Sociology Exam 2: Social Control, Race, Gender & Sexuality, Stratification & Capitalism

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, theories, and concepts from Weeks 7 through 10 of sociology lecture notes for Exam 2 preparation.

Crime

The violation of laws enacted by society; a form of formal social deviance that involves prosecution and penalization through the legal system.

Dimensions of Power

Steven Lukes' framework conceptualizing how power operates: the 1st (simple) dimension involves A getting B to do what A wants; the 2nd (complex) dimension involves A shaping the agenda to restrain options; and the 3rd (hegemonic) dimension involves A dominating the agenda by establishing a rationalized ideology that justifies their power.

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

A work by Michel Foucault tracing the historical evolution of punishment from premodern public spectacles (such as the 1757 execution of Robert-François Damiens) to modern disciplinary institutions (such as the Mettray Penal Colony in the mid-1800s), emphasizing efficiency and the reform of the soul over physical torture.

Formal Social Sanctions

Mechanisms of social control where explicit rules and consequences prohibit deviant behavior, enforced through institutions such as police, judicial courts, and correctional facilities.

Informal Deviance

Minor violations of socially established norms that do not break formal laws, resulting in informal social responses such as judgment, disapproval, or gossip rather than legal consequences.

Informal Social Sanctions

The usually unexpressed but widely recognized rules governing social life and group membership that regulate behavior through ostracism, awkward glances, or verbal rebukes.

Michel Foucault

French philosopher and social theorist who studied modern social control, surveillance, power, and knowledge, introducing concepts such as disciplinary mechanisms, the Panopticon, and biopower.

Biopower

A mechanism analyzed by Michel Foucault by which humans are managed through the regulation and optimization of life itself, operating through institutions like schools, hospitals, and prisons for individual efficiency, as well as biostatistics and administration for population management.

Norms

Expectations or rules governing acceptable behavior within a society or group.

Panopticon

An architectural circular prison featuring an outer ring of cells monitored by a central guard tower, designed so the prisoner never knows if they are being watched, while the guard can observe them at any time.

Panopticonism

A theory positing that dominant modern social institutions produce a totalizing state of surveillance that becomes internalized by individuals, leading to self-regulation.

Power

The ability to carry out one's own will despite resistance.

Social Control

The set of mechanisms that create normative compliance in individuals, enforced via formal and informal sanctions, which historically shifted from violent, public physical control to institutional, mental control.

Social Deviance

Any transgression of socially established norms that is contextual and socially constructed; functionalists argue it reinforces cohesion and clarifies boundaries, while conflict theorists view it as a tool used by elites to protect the status quo.

Stigma

A negative social label that fundamentally alters others' behavior toward an individual and changes that person's self-concept and social identity, often causing secondary deviance and systemic disadvantage.

Strain (Means-Ends) Theory

Robert Merton's theory positing that deviance occurs when a society fails to give all of its members equal ability to achieve socially acceptable goals, leading to adaptations: conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and rebellion.

Total Institution

An institution that is totally immersive, controls all basics of daily life, and conducts all activities in the same place under a single entity without barriers between life spheres, stripping individuality and enforcing homogeneity (e.g., prisons, mental hospitals, military camps).

Black Lives Matter (BLM)

A civil rights and social movement formed to confront institutional racism, police violence, and racial bias within the criminal justice system.

Color-Blind Racism

The view that racial inequality is perpetuated by a supposedly neutral stance that ignores historical inequities and structural barriers, falsely replacing biological racism with cultural arguments attributing disparities to cultural shortcomings.

Critical Race Theory

A legal and sociological theory coined by Kimberle Crenshaw asserting that race is socially constructed to oppress nonwhites, that racism is fundamentally ingrained in US legal and social institutions, and that racial progress generally occurs only when aligned with white elite interests.

Discrimination

Harmful or negative actions taken against people deemed inferior on the basis of their racial or ethnic category, without regard to individual merit.

Prejudice

Negative thoughts, attitudes, and judgments directed toward an ethnic or racial group, categorized across types such as All-Weather Liberals, Fair-Weather Liberals, Timid Bigots, and All-Weather Bigots.

Ethnicity

A social affiliation and identity based on real or presumed cultural characteristics (such as language, religion, nationality, and customs) that is voluntary, self-defined, non-hierarchical, and fluid.

