Sociology: Culture, Gender, and Race

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering sociological concepts of culture, cultural production and consumption, gender inequality, and the social construction of race and ethnicity.

Material culture

Physical goods, often produced and exchanged within an economic system.

Symbolic culture

The beliefs, values, and language that shape and organize social life.

Collective representations

A bundle of images and words that represent a particular culture and function to create social order and cohesion.

Code switching

The skill of adopting a set of informal rules and manners that are appropriate in a specific setting.

Cultural toolkit

Sets of beliefs, values, and attitudes that people learn and deploy strategically to solve problems in different situations.

Culture industries

A system of people and organizations responsible for the mass production of cultural goods.

Production of culture perspective

A sociological framework analyzing how macro-level arrangements in cultural industries, such as laws and technology, shape innovations and standardize cultural goods.

Corporate consolidation

The acquisition of smaller corporations by larger ones, resulting in a more uniform symbolic and material cultural landscape.

Conspicuous consumption

Gaining prestige by exhibiting valuable cultural goods to signal wealth to others.

Cultural capital

Non-economic cultural resources, such as knowledge, skills, and behaviors, attuned to a particular sphere of social life.

Field

A context of social relations, such as a profession or a community, where a particular kind of cultural capital is exchanged.

Habitus

A learned disposition or set of tendencies based within the particular social world a person inhabits that organizes how they perceive and act in the world.

Status

The social designation of honor, either positive or negative.

Status group

A collection of people who share similar characteristics that a community has accorded a certain level of prestige.

Symbolic boundaries

Conceptual ways people separate each other into groups through traditions, styles, tastes, and classifications.

Boundary work

The process of creating and maintaining symbolic boundaries to limit group membership and access to resources.

Cultural omnivores

People who differentiate themselves and gain status by possessing wide knowledge across many different cultural fields.

McDonaldization

The mass production of culture leading to standardized cultural goods everywhere, driven by capitalism's rationalization of efficiency, predictability, and control.

Cultural imperialism

The imposition of a dominant group's material and symbolic goods onto other societies or local cultures.

Cultural appropriation

The practice in which members of a dominant culture adopt cultural goods, such as ideas, symbols, skills, or expressions, from other groups for profit.

Culture jamming

The practice of raising awareness about McDonaldization, corporate consolidation, and cultural imperialism through unauthorized, subversive guerilla marketing campaigns.

Global commodity chain

The international production, distribution, and marketing system linking corporations, laborers, and consumers.

Transgender

A term describing individuals whose gender identity and expression differ from the sex they were assigned at birth.

Non-binary

A gender identity that is not exclusively masculine or feminine.

Cisgender

An individual whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.

Gender binary

A classification system that recognizes only two distinct gender categories.

Intersectionality

A framework demonstrating how different social relations, including gender, race, class, disability, and sexuality, intersect to shape individual experiences.

Feminism

A collection of social and political movements advocating for equality across all sexes and genders.

Motherhood penalty

The systematic workplace disadvantages in wages, benefits, and perceived competence associated with motherhood.

Fatherhood bonus

The benefit in higher wages and elevated perceived competence granted to working fathers compared to childless men and working mothers.

Ethnicity

A shared group identity based on common culture, religion, history, or ancestry, rather than strictly on physical markers.

One-drop rule

A historical U.S. custom and legal doctrine declaring that an individual with any African ancestry, regardless of amount, is classified as Black.

Social construct

A concept that humans invent and invest with meaning to understand or justify dimensions of the social world.

Implicit bias

Unconscious mental associations and automatic preferences that influence everyday perceptions and interactions.

Internalized bias

The psychological phenomenon where a person belonging to a marginalized group associates their own group with negative evaluations.

Stereotypes

Widely-shared perceptions about the personal characteristics, tendencies, or abilities of members belonging to a particular group.

Prejudices

Preconceived, typically negative beliefs, attitudes, and opinions about members of a group that are not grounded in personal experience or evidence.