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Sociology1chpters5678

Terms

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Role
The behavior expected of a status in relationship to another status.
Role strain
A predicament in which the role a person enacting includes contradictory or conflicting expectations.
Bureaucracy
An organization that uses the most efficient means to achieve a valued goal.
Ascribed characteristics
Attributes that people possess at birth, develop over time, or possess through no effort or fault of their own.
Semiperipheral economies
Economies characterized by moderate wealth (but extreme inequality) and moderate diversification. Semiperipheral economies exploit peripheral economies and are, in turn, exploited by core economies.
McDonaldization of society
"The process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world"
Life chances
A critical set of potential social advantages including the chance to stay alive during the first year of life to the chance to determine the quality of one's health care in the last years of life.
Retreatism
The rejection of both cultural goals and the means of achieving those goals.
Censors
People whose job is to sift through information conveyed through movies, in books, in letters, on tv, on the internet, and in other venues, and remove or block any material considered unsuitable or threatening to some audiences.
Status value
The value that some characteristics impart to those who possess them, causing those individuals to be regarded and treated as more valuable or more worthy than persons who possess features from other categories.
Urban underclass
The group of families and individuals in the inner city who are outside the mainstream of the American occupational system and who consequently represent the very bottom of the economic hierarchy.
Organic Solidarity
Social order based on interdependence and cooperation among people performing a wide range of diverse and specialized tasks.
Pure deviants
People who have broken the rules and are caught, punished, and labeled as outsiders.
Crime
Deviance that breaks the laws of society and is punished by formal sanctions.
Secret deviants
People who have broken the rules but whose violation goes unnoticed or, if it is noticed, prompts no one to enforce the law.
Class
A category that designates a person's overall status in society.
Witch-hunt
A campaign to identify, investigate, and correct behavior that is believed to be undermining a group or a country. More often than not, the behavior identified and investigated is not the cause of a particular problem but is a distraction that takes attention away from the real problem.
Social interaction
Everyday events in which at least two people communicate and respond through language and symbolic gestures to affect one another's behavior and thinking.
Vertical mobility
Movement that occurs when a change in class status corresponds to a gain or loss in rank.
Positive sanction
An expression of approval and a reward for compliance.
Place
A reference to geographic locations known to others by their formal or informal boundaries or borders. Examples include countries, states, regions, counties, provinces, cities, towns, villages, neighborhoods, and streets.
Social structure
Two or more people occupying social statuses and enacting roles.
Falsely accused
People who have not broken the rules but who are treated as if they have done so.
Achieved characteristics
Attributes a person acquires through some combination of personal choice, effort, and ability.
White-collar crime
"Crimes committed by persons of respectability and high social status in the course of their occupations"(Sutherland and Cressey 1978,p.44)
Iron cage of rationality
The irrationalities that rational systems generate.
Rebellion
The full or partial rejection of both the cultural goals and the means of attaining those goals and the introduction of a new set of goals and means.
Back stage
The region out of an audience's sight where individuals can do things that would be inappropriate or unexpected on the front stage.
Folkways
Norms that apply to the details of life or routine matters.
Control
When the process of producing and acquiring the service or product is planned out in detail.
Multinational corporations
Enterprises that own or control production and service facilities in countries other than the one in which their headquarters are located.
Innovation
The acceptance of the cultural goals but the rejection of the legitimate means to obtain these goals.
Intragenerational mobility
A form of vertical mobility in which a person moves upward or downward in status during his or her lifetime.
Rights
The behaviors that a person assuming a role can demand or expect from others.
Organization
A coordinating mechanism created by people to achieve an agreed-upon goal.
Caste system
A system of social stratification in which people are ranked on the basis of ascribed characteristics or traits over which they have no control.
Differential association
A theory of socialization that explains how delinquent behavior is learned. It refers to the idea that "when persons become criminal, they do so because of contacts with criminal patterns and also because of isolation from anticriminal patterns"(sutherland and cressey 1978,p.78)
Externality costs
Costs that are not figured into the price of a product but that are nevertheless eventually paid by the consumer when using, creating, or disposing of a product.
Ritualism
The rejection of cultural goals but a rigid adherence to the legitimate means of attaining those goals.
Neocolonialism
Continuing economic dependence on a former colonial power after independence.
Status group
An amorphous group of persons held together by virtue of a lifestyle that has come to be expected of all those who wish to belong to the circle.
"Negatively privileged" property class
Persons completely unskilled, lacking property, and dependent on seasonal or sporadic employment who constitute the very bottom of the class system.
Claims makers
People who articulate and promote claims and who tend to gain in some way if the targeted audience accepts their claims as true.
Quantification and calculation
The ability of customers to easily evaluate a product or service with numerical indicators.
Oligarchy
Rule by the few, or the concentration of decision-making power in the hands of a few persons who hold the top positions in a hierarchy.
Formal sanctions
Definite and systematic laws, rules, regulations, and policies that specify (usually in writing) the conditions under which people should be rewarded or punished and that define the procedures for allocation rewards and imposing punishments.
Apartheid
A system of laws in which everyone in South Africa was put into a racial category and issued an identity card denoting his or her race.
Efficiency
A corporation or organization offering the "best" products and services that allow consumers to get quickly from one state to another (for example, from hungry to full, from fat to thin, from uneducated to educated).
Constructionist approach
A sociological approach that focuses on the process by which specific groups, activities, conditions, or artifacts become defined as problems.
Mechanical solidarity
Social order and cohesion based on a common conscience or uniform thinking and behavior.
Colonialism
