Exam #2 Flashcards
Social structure
the invisible feature of social life that controls and transforms our behaviour
Social networks
the set of direct and indirect connections among a group of people.
Direct connections
links of kinship, friendship, and acquaintance.
Commuities
a group of people living together and sharing common values, a common territory, and a daily life.
What did Ferdinand Tonnies distinguish?
community life, called it “Gemeinschaft”.
called non-community life “Gesellschaft”.
Associated community life with rural areas, non-community life with urban areas.
Gemeinschaft
the typical features of rural and small-town life.
a stable, homogenous group of residents with a strong attachment to a particular place.
marked by dense or highly connected networks, centralized and controlling elites, and multiple social ties.
Gesellschaft
city life.
kind of organization that brings together a diverse group of residents with different personal histories.
people are less cohesive, less controlled.
What did Charles Horton Cooley distinguish?
primary groups and secondary groups.
Primary groups
small and marked by regular face-to-face interaction.
ex: family household and cliques
Secondary groups
larger and many members, may not interact regularly.
Spontaneous organization
an organization that arises quickly to meet a single goal and disbands when goal is achieved.
ex: search parties
Informal organization
an organization with loosely specified goals and little task differentiation between members.
ex: clique
Clique
a group of tightly interconnected people.
a friendship circle whose members are all connected to one another, and to the outside world, in similar ways.
built on friendship and exclusion of outsiders.
Formal organization
a deliberately planned social group that co-ordinates people, capital, and tools through formalized roles, statuses, and relationships to gain a specific set of goals.
Bureaucracy
the most developed, most efficient organization, with formal properties that include written rules, protected careers, and a clear chain or reporting relationships.
ordered by criteria independent of the personal qualities of the people who hold positions of power and is a system that is rationalized and associated with states and the post-Industrial Revolution period.
What did Max Weber do?
first sociologist to study ‘bureaucracies’.
found that this form of organization held enormous advantages over earlier organizational forms.
What did bureaucracy arise from in response to?
three important historical conditions
- European nation building
- capitalism
- industrialization
Capitalism
a system devoted to the pursuit of maximum profits.
Rationalization
movement away from mystical and religious interpretations of the world.
The rule of law
the rise of impersonal authority based on the universal application of a codified set of rules and laws.
7 essential characteristics of bureaucracy identified by Weber
- division of labour
- hierarchy of positions
- formal system of rules
- reliance on written documents
- separation of the person from the office
- hiring and promotion based on technical merit
- protection of careers
What did Adam Smith do?
noted the overwhelming productive superiority of specialization.
specialized division of labour became the foundation of modern industry and bureaucratization.
Means of production
term used by the marxists to refer to wealth-generating property such as land, factories, and machinery;
the way goods are produced for sale on the market, including all the workers, machinery, and capital such as production needs.
Deviance
people, behaviour, and conditions subject to social control.
those activities and people that society thinks are not the norm.
Social control
the various and myriad ways in which members of social groups express their disapproval of people and behaviours.
(name-calling, ridicule, ostracism, incarceration, killing).
Social groups
a number of individuals, defined by formal or informal criteria of membership, who share a feeling of unity or are bound together in stable patterns of interaction.
Social interaction
the process by which which people act and react in relationships with others.
Extreme deviance
behaviour that is so far beyond the norm that it invites an extreme strong negative reaction from the almost all sectors of the community.
Objective deviance
particular ways of thinking, acting, and being.
the behaviour or condition itself.
