AP/SOCI 1010 A: Sociological Imagination, Classical, and Contemporary Social Theories

Practice vocabulary flashcards for AP/SOCI 1010 A covering core concepts, historical emergence, classical theorists (Durkheim, Weber, Marx, Du Bois, Mead, Goffman), contemporary theories (Gramsci, Feminism, Foucault, Queer Theory, Said), and exam review themes.

Sociology

The science of society, a term coined by Auguste Comte in 1838 amidst the Scientific, Political, and Industrial Revolutions.

Positivism

A legacy of the Scientific Revolution asserting that an objective and knowable reality exists, all sciences will grow more alike over time, and scientific inquiry has no room for value judgments.

Anti-Positivism

A methodological position asserting that reality does not pre-exist its representation, the social world operates at multiple scales requiring different methodologies, and the stark fact/value distinction must be rejected.

Scientific Revolution

A period from approximately the 14th to 17th century and beyond that challenged the authority of the Church by using systematic observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and replicability to understand the natural and social worlds.

Political Revolutions (18th Century)

Major upheavals including the American (1775–1783), French (1789–1794), and Haitian (1791–1804) Revolutions that unraveled divinely ordained hierarchies, promoted human equality, and established legacies of social justice and secular inquiry.

Industrial Revolution

A transformation from the mid-18th to late-19th centuries marked by technological changes (steam engine, cotton gin), enclosure of the commons, increased wage labor, factory growth, and urbanization.

Canadian Sociology

A national sociological framework characterized by regionalism (East/West, Quebec), a focus on political economy, a radical and feminist perspective, and the Canadianization movement.

The Sociological Imagination

A sociological quality of mind conceptualized by C. Wright Mills to inquire into the dynamic relationship between individual biography and history.

Personal Troubles

Private problems experienced by individuals within their immediate personal milieu, which C. Wright Mills linked to broader public social issues.

Social Issues

Matters that transcend personal environments and relate to the historical formation, structure, and institutional arrangements of a society as a whole.

Seeing the General in the Particular

Peter Berger's perspective in Invitation to Sociology encouraging sociologists to identify broader social patterns operating within the lives and behaviors of specific individuals.

Seeing the Strange in the Familiar

Peter Berger's humanistic approach urging individuals to cultivate curiosity and astonishment by questioning everyday, taken-for-granted social arrangements.

Agency

The assumption that individuals possess the capacity to act independently, make choices, and alter or shape their lives.

Structure

The relatively stable social arrangements, opportunities, and constraints that organize society and shape individual lives over time.

Social Structure

An uneven force field composed of processes that produce and rely on differences, which become so normalized that they are perceived as objective facts.

The Enlightenment

An intellectual movement asserting that the individual is naturally free, autonomous, and logically prior to society, and that social institutions can be understood and reconstituted through human reason.

Conservative Reaction

A counter-Enlightenment perspective asserting that society produces the individual, institutions have independent existence, social change produces pathology, and the family is the proper unit of analysis.

Functionalism

A classical theoretical perspective viewing society as an integrated system of functional parts seeking consensus and stability, often using biological metaphors and treating conflict as abnormal.

Conflict Theory

A sociological perspective asserting that society is comprised of competing groups with conflicting values and scarce resources, treating power and conflict as natural and enduring features of social life.

Symbolic Interactionism

A microsociological perspective focusing on how individuals act based on the meanings they assign to reality, which are learned, interpreted, and negotiated through ongoing social interaction.

Collective Conscience

Émile Durkheim's term for the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average person in a society, existing independently of individuals, shaping their actions, and outliving them.

Social Facts

Émile Durkheim's concept of forces, rules, and customs external to the individual that exert coercive power over their behavior, functioning as expressions of the collective conscience.

Mechanical Solidarity

Durkheim's term for social cohesion in societies with a low division of labor, where individuals share similar experiences, perform similar tasks, and deliberately choose to cooperate.

