SOC101 TEST TWO STUDY GUIDE

Adam Smith — Main works

The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), The Wealth of Nations (1776), Lectures on Jurisprudence (published 1976).

Adam Smith — Sociological imagination

Economic relations are connected to social ranks, customs, values, institutions, and moral sentiments.

Economic embeddedness

Economic actions are connected to social groups, institutions, values, and routines.

Unintended consequences

Individual actions can produce broader societal effects that were not intended.

Division of labor (Smith)

Specialization increases productivity by improving dexterity and reducing wasted motion.

Invisible hand

Individuals pursuing self-interest can unintentionally promote the public interest.

Three references to the invisible hand

History of Astronomy, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and The Wealth of Nations.

Émile Durkheim — Main works

The Division of Labor in Society (1893), The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Suicide (1897), The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912).

Durkheim — Role in sociology

Defined social facts and helped institutionalize sociology through the University of Bordeaux sociology department and L'Année Sociologique.

Anomie

A state of normlessness or weakened social regulation caused by societal transformations, potentially producing powerlessness, meaninglessness, and social isolation.

Anomic division of labor

A condition in which inadequate social regulation disrupts relationships between specialized roles.

Anomic suicide

Suicide associated with weakened social regulation and disrupted norms.

Max Weber — Main works

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905) and Economy and Society (1922).

Weber — Main argument

Religion, religious ethics, and rationalization shaped modern capitalism, bureaucracy, power, and authority.

Bureaucracy

A large organization characterized by defined goals, hierarchy, specialized roles, impersonality, written rules, efficiency, and merit-based promotion.

Advantages of bureaucracy

Increased efficiency and reduced nepotism.

Disadvantages of bureaucracy

Restricted individual freedom, cold rationalism, and potential obstacles to democracy.

Iron cage

A metaphor describing how modern individuals become constrained by technical, economic, and bureaucratic conditions.

Steel-hard shell

An alternative translation emphasizing how bureaucratic rationality shapes and molds individuals.

Power (Weber)

The probability that an actor can carry out their will despite resistance.

Elements of domination

Coercion, interests, and legitimacy.

State (Weber)

A territorial organization that successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force.

Traditional authority

Authority based on established customs and traditions.

Charismatic authority

Authority based on devotion to a leader's exceptional qualities.

Rational-legal authority

Authority based on formal laws, rules, and established positions.

Routinization of charisma

The process through which a charismatic leader's goals, rules, and structures survive beyond their leadership.

Michel Foucault — Power

Power operates through relationships, institutions, practices, and discourses rather than only direct control.

Disciplinary power

Power exercised through internal control, surveillance, socialization, and psychological mechanisms.

Biopower/biopolitics

The management and regulation of human life, health, and population data by states and institutions.

Panopticon

A prison design created by Jeremy Bentham that Foucault used to explain how potential constant surveillance makes individuals police themselves.

W. E. B. Du Bois — Subfields

Contributed to urban sociology, ethnic studies, and race studies.

Double consciousness

The experience of African Americans seeing themselves through both their own perspective and the eyes of a white-dominated society.

Institutionalization of Sociology in the U.S.

The process through which sociology became established as an academic discipline in American universities and institutions.

Jane Addams

Co-founded Hull-House in Chicago in 1889 to assist poor immigrants through health care, education, and social services; combined research with social activism; won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

William Graham Sumner

Taught the first sociology course at Yale in 1875.

Albion W. Small

Founded the first independent U.S. Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago in 1892 and founded The American Journal of Sociology in 1895.

The City (1925)

Work by Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie introducing an ecological theory of the city.

Ecological theory of the city

Views cities as systems adapting to geography and competition for resources.

Emerging sociological subfields

Sociology of immigration, economic sociology, sociology of health, criminology, sociology of inequalities, and urban studies.

Karl Marx — Main works

Capital (1867) and The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels).

Historical materialism

Societies change through transformations in modes of production driven by struggles between opposing classes.

Historical stages in the study guide

Primitive community, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and future utopian communism.

Alienation

Becoming foreign to one's world or submitting to forces of one's own creation.

Four forms of alienation

Alienation from the product, production process, human essence, and fellow community members.

Alexis de Tocqueville

French political thinker who studied American democracy and society.

Tocqueville — Visit to the U.S.

Traveled with Gustave de Beaumont in 1831 to study the penitentiary system and later published Democracy in America (1835).

Free association

The American practice of forming voluntary civic, religious, and moral associations rather than relying solely on government.

Tocqueville — Main issues

Examined American democracy, voluntary associations, and the contradictions of slavery.

Hannah Arendt

Political theorist known for analyzing totalitarianism and threats to democratic society.

The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

Arendt's major work analyzing Nazism and Stalinism as totalitarian systems.

Totalitarianism

A system characterized by extensive state control, systemic terror, destruction of individuality, mass manipulation, racism, and ideological fanaticism.

Arendt's warning

Extremist doctrines can re-emerge when democratic institutions are weakened.