Learn: Marx, Wallerstein, and Weber: Key Sociological Concepts

Historical materialism

Marx: Explaining historical change through how people produce their livelihood and organize relations of production.

Productive forces

Marx: The tools, technology, skills, and labor capacities used in production.

Relations of production

Marx: Social relationships organizing production, especially ownership and the relationship between owners and workers.

Means of production

Marx: Resources used to produce goods, such as land, factories, machinery, and tools.

Economic base

Marx: The productive forces and relations of production that organize material life.

Superstructure

Marx: Legal, political, and ideological arrangements connected to the economic base.

Bourgeoisie

Marx: The capitalist class that owns the means of production and employs wage labor.

Proletariat

Marx: Workers who lack sufficient means of production and depend on selling their labor power.

Labor power

Marx: A person's capacity to work, which workers sell to employers for wages.

Capital

Marx: Value used to generate more value through a social relationship involving control over production and wage labor.

Surplus value

Marx: Value workers create beyond the value of their labor power, appropriated by capitalists.

Exploitation

Marx: Capitalists' appropriation of surplus value produced by workers; it can occur even when workers receive high wages.

Constant capital

Marx: Value invested in means of production consumed during production; it transfers existing value to the product.

Variable capital

Marx: Value invested in labor power, whose use creates new value.

Ideology

Marx: Ideas connected to social and material relationships that can obscure domination or present historical arrangements as natural.

Praxis

Marx: Practical activity through which people transform social circumstances and themselves.

Commodification

The process through which an activity, object, or relationship becomes organized as a commodity for exchange.

Nominal wages

Marx: The money amount workers receive.

Real wages

Marx: The goods and services workers can purchase with their wages.

Relative wages

Marx: Workers' share of newly created value relative to capital's share; real wages can rise while relative wages fall.

C-M-C

Marx: Selling a commodity for money to purchase another commodity; exchange serves consumption.

M-C-M′

Marx: Advancing money to obtain commodities and return with more money; exchange serves accumulation.

World-system

Wallerstein: An interconnected division of labor spanning multiple political territories.

Capitalist world-economy

Wallerstein: A profit-oriented economic system spanning multiple states rather than unified under one political authority.

Core

Wallerstein: Positions concentrating relatively profitable production, stronger states, and greater control over surplus.

Periphery

Wallerstein: Subordinate positions associated with weaker states, less profitable production, and the transfer of surplus toward the core.

Semi-periphery

Wallerstein: Intermediate positions combining core and peripheral characteristics and helping stabilize the world-system.

Unequal exchange

Wallerstein: Exchange relationships through which unequal economic and political power enable surplus transfers toward dominant positions.

Relational underdevelopment

Wallerstein: Subordination produced through integration into an unequal world economy, rather than simply an earlier stage of development.

Reproduction of labor power

The daily and generational maintenance of workers' capacity to work through food, care, rest, education, and raising children.

Unpaid reproductive labor

Feminist Marxist approaches: Unpaid work, such as caregiving and housework, that maintains workers and future generations.

Historical institutionalism

Weberian tradition: Explaining outcomes through historically specific institutions, power relationships, and their interactions over time.

Institution

Formal rules or informal norms that structure conduct and distribute opportunities, resources, or power.

Teleology

An explanation that treats history as moving toward a predetermined endpoint.

Anti-teleology

Weberian principle: History has no inevitable destination; outcomes depend on particular historical processes and combinations.

Contingency

The dependence of an outcome on particular circumstances and combinations that could have been different.

Unintended consequences

Outcomes of action that actors did not intend, such as religious discipline helping generate capitalist conduct.

Spirit of capitalism

Weber: A disciplined orientation treating methodical work and profit-making as duties or ends in themselves.

Calling

Weber: The understanding of ordinary occupational work as a morally or religiously significant duty.

Predestination

Calvinist doctrine discussed by Weber: God has already determined who will be saved; people cannot earn salvation through their actions.

Inner-worldly asceticism

Weber: Disciplined restraint and devotion to a calling within everyday life, rather than withdrawal from the world.

Verstehen

Weber: Interpretive understanding of the subjective meanings people attach to their actions.

Ideal type

Weber: An analytical model emphasizing selected features of a phenomenon to help compare and explain actual cases.

Class situation

Weber: A person's economic opportunities or life chances arising from their position in markets.

Status group

Weber: A group distinguished by shared social honor, lifestyle, and boundaries of membership.

Social closure

The restriction of access to a group, resource, or opportunity to protect members' advantages.

Party

Weber: An organized group seeking to influence social action or acquire power.

Power

Weber: The probability of carrying out one's will in a social relationship despite resistance.

Domination

Weber: The probability that a command will be obeyed by a given group.

Legitimacy

Belief that an authority or institutional arrangement is valid or justified; it does not mean the analyst endorses it.

