Social Change

Flashcards about social change, collective behavior, social movements, and the impact of technology.

What is social change?

The transformation of a culture over time.

What are some ways social change occurs?

Major physical events, demographic factors, and innovations.

Name some of the helping professions that sociology majors enter.

Nursing, counseling, and teaching, including careers in the social service and nonprofit sectors.

What is collective behavior?

Behavior that follows from the formation of a group or crowd of people who take action together toward a shared goal.

According to contagion theory, what happens to individuals who join a crowd?

Individuals who join a crowd can become “infected” by a mob mentality and lose the ability to reason.

What is emergent norm theory?

Individual members of a crowd make their own decisions about behavior, and norms are created through others’ acceptance or rejection of these behaviors.

What is a crowd?

A temporary gathering of people in a public place; members might interact but do not identify with one another and will not remain in contact.

What is a riot?

Continuously disorderly behavior by a group of people that disturbs the peace and is directed toward other people and/or property.

What is mass behavior?

Similar behaviors engaged in by large groups of people who are not necessarily in the same place.

What are fads?

Interests or practices followed enthusiastically for a relatively short period of time.

What is fashion?

The widespread custom or style of behavior and appearance at a particular time or in a particular place.

What is a social dilemma?

Behavior that is rational for the individual can, when practiced by many people, lead to collective disaster.

What is the tragedy of the commons?

Many individuals’ overexploitation of a public resource depletes or degrades that common resource.

What is a public goods dilemma?

Individuals incur the cost to contribute to a collective resource, though they may never benefit from that resource.

What is a social movement?

Any social group with leadership, organization, and an ideological commitment to promote or resist social change.

What is activism?

Any activity intended to bring about social change.

What does progressive mean in the context of social movements?

Term describing efforts to promote forward-thinking social change.

What does regressive mean in the context of social movements?

Term describing resistance to particular social changes, efforts to maintain the status quo, or attempts to reestablish an earlier form of social order.

According to mass society theory, why do people join social movements?

People join not because of the movement’s ideals but to satisfy a psychological need to belong to something larger than themselves.

What does relative deprivation theory focus on?

The actions of oppressed groups seeking rights or opportunities already enjoyed by others in the society.

What is gerrymandering?

Redrawing the boundary lines of state voting districts in order to advantage one political party over another.

What does resource mobilization theory focus on?

The practical constraints that help or hinder social movements’ action.

What does framing theory examine?

How participants give meaning to their struggles for social change.

What are the four stages that social movements tend to go through, according to Armand Mauss?

The public defines the problem, people begin to organize, the movement becomes bureaucratized, and the movement begins to decline.

What is cultural diffusion?

The dissemination of material and nonmaterial culture from one group to another.

What is technological determinism?

Changes in technology drive changes in society, rather than vice versa.

What is cultural lag?

The time between changes in material culture or technology and the resulting changes in the broader culture’s relevant norms, values, meanings, and laws.

What are virtual communities?

Social groups whose interactions are mediated through information technologies, particularly the internet.

What is a global village?

New communication technologies override barriers of space and time, joining together people all over the globe.

What is globalization?

The cultural and economic changes resulting from dramatically increased international trade and exchange in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

What is cultural imperialism?

The imposition of one culture’s beliefs and practices on another culture through media and consumer products rather than by military force.

What is cultural leveling?

The process by which cultures that were once unique and distinct become increasingly similar.

What does modernity include?

The decline of tradition, an increase in individualism, and a belief in progress, technology, and science.

What does postmodernity include?

A focus on the production and management of information and skepticism of science and technology.