Chapter 3 Flashcards
Paradox of consequences
The tendency for the means chosen to achieve ends in social life to undermine or defeat those ends
Rationalisation
A trend in social change whereby traditional criteria of action are replaced by technical, calculative or scientific criteria –> mainly through bureaucratic means
Orientation to work
The meaning attached by individuals to their work, which predisposes them both to think and act in particular ways with regard to that work
Social construction of reality
The process in which people, through cultural interaction, give meaning to the world.
Social institutions
Regularly occurring meanings, rules, activities and relationships which have become ‘normal’ or taken-for-granted in any given society
Institutional entrepeneurs
Individuals with sufficient resources and interests to be able to strand back from existing institutional arrangements in order to create new institutional patterns of change existing ones
Charismatic authority
Is founded on the belief in the extraordinary devotion
Traditional authority
People willingly obey to someone because they believe it has to from tradition
Rational-legal-authority
You obey the police, because they are the official
The doctrine of predestination
You will never know if you are one of the chosen few to go to heaven, but if you work hard and don’t spend a lot of money, you can assume you go to heaven
Institutional logics
Rules, assumptions and practices associated with key institutions
Institutional work
The efforts made by social actors to maintain, disrupt or create institutional patterns
The capitalist labour process
The design, control and monitoring of work tasks and activities by managers acting as agents of the capital, owning class to extract surplus value from the labour activities of employees
Postmodernism
A way of looking at the world which rejects attempts to build systematic explanations of history and human activity and which, instead, concentrates on the ways in which human beings go about ‘inventing’ their worlds, especially through language and cultural innovation
Subjectivity
The sense which people have of who they are and how they fit into the social world
