Socl 2001 Chapter 4 Review – Flashcards
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What type of sociology focuses on the broad features of society?
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Macrosociology (1st level)
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Who studies macrosociology, primarily?
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Conflict theorists and functionalists use this approach to analyze such things as social class and how groups are related to one another.
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What type of sociology focuses on social interaction - what people do when they come together?
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Microsociology (2nd level)
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Microsociology is the primary focus of who?
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Symbolic interactionists
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The different focuses of macro- and micro sociology yield what?
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Distinctive perspectives. Macro-, for example, studies how groups across the US interact with each other. Micro- will understand the individuals within a certain group in a certain area of the US. Both approaches, however, are necessary to understand life in society.
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To better understand human behavior, what is necessary?
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To understand social structure, the framework of society that was already laid out before birth is necessary to understand human behavior.
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What is the sociological significance of social structure?
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It guides our behavior. Even though you may have just heard amazing news, you calm down when you entered a college classroom; primary example of social structure.
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Social structure tends to do what?
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Override our personal feelings and desires
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How does social location effect social structure?
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Different groups from different social locations have logical behaviors as an outcome of where they find themselves in the social structure as your own.
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People learn behaviors and attitudes because of what?
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Because of their location in the social structure (whether those are privileged, deprived, or in between), and they act accordingly. The differences in our behavior and attitudes are not because of biology (race-ethnicity, sex, or any other supposed genetic factors), but to our location in the social structure.
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What are some major components of social structure?
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Culture, social class, social status, roles, groups, and social institutions.
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Sociologist use the term culture to refer to what?
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A group's language, beliefs, values, behaviors, and even gestures. Culture also includes the material objects that a group uses.
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What is the broadest framework that determines what kind of people we become?
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Culture
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To understand people, what must be examined?
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The social locations that those people hold
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Social class and social status are significant factors in social life. Why?
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Fundamental to what we become, they affect our orientations to life.
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What is especially significant in social class?
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Income, education, and occupation prestige. Large numbers of people who have similar amounts of income and education and who work at jobs that are roughly comparable in prestige make up a social class.
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Why is social class so important to social structure?
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Social class influences to only our behaviors, but also our ideas and attitudes.
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Statuses may carry all kinds of connotations such as what?
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Prestige, as in the case of a doctor, astronaut, or judge; little prestige, as in the case of a waiter; or looked down upon, as in the case of an ex-convict or thief.
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Statues provides guidelines for what?
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How we are to act and to feel
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Like other aspects of social structure, statuses set limits on what?
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Statuses set limits on what we can and cannot do. Because social statuses are an essential part of the social structure, all human groups have them.
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What term is used to refer to all the statuses or positions that one may occupy?
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Status set; everyone occupies several positions at the same time. For example, you may be a son or daughter, a worker, a date, and a student.
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How is your status set effected once your status changes?
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Your status set changes as your particular statuses change. For example, if you graduate from college, take a full-time job, get married, buy a home, and have children, your status set changes to include the positions of worker, spouse, homeowner, and parent.
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An ascribed status is what?
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Involuntary; you do not ask for it, nor can you choose it. At birth, you inherit ascribed statuses such as your race-ethnicity, sex, and the social class of your parents, as well as your status as female or male. Others, such as teenager or senior citizen, are related to your life course; they are given to you later in life.
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Achieved status are what?
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Voluntary; these you earn or accomplish. Achieved status can either be positive (a student, friend, spouse, or lawyer) or negative (school dropout, former friend, ex-spouse or debarred lawyer). Both college president and bank robber are achieved statuses.
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People who are pleased with their social status often want others to recognize their position. To elicit this recognition, they use what?
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Status symbols. For example, people wear weddings rings to announce their marriage status. Status symbols can also be negative, such as having the DUI sticker.
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Who uses status symbols?
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All of us.
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Why do we use status symbols?
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To announce our statuses to others and to help smooth our interactions in everyday life.
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What kind of master status is ascribed?
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Your gender. Whatever you do, people perceive you as a male or female. Other examples include race-ethnicity and age.
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What kind of master status is achieved?
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Wealth
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What are some negative examples of master statuses?
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Being handicapped
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Our statuses usually fit together fairly well, but some people have a mismatch among their statuses known as what?
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Status inconsistency (status discrepancy); a 14-year-old college student is an example.
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How are statuses similar to that of other components of social structure?
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Our statuses come with built-in norms (expectations) that guide our behavior. When statuses mesh well, we know what to expect of people. This helps social interaction to unfold smoothly.
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Status inconsistency does what in relations to our behavior?
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Status inconsistency upsets our norms and expectations.
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What do sociologists see essential to social life?
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Roles; they are already set up for you once you are born.
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What is the difference between a role and a status?
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The difference between role and status is that you occupy a status, but you play a role.
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Roles are like fences. Why?
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They allow a certain amount of freedom, but for most of us that freedom doesn't go very far. Our socialization is so thorough that we usually want to do what our roles indicate appropriate. Roles are remarkably effective at keeping people in line as well as what to do in between.
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What is the sociological significance of roles?
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They lay out what is expected of people. As individuals throughout our society perform their roles, those many roles mesh together to form society.
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The group to which we belong are what?
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The group to which we belong, just like social class, statuses, and roles, are powerful forces in our loves. By belonging to a group, we assume an obligation to affirm the group's values, interests, and norms.
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How do you remain a member in good standard in a group?
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We need to show that we share those same characteristics of that group. That means, when we belong to a group, we yield to others the right to judge our behavior - even though we may like it. Some groups have influence over only small segments of our behavior, though.
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Social institutions do what?
