Exam I Flashcards
Coined the phrase “sociological imagination.”
C. Wright Mills
The vivid awareness of the relationship between experience and the wider society.
Ability to see things socially and how they interact and influence each other.
Sociological Imagination
founded concept of understanding how society holds together and how modern capitalism and industrialization have transformed the ways people relate to one another.
Emile Durkheim
Coined the term “anomie.”
Emile Durkheim
The sense of normlessness resulting from drastic changes in living conditions or arrangements.
Anomie
Belief that the social world can be described and predicted by certain observable relationships.
Durkheim is “founding practitioner.”
Positivist Sociology
The founding fathers of the sociological discipline.
Karl Marx
Max Weber
Emile Durkheim
Concept that it was primarily the conflicts between classes that drove social change throughout history.
Historical Materialism
Coined the theory of Historical Materialism
Karl Marx
Concept that conflict among competing interests is the basic, animating force of any society.
Conflict Theory
The idea that people act in response to the meaning that signs and social signals hold for them.
Symbolic Interactionism
Coined the term “social physics” (aka positivism).
Auguste Comte
The need to make moral sense out of social order in a time of declining religious authority.
Positivism
Comte’s Three Stages:
- Theological Stage: Society is result of divine will.
- Metaphysical Stage: Humankind’s behavior governed by natural, biological instincts.
- Scientific Stage: Social physics identify scientific laws that govern human behavior.
Developed the concept of “Double Consciousness”
W.E.B. Du Bois
Concept of constantly maintaining two behavioral scripts: one for moving through the world and another to incorporate external opinions of prejudiced onlookers.
Double Consciousness
Max Weber
“understanding”
Verstehen
Concept in which researchers imagine themselves experiencing the life positions of those they want to understand, (rather than observing them as objects).
Interpretive Sociology
Founded Interpretive Sociology
“verstehen”
Max Weber
Who were the European Sociologists?
Comte
Durkheim
Weber
Simmel
Marx
Who were European Sociologists influenced by?
Enlightenment thinkers, French Revolution, and First Industrial Revolution.
A complex group of interdependent positions that, together, perform a social role and reproduce themselves over time.
Social Institution
Concept that the best way to analyze society was to identify the roles that different aspects or phenomena play.
Functionalism
Concept that the grand narratives of history are over.
Postmodernism
Concept that humans’ behaviors and personalities are shaped by their social and physical environments, a concept known as social ecology.
American Sociology
An entity that exists because people behave as though it exists and whose existence is perpetuated as people & social institutions act in accordance with widely agreed-on formal rules or informal norms of behavior associated with that entity.
Social Construction
Theory that attempts to predict how certain social institutions tend to function.
Midrange Theory
Seeks to understand local interactional contexts / study of how face-to-face interactions create the social world.
ie: participant observation and in-depth interviews
Microsociology
Seeks to understand social dynamics at a higher level of analysis - across the breadth of society.
Macrosociology
An emphasis on women’s experiences and a belief that sociology and society in general subordinate women. Am emphasis on equality between men and women and desire to see women’s lives and experiences represented in sociological studies.
Feminist Theory
A qualitative method of studying people or a social setting that uses observation, interaction, and sometimes formal interviewing to document behaviors, customs, experiences, social ties, and so on.
Ethnography
A procedure involving the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses based on systematic observation, measurement, and/or experiments.
Scientific Method
An abstracted, systematic model of how some aspect of the world works.
Theory