Genocide

The mass, coordinated killing of a group of people based on their racial, ethnic, or religious traits, such as the Holocaust.

Institutional Racism

Institutions and social dynamics that appear race-neutral on the surface but end up systematically disadvantaging minority groups, such as court policies and housing requirements.

Nativism

A sociopolitical movement aimed at protecting and preserving a nation's land or culture from the allegedly dangerous and polluting effects of new immigrants.

Pluralism

The presence and engaged coexistence of numerous distinct racial and ethnic groups in one society, where all groups maintain their unique cultures and have equal social standing.

Primordialism

The concept explaining that ethnic ties persist because they are fixed in deeply felt, primordial attachments to one's ancestral culture and homeland, remaining robust even after structural integration.

Race

An ascribed, involuntary, and socially constructed category signifying political struggles and social conflicts based on perceived physical differences across types of human bodies.

Racism

The belief that members of separate races possess different and unequal traits, and that certain races are inherently superior or inferior to others.

Scientific Racism

Nineteenth-century theories and investigations—including pseudosciences like physiognomy and phrenology—that sought to legitimize racial inequality through biological inquiry.

Segregation

The legal or social practice of separating people on the basis of their race or ethnicity, enforced historically through Jim Crow policies and sustained through structural mechanisms like residential redlining.

Social Construct

An idea or category created, institutionalized, and sustained by individuals and groups within a society rather than by biological nature.

Straight-Line Assimilation

A linear model positing that immigrants arrive, settle, adopt local habits, progressively shed homeland primordial attachments, and ultimately achieve full assimilation into dominant cultural norms.

The New Jim Crow

A framework demonstrating that the US mass incarceration system operates as a redesigned racialized caste system of social control, evolving from slavery (1619–1865) and Jim Crow segregation (1860s–1960s) to mass incarceration (1970s–present) under color-blind rhetoric like the War on Drugs.

White Privilege

An invisible set of unearned societal assets, opportunities, and immunities granted to white people and withheld from people of color in identical political, social, or economic contexts.

MeToo Movement

A global social movement created to support survivors of sexual assault and harassment, combat sexual violence, and hold institutional perpetrators accountable.

Androgynous

A non-binary, intermediate position that is neither clearly masculine nor clearly feminine.

Cisgender

Individuals whose gender identity matches their biological sex assigned at birth.

Emotional Labor

The process of managing one's feelings and outward expressions to satisfy the display requirements of a job, especially prevalent in female-dominated service professions.

Essentialism

A perspective that explains social phenomena in terms of natural, biological, or evolutionary inevitabilities, arguing that gender disparities stem from hardwired, innate biology rather than social learning.

Gender

A socially constructed, fluid social position and set of cultural attributes, roles, and performative behaviors associated with biological sex.

Gender Role Socialization

The lifelong process through which individuals learn, internalize, and perform cultural norms and behaviors associated with masculinity and femininity through guidance, media, and language.

Hegemonic Masculinity

The configuration of practice that legitimizes men's dominant position in society, justifies the subordination of women and marginalized masculinities, and sets the standard of manhood.

Heteronormativity

Cultural frameworks that promote heterosexuality as the default sexual orientation, marginalizing non-heterosexual relationships and forcing individuals to 'come out.'

History of Sexuality

Michel Foucault's work examining how power operates through scientific, medical, and institutional discourse on sex, rejecting the 'repressive hypothesis' and showing that modern societies amplified discourse and categorizations rather than silencing them.

Homosexuality

The social identity of an individual who has romantic, sexual, or emotional attraction toward members of the same sex, which crystallized as a medicalized and legal identity in the late 19th century.

Intersectionality

A critical framework coined by Kimberle Crenshaw emphasizing that social identities (race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.) intersect and mutually construct one another rather than operate independently, shaping structural privilege and oppression.

Intersex

Individuals born with reproductive, chromosomal, or anatomical traits that do not conform to standard medical and cultural binaries of male or female bodies, demonstrating that biological sex is a continuum.

Patriarchy

A nearly universal social system in which power, leadership, and authority are primarily held by men, subordinating femininity to masculinity.

Queer Theory

A field of study that deconstructs and challenges normative categories of gender and sexuality, opposing essentialist claims that they are naturally fixed.

