It is still true that sociology has trouble agreeing on basic concepts.
It certainly has a canon of commonly used terms such as role, norm, value, such as anomie and deviance, such as stratification or differentiation, by which the guild recognizes itself, but whenever the context of these and other terms is at stake, the discipline becomes self-controversial.
This can be an advantage, insofar as every position can be countered by a Negation, every discussion of one context by the discussion of another; communication remains open, does not suffer from general consistency constraints, and can therefore function cafeteria-like on the market of the already sparse usability of sociological insights and skills: It can, because it brings much, bring some. Thereby, it is not necessary to pay attention to the fact that what one person gets competes conceptually with what another person could give.
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Cf. Wiki Cafe site 
(cafeteria-like?)
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It is well known, however, that there are ambitious theoretical undertakings within the framework of sociology which are concerned with the conceptual connection of the disparate. Only then, when such theories (which are universal with regard to the social) come into play, the question of basic concepts becomes virulent.
This is the question of non-empirical concepts that first span the field of observable phenomena, of concepts that organize observability without themselves being empirically capable in any meaning. Basic ideas stage the design of a theory, and actually one recognizes them by the fact that one cannot pull them away without the theory collapsing. Habermas without reason? Luhmann without a system?
If one concedes that every theory has basic ideas, primordial distinctions, which, however re-enterable they may be, cannot be erased, then it is clear that the exposition of a further basic idea can at first only take place very abstractly - in the self-contact of the theory, spartanically, cautiously, with as little audacity as possible, but taking into account the riskiness of speaking of a basic idea and not of any idea. It is to be demanded of a basic idea that it can be related to all other basic ideas and branchial ideas of the theory and that thereby something becomes visible which would not be visible without it. At the same time, one may expect for some claims to the profession that it could find connections beyond the narrower limits of the theory moved here. For this it is then again necessary to speak of a sociological basic idea of systems theory and not of a basic idea of systems theory.
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