Sociology 2nd Exam

Social Deviance

Any transgression of socially established norms.

Informal Deviance

Minor violations of social norms that may or may not be punished.

Crime

The violation of laws enacted by society; formal deviance.

Social Control

Mechanisms that create normative compliance in individuals.

Formal Social Sanctions

Mechanisms of social control by which rules or laws prohibit deviant criminal behavior.

Informal Social Sanctions

The usually unexpressed but widely known rules of group membership; the unspoken rules of social life.

Social Cohesion

Social bonds; how well people relate to each other and get along on a day-to-day basis.

Mechanical or Segmental Solidarity

Social cohesion based on sameness.

Organic Solidarity

Social cohesion based on difference and interdependence of the parts.

Social integration

The extent to which you are integrated into your social group or community.

Social Regulation

The number of rules guiding your daily life and, more specifically, what you can reasonably expect from the world on a day-to-day basis.

Egoistic Suicide

Suicide that occurs when one is not well integrated into a social group.

Altruistic Suicide

Suicide that occurs when one experiences too much social integration.

Anomie

A sense of aimlessness or despair that arises when we can no longer reasonably expect life to be predictable; too little social regulation; normlessness.

Anomic Suicide

Suicide that occurs as a result of insufficient social regulation.

Fatalistic Suicide

Suicide that occurs as a result of too much social regulation.

Strain Theory

Robert Merton's theory that deviance occurs when a society does not give all of its members equal ability to achieve socially acceptable goals.

Conformist

An individual who accepts both the socially acceptable goals and socially acceptable strategies to achieve those goals.

Ritualist

An individual who rejects socially defined goals but not the means.

Innovator

Social deviant who accepts socially acceptable goals but rejects socially acceptable means to achieve them.

Retreatists

One who rejects both socially acceptable means and goals by completely retreating from, or not participating in, society.

Rebel

An individual who rejects both traditional goals and traditional means and wants to alter or destroy the social institutions from which they are alienated.

Labeling Theory

The belief that individuals subconsciously notice how other see or label them, and their reactions to those labels over time form basis of their self-identity.

Primary Deviance

"The first act of rule breaking that may lead to a new label ""deviant,
 thus influencing how people think about and act toward you."

Secondary Deviance

Subsequent acts of rule breaking that occur after primary deviance and as a result of your new deviant label and people's expectations of you.

Stigma

A negative social label that changes others' behavior toward a person and therefore alters that person's own self-concept and social identity.

Broken Windows Theory of Deviance

Theory explaining how social cues impact whether individuals act deviantly---specifically, whether local, informall social norms allow deviant acts.

Street Crime

Crime committed in public and often associated with violence, gangs, and poverty.

White-Collar Crime

Offense committed by a professional (or professionals) against a corporation, agency, or other institution.

Corporate Crime

A particular type of white-collar crime committed by the officers (CEOs and other executives) of a corporation.

Deterrence Theory

Philosophy of criminal justice arising from the notion that crime results from rational calculation of its costs and benefits.

Recidivism

When an individual who has been involved with the criminal justice system reverts to criminal behavior.

Total Institution

An institution in which one is totally immersed and that controls all the basics of day-to-day life; no barriers exist between the usual spheres of daily life, and all activity occurs in the same place and under the same single authority.

Panopticon

A circular building composed of an inner ring and an outer ring desinged to serve as a prison in which the guards, housed in the inner ring, can observe the prisoners without the detainees knowing whether they are being watched.

Socioeconomic Status

An individual's postition in a stratified social order.

Stratification

The hierarchical organization of a society into groups with differing levels of power, social prestige, or status and economic resources.

Income

Money received by a person for work, from transfers (gifts, inheritances, or government assistance), or from returns on investments.

Wealth

A family's or individual's not worth

Upper Class

A term for the economic elite.

Middle Class

A term commonly used to describe those individuals with nonmanual jobs that pay significantly more than the poverty line--though this is a highly debated and expansive category, particularly in the United States, where broad swaths of the population consider themselves middle class.

Dialectic

A two-directional relationship, followng a pattern in which an original statement or thesis is countered with an antithesis, leading to a conclusion that united the strength of the original postion and the counterarguments.

Dialetic Materialism

A notion of history that privileges conflict over economic, material resources as the central struggle and driver of change in society.

Structural Functionalism

A theory in which society's many parts--institutions, norms, traditions, and so on--mesh to produce a stable, working whole that evolves over time; best embodied by Talcott Parsons.

Conflict Theory

The idea that conflict between competing interests is the basic, animating force of social change and society in general.

Equality of Opportunity

The idea that everyone has an equal chance to achieve material wealth, social prestige, and power because the rules of the game, so to speak, are the same for everyone.

Bourgeois Society

A society of commerce (modern capitalist society, for example) in whihc the maximaization of profit is the primary business incentive.

Equality of Condition

The idea that everyone should have an equal starting point.

Equality of Outcome

"The idea that each player must end up with the same amount regardless of the fairness of the ""game."""

Free Rider Problem

The notion that when more than one person is responsible for getting something done, the incentive is for each individual to shirk responsibility and hope other will pull the extra weight.

Estate System

A politically based system of stratification characterized by limited social mobility.

Caste System

A religion-based system of stratification characterized by no social mobility.

Class System

An economically based heirarchical system characterized by cohesive oppositional groups and somewhat loose social mobility.

Proletariat

The working class.

Bourgeoisie

The capitalist class.

Contradictory Class Locations

"The idea that people occupy locations in the class structure that fall between the two ""pure"" classes."

