Exam I

If one wants to understand why people do the things they do, one must take into account not only what is really going on in a particular situation but also what people think is going on.

Law of Three Stages:

1.    Theological: Religious leaders are the major source of knowledge

2.    Metaphysical: People turned to philosophers for guidance

3.    Positive: Knowledge would be based on scientific principles

Mechanical Solidarity: People in the community functioning together as a simple machine.

People Shared idea’s, values and goals

A “means to an end” relationship (e.g., hiring a tutor to help you pass an exam).

Interested in the fact that human behavior was becoming more rational

Non-rational: behavior that was not especially geared to achieving some goal but was simply to be experienced or appreciated for itself.  (non-calculating).

Bourgeoisie: People who owned the means of production—specifically, the owners of the factories that produced the goods sold and distributed throughout society.

Individualism: The Idea that in life people pursue their own ends, that people follow their own ideas.

C.E. Mills, “ Without the guidance of the sociological imagination, we are tempted to solve all problems by treating individuals.”

Social Imagination: The ability to look beyond the personal troubles of individuals to see the public issues of social structure, that is that social forces operating in the larger society. 

”Understanding social things involves identifying their manifest functions which are intended and obvious, as well as their latent functions, which are unintended and frequently hidden”

positions in the social structure that individuals achieve for themselves (murderer, college graduate, doctor, etc.)

Role Strain: Experienced when one cannot keep up with all the demands of a particular role.

a clash in the demands of roles. (example a judges daughter is brought to court, the role of judge and parent would clash).

Statuses are not weighed the same. A sociology professor is referred to as a female sociology professor—The female’s sex becomes her master status at this point because it is what is weighed heaviest.

Group aggregate: One or more other individuals with whom we share some sense of identity or common goals and with whom we interact within a specific social structure

(students in a class room).

Primary group: How humans are socialized—the group of how they are taught to be functioning members of social groups.

Secondary Group: what’s important is your status not your personal characteristics. 

groups of people band together to achieve a specific goal and formalize their relationships with one another --generally operate under specific status positions, president, vice president, worker bee’s

Ideal Types: pure form of bureaucracy, its what’s left when you strip away all the parts of an organization that are not necessary to it being a bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy: Area’s of authority are delegated to individuals

Goal displacement:  When individuals lose sight of their ultimate purposes and the process becomes more important than the outcome.

Material Culture: Includes all those things that humans make or adapt from the raw stuff of nature: computers, houses, forks, bulldozers, jewelry, telephones, socks, etc.

Nonmaterial culture: made up of intangible things—such as, truth & beauty, right & wrong, what’s funny and what’s not. 5 basic categories: Symbols, language, norms, values, and beliefs.

Symbols:  Anything that represents something else to more than one person

Language: An organized set of symbols

Norms: Rules about behavior

Folkways: represent casual norms; violations are not taken seriously.

Mores/Mos:  These are anything but casual. Mores reflect important rules, such as the norms against unjustified assaults on other persons.

Taboos: There are norms that are so deeply held that even the thought of violating them upsets people. For example, in the United States, there is a taboo against eating human flesh.

Formal Sanction: Official responses from specific organizations within society, such as the government, universities, or churches.

Informal Sanction: Come from individuals in a social group; can include being laughed at, given the cold shoulder, or to be made to feel humiliated.

Values: general or abstract ideas about what is good and desirable, as opposed to what is bad and undesirable, in a society.

Beliefs: People’s ideas about what is real and what is not real; beliefs then, have to do with what people accept as factual.

Ideology: Knowledge that has been distorted by social, economic, or political interests., Marx believed so the upper classes used ideology to maintain their economic superiority.

Social institutions: An institution is a set of ideas about the way a specific important social need ought to be addressed. Institutional responses to problems tend to be justified by important social values and beliefs, and they tend to be slow to change. An institution, then, is part of nonmaterial culture.

Cultural diffusion: the process by which cultural things are adopted: (Americans got sushi bars from the Japanese’s culture, and the Japanese culture got baseball from the American culture.)

Cultural leveling: AS cultural diffusion increases, the differences between cultures decrease. (E.g. when walking down the street in Moscow, London, New York, and you see someone eating a Big Mac while talking on their cell phone you would experience cultural leveling).

Subculture: a group of people whose values, language, dress, and so on set them apart from the larger society.

Counterculture:a subculture set apart from the larger culture, they are perceived to threaten the parent culture, (E.g., KKK, it proclaims a racism that most Americans find repugnant)

Age, Art, Collective behavior, culture, deviance, economy, education, environment, family and sex, gender, health care, law, mass media, military, political institutions race and ethnicity, religion, small groups,

focus on broader social phenomena, such as whole social structures, systems, and institutions. Macro-sociologist might look at the impact of economic change on divorce and birth rates in a particular society.