Sociological Developments and Concepts

Vocabulary practice flashcards generated from lecture notes on sociological history, theories, research methodologies, and cultural concepts.

Empiricism

The principle that you know things because you can interpret them with your senses.

Stand Point Epistemologies

The idea that you can only understand the experiences of yourself, which influences the way you interpret data and situations.

Chanakya

An advisor in ancient India around 300 BC who wrote the Arthashastra, advocated for political realism, government involvement in the economy, and the caste system.

Arthashastra

A text written by Chanakya centered around political realism.

Ibn Khaldun

A 14th-century thinker from an Andalusian wealthy family who wrote the Muqaddimah, studying group solidarity, conquest, government, and social decline.

Muqaddimah

An influential text written by Ibn Khaldun as an introduction to the beginning of history.

Sociological Imagination

Connecting the micro to the macro, specifically an individual's relationship to society or the system.

Emilie Durkheim

A sociologist who studied suicide through religion in the late 1800s and found that Protestants were more likely to commit suicide than Catholics.

Anomie

A feeling of normlessness or meaninglessness.

Social Facts

Things that are consistent to all societies over history, such as culture and language.

Functionalist Theories

Theories asserting that societies are largely stable and harmonious organisms made up of interrelated structures that allow them to function.

Manifest Functions

Functions created with intent by society's developers, such as public schools created to educate the population.

Latent Functions

Functions that are unintentional and occur as a result of manifest functions.

Karl Marx

A radical optimist thinker who advocated for a society that creates for need instead of money and developed conflict theory.

Conflict Theory

A theoretical framework stating that society is in conflict, has inequality, and experiences constant class struggle over the means of production.

Proletariat

The working class in Karl Marx's conflict theory.

Bourgeoisie

The owning class in Karl Marx's conflict theory.

False Consciousness

An ideology put in place whenever there is social inequality, as described by Karl Marx.

Max Weber

A radical pessimist thinker who believed conflict theory was inevitable and analyzed bureaucracy, class/status/party, and rational calculability.

Status

Prestige within Max Weber's stratification system.

Party

Political power within Max Weber's stratification system.

Rational Calculability

Elements described by Max Weber that create a society obsessed with counting.

Symbolic Interactionism

A micro-sociology framework uniquely contributed by the US that views meaning-making as a social process and reality as a social construct.

Dramaturgy

Analyzing the world in terms of its relationship to theatre and roles.

Bias (in sociological studies)

Anything that can distort the meaning of data.

Sampling Bias

A situation where the method of collecting samples distorts the data.

Falsifiability

The standard that determines if a hypothesis is scientific.

Project Camelot

An American study on how to topple foreign governments when an elected leader does not benefit the United States.

Peter Kropotkin

A Russian anarchist, sociologist, and scientist-geographer who argued that cooperation and mutual aid are fundamental drivers of social evolution.

Anne Swidler

A sociologist who argued that culture is a toolkit for living.

Ethnocentrism

Judging other cultures through the lens of your own culture.

Cultural Relativism

Judging other cultures through the values of that culture itself.

Material Culture

A physical representation of culture, such as food and clothing.

Nonmaterial Culture

values and ideas that a society values

Values

Abstractions that a culture upholds.

Norms

Beliefs on how cultural abstractions should be expressed.

Sanctions

Responses to behavior surrounding norms, which can be positive or negative.

Folkway

A minor negative consequence for violating a norm, such as picking your nose.

Mores

A more serious negative consequence for violating a norm, such as cheating on a spouse.

Laws

Norm violations serious enough for a society to punish an individual seriously.

Taboos

The most serious norm violations that cause a person to be ousted from society.

Dominant Culture

A culture that strongly shapes a society.

Sub-cultures

Cultures that exist within a dominant culture, not necessarily against it.

Counter-culture

A culture that exists to oppose the dominant culture.

Commodification

The process that transforms a counter-culture into a safer sub-culture.

Cultural Hegemony

A concept from Gramschi's prison notebooks where ideas become natural or normal to the extent that people cannot imagine alternatives.

Socialization

The process of learning the values and norms of a given culture or society.

Normative Indoctrination

A term used to point out the coercive character of socialization.

Looking Glass Self

The concept that individuals develop themselves through the perception of others they engage with.

Imitation Stage

The stage in George Herbert Mead's framework where babies copy others.

Play Stage

The stage in George Herbert Mead's framework where children practice social roles.

Game Stage

The stage in George Herbert Mead's framework where older children play organized activities like sports to understand the rules of society.

The Thomas Theorem

The principle that if one believes a thing is real, it will become real in its consequences.

Master Status

The dominant status that is most salient at a given time and can change.

Ascribed Status

Aspects of self given to an individual by others that typically cannot be changed, such as race.

Achieved Status

Aspects of self that an individual earns.

Copresence

The capacity to feel a sense of togetherness.

Saturated Self

A state where multiple articulations of the self exist across different media platforms.