Introduction to Soc EXAM

Sociology

Is the scientific study of human activity in society. More specifically, it is the study of the social forces that affect, influence or pressure people to interact, respond, or think in certain ways. Emerged as a reaction from the Industrial Revolution, an ongoing and evolving social force.

Sociological Imagination

A quality of mind that allows people to grasp how remote and impersonal social forces shape their life story or biography.

Historical Development of Sociology

Sociology emerged as a formal scholarly discipline in the 19th century. The term sociology was first introduced by Joseph Sieyes and later reintroduced by Auguste Comte.

Social Darwinism

The study and implementation of various pseudoscientific theories and societal practices that purport to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economics and politics.

Herbert Spencer

Social Darwinism held that certain human beings would become more powerful than others because of their race or group.

Quantitative Research Methods

Statistical data, comparative methods, and field methods to study social relationships and cultural institutions.

Qualitative Research Methods

Several techniques, including interviews, focus groups, and observation.

Bourgeoisie

The profit driven owners of the means of production.

Proletariats

Those individuals who must sell their labor to the bourgeoisie.

Society

A group of people who live in a definable community and share the same cultural components.

August Comte

A French philosopher known as the father of positivism, game sociology its name in 1839. Positivism holds that valid knowledge about the world can be derived only from a sense of experience or knowing the world through the senses of sight, touch, smell, and hearing, and making empirical associations based on these observations. 

Globalization

The ever-increasing flow of goods, servies, money, people, technology, information, and other cultural items across national borders.

Glocalization

The process by which a locality embraces, adapts, to, or resists a product, an idea, a way of behaving that has come to them in the cross-national flow. It is also something unique to locality that is launched on the path toward globalization.

Industrial Revolution

The name given to the changes in the way people produced goods, grew food, got from one place to another, extracted resources from the earth, and communicated and interacted with one another.

Emile Durkheim

French sociologist focused on the division of labor and solidarity. The division of labor is the way a society divides and assigns day to day tasks needed to produce goods and deliver services. 

Conflict Theory/Karl Marx

German philosopher who believed in Conflict Theory: that those who have perpetually tried to increase their wealth at the expense and suffering of those who have not.

Urbanization

 A transformative process where people move away from sparsely populated rural environments to densely populated urban areas.

Symbolic Interaction Theory

A framework for building theories that see society as a product of everyday human interactions.

Max Weber & Rationalization

A German scholar that made it his task to analyze how the Industrial Revolution affected social actions.

Functional Theory

 Functionalism emphasizes how various social institutions work together to meet the needs of a society.

Latent Functions

When a part’s effect is unintended, not anticipated, or unexpected.

Manifest Functions

When a part’s effect on social order is something is expected, anticipated, or intended.

Hawthorne Effect

A phenomenon in which research subjects alter their behavior when they learn they are being observed.

W.E.B. Dubois

 Explored double consciousness and racial barriers.

Social Lenses

How we view a situation, others and the world around us.

Jane Addams & Social Work

Co-founder of Hull House, focused on social work.

Debunking

Seeing beyond taken-for-granted assumptions of social reality.

Theory

Strengthened or weakened by new evidence.

Anthropocene

An unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth's history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet's climate and ecosystems.

Anomie

Loss of societal values leading to disconnection.

Culture

Is an important but elusive concept that consists of material and nonmaterial components.

Language

Important significant symbols, words allow us to communicate and convey meanings.

Symbols

And kind of physical or phenomena words, objects, sounds, feelings, odors, gestures, behaviors to which people assign names and meanings.

Values

General, shared concepts of what is good, right, appropriate, worthwhile, and important with regard to conduct, appearance, and states of being.

Cultural Universals

Things all cultures have in common.