Sociology Exam 2 Content

Chapters 5 & 6

Social Structure

Complex framework of societal institutions and practices that make up a society and establish certain limits on people’s behavior.

Social Interaction

Process by which people act toward or respond to other people, foundation of all relationships and groups in society.

Status

A socially defined position in a group or society characterized by certain expectations, rights, and duties.

Status Set

Comprises all the statuses that a person occupies at a given time.

Ascribed Status

A social position conferred at birth or received involuntarily later in life, based on attributes over which the individual has little or no control.

Achieved Status

A social position that a person assumes voluntarily as a result of personal choice, merit, or direct effort.

Master Status

The most important status that the person occupies, dominates all the individual’s other statuses and is the overriding ingredient in determining a person’s general social position, varies contextually.

Status Symbols

Material signs that inform others of a person’s specific status.

Social Group

Consists of 2 or more people who interact frequently and share a common identity and feeling of interdependence.

Social Solidarity/Cohesion

Refers to a group’s ability to maintain itself in the face of obstacles.

Social Network

A series of social relationships that link an individual to others.

Formal Organization

A highly structured group formed for the purpose of completing certain tasks or achieving specific goals.

Social Institution

A set of organized beliefs and rules that establishes how a society will attempt to meet its basic social needs.

Social Institutions: Functionalist

Replacing members, teaching new members, producing/distributing/consuming goods, preserving order, providing/maintaining a sense of purpose.

Social Institutions: Conflict

Originally organized to meet basic social needs, does not believe social institutions work for the common good of everyone.

Hunter-Gatherer Societies

Uses simple technology, basic social unit of kinship, egalitarian, division of labor based on age and sex.

Pastoral Societies

Based on technology that supports the domestication of large animals to provide food, greater gender inequality.

Horticultural Societies

Based on technology that supports the cultivation of plants to provide food.

Agrarian Societies

Uses technology of large scale farming, including animal/energy powered plows/equipment to produce food supply.

Industrial Societies

Based on technology that mechanizes production through the application of science to production, transformed social institutions, politics based in democracy.

Postindustrial Societies

Technology supports a service and information based economy, characterized by information explosion, service economies.

Durkheim: Mechanical and Organic Solidarity

Social solidarity derives from social structure based on division of labor.

Mechanical Solidarity

Social cohesion of preindustrial societies in which there is minimal division of labor and people feel united by shared values and common social bonds.

Organic Solidarity

Refers to the social cohesion found in industrial societies.

Gemeinschaft

Characterized by rural life, sense of community based on similarity, intimate face-to-face social interactions, primary focus on personal relationships, informal social control, ascribed status most important, limited social change.

Gesellschaft

Characterized by urban life, lack of feeling of community, impersonal/task-oriented relationships, primary focus on tasks/goals accomplished, formal social control, achieved status most important, social change is more prevalent.

Civil Inattention

The ways in which an individual shows awareness that another is present without making this person the object of particular attention.

Interaction Order

Regulates the form and processes, but not the content, of social interaction.

Social Construction of Reality

The process by which out perception of reality is largely shaped by the subjective meaning that we give to an experience.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

A false belief or prediction that produces behavior that makes the originally false belief come true.

Homed System

The social service system that offers formal help but is quick to label and stigmatize them.

Ethnomethodology

The study of everyday knowledge that people use to understand situations they are in and how this knowledge when recognized by others in the situation can create order.

Dramaturgical Analysis

The study of social interaction that compares everyday life to a theatrical presentation.

Social Script

A playbook that the actors use to guide their verbal replies and overall performance to achieve the desired goals of the conversation or fulfill the role they are playing.

Impression Management/Presentation of Self

Refers to people’s efforts to present themselves to others in ways that are most favorable to their own interests or image.

Face-Saving Behavior

Refers to the strategies we use to rescue out performance when we experience potential or actual loss of face.

Nonobservance

A face-saving technique in which one role player ignores the flaws of another’s performance to avoid embarrassment for everyone involved.

Arlie Hochschild

Suggests that humans acquire a set of ‘feeling rules’ that shapes the appropriate emotions for a given role or specific situation.

Emotional Labor

Occurs only in jobs that require personal contact with the public or the production of a state of mind in others.

Nonverbal Communication

The transfer of information between persons using body language, eye contact, social distance, vocal cues, or touch.

Personal Space

The immediate area surrounding a person that they claim as private.

4 Dimensions (Edward Hall)

Intimate distance, personal distance, social distance, public distance.

Aggregate

A collection of people who happen to be in the same place at the same time but share little else in common.

Category

A number of people who may never have met one another but share a similar characteristic such as education level.

Primary Group

A small, less specialized group in which members engage in face-to-face, emotion based interactions over an extended period of time.

Secondary Group

A larger, more specialized group in which members engage in more impersonal, goal oriented relationships for a limited period of time.

