Evaluating Cultures & Types of Culture
What term describes judging another culture by the standards of your own culture?
What is ethnocentrism?
It means evaluating another culture using one’s own values and norms as the standard, often leading people to see their own culture as better or more correct.
Minor violations of social norms are called _____, while serious violations that break laws are called _____.
What are informal deviance and formal deviance?
Informal deviance includes small rule-breaking like cutting in line or talking loudly in public. Formal deviance, also called crime, includes behaviors that violate written laws, such as theft or assault.
Social stratification refers to the ranking of people based on what three main factors?
What are wealth, power, and status?
Social stratification means that people are ranked in layers of society based on how much money, influence, and prestige they have. These rankings create structured inequality between groups.
Sociologists describe race as a __________ because categories of race are created and maintained by society rather than biology.
What is a social construct?
Race is based on socially created meanings about physical differences, not on any true genetic division.
The shift from producing goods to providing services and experiences is known as the rise of what kind of economy?
What is the service economy?
It refers to an economy based on jobs in areas such as healthcare, education, technology, and hospitality instead of manufacturing. This shift has created more service and care-based work rather than factory or agricultural jobs.
According to Durkheim’s Normative Theory of Suicide, what two social conditions determine how connected and regulated people feel in society?
What are social integration and social regulation?
Durkheim argued that suicide results from imbalances in how well people are integrated into their community and how strongly social rules regulate their lives. When integration or regulation is too weak or too strong, it increases the risk of deviant outcomes like suicide.
Philosopher Michel Foucault used the idea of a circular prison design to explain how modern societies use surveillance to control behavior. What is this concept called?
What is the Panopticon?
The Panopticon is a model of power where people regulate their own behavior because they believe they are constantly being watched. It represents how surveillance creates self-discipline in schools, workplaces, and prisons.
What is the belief that another culture is superior to one’s own?
What is xenocentrism?
It means believing that the customs, ideas, or products of another culture are better than those of your own, such as preferring another country’s food, fashion, or lifestyle over your own.
According to Durkheim, deviance offends society’s shared moral code called the _____, and punishment helps maintain it.
What is the collective conscience?
It means the common moral beliefs and values that unify society. When people commit deviance, they violate these shared norms, and punishment reminds others of acceptable behavior.
What is the difference between wealth and income?
Wealth is the total value of a person’s assets such as savings, property, and investments. Income is the money received from work, investments, or other sources. Wealth shows long-term financial security, while income shows short-term earnings.
What is the difference between prejudice and discrimination?
What are attitudes and actions?
Prejudice is a negative attitude or belief about a group, while discrimination is unequal treatment or behavior toward that group.
The decline of manufacturing jobs in the U.S., often due to automation and overseas relocation, is called what?
What is deindustrialization?
Deindustrialization happens as a result of capital flight, when companies close factories in wealthy countries and move production to nations with cheaper labor and lower costs. This shift leads to the loss of middle-class industrial jobs in core nations while creating new factories in developing ones.
Despite women’s growing participation in the labor force, they continue to earn less than men on average. What is this difference called, and what are two major factors that contribute to it?
What is the gender pay gap?
The gender pay gap refers to the difference in average earnings between men and women. It results partly from the historic “family-wage” system, which assumed men were primary breadwinners, and from occupational segregation and discrimination that keep women concentrated in lower-paid or part-time work.
Which federal program, managed by the FBI, collects official crime statistics from police departments across the United States?
What is the Uniform Crime Report (UCR)?
The UCR gathers data from law enforcement agencies about reported crimes like murder, robbery, and assault. It helps track long-term crime trends but only includes crimes that have been reported to police.
What’s the difference between material and nonmaterial culture? Give one example of each.
Material culture includes things you can touch, like clothing, art, and buildings. Nonmaterial culture includes values, beliefs, and rules for behavior, such as the idea of personal freedom or respect for elders.
Durkheim described two main types of justice. Punitive justice focuses on _____, while rehabilitative justice focuses on _____.
What are punishment and reform?
Punitive justice focuses on making offenders suffer to reinforce social boundaries, while rehabilitative justice focuses on understanding offenders’ circumstances and helping them change so they can rejoin society.
Explain the difference between an open and a closed stratification system.
An open system allows people to move up or down the social ladder based on achievement, such as in a class system. A closed system, like a caste system, restricts mobility and assigns people a lifelong status based on birth.
Robert Merton’s chart shows four ways prejudice and discrimination can combine. Name all four types and describe each.
What are the active bigot, timid bigot, unprejudiced discriminator, and unprejudiced nondiscriminator?
Active bigot: Holds prejudice and acts on it.
Timid bigot: Holds prejudice but does not act on it.
Unprejudiced discriminator: Claims equality but still acts with bias through behavior or policy.
Unprejudiced nondiscriminator: Rejects prejudice and treats everyone equally.
The chart shows how social pressure and context influence discrimination.
The movement of production or jobs to other countries to reduce labor costs is called what, and how has it affected American workers?
What is outsourcing?
Outsourcing happens when companies hire workers in other nations for cheaper labor or specialized skills. It has lowered production costs for corporations but led to job loss and wage stagnation for many U.S. workers.
Durkheim identified four types of suicide. Name all four and briefly describe each.
What are egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic suicide?
Egoistic: from too little social integration.
Altruistic: from too much integration, such as sacrificing oneself for a group.
Anomic: from too little social regulation, often during social upheaval.
