Basics of Sociology
Participant observation is an example of this type of research method.
What are qualitative methods?
These rules of conduct specify appropriate behavior in a given range of social situations.
What are norms?
This term generally refers to material variations between groups of individuals that create variations in prosperity and power. It can be measured by income, wealth, ownership, or education, for example.
What is class?
Its defining features are rational profit seeking (per Weber), wage labor relations (per Marx), and a cooperative division of labor (per Durkheim)
Predominant form of polities in the modern era, characterized by defined territorial boundaries and citizens who understand themselves as part of a unified community.
What is the nation-state?
This refers to one's ability to move beyond individualist explanations of events and connect biography with history.
What is the sociological imagination?
The process by which we develop an awareness of culture, the unwritten rules of society, and our sense of self.
What is socialization?
The process by which racial inequalities are reproduced overtime as they get "baked in" to our social structures. One example of this is redlining.
What is institutional racism?
What is public sociology?
Tension that produces conflicting interests within societies and can lead to collective action.
What is structural strain?
One limit of this type of research method is that it can lack depth and detail, even though it can be used on a large scale
What are quantitative methods?
The socially constructed characteristics of a person's (or a group's) character that relate to who they are and what is meaningful to them.
What is identity?
Social norms dictating how men and women should behave. By following these, we learn how to "do" gender.
What are hegemonic masculinity and hegemonic femininity?
Collective action that seeks the overthrow of the government and the seizing of state power, according to Almeida.
What are revolutionary movements?
The economy’s profit-driven need to produce and sell products, resulting in an ever-expanding global demand for natural resources and cheap labor that leads to environmental degredation.
What is the treadmill of production?
Ideas that explain the way social structures work.
What are social theories?
The assumption that one set of cultural norms, values, and object is (or should be) universal.
What is ethnocentrism?
This concept helps explain how a white man's experience cannot be understood in terms independent of either his white or man identities.
What is intersectionality?
A process by which responsible institutions compound harm on original victims by prioritizing other interests and goals, according to Deb and Seamster.
What is institutional betrayal?
Bellicist theories (like that of Charles Tilly) say this occurred through war and war-making, while voluntary theories say this occurred through the need to address shared cooperative interests like agriculture projects.
What is state formation?
Relationships among people, characterized by (often invisible) patterns and directed without the conscious will of any single individual.
What is the social?
Efforts (both conscious and unconscious) to compel others to react to us in the ways we wish them to.
What is impression management?
The small network of individuals in corporate, political, and military positions that hold concentrated power in modern societies, despite claims of being democratic, according to C. Wright Mills.
What is the power elite?
What are structure (of the production process) and agency (actions of the workers themselves)?
The reason modern societies are best understood through the lens of democratic elitism, according to Weber.
What are large societies developing bureaucracies and rule by experts, instead of government direct democracy?