Social Theory Final Exam

For Olson, the free-rider problem is most likely to be overcome under certain conditions. Which of the following conditions would be prone to motivate people to contribute to collective action?

Selective incentives can be provided to reward contributors

Following from Olson’s logic, we might expect that the U.S. government favors having workers’ income taxes deducted directly from their paychecks because:

Public projects pose social dilemmas

Following from our discussion of Olson, which of the following would be a readily excludable good?

Club membership

Following from the logic of social capital, social obligations are more likely to be binding when a person

Is part of a closed group

Rational-choice theorists like Hechter argue that norms are only effective under certain circumstances. Which of the following circumstances would they wish to exclude?

When norms are enforced only by subjective morality

Following from the logic of Hechter's theory, under which of the following conditions would a society be most reliant on trust to achieve cooperation?

When entry into groups is fluid and populations are large

For Weber, which was an ideological factor in the rise of industrial capitalism in Western Europe?

Protestantism

According to Weber, which was as an unintentional consequence of the Protestant Reformation?

New attitudes justifying hard work and profit taking

Following Weber's explanation for the rise of industrial capitalism in Europe, when the coincidence of several factors at the same moment results in historical transformation we can refer to this as:

Multi-causal conjuncture

According to Weber, competitive entrepreneurs thought that the Protestant ethic justified paying workers low wages because this would:

Discourage workers from engaging in sinful and wasteful behaviors

Both Weber and Simmel offer _____ as a key _____ that explains how groups maintain their coherence and identity.

Social closure, mechanism

Following Georg Simmel's logic, the opportunity for individuality would tend to be limited when:

All of the other answers explain why individuality is constrained. (People lack the capacity to occupy cross-cutting social circles, The social circle surrounding people is narrow, The groups to which people belong have the ability to prevent ties to other groups, People depend on their kin to provide most of their needs)

When members of subordinated groups cannot gain positive recognition from members of advantaged status groups, but are regarded firstly as social problems, DuBois argues that the social-self suffers from disabling: 

double-consciousness.

Orlando Patterson argues that the black-white racial dichotomy in America should be of declining salience for all of the following reasons except:

Social scientists, journalists, and other educated professionals have abandoned race thinking

Following Kant and Habermas, periodicals, journals, newspapers, television news, and the internet can all be regarded as media that

Constitute a public sphere in between private citizens and affairs of state

For Tocqueville, which of the following does NOT tend to contribute to the creation of effective and legitimate democratic government:

Centralized governments that assume all responsibility for the production of public goods

Which of the following statements contradicts Alexis de Tocqueville's thinking in Democracy in America:

He believed that intellectuals should rule because common people are incapable of self-government

According to Habermas, what force might help to prevent the deformation of the public sphere?

The mobilization of social movements voicing the lifeworld concerns of common people

Based on the logic of Simmel's theory of groups, we might expect that the greatest degree of binding group solidarity would be found where:

The social categories people occupy and the social networks they form are almost completely congruent

Tilly argues that social categorization facilitates in-group cooperation but also leads to processes of social closure and exclusion.  In extreme cases, the social categories that people belong to determine the entirety of their network ties and social exchanges.  Compared with the rest of a diverse society, a group in this situation could be characterized as experiencing:

Segregation

Framed in the terms of the scientific method of knowing, sociological theory can be best thought of as specific concepts that yield

general explanations of observable phenomena in social life