Ingroup

A group in which a person belongs and with which the person feels a sense of identity.

Outgroup

A group to which a person does not belong and toward which the person may feel competitiveness or hostility.

Reference Group

A group that serves as a standard for evaluating one’s behavior and social attitudes, regardless of whether that individual is an actual member.

Instrumental/Task-Oriented Needs

Groups help members do jobs that are impossible or difficult to do alone.

Expressive/Emotional Needs

Involve self expression and support from family, friends, and peers.

Dyad/Coalition

A group comprised of 2 members.

Triad

A group comprised of 3 members.

Absolute Size

the number of members the group actually has.

Relative Size

The number of potential members for a group.

Network

A web of social relationships that links one person with other people and through them with other people they know, consists of primary ties and secondary ties.

Primary Ties

Comprised of relatives and close friends.

Secondary Ties

Comprised of acquaintances, classmates, professors, supervisors, and coworkers.

Leadership

Refers to the ability to influence and guide members of a group or social system.

Instrumental Leadership

Goal or task oriented leadership.

Expressive Leadership

Leadership that provides emotional support for members.

Authoritarian Leaders

Make all major group decisions and assigns tasks to members.

Democratic Leaders

Encourage group discussion and decision making through consensus building.

Laissez-Faire Leaders

Minimally involved in decision making and encourage group members to make their own decisions.

Relational Leaders

Focus on building relationships between the leader and the followers.

Conformity

The process of maintaining or changing behavior to comply with the norms established by a society, subculture, or other group.

Solomon Asch

Found that group conformity is so strong that participants were willing to contradict their own judgement if the rest of the group disagreed with them.

Stanley Milgram

Controversial experiments to explore obedience to authority.

Groupthink

The process by which members of a cohesive group arrive at a decision that many members privately believe is unwise.

Normative Organizations

Voluntarily joined to pursue a common interest or gain satisfaction/prestige from being a member.

Coercive Organizations

Associations people are forced to join.

Utilitarian Organizations

People voluntarily join when they can be provided a desired, material reward.

Bureaucracy

An organizational model characterized by a hierarchy of authority, a clear division of labor, explicit rules and procedures, role selection based on specific qualifications, and impersonality in personnel matters.

Rationality

The process by which traditional methods of social organization, characterized by informality and spontaneity, are gradually replaced by efficiently administered formal rules and procedures.

Ideal Type

Abstract model that describes the recurring characteristics of some phenomenon, such as bureaucracy.

4 Dimensions of Formal Rationality

Efficiency, predictability, quantity over quality, control through nonhuman technologies.

Problems of Bureaucracy

Inefficiency, rigidity, resistance to change, perpetuation of race, class, gender inequalities.

Iron Law of Oligarchy

The tendency to become a bureaucracy ruled by the few.

Humanizing Bureaucracy

A movement to establish an organizational environment that develops rather than impedes human resources.

Socially Sustainable Organization

Success of the org, impact on the environment, social conditions.

Globalization

the key word for management and change in many orgs, use of technology is intricately linked with performing flexible, mobile, work anywhere in the world. “Smart Working.”

Demography

A subfield of sociology that examines population size, composition, and distribution.

Fertility

The actual level of childbearing for an individual or a population.

Fecundity

The potential number of children who could be born if every woman reproduced at her maximum biological capacity.

Crude Birth Rate

The number of live births per 1,000 people in a population in a given year.

Total Fertility Rate (TFR)

The average number of children that a biological female is expected to have during the reproductive years, assuming age specific fertility rates remain unchanged.

Mortality

The incidence of death in a population.

Crude Death Rate

The number of deaths per 1,000 people in a population in a given year.

Infant Mortality Rate

The number of deaths of infants under 1 years old per 1,000 live births in a given year.

Life Expectancy

An estimate of the average lifetime in years for people born in a specific year.

Migration

The movement of people from 1 geographic area to another for the purpose of changing residency.

Sex Ratio

The number of boys/men to girls/women in a given population.

Population Pyramid

A graphic representation of the distribution of a population by sex and age.

Malthusian Perspective

Population inevitably surpasses food supply and the lack of food ends population growth and could eliminate the existing population.

Positive Checks

Mortality risks such as famine, disease and war.

Preventative Checks

Limits to fertility.

Population: Marxist Perspective

Poverty is a consequence of the exploitation of workers by the owners of the means of production. Overpopulation occurs because capitalists desire to have a surplus of workers to screw them over.

Zero Population Growth

The point at which no population increase occurs from year to year because the number of births + immigrants is equal to the number of deaths + emigrants.

Demographic Transition

The process by which some societies have moved from high birth/death rates to relatively low birth/death rates because of technological/economic development.

Rational Choice Theory

Based on the assumption that people make decisions based on a calculated cost-benefit analysis.