Sex

The physical and physiological differences that society uses to distinguish males from females, including primary reproductive organs and secondary characteristics.

Sexism

Prejudice, discrimination, or institutional bias based on a person's sex or gender, manifested in phenomena like the glass ceiling, glass escalator, and motherhood penalty.

Sexual Harassment

An illegal form of discrimination ranging from inappropriate sexual comments to quid pro quo sexual barter and physical sexual assault.

Sexuality

Desires, intimate behaviors, sexual preferences, and identities regarding sex that are socially constructed and variable across historical periods and cultures.

Liberal Feminism

A strand of feminism that works within mainstream societal and legal structures to integrate women and secure equality (e.g., Title IX, Equal Rights Amendment).

Radical Feminism

A strand of feminism that calls for dismantling patriarchy, contending that the subordination of women under patriarchal power is the most fundamental form of human oppression.

Socialist Feminism

A strand of feminism that utilizes Marxist theory to critique capitalist economic foundations and patriarchal exploitation, highlighting issues such as unpaid domestic labor and the male-breadwinner dynamic.

Cultural Feminism

A strand of feminism focused on establishing a vanguard of feminist public intellectuals, producing research, founding women's studies programs, and elevating distinct feminine values.

Toxic Masculinity

Harmful, narrow, and repressive models of masculinity marked by emotional suppression, aggressive behavior, and dominance, serving as a social determinant of elevated suicide and distress among men.

Transgender

Individuals whose gender identity or expression does not correspond to the biological sex they were assigned at birth.

Absolute Poverty

The condition where a household's income falls below the minimum required to purchase enough food to sustain basic physical survival.

Alienation

Karl Marx's concept describing a condition under capitalism where workers are dominated by forces of their own creation, becoming separated from the product, the process of production, their human potential, and other people.

Capitalism

An economic system characterized by private ownership of property, goods, and means of production, where investments are privately directed and prices, production, and distribution are governed by market competition and wage labor.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

A 2010 US Supreme Court decision upholding corporate 'legal personhood' by ruling that corporations possess 1st Amendment free speech rights to spend unlimited treasury funds on independent political campaign expenditures.

Communism

A theoretical classless and stateless society wherein the means of production are owned and operated in common, liberating humans from wage labor and alienation as a post-socialist end-state.

Contradictory Class Locations

Structural positions in capitalist societies (such as managers and supervisors) that fall between the two pure Marxist classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Corporation

A legal entity possessing personhood distinct from that of its owners, executives, and shareholders, granting limited liability to investors and internal members.

Internal Contradictions of Capitalism

Systemic paradoxes inherent to global capitalism that trigger routine crises: crises of effective demand (depressed wages leading to underconsumption), ecological crises (infinite extraction on a finite planet), and crises of the state (public bailouts creating socialism for the wealthy).

Monopoly

A market condition in which a single seller dominates the supply of a good or service to the total exclusion of competitors, resulting in zero competition and distorted consumer pricing.

Oligopoly

A market structure in which a small handful of large firms dominate and control an entire industry, creating high barriers to entry for new competitors.

Relative Poverty

A measurement of poverty based on a percentage of the median household income in a given location, used to assess social exclusion and inequality within affluent societies.

Socialism

An economic system in which most or all societal needs are met through nonmarket distribution methods, featuring public or worker oversight of economic production as a transitional phase toward communism.

Theory of the 'Invisible Hand'

Adam Smith's concept positing that individuals pursuing their own rational self-interest inadvertently coordinate supply, demand, and prices to promote the economic well-being of society as a whole without central planning.

'Tragedy of the Commons'

Hardin's concept explaining how individuals acting independently in their self-interest inevitably deplete and degrade shared, finite natural resources, disproportionately affecting developing communities.

Union

An organization of workers formed to engage in collective bargaining with employers over compensation, workplace safety, and job conditions.

Union Busting

An intentional campaign conducted by a company or employer to disrupt, undermine, or dissolve organized labor unions, such as through mass firings.

Thomas Theorem

A sociological principle stating that if people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences, regardless of whether the definition is objectively accurate.

Mettray Penal Colony

A mid-1800s reformatory for young men in France analyzed by Michel Foucault, which enforced rigid schedules, moral training, and self-improvement programs, exemplifying modern disciplinary social control.