Whenever you want to accomplish task neatly, aesthetically and usefully, it depends a great deal on the tools you are able to choose and your knowing how to use them.

Michaelangelo was 23 years old when he completed his Pieta. He chose for it best piece of marble, a piece without a vein. He made his tools according to the perception he had in his mind and brought it to his hands, sometimes gently, sometimes with force. The human being has the capacity to collect, compare and apply answers to the burning questions which face us.

In this chapter we want to fashion a tool by which you can gain an insight either in an institution, the neighbourhood, or environment or the society at a wider base. This tool is called a social analysis. The analysis contains the components of the society we live in, deals with, and is related to the gathering of information about its vitality, its freshness, its expansion, its expansion, its planning force for the future, its production system, its protection system, its education system, its social and religious make up, its communication system, and its recreational system.

The above shows already how complex our society has become, but still at the base of it all we find an age old unit -- the family, the neighbourhood, the village, the city, the state, the country. Within this context we find the institutions, and the groups and all that bustles with life and makes it vibrate. Our time is the most historically minded of all ages, if we understand history as the struggle of the human being, by the esercise of his/her reason, to understand his/her environment and to act on it. In this process, human beings have become the builders of society. This conscious person understands how societies develop and thereby givesdue importance to the masses and to various factors such as economics, politics, and ideology.

Socities undergo a social evolution, due to self regulating systems of communication and control. To analyse a society you have to become aware of the regulating and controlling systems, you have to put your hand on the pulse, and come know where the systems are hidden which makes the society vibrate or die, act in a corrupt, or oppressive way. In the following pages you will find information to guide you in the way you can perform soical analysis.