AQA A-Level Sociology: Theories and Methods Flashcards

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the core sociological concepts, theories, and key thinkers across Functionalism, Neo-Marxism, Feminist Theory, Action Theories, Postmodernism, Science, Value Freedom, and Social Policy.

Anomie

A state of normlessness identified by Émile Durkheim where traditional values break down before new ones are established during rapid social change, threatening value consensus.

Organic Analogy

Talcott Parsons' comparison of society to a biological organism, showing how interdependent social institutions function together to maintain stability and meet system needs.

AGIL Schema

Parsons' model of four basic functional prerequisites every society must meet: Adaptation (economy), Goal attainment (political leadership), Integration (social cohesion), and Latency (pattern and tension management).

Instrumental Needs

Needs identified by Parsons—specifically Adaptation and Goal attainment—that involve the practical means to an end, such as producing resources and making collective decisions.

Expressive Needs

Needs identified by Parsons—specifically Integration and Latency—that involve channelling emotions and maintaining social bonds, such as emotional support and socialisation.

Structural Differentiation

The evolutionary process described by Parsons where separate, specialised institutions develop to take over functions previously performed by a single structure as society transitions from traditional to modern.

Functional Alternatives

Robert Merton's concept that different institutions or structures can perform the same societal role, challenging Parsons' assumption of indispensability.

Functional Autonomy

Merton's view that some parts of society operate independently of one another, refuting Parsons' assumption of complete functional unity across all institutions.

Manifest and Latent Functions

Merton's distinction between deliberate, recognised outcomes of institutions (manifest) and unintended, unrecognised, or potentially harmful outcomes (latent).

Teleology (in Functionalism)

A logical criticism that functionalism explains the existence of an institution purely by its outcome or effect rather than explaining how the institution originated.

Hegemony

Antonio Gramsci's concept of ruling-class leadership and dominance maintained through cultural and ideological consent via institutions like education, media, and religion rather than through force alone.

Dual Consciousness

Gramsci's concept describing how working-class awareness is shaped simultaneously by ruling-class ideology and by their daily, practical experiences of exploitation and poverty.

Organic Intellectuals

Working-class thinkers and leaders who challenge dominant bourgeois ideology, articulate the interests of the working class, and construct a counter-hegemonic alternative.

Instrumental Reason

A concept highlighted by Theodor Adorno explaining that workers accept exploitative jobs through calculated, pragmatic choices to attain career stability and financial security rather than sheer delusion.

False Needs

Herbert Marcuse's concept referring to manufactured desires for consumer goods and lifestyles created by mass culture to sustain capitalism rather than satisfy authentic human well-being.

Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs)

Louis Althusser's term for coercive state institutions that enforce ruling-class dominance through direct force or threat of force, including the police, military, courts, and prisons.

Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs)

Althusser's term for state-linked institutions (such as education, religion, media, and the family) that reproduce capitalist dominance subtly by spreading ruling-class ideology and generating false consciousness.

Relative Autonomy

Althusser's structuralist Marxist model arguing that political and ideological levels have independence from the economic base and can influence and reinforce it through two-way causality.

Triple Systems Theory

Sylvia Walby's feminist theory showing that female oppression is caused by the combined intersection of three separate structures: patriarchy, capitalism, and racism.

Discourses

In poststructuralist feminism (Judith Butler), socially constructed ways of thinking and talking about the world through language that establish power relations and define gender identity.

Phallocentric Language

Hélène Cixous's term describing language that is male-dominated and structured around a patriarchal viewpoint of the world.

Instrumentally Rational Action

Max Weber's category of action where an individual logically calculates the most efficient means to achieve an explicit, chosen goal.

Value-Rational Action

Weber's category of action oriented towards a goal pursued for its own intrinsic worth, duty, or religious value, regardless of practical outcomes.

Looking-Glass Self

An interactionist concept describing how an individual's self-concept and identity are shaped by how they perceive others to view and judge them.

Dramaturgical Model

Erving Goffman's theatrical approach viewing social life as a stage where social actors employ impression management front stage and relax backstage.

Role Distance

Goffman's concept describing the gap between an individual's authentic self and the social roles they enact, arguing roles are loosely scripted rather than completely internalised.

Typifications

Alfred Schutz's phenomenological concept of shared, common-sense categories used by members of society to classify the social world and stabilise everyday meanings.

Natural Attitude

Schutz's term for the unquestioned, taken-for-granted assumptions and routines that members of society accept without reflection as objective reality.

Indexicality

Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodological concept that the meanings of actions and speech are inherently context-dependent and never fixed.

Reflexivity (Ethnomethodology)

Garfinkel's concept of how people employ shared common-sense knowledge to make interactions and context-dependent meanings appear clear and orderly.

Breaching Experiments

Garfinkel's research technique of deliberately breaking unspoken social rules in everyday life to reveal how individuals actively construct, sustain, and repair social order.

Duality of Structure

Anthony Giddens' principle in structuration theory that social structures and human agency are interdependent: structures shape action, while human actions continuously reproduce and transform structures.

Flexible Accumulation

David Harvey's post-Fordist concept describing contemporary capitalism's emphasis on niche markets, customized goods, rapid product turnover, and ICT-driven global production.

Disembedding

Anthony Giddens' concept of late modernity where social interactions are lifted out of local contexts and no longer require face-to-face contact across space and time.

Risk Society

Ulrich Beck's concept that late-modern society is characterized by human-made, manufactured hazards (such as global pollution and climate change) resulting from advanced technology.

Paradigm

Thomas Kuhn's concept of an agreed-upon overarching framework of shared theories, assumptions, methods, and questions that scientists accept uncritically during periods of normal science.

Open System (Realism)

Russell Keat and John Urry's term for a scientific environment (such as sociology or meteorology) where variables cannot be controlled and precise predictions cannot be made.

Value Relevance

Max Weber's concept stating that a sociologist's personal and cultural values inevitably guide the initial choice of research topic and theoretical interpretation.

Domain Assumptions

Alvin Gouldner's concept referring to underlying, culturally conditioned worldviews and basic assumptions about human nature and society held by sociologists.

Social Problems vs. Sociological Problems

Peter Worsley's distinction between social problems (public conflicts causing harm that require policy solutions) and sociological problems (any patterned social behaviour studied to understand human society).