The ideal type' is one of Weber's best known contributions to contemporary sociology. It occupies a very important place in his methodology. Weber believed, it was the responsibility of sociologists to develop conceptual tools. The most important of such conceptual tool is e ideal type. Weber used Ideal type in a specific sense. To him Ideal pe is a mental construct, like a model, for the scrutiny and systematic aracterization of a concrete situation. Indeed he used Ideal type as a methodological tool to understand and analyze social reality. Methodology a conceptual and logical research procedure by which knowledge is Developed. Historically much of the methodological concern in the social sciences has been directed towards establishing their scientific credentials. eber developed a key conceptual tool, the notion of the ideal type. It ill be recalled that Weber argued that no scientific system is ever capable reproducing all concrete reality, nor can any conceptual apparatus ever do full justice to the infinite diversity of particular phenomena. 

All science involves selection as well as abstraction. Yet the social scientist can easily be caught in a dilemma when he chooses his conceptual apparatus. When his concepts are very general as when he attempts to explain capitalism or Protestantism by subsuming them under the general concepts of economics or religion-he is likely to leave out what is most distinctive to them. When, on the other hand, he uses the traditional conceptualizations of the historian and particularizes the phenomenon under discussion, he allows no room for comparison with related phenomena. The notion of the ideal type was meant to provide escape from this dilemma.

The Indian village and village society remained a life long focus of interest for Srinivas. He took Indian village an unit of social analysis. However some social anthropologist like Louis Dumont was in favour of taking social institutions like caste, instead of village an unit of social analysis. For dumant village is merely a collection of people living in a particular place. Villages may live or die and people may move from one village to the another, but institutions like caste or religion follow them and go with them wherever they go. For this reason Dumant was not in favour of giving much importance to the village.

As against this Srinivas believed that villages had served as a unifying identity and that village unity was quite significant in rural social life. Srinivas also criticized the British administrator anthropologists who had put forward a picture of Indian village as unchanging, self sufficient 'little republics." Using historical and sociological evidence, Srinivas showed that the village had, in fact, experienced considerable change. Moreover, villages were never self-sufficient and had been involved in various kinds of economic, Social and Political relationships at the regional level. On the basis of there argument, Srinivas was in favour of taking villages as an umit of social analysis in India.