Organic Solidarity

Durkheim's term for social cohesion in modern societies characterized by a complex division of labor, where interdependence stems from individuals relying on the specialized services of others.

Rational Behavior

Max Weber's concept of social action guided by means-end thinking and directed toward achieving calculable, narrow goals.

Nonrational Behavior

Max Weber's concept of social action that is not calculated or driven by means-end considerations.

Double Consciousness

W.E.B. Du Bois's concept describing the distinct psychological experience and double vision of African Americans navigating identity as simultaneously American and Black.

Analysis of Whiteness

W.E.B. Du Bois's critical approach examining race not solely as oppression experienced by minorities, but as a racial formation that actively generates privilege.

The "I"

George Herbert Mead's concept of the spontaneous, impulsive, creative, and unsocialized dimension of the human self.

The "Me"

George Herbert Mead's concept of the socialized self that internalizes societal norms and expectations to monitor, evaluate, and regulate the actions of the "I".

Dramaturgical Analysis

Erving Goffman's theoretical framework viewing the self as an ongoing series of reflective theatrical performances enacted before social actors who interpret and adjust their conduct.

Base

Karl Marx's term for the economic foundation of society, which consists of the forces of production and the relations of production.

Superstructure

Karl Marx's term for the non-economic dimensions of society—including culture, religion, law, politics, and ideology—that are shaped by and reflect the economic base.

Forces of Production

The technological, physical, and human resources utilized to produce goods within a society, such as raw materials, machinery, tools, knowledge, and labor.

Relations of Production

The social relationships and institutional arrangements that organize economic production, including division of labor, compensation, and the power dynamic between owners and workers.

Marxist View of Ideology

The perspective that ruling-class ideas detach from their material origins to present themselves as universal truths, creating an illusion or false consciousness that conceals contradictions.

Hegemony

Antonio Gramsci's concept of ruling dominance achieved through a combination of force and consent, wherein the ruling class offers concessions and incorporates resistance to define common sense.

Institutions of Coercion

State-operated apparatuses in Gramsci's framework—such as the military, police, and legal system—that enforce compliance through direct or threatened force.

Institutions of Consent

Civil society organizations in Gramsci's theory—such as mass media, religious bodies, and schools—that actively manufacture willing ideological agreement among the public.

First-Wave Feminism

A feminist movement from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries that fought for formal legal and political rights, including access to higher education, property ownership, and the right to vote.

The Persons Case (1929)

A pivotal Canadian legal decision ruling that women were legally recognized as "persons," making them eligible for appointment to the Canadian Senate.

Second-Wave Feminism

A mid-20th-century feminist movement that organized against workplace discrimination and the sexual division of labor, established Women's Studies, and exposed the gendered production of knowledge.

Third-Wave Feminism

A feminist movement emerging in the 1980s that rejected the homogenous category of "woman," examined how racism, elitism, and heterosexism intersect, and incorporated poststructuralist thought.

Intersectionality

A theoretical concept associated with thinkers such as bell hooks analyzing how multiple axes of social identity—such as race, gender, class, and sexuality—simultaneously structure oppression.

Discourse

Michel Foucault's concept of an organized system of knowledge that sets rules for what can be said, how it can be said, and who can speak, thereby constituting the very objects it describes.

Sovereign Power

The conventional view of power as a top-down, centralized capacity possessed by authorities that externally limits individual freedom and distorts human truth.

Disciplinary Power

Michel Foucault's understanding of power as a bottom-up, relational web operating through institutions, self-regulation, and normalization to produce docile bodies.

Queer Theory

A theoretical framework emerging as a critique of fixed sexual identities that deconstructs the normal/abnormal binary and rejects equating sexual acts with fixed identities.

Orientalism

Edward Said's 1978 concept describing the Western discourse that constructs an essentialized, binary opposition between the modern/rational West and the traditional/irrational East.

Macrosociology and Microsociology

Two foundational sociology typologies: macrosociology analyzes wide-scale structural systems, institutions, and historical shifts, while microsociology focuses on small-scale interpersonal dynamics.