Sociology 3e - Culture

Introduction to Sociology 3e

Culture and Society

People follow rules and standards created and maintained within their culture or group. Martial artists provide an example of visible respect for each other, even in professional fights where pre-fight animosity is common.

What is Culture?

Culture encompasses shared beliefs, values, and practices.
Society refers to people living in a definable community who share a culture.

Material vs. Nonmaterial Culture

Material Culture: The objects or belongings of a group of people.
Nonmaterial Culture: The ideas, attitudes, and beliefs of a society.
Cultural Universals: Patterns or traits globally common to all societies.

Examples of Cultural Universals

Examples of cultural universals include music, visual art, humor, and movies.

Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativism

Ethnocentrism: Evaluating another culture based on the standards of one's own culture.
Cultural Imperialism: Deliberately imposing one’s own cultural values on another culture.
Culture Shock: Personal disorientation when confronted with an unfamiliar way of life.
Cultural Relativism: Assessing a culture by its own standards.
Xenocentrism: The belief that another culture is superior to one’s own.

Values and Beliefs

Values: A culture’s standard for discerning what is good and just in society.
Beliefs: Tenets or convictions that people hold to be true.
Ideal Culture: The standards a society would like to embrace and live up to.
Real Culture: The way society really is, based on what actually occurs and exists.
Sanctions: Ways to authorize or formally disapprove of certain behaviors.
Social Control: Encouraging conformity to cultural norms.

Norms

Norms: Visible and invisible rules of conduct through which societies are structured.
Informal Norms: Casual behaviors that are generally and widely conformed to.
Formal Norms: Established, written rules.
Sociologists and cultural competency advocates resist casual associations of what is 'normal'.

Symbols and Language

Symbols: Gestures or objects with associated meanings recognized by people who share a culture.
Language: A symbolic system of communication.
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: The way people understand the world based on their form of language.

Types of Culture

High Culture: Cultural patterns of a society’s elite.
Popular Culture: Mainstream, widespread patterns among a society’s population.
Subcultures: Groups that share a specific identification, apart from a society’s majority, existing within a larger society.
Countercultures: Groups that reject and oppose society’s widely accepted cultural patterns.

Innovation and Discovery

Innovations: New objects or ideas introduced to a culture for the first time.
Discoveries: Things and ideas found from what already exists.
Inventions: Combinations of pieces of existing reality into new forms.
Culture Lag: The gap of time between the introduction of material culture and nonmaterial culture’s acceptance of it.

Diffusion and Globalization

Globalization: Integration of international trade and finance markets.
Diffusion: The spread of material and nonmaterial culture from one culture to another.

Technology Adoption Lifecycle

Sociologist Everett Rogers (1962) developed a model of the diffusion of innovations.
Consumers gradually adopt a new innovation, growing toward 100 percent usage or complete saturation within a society.
This graph is frequently used in business, sales, technology, and cultural innovations.
It can be used to describe how quickly different groups adopt (or begin using) a new technology or a new slang word.
It's a framework, not every innovation follows this exact pattern, but it provides a good foundation for discussion and prediction.