Georg Simmel in the context of "Ferdinand Tönnies"

Urban sociology is the sociological study of cities and urban life. One of the field’s oldest sub-disciplines, urban sociology studies and examines the social, historical, political, cultural, economic, and environmental forces that have shaped urban environments.Like most areas of sociology, urban sociologists use statistical analysis, observation, archival research, census data, social theory, interviews, and other methods to study a range of topics, including poverty, racial residential segregation, economic development, migration and demographic trends, gentrification, homelessness, blight and crime, urban decline, and neighborhood changes and revitalization. Urban sociological analysis provides critical insights that shape and guide urban planning and policy-making.

The philosophical foundations of modern urban sociology originate from the work of sociologists such as Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tönnies, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber and Georg Simmel who studied and theorized the economic, social and cultural processes of urbanization and its effects on social alienation, class formation, and the production or destruction of collective and individual identities.

Economic sociology is the study of the social cause and effect of various economic phenomena. The field can be broadly divided into a classical period and a contemporary one, known as "new economic sociology".

The classical period was concerned particularly with modernity and its constituent aspects, including rationalisation, secularisation, urbanisation, and social stratification. As sociology arose primarily as a reaction to capitalist modernity, economics played a role in much classic sociological inquiry. The specific term "economic sociology" was first coined by William Stanley Jevons in 1879, later to be used in the works of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber and Georg Simmel between 1890 and 1920. Weber's work regarding the relationship between economics and religion and the cultural "disenchantment" of the modern West is perhaps most representative of the approach set forth in the classic period of economic sociology.

Conflict theories are perspectives in political philosophy and sociology which argue that individuals and groups (social classes) within society interact on the basis of conflict rather than agreement, while also emphasizing social psychology, historical materialism, power dynamics, and their roles in creating power structures, social movements, and social arrangements within a society. Conflict theories often draw attention to power differentials, such as class conflict, or a conflict continuum. Power generally contrasts historically dominant ideologies, economies, currencies or technologies. Accordingly, conflict theories represent attempts at the macro-level analysis of society.

Many political philosophers and sociologists have been framed as having conflict theories, dating back as far as Plato's idea of the tripartite soul of The Republic, to Hobbes' ideas in The Leviathan. Other historical political philosophers associated with having "conflict theories" include Jean Bodin, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Robert Malthus, Karl Marx, and Georg Simmel. Georg Simmel was one of the earliest sociologists to formally use "conflict" as a framework to understand social change, writing about the topic in his 1908 book, "Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations".

The German Sociological Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, DGS) is a professional organization of social scientists in Germany. Established in Berlin on January 3, 1909, its founding members included Rudolf Goldscheid, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel. Its first president was Tönnies, who was forced out of office by the Nazi regime in 1933; his successor, Hans Freyer, attempted to reform the DGS on Nazi lines but ultimately decided to suspend its activities the following year. The DGS was revived after World War II under the chairmanship of Leopold von Wiese in 1946, and has remained active since then, with about 3,200 members as of 2019.

The sociology of culture, and the related cultural sociology, concerns the systematic analysis of culture, usually understood as the ensemble of symbolic codes used by a member of a society, as it is manifested in the society. For Georg Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history". Culture in the sociological field is analyzed as the ways of thinking and describing, acting, and the material objects that together shape a group of people's way of life.

Contemporary sociologists' approach to culture is often divided between a "sociology of culture" and "cultural sociology"—the terms are similar, though not interchangeable. The sociology of culture is an older concept, and considers some topics and objects as more or less "cultural" than others. By way of contrast, Jeffrey C. Alexander introduced the term cultural sociology, an approach that sees all, or most, social phenomena as inherently cultural at some level. For instance, a leading proponent of the "strong program" in cultural sociology, Alexander argues: "To believe in the possibility of cultural sociology is to subscribe to the idea that every action, no matter how instrumental, reflexive, or coerced [compared to] its external environment, is embedded to some extent in a horizon of affect and meaning." In terms of analysis, sociology of culture often attempts to explain some discretely cultural phenomena as a product of social processes, while cultural sociology sees culture as a component of explanations of social phenomena. As opposed to the field of cultural studies, cultural sociology does not reduce all human matters to a problem of cultural encoding and decoding. For instance, Pierre Bourdieu's cultural sociology has a "clear recognition of the social and the economic as categories which are interlinked with, but not reducible to, the cultural."

Formal sociology is a scientific approach to sociology developed by Georg Simmel and Leopold von Wiese. In his studies, Simmel was more focused on forms of social interactions than content. Thus his approach to sociology was labeled formal sociology. In formal sociology, one formal concept can be applied to understand various events. In Simmel's view, one form of a social phenomenon is always associated with many formal events. Formal sociology aims to show that despite social interactions' complex processes, forms can be isolated and may even be identical.