Fatalistic: from too much regulation, such as prisoners feeling hopeless and trapped.
Unlike police-based crime data, which national survey asks individuals about their personal experiences as crime victims, even if those crimes were never reported?
What is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)?
The NCVS is conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics to measure both reported and unreported crimes. It helps estimate the “dark figure of crime” — offenses that never appear in police records.
Identify two types of culture and explain how they differ.
What are high culture, popular culture, subculture, and counterculture?
High culture includes the art, music, and traditions of society’s elite, like classical concerts or fine art galleries.
Popular culture includes everyday entertainment and trends that most people share, such as television, sports, or social media.
Subcultures are smaller groups within a larger culture that share distinct traits or interests, like skateboarders or gamers.
Countercultures are groups that reject and oppose mainstream values, such as the hippie movement in the 1960s or modern activist groups that challenge authority.
According to Robert Merton’s Strain Theory, deviance occurs when there is a gap between cultural goals and legitimate means. Name and describe the five ways individuals adapt to this strain.
What are conformists, ritualists, innovators, retreatists, and rebels?
Conformists accept society’s goals and the approved means to reach them.
Ritualists reject society’s goals but continue to follow the rules.
Innovators accept goals but use illegitimate means, such as fraud or theft, to achieve them.
Retreatists reject both goals and means and withdraw from society.
Rebels reject both and try to create new systems, such as revolutionaries seeking change.
Define the four main types of social mobility discussed in class and provide an example of each.
What are upward, downward, intergenerational, and intragenerational mobility?
Upward mobility means moving to a higher social position, such as being the first in a family to graduate college and enter a professional career.
Downward mobility means losing status, such as a family falling into poverty after job loss.
Intergenerational mobility means change in class between generations, like a janitor’s child becoming a doctor.
Intragenerational mobility means change within a person’s own lifetime, such as being promoted from worker to manager.
List and explain the main types of intergroup relations sociologists identify, from the most tolerant to the least tolerant.
What are pluralism, assimilation, amalgamation, segregation, and genocide?
Pluralism means groups keep their cultural identity while coexisting.
Assimilation means minority groups adopt the culture of the dominant group.
Amalgamation means different groups combine to form a new blended identity.
Segregation means physical or social separation between groups.
Genocide is the deliberate attempt to destroy an entire group.
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined a term for the management of emotions to meet workplace expectations. What is it called, and what does it describe?
What is emotional labor?
Emotional labor means regulating one’s emotions to fulfill a job’s requirements, such as flight attendants showing warmth or call center employees staying cheerful. It highlights how service jobs require emotional effort as part of paid work.
Sociologist Erving Goffman defined _______ as a powerful negative label that changes a person’s self-concept and social identity.
What is stigma?
Stigma is a mark of social disgrace that sets someone apart from others. It can lead people to be discredited or excluded from normal social interaction because of traits such as illness, deviance, or poverty.
Erin Cech argues that the “Passion Principle” encourages people to choose work they love rather than work that pays well. According to her research, how does this belief reinforce social inequality?
What is that it rewards those who already have privilege and resources to pursue passion without financial risk?
The Passion Principle allows people from wealthier backgrounds to take unpaid internships or low-paying “dream jobs,” while those without economic security must prioritize survival over passion. This reproduces class inequality by framing privilege as personal choice.
When technology changes faster than the beliefs, laws, or values that guide it, society experiences what phenomenon? Explain why this happens.
What is cultural lag? It happens when material culture like technology or innovation changes more quickly than nonmaterial culture like values or social norms. This causes tension or confusion as people and laws try to catch up, such as privacy rules not keeping pace with social media technology.
Labeling Theory explains how being labeled “deviant” can change a person’s behavior. What is the difference between primary deviance and secondary deviance?
What are primary and secondary deviance?
Primary deviance is the initial rule-breaking that might go unnoticed or unpunished. Secondary deviance happens after someone is labeled a deviant, when they internalize that label and continue the behavior because of how society now treats them.
What is the difference between absolute and relative measurements of poverty?
Absolute poverty measures whether people have enough income to meet basic survival needs like food and shelter. Relative poverty compares people’s income to the standard of living in their society, showing inequality between groups even if their basic needs are met.
Explain the idea of scientific racism and how it connects to the social construction of race.
It refers to the misuse of science to justify racial hierarchy, such as 19th-century claims that certain races were biologically superior. This false “science” reinforced the social construction of race and supported systems of inequality.
Describe how the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution each contributed to the development of modern capitalism.
What are the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution?
The Agricultural Revolution introduced farming, surplus food production, and trade, which allowed people to accumulate wealth and private property.
The Industrial Revolution replaced manual labor with machines like the Spinning Jenny and the steam engine, leading to mass production, factory work, and urbanization. These revolutions shifted societies from subsistence living to profit-driven economies and created the foundation for modern capitalism.
In the 20th century, many companies paid male workers a “family wage.” What did this mean, and how did it relate to the gender pay gap that persists today?
The family wage was the idea that men should earn enough to support a wife and children, reinforcing the belief that men were breadwinners and women were dependents. This system excluded women from equal pay and contributed to the gender pay gap that continues, where women are often paid less than men for similar work.
Calarco described how families provide unequal support for young adults. What’s the difference between “safety nets” and “springboards”?
What are two types of family resources that shape opportunity?
Safety nets help people recover from hardship (like paying rent after job loss), while springboards launch people forward (like funding college or unpaid internships). These differences reproduce inequality between social classes.