Midterm Flashcards
Sociology
The systematic study of human behaviour in social context.
Social structures
Stable patterns of social relations.
Sociological Imagination
The quality of mind that enables one to see the connection between personal troubles and social structures.
Mesostructures
Patterns of social relations in organizations that involve people who are not often intimately acquainted and who often do not interact face to face.
Macrostructures:
Overreaching patterns of social relations that lie outside and above one’s circle of intimates and acquaintances.
Patriarchy
A system of power relations and customary practices that help to ensure male dominance in economic, political, and other spheres of life.
Microstructures
Patterns of social relations formed during face-to-face interaction.
Global structures
Patterns of social relations that lie outside and above the national level.
Scientific Revolution
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.
Theory
A conjecture about the way observed facts are related.
Democratic Revolution
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.
Who is Émile Durkheim (1858-1917)?
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.
Industrial revolution
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.
Social solidarity
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.
Rate
The number of times an event happens in a given period per 100 000 members of the population.
What did Robert Merton propose?
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.
Dysfunctions
Effects of social structures that create social instability.
Manifest functions
Visible and intended effects of social structures.
Latent functions
Invisible and unintended effects of social structures.
What did Talcott Parsons argue?
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.
What did Karl Marx focus on
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)
Social Class
Positions people occupy in a hierarchy that is shaped by the source or amount of their income and wealth.
Class conflict
The struggle between classes to resist and overcome the opposition of other classes.
Conflict theory
Highlights the tensions underlying existing social structures and the capacity of those tensions to burst into the open and cause social change.
Class consciousness
Awareness of being a member of a social class.
Cultural hegemony
Involves the control of a culture by dominant classes and other groups to the point where their values are universally accepted as common sense.
What did the great American sociologist C. Wright Mills suggest?
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.
When was the sociological imagination born?
When three revolutions pushed people think about society in an entirely new way.
Who is Max Weber
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.
Poststructuralism
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.
