and conflict depend on social position; cooperation can be enforced and hide conflict.
  • 2. Social Change and Social Order in Rural and Urban Society: what counts as social change and where it comes from; social order, power, authority and law; order and change in village, town and city.
  • 3. Environment and Society: the two-way relationship between ecology and society, risk and the Bhopal disaster, the major environmental hazards, social ecology and sustainable development.
  • 4. Introducing Western Sociologists: the three revolutions behind sociology, and the key ideas of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, including Weber's account of bureaucracy.
  • 5. Indian Sociologists: the pioneers Ananthakrishna Iyer and Sarat Chandra Roy, and G.S. Ghurye, D.P. Mukerji, A.R. Desai and M.N. Srinivas.

For UPSC, the book mainly strengthens GS1 (Indian society, urbanisation, caste and tribe), with links to GS2 and GS4 through Weber's bureaucracy, and supplies the vocabulary for Mains answer-writing. Research methods and project work are covered in Introducing Sociology (chapter 5) and Class XII Indian Society (chapter 7).