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They not only shape your behavior, but they even color your thoughts.
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How are social institutions influential in your life?
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By wearing the fabric of society, social institutions set the context for your behavior and orientations to life. If your social institutions were different, your orientations to life would be different.
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What gives us different views social institutions?
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Functionalist and conflict perspectives
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Why do all societies establish customary ways to meet their basic needs?
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Because the first priority of human groups is to survive. In tribal societies, some social institutions are less visible because the group meets its basic needs in informal ways.
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What is an example of societies establishing customary ways to meet their basic needs?
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A society may be too small to have people specialize in education, for example, but it will have established ways of teaching skills and ideas to the young. It may be too small to have a military, but it will have some mechanism of self-defense.
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Functionalists identify how many basic needs that each society must meet if it is to survive?
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Functionalists identify five functional requisites that each society must meet if it is to survive (Aberle 1950; Mack and Bradford 1979): replacing members, socializing new members, producing and distributing goods and services, preserving order, and providing a sense of purpose.
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Explain the functional requisite of replacing members.
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If a society does not replace its members, it cannot continue to exist. With reproduction fundamental to a society's existence and the need to protect infants and children universal, all groups have developed some version of family.
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How is family related to the function requisite of replacing members?
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The family gives the newcomer to society a sense of belonging by providing a lineage, an account of how he or she is related to others. The family also functions to control people's sex drive and to maintain orderly reproduction.
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Explain the functional requisite of socializing new members.
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Each baby must be taught what it means to be a member of the group into which it is born. To accomplish this, each human group develops devices to ensure that its newcomers learn the group's basic expectations.
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Who is the "bearer of culture," in relation to the functional requite of socializing new members?
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The family; family is essential to the process of integrating a new baby, but other social institutions, such as religion and education, also help with socializing new members.
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Explain the functional requisite of producing and distributing goods and services.
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Every society must produce and distribute basic resources (food, clothing, shelter, even education).
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What is established, consequently, as part of a group producing and distributing goods and services?
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Consequently, every society establishes an economic institution, a means of producing goods and services along with routine ways of distributing them.
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What are the two types of threats societies can face, in relation to the functional requisite of preserving order.
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An internal threat with the potential for chaos and an external threat with the possibility of attack.
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Explain how societies protect themselves from an internal threat, in relation to the functional requisite of preserving order.
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To protect themselves from internal threat, they develop ways to police themselves, ranging from informal means, such as gossip, to formal means, such as armed groups.
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Explain how societies protect themselves from an external threat, in relation to the functional requisite of preserving order.
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To defend themselves against an external conquest, they develop a means of defense, some form of the military.
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Explain the functional requisite of providing a sense of purpose?
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Every society must get people to yield self-interest in favor of the needs of the group. To convince people to sacrifice personal gains, societies instill a sense or purpose.
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How do groups instill a sense of purpose?
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Human groups develop many ways to implant such beliefs, but a primary one is religion, which attempts to answer questions about ultimate meaning.
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Who all is involved in instilling a sense of purpose in a group?
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All of a society's institutions are involved in meeting this functional requisite; the family provides one set of answers about the sense of purpose, the school another, and so on.
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How do the views of functionalists and conflict theorists agree regarding social institutions?
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Both agree that social institutions were designed originally to meet basic survival needs.
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How do the views of functionalists and conflict theorists differ regarding social institutions?
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Functionalists view social institutions are working together to meet universal humans needs, but conflict theorists regard social institutions as having a single primary purpose - to preserve the social order (safeguarding the wealthy and powerful in their positions of privilege).
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Who has used conflict theory to gain a better understanding of how social institutions affect gender relations?
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Feminist sociologists; their basic insight is that gender is also an element of social structure, not just a characteristic of individuals.
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Sociologist Emile Durkheim was interested in how societies managed to create social integration and he found the answer tin what he called what?
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Mechanical solidarity; people who perform similar tasks develop a shared way of viewing life.
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Sociologists with mechanical solidarity tolerate little what?
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Diversity in behavior, thinking or attitudes; their unity depends on sharing similar views.
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As societies get larger, they develop different kinds of work, or a what?
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A specialized division of labor; this disperses people into different interest groups where they develop different ideas about life.
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With a specialized division of labor creating interdependence, Durkheim called this new form of solidarity what?
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Organic solidarity
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How has the change to organic solidarity changed the basis for social integration?
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In centuries past, you would have had views similar to your neighbors because you lived in the same village, but no longer does social integration require this. Our separate activities contribute to the welfare of the group. The change from mechanical to organic solidarity allows our society to tolerate a wide diversity of orientations to life and still merman to work as a whole.
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Ferdinand Tonnies analyzed a fundamental shift in relationships and created two terms called what?
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Gemeinschaft meaning "intimate community" and Gesellschaft meaning "impersonal association."
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How did Tonnies use the term Gemeinschaft?
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To describe village life, the type of society in which everyone knows everyone else.
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How did Tonnies use the term Gesellschaft?
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He noted that society was changing from the village life. The personal ties, kinship connections, and lifelong friendships that he had come to know in his childhood were being replaced by short-term relationships, individual accomplishments, and self-interest.
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What do the terms Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft, mechanical solidarity, and organic solidarity have in common?
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They all support the notion that the world is changing from a community in which people were united by close ties and shared ideals and feelings to an anonymous association built around impersonal, short-term contacts. They indicate that as societies change, so do people's orientations to life.
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What's the sociological point to the world changing to a more impersonal style of life?
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The sociological point is that social structure sets the context for what we do, fell, and think, and ultimately, then, for the kind of people we become.
