Twenty flashcards introducing the foundations of sociological thought. Covers the sociological imagination, the three major theoretical perspectives, the contributions of Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Mead and Bourdieu, plus essential concepts including socialisation...
Twenty flashcards introducing the foundations of sociological thought. Covers the sociological imagination, the three major theoretical perspectives, the contributions of Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Mead and Bourdieu, plus essential concepts including socialisation, status and role, stratification, social mobility, deviance theories and globalisation. Suited to A-Level Sociology, AP and introductory undergraduate courses.
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The systematic study of human society, social relationships, institutions and the patterned ways in which social structures shape individual behaviour.
The capacity to see how personal troubles connect to wider public issues and historical forces — linking individual biography to social structure.
Associated with Durkheim and Parsons, it views society as an interdependent system whose institutions each perform functions maintaining stability and social order.
Durkheim's term for a state of normlessness in which social norms weaken or conflict, leaving individuals without moral guidance and raising rates of deviance and suicide.
Society is structured by class conflict over the means of production between the bourgeoisie (owners) and the proletariat (workers), driving historical change.
The Marxist idea that the working class holds beliefs, spread through ideology, that misrepresent their real interests and so sustain their own exploitation.
Developed by Mead and Blumer, it studies how people create and negotiate shared meaning through symbols and everyday face-to-face interaction.
Empathetic understanding — interpreting social action by grasping the subjective meanings and motives that actors themselves attach to it.
That Calvinist values of hard work, thrift and worldly asceticism provided the cultural conditions that enabled modern rational capitalism to emerge.
Structure refers to the patterned social arrangements that constrain behaviour. Agency is the individual's capacity to act independently and make free choices.
Values are broad cultural ideals; norms are specific rules for behaviour; mores are norms carrying strong moral significance whose violation causes outrage.
Primary socialisation occurs in early childhood within the family. Secondary socialisation occurs later through school, peers, workplace and media.
Ascribed status is assigned involuntarily, such as by birth, age or sex. Achieved status is earned through personal effort and choice.
Role conflict is tension between the demands of two different roles. Role strain is tension between competing demands within a single role.
The hierarchical arrangement of a society into layers with unequal access to wealth, power and prestige, typically persisting across generations.
Movement between positions in the stratification system. Intragenerational mobility occurs within one person's lifetime; intergenerational mobility occurs between parents and children.
The non-financial assets — tastes, language, credentials and cultural knowledge — that confer social advantage and help reproduce class inequality through education.
Deviance is not inherent in an act but results from society's reaction to it; being labelled deviant can become a master status leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Deviance arises when society promotes success goals but denies legitimate means of achieving them, producing adaptations such as innovation, ritualism, retreatism and rebellion.
Ethnocentrism judges another culture by one's own standards. Cultural relativism seeks to understand a culture on its own terms without judgement.