A form of domination in which a foreign power uses its superior military force to impose its political, economic, social, and cultural institutions on an indigenous population with the aim of controlling their resources, labor, and markets.
Role Conflict
A predicament in which the expectations associated with two or more roles in a role set contradict one another.
Intergenerational mobility
A form of vertical mobility in which people within a family move upward or downward in status over two or more generations.
Social mobility
Movement from one class to another.
Core economies
The wealthiest, most highly diversified economies in the world with strong, stable governments.
Front stage
The region visible to the audience where people take care to create and maintain the images and behavior an audience has come to expect.
Obligations
The relationship and behavior that the person enacting a role must assume toward others in a particular status.
"Positively privileged" property class
Those individuals at the very top of the class system.
Impression management
The process by which people in social situations manage the setting and their dress, words, and gestures to correspond to the impressions they are trying to make or the image they are trying to make or the image they are trying to project.
Dramaturgical model
A model in which social interaction is viewed as though it were theater, people as though they were actors, and roles as though they were performances presented before an audience in a particular setting.
Trained incapacity
The inability to respond to new and unusual circumstances or to recognize when official rules and procedures are outmoded or no longer applicable.
Content
The cultural frameworks (norms,values,beliefs,material culture) that guide social interactions, specifically behavior, dialogue,and interpretations of events.
Corporate crime
Crime committed by a corporation as it competes with other companies for market share and profits.
Surveillance
A mechanism of social control that involves monitoring people's movements, activities, conversations, and associations with the purpose of keeping track of those believed likely to engage in wrongdoing, preventing people from engaging in wrongdoing, and ensuring that the public is protected from wrongdoers.
Social control
Methods used to teach, persuade, or force a group's members, and even nonmembers, to comply with and not deviate from its norms and expectations.
Alienation
A state in which human life is dominated by the forces of human inventions.
Conformists
People who have not violated the rules of a group and are treated accordingly.
Conformity
Behavior and appearances that follow and maintain the standards of a group. also, the acceptance of the cultural goals and the pursuit of these goals through legitimate means.
Role set
An array of roles.
Class system
A system of social stratification in which people are ranked on the basis of achieved characteristics on merit, talent, ability, or past performance.
Informal dimension
Owner-or employee-generated norms that evade, bypass, do not correspond with, or are not systematically stated in official policies, rules, and regulations.
Deviant subcultures
Groups that are part of the larger society but whose members adhere to norms and values that favor violation of the larger society's laws.
Peripheral economies
Economies that rely on a few commodities or even a single commodity, such as coffee, peanuts, or tobacco, or a single mineral resource, such as tin, copper, or zinc.
Conformity
Behavior and appearances that follow and maintain the standards of a group. also, the acceptance of the cultural goals and the pursuit of these goals through legitimate means.
Informal sanctions
Spontaneous, unofficial expressions of approval or disapproval that are not backed by the force of law.
Diviance
Any behavior or physical appearance that is socially challenged and/or condemned because it departs from the norms and expectations of a group.
Downward mobility
A form of vertical mobility in which a person moves down in status.
Solidarity
The ties that bind people to one another in a society.
Situational factors
Forces outside an individual's immediate control such as environmental conditions.
Dispositional traits
Personal or group traits, such as motivation level, mood, and inherent ability.
Ideal type
A deliberate simplification or caricature of a bureaucracy in that the characteristics emphasized exaggerate certain aspects of bureaucracy, which makes them the objects of comparison.
Professionalization
A trend in which organizations hire experts with formal training in a particular subject or activity that is essential to achieving organizational goals.
Mores
Norms that people define as essential to the well-being of their group or nation.
Formal dimension
The official, written guidelines, rules, regulations, and policies that define the goals and roles of the organization and its relationship to other organizations and with integral parties.
Upward mobility
A form of vertical mobility in which a person moves up in status.
Social stratification
The systematic process by which individuals, groups, and places are divided into categories that are ranked on a scale of social worth.
Confederate
Someone who works in cooperation with the investigator conducting a research study.
Political parties
Organizations oriented toward the planned acquisition of social power and toward influencing social action no matter what its content may be.
Social status
A position in a social structure.
Predictability
For all intents and purposes, a state in which the service or product will be the same no matter where or when it is purchased.
Negative sanction
An expression of disapproval for noncompliance.
Censorship
A method employed to prevent information from reaching some audience.
Division of labor
Work that is broken down into specialized tasks, with each task being performed by a different set of persons trained to do that task. The persons doing each task often live in different parts of the world. Not only are the tasks specialized, but the parts and materials needed to manufacture products also come from many geographical regions of the world.
Context
The larger historical circumstances and social forces that bring people together for social interaction.
Rationalization
A process whereby thought and action rooted in emotion, superstition, respect for mysterious forces, and tradition are replaced by thought and action grounded in the logical assessment of cause and effect or the means to achieve a particular end.
Master status of deviant
An identification marking a rule breaker first and foremost as a deviant such that other identifications pale in comparison to this master status.
Thomas theorem
An assumption focusing on how people construct reality: If people define situations as real, their definitions have real consequences.
Sanctions
Reactions of approval and disapproval to others' behaviors and appearances.
Structural strain
Any situation in which (1) the valued goals have unclear limits, (2) people are unsure whether the legitimate means that society provides will allow them to achieve the valued goals, and (3) legitimate opportunities for meeting the goals remain closed to a significant portion of the population.
Scapegoat
A person or a group that is assigned blame for conditions that leaders cannot control.

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