Midterm

Question 1

Sociology

Answer 1

The systematic study of human behaviour in social context.

Question 2

Social structures

Answer 2

Stable patterns of social relations.

Question 3

Sociological Imagination

Answer 3

The quality of mind that enables one to see the connection between personal troubles and social structures.

Question 4

Mesostructures

Answer 4

Patterns of social relations in organizations that involve people who are not often intimately acquainted and who often do not interact face to face.

Question 5

Macrostructures:

Answer 5

Overreaching patterns of social relations that lie outside and above one’s circle of intimates and acquaintances.

Question 6

Patriarchy

Answer 6

A system of power relations and customary practices that help to ensure male dominance in economic, political, and other spheres of life.

Question 7

Microstructures

Answer 7

Patterns of social relations formed during face-to-face interaction.

Question 8

Global structures

Answer 8

Patterns of social relations that lie outside and above the national level.

Question 9

Scientific Revolution

Answer 9

Beginning in Europe about 1550, a movement to promote the view that sound conclusions about the workings of the world must be based on solid evidence, not just speculation.

Question 10

Theory

Answer 10

A conjecture about the way observed facts are related.

Question 11

Democratic Revolution

Answer 11

The process, beginning abut 1750, in which the citizens of the United States, France, and other countries, broadened their participation in government, thereby suggesting that people can organize society and solve social problems.

Question 12

Who is Émile Durkheim (1858-1917)?

Answer 12

She is considered to be the first modern sociologist; who argued that human behaviour is influenced by “social facts” or the social relations in which people are embedded.

Question 13

Industrial revolution

Answer 13

Beginning in Britain in the 1780’s, a process of rapid economic transformation that involved the large-scale application of science and technology to industrial processes, the creation of factories, and the formation of a working class.

Question 14

Social solidarity

Answer 14

A property of social groups that increases with the degree to which a group’s members share beliefs and values, and the frequency and intensity with which they interact.

Question 15

Rate

Answer 15

The number of times an event happens in a given period per 100 000 members of the population.

Question 16

What did Robert Merton propose?

Answer 16

That social structures may have different consequences for different groups, and some of those consequences may be disruptive or have dysfunctions. Some functions are manifest, others are latent.

Question 17

Dysfunctions

Answer 17

Effects of social structures that create social instability.

Question 18

Manifest functions

Answer 18

Visible and intended effects of social structures.

Question 19

Latent functions

Answer 19

Invisible and unintended effects of social structures.

Question 20

What did Talcott Parsons argue?

Answer 20

He argued that society is well integrated and in equilibrium when the family successfully raises new generations, the military successfully defends society against external threats, schools are able to teach students the sills and values they need to function as productive adults, and religions create a shared moral code among people.

Question 21

What did Karl Marx focus on

Answer 21

He focused on the study of social classes, the positions people occupy in a hierarchy that is shaped by the source or amount of their income and wealth. (He had flaws in his argument)

Question 22

Social Class

Answer 22

Positions people occupy in a hierarchy that is shaped by the source or amount of their income and wealth.

Question 23

Class conflict

Answer 23

The struggle between classes to resist and overcome the opposition of other classes.

Question 24

Conflict theory

Answer 24

Highlights the tensions underlying existing social structures and the capacity of those tensions to burst into the open and cause social change.

Question 25

Class consciousness

Answer 25

Awareness of being a member of a social class.

Question 26

Cultural hegemony

Answer 26

Involves the control of a culture by dominant classes and other groups to the point where their values are universally accepted as common sense.

Question 27

What did the great American sociologist C. Wright Mills suggest?

Answer 27

He wrote that the sociologists main task is to identify and explain the connections between people’s personal troubles, the changing social structures in which they are embedded, and ways they can contribute to improving their lives and the state of the world. He called the ability to see these connections sociological imagination.

Question 28

When was the sociological imagination born?

Answer 28

When three revolutions pushed people think about society in an entirely new way.

Question 29

Who is Max Weber

Answer 29

Weber debated with Marx’s theories. He stated that economic circumstances alone do not explain the rise of capitalism. Argued that capitalism would not necessarily give way to socialism. He regarded the growth of the bureaucracy and the overall “rationalization” of life as the defining characteristics of the modern age.

Question 30

Poststructuralism

Answer 30

A school of thought that originated in mid-twentieth-century France, it denied the stability of social relations and of cultures, their capacity to always shape how people think and act, and the neat categorization of social and cultural elements as binary opposites.