Foundations
AI technology exists, but laws and ethics around it haven't caught up yet. Chapter 3 calls this gap between material and nonmaterial culture this.
What is culture lag?
Max Weber said bureaucracies share four characteristics. Name at least two of them.
What are hierarchy of authority, division of labor, explicit rules, and impersonality?
Wallerstein's world systems theory places every country into one of these three categories based on economic power.
What are core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral nations?
Durkheim said religion divides the world into these two categories — one referring to ordinary everyday life, the other to things that inspire wonder and feel connected to the divine.
What are the profane and the sacred?
Talcott Parsons' concept from Chapter 19 — the set of expectations placed on sick people, including following doctor's orders, trying to get well, and being temporarily excused from normal responsibilities.
What is the sick role?
In research, this is the variable the researcher manipulates; the other is the one they measure as a result.
What is the independent variable and the dependent variable?
When bystanders fail to help in an emergency because they each assume someone else will step in, responsibility gets spread across the group. This is called ___ .
What is diffusion of responsibility? (the bystander effect)
Judging another culture's practices as inferior based purely on the standards of your own culture — the opposite of cultural relativism.
What is ethnocentrism?
Karl Marx described religion this way — arguing it keeps the poor satisfied with suffering and preserves the status quo.
What is "the opium of the people"?
The large-scale movement of people from rural areas into cities — a process that has accelerated globally since the Industrial Revolution and is covered in Chapter 20.
What is urbanization?
A group that has its own identity but still participates in mainstream society vs. a group that actively rejects and opposes mainstream society's values.
What is a subculture vs. a counterculture?
Sutherland's theory that deviant behavior is learned through close relationships with others who engage in and approve of it, just like any other learned behavior.
What is differential association theory?
Pierre Bourdieu's term for the cultural knowledge, vocabulary, and social awareness that upper-class families pass down — and that schools systematically reward.
What is cultural capital?
Weber's argument that Protestant values — hard work, saving money, avoiding excess — helped fuel the rise of capitalism in Europe.
What is the Protestant ethic?
In Merton's strain theory, this adaptation describes someone who has given up on achieving success but still shows up and follows the rules — just going through the motions.
What is ritualism?
Mead's term for the internalized voice of society as a whole — the generalized expectations of everyone around you that shape how you see yourself.
What is the generalized other?
George Ritzer's concept that society is being reorganized around efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control - modeled after fast food chains.
What is McDonaldization?
Chapter 12 introduced this concept for the unpaid domestic labor — cooking, cleaning, childcare — that falls disproportionately on women even after they finish a full paid workday.
What is the second shift?
Conflict theorists argue this school practice — sorting students into different academic levels — reinforces class and race inequality through self-fulfilling prophecies.
What is tracking?
This concept describes how environmental hazards — landfills, factories, toxic waste sites — are disproportionately located in or near low-income and minority communities.
What is environmental racism?
When someone joins the military and goes through boot camp, their old identity is stripped away and rebuilt through this process — a type of resocialization that occurs in a total institution.
What is a degradation ceremony?
Robert Michels argued that all large organizations — even democratic ones — will inevitably come to be controlled by this.
What is a small group of elites? (Iron Rule of Oligarchy)
The wage gap widens significantly at this intersection — Latina women earn roughly 56 cents for every dollar a White man earns, even with equivalent credentials. This layered disadvantage reflects this concept.
What is intersectionality?
This type of religious organization sits between a sect and a denomination — groups like the Amish or Jehovah's Witnesses that hold distinct beliefs but are more stable than sects.
What is an established sect?
Aberle identified four types of social movements based on how much change they seek and who they target. A movement like Alcoholics Anonymous that seeks to change individuals completely falls under this type.
What is a redemptive movement?