Status Hierarchy System

A system of stratification based on social prestige.

Elite-Mass Dichotomy System

A system of stratification that has a governing elite, a few leaders who broadly hold power in society.

Meritocracy

A society where statue and mobility are based on individual sttributes, ability, and achievement.

Social Mobility

The movement between different positions within a system of social stratification in any given society.

Structural Mobility

Mobility that is inevitable from changes in the economy.

Exchange Mobility

Mobility resulting from the swapping of jobs.

Status-Attinment Model

Apporach that ranks individuals by socioeconomic status, including income and educational attainment, and seeks to specifiy the attributes characteristic of people who end up in more desirable occupations.

Parenting Stress Hypothesis

A paradigm in which low income, unstable employment, a lack of cultural resources, and a feeling of inferiority from social class comparisons exacerbate household stress level; this stress, in turn, leads to detrimental parenting practices such as yelling and hitting, which are not conducive to healthy child development.

Culture of Poverty

"The argument that poor people adopt certain practices that differ from those of middle-class, ""mainstream"" society in order to adapt and survive in difficult economic circumstances."

Underclass

The notion, building on the culture of povery argument, that the poor not only are different from mainstream society in their inability to take advantage of what society has to offer but also are increasingly deviant and even dangerous to the rest of us.

Perverse Incentives

Reward structure that lead to suboptimal outcomes by stimulating counterproductive behavior; for example, it is argued that welfare--to the extent that it discourages work efforts--has perverse incentives.

Absolute Poverty

The point at which a household's income falls below the necessary level to purchase food to physically sustain its members.

Relative Poverty

A measurement of poverty based on a percentage of the median income in a given location.

Sex

The percieved biological differences that society typically uses to distinguish males from females.

Gender

A social position; behaviors and a set of atrributes that are associated with sex identites.

Sexuality

Desire, sexual preference, and intimate behavior.

Essentialist

Arguments explaining social phenomena in terms of natural, biological, or evolutionary inevitabilities.

Androgynous

Neither masculine nor feminine.

Transgender

Describes people whose genderr does not correspond to their birth sex.

Cisgender

Describes people whose gender corresponds to their birth sex.

Hegemonic Masculinity

The condition in which men are dominant and privileged, and this dominance and privilege is invisible.

Feminism

A social movement to get people to understand that gender is an organizing principle in society and to address gender-based inequalities that intersect with other forms of social identity.

Sexism

A form of prejudice that occurs when a person's sex or gender is the basis for judgment, discrimination, or other differential treatment against that person.

Sexual Harassment

"An illegal form of discrimination revolving around sexuality that can involve everything from inappropriate jokes to sexual ""barter"" (where victims feel the need to comply with sexual requests for fear of losing their job) to outright sexual assault."

Emotional Labor

Managing emotions and their outward expression to meet the expectations of a job, especially in service sector work and female-dominated occupations.

Glass Ceiling

An invisible limit of women's climb up the occupational ladder.

Glass Escalator

The accelerated promotion of men to the top of a work organization, especially in feminized jobs.

Sex Role Theory

Talcott Parson's theory that men and women perform their sex roles as breadwinners and wives/mothers, respectively, because the nuclear family is the ideal arrangement in modern societies, fulfilling the function of reproducing workers.

Intersectionality

The idea that it is critical to understand the interplay between social identities such as race, class, gender, ability status, and sexual orientation, even though many social systems and institutions (such as the law) try to treat each category on its own.

Matrix of Domination

Intersecting domains of oppression that create a social space of domination and, by extension, a unique posiiton within that space based on someone's intersectional identity along the multiple dimensions of gender, age, race, class, sexuality, location, and so on.

Bisexual

An individual who is sexually attracted to both genders/sexes.

Homosexual

The social identity of a person who has sexual attraction to and/or relations with people of the same sex.

Heteronormativity

The idea that heterosexuality is the default or normal sexual orientation from which other sexualities deviate.

Race

A group of people who share a set of characteristics--typicall, but not always, physical ones-- and are said to share a common bloodline.

Racism

The belief that members of separate races possess different and unequal traits.

Ethnicity

One's ethnic quality or affiliation. It is voluntary, self-defined, nonhierarchical, fluid and multiple, and based on cultural differences, not physcial ones per se.

Symbolic Ethnicity

A nationality, not in the sense of carrying the rights and duties of citizenship but in the sense of identifying with a past or future nationality. For later generations of White ethnics, it is something not constraining but easily expressed, with no risks of stigma and all the pleasures of feeling like an individual.

Scientific Racism

Nineteeth-century theories of race that characterize a period of feverish invfestigation into the origins, explanations, and classifications of race.

Ethnocentrism

The belief that one's own culture or group is superior to others and the tendency to view all other cultures from the perspective of one's own.

Ontological Equality

The philosophical and religious notion that all people are created equal.

Social Darwinism

"The application of Darwinian ideas to society --namely, the evolutionary ""survival of the fittest."""

One-Drop Rule

"The belief that ""one drop"" of Black blood makes a person Black, a concept that evolved from U>S> laws forbidding miscegenation."

Critical Race Theory

A legal theory that asserts that race is not natural but rather is socially constructed in order to oppress nonwhites and that racism is inherent in U.S. legal institutions.

Racialization

The formation of a new racial identity by drawing ideaological boundaries of difference around a formerly unnoticed group of people.

Prejudice

Thoughts and feeling about an ethnic or racial group, which leads to preconceived notions and judgments (often negative) about the group.