Rational-legal authority

Weber: Authority accepted because people believe in valid rules and the right of authorized officeholders to issue commands.

Traditional authority

Weber: Authority accepted because people believe in the sanctity of established customs and customary rulers.

Charismatic authority

Weber: Authority accepted because followers believe in a leader's exceptional qualities or mission.

Routinization of charisma

Weber: The transformation of unstable personal charisma into more enduring offices, rules, or traditions.

Bureaucracy

Weber: Organization through specialized offices, hierarchy, written records, qualifications, and impersonal rules.

Rationalization

Weber: The growing organization of conduct through calculation, formal procedures, predictability, and efficiency.

Iron cage

Weber: The constraint individuals experience within increasingly rationalized capitalist and bureaucratic systems.

Political alliance networks

Wimmer: Connected groups whose cooperation and relative power shape institutional rules and their transformation.

Distributional effects

The unequal allocation of resources, opportunities, prestige, or power produced by institutional arrangements.

Endogenous change

Change generated by processes within an institution or system.

Exogenous change

Change prompted by developments or shocks originating outside the institution or system being analyzed.

Displacement

Mahoney and Thelen: Existing institutional rules are replaced by new ones.

Layering

Mahoney and Thelen: New rules are added alongside or on top of existing rules, gradually altering the institution.

Drift

Mahoney and Thelen: Existing rules have changing effects because their environment changes without corresponding institutional adjustment.

Conversion

Mahoney and Thelen: Existing rules are interpreted or enacted differently and redirected toward new purposes.

Veto possibilities

Mahoney and Thelen: Opportunities for defenders of existing institutions to block proposed changes.

Institutional discretion

Mahoney and Thelen: Room to interpret, implement, or enforce institutional rules in different ways.

Insurrectionaries

Mahoney and Thelen: Actors who openly mobilize to replace existing institutions or rules.

Parasitic symbionts

Mahoney and Thelen: Actors who depend on an institution while exploiting it in ways that undermine its purpose or operation.

Subversives

Mahoney and Thelen: Actors who comply with existing rules while pursuing longer-term institutional transformation.

Opportunists

Mahoney and Thelen: Actors with ambiguous commitments to institutional continuity who exploit openings to advance their interests.

Social fact

Durkheim: A collective way of acting, thinking, or feeling that exists beyond individual manifestations and can constrain individuals.

Sui generis

Durkheim: Existing as a distinct kind of reality; society has properties that cannot be reduced to individual psychology.

Social solidarity

Durkheim: The bonds that connect individuals to one another and to collective life.

Division of labor

The specialization and distribution of tasks; Smith emphasizes productivity, Marx domination, and Durkheim solidarity.

Mechanical solidarity

Durkheim: Cohesion based on similarity, shared beliefs, and a strong common moral life.

Organic solidarity

Durkheim: Cohesion based on interdependence among people performing different specialized activities.

Collective conscience

Durkheim: The shared beliefs and sentiments that form a society's common moral life.

Repressive law

Durkheim: Law that punishes offenses against collective moral sentiments.

Restitutive law

Durkheim: Law that restores or regulates relationships among differentiated people and activities.

Social integration

Durkheim: The extent to which people are attached to groups, shared purposes, and collective life.

Social regulation

Durkheim: The social rules and limits that organize conduct, expectations, and desires.

Anomie

Durkheim: Inadequate or disrupted social regulation, leaving expectations and desires insufficiently bounded.

Egoistic suicide

Durkheim's sociological type associated with insufficient social integration.

Altruistic suicide

Durkheim's sociological type associated with excessive social integration, in which the collective outweighs individual existence.

Anomic suicide

Durkheim's sociological type associated with insufficient or disrupted social regulation.

Fatalistic suicide

Durkheim's sociological type associated with excessive social regulation and oppressive constraint.

Collective representations

Durkheim: Shared symbols and categories through which people understand and organize reality.

Sacred

Durkheim: Things set apart and protected by special prohibitions, beliefs, and practices.

Profane

Durkheim: The ordinary domain distinguished from things designated as sacred.

Ritual

Patterned practice relating people to sacred objects or collective symbols and renewing social relationships.

Collective effervescence

Durkheim: Intensified shared emotion generated through collective gatherings and practices.

Moral community

Durkheim: People united through shared beliefs, practices, and obligations.

Functionalism

An approach examining how social arrangements contribute to the maintenance or reproduction of a larger social system.

Function

The contribution or effect of a practice or institution in relation to a larger system; it need not be consciously intended.

Social role

Parsons: Shared expectations governing the conduct of someone occupying a particular social position.

Socialization

The process through which people learn social expectations, values, and ways of acting.

Internalization

Parsons: The process through which cultural values and expectations become part of a person's own motivations and orientations.

Institutionalization

Parsons: The establishment of shared expectations as stable roles and patterns of social relationships.

Sanction

A positive or negative response that encourages conformity or discourages violations of expectations.