Sociology

Front 1

Means of production

Back 1

all the objects required to produce goods; objects such as factories, machinery, land, tools, transportation equipment, communications equipment etc.

Front 2

means of mental production

Back 2

machinery capital and labor required to produce and disseminate ideas

Front 3

surplus value

Back 3

marx's view of exploitation was surplus value
-equals the difference between the calue of the goods workers produce and the calue of the worker's labor
exploitation is the process whereby surplus value is extracted from workers

Front 4

power

Back 4

ability to get others to do what you want them to do

Front 5

social status

Back 5

statuses can be ranked in terms of how desirable they are or how much prestige they have. statuses which are more desirable and prestigious have greater social status

Front 6

status

Back 6

position in society. everybody occupies a number of statuses: daughter old person student.

Front 7

downsizing

Back 7

practice where companies reduce the number of workers they emply without shutting down their offices, factories, or stores. Instead, they fire their workers or fail to hire new workers when old workers quit or retire.

Front 8

labor market

Back 8

the buying and selling of labor in the free market. employers buy the labor power of their employees. employees sell their labor power to their employers.

Front 9

poverty

Back 9

three times the amount of money it takes to feed a family. the us uses what is called "the thrifty food plan" to determine how much money it takes to feed a family

Front 10

reserve army of labor

Back 10

the large number of unemployed and underemployed people in the united states ( a person is underemplyed if they are part time or temporary worker but would prefer full time permanent employment

Front 11

unemployment

Back 11

bureau of labor statistics- out of work, are available for work, and have actively looked for work in the past four weeks

Front 12

culture of poverty

Back 12

culture in which group members develop:
a present- time orientation
low aspirations
fatalism
feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness

Front 13

fatalism

Back 13

belief that you have no control over events, that what is going to happen to you will happen to you regardless of what you do

Front 14

model minority group

Back 14

minority group that has succeeded economically, and whose economic success is supposedly due to the fact that is possesses the right cultural traits

Front 15

present-time orientation

Back 15

inability to plan for the future because the individual's attention is focused entirely on the present

Front 16

black urdan underclass

Back 16

william wilson refers to the large number of poor blacks living in poor urban neighborhoods as...

Front 17

demographic explanations

Back 17

explanations of social phenomena that focus on factors such as population size, family size and structure, and immigrations

Front 18

dissimilarity index

Back 18

measure of segregation that equals, for any given region, the number of blacks that would have to move to overcome segregation decided by the number of blacks that would have to move if the region were completely segregated

Front 19

extreme poverty areas

Back 19

neighborhoods where more than 40% of the population is poor

Front 20

high poverty areas

Back 20

neighborhoods where 30-40% of the population is poor

Front 21

intentional racism

Back 21

when an individual, group, or organization intentionally discriminates against another individual or group because of the other individual's or group's racial or ethnic status

Front 22

institutional racism

Back 22

occurs when racially inequitable outcomes in one institutional arena (such as the housing market) result in racially inequitable outcomes in other institutional arenas (such as the public school system)
occurs when the rules, arrangements, and practices of society's social institutions tend to favor one racial or ethnic group more than another; when these rules arrangements, and practices have racially or ethnically unequal outcomes

Front 23

isolation index

Back 23

measure of segregation. tells the percentage of blacks that live in the neighborhood of the average black person.

Front 24

poverty areas

Back 24

neighborhood where 20-30% of the population is poor

Front 25

residential segregation

Back 25

when whites and blacks live in seperate neighborhoods

Front 26

deviance

Back 26

1. socially disapproved acts beliefs and behavior
2. acts beliefs and behavior that violate some agreed-upon norm (rule or law) that prevails in a community or in society at large

Front 27

social control

Back 27

ability of others to make us conform/ to keep us from being deviant

Front 28

stigma

Back 28

powerfully negative social label that radically changes a person's self-concept and social identity

Front 29

stigmatization

Back 29

process whereby an individual or group is given a powerfully negative social label that transforms the way others think about them and the way they think about themselves

Front 30

white collar crime

Back 30

crimes committed by persons of high social status in the course of their occupations

Front 31

bureaucratic alienation

Back 31

experience most people feel when they enter a bureaucratic organization of losing their individuality and/or being forced to behave in ways that do not fit their images of themselves

Front 32

bureaucracy

Back 32

large hierarchical organization that
1. is governed by formal rules and regulations and
2. has a clear set of highly defined work tasks. specific work tasks are associated with specific positions in the organization

Front 33

career ladder

Back 33

organized paths of career advancement within a bureaucracy

Front 34

deskilling

Back 34

process whereby companies take a complex task, break the task down into many simple steps, and hire different employees to carry out each seperate step

Front 35

division of labor

Back 35

1. way in which and degree to which the work society needs to accomplish is divided into specific jobs and tasks
2. way in which these jobs and tasks are distributed to different people and social groups

Front 36

hierarchy

Back 36

group of persons or positions that are arranged in a rank order, with those at the top of the order wielding more power than those at the bottom of the order

Front 37

organization

Back 37

group created to pursue definite goals, where
1. tactics and procedures are designed and evaluated in terms of their effectiveness in achieving those goals and
2. operations are based on written records and rules

Front 38

production process

Back 38

all the different steps involved in making a product

Front 39

class

Back 39

large group of people who occupy a similar economic position in the wider society based on:income
wealth
property ownership
education
skills
authority in the economic sphere

Front 40

mobility

Back 40

ability to move from one position in a stratification system to another

Front 41

income

Back 41

money earned from salary, wages and payments periodically received as returns on an occupation or investment or as government transfers (ex: welfare payments)

Front 42

mean

Back 42

average value of a series of numbers

Front 43

median

Back 43

midpoint in a series of values that are arranged in numerical order

Front 44

stratification

Back 44

existence of structure inequalities in a society (inequality created by social structures): to the way that societies social structures distribute rewards unequally among individuals

Front 45

stratification systems

Back 45

specific way in which inequality is structured in a specific society at a specific point in time

Front 46

wealth

Back 46

total extent at a single point in time of an individual's accumulated assets and access to resources.
1. net worth- value of an individual's assets minus his or her debt
2. net financial assets- individual's net worth minus the equity she or he has accrued in a home or vehicle

Front 47

dominant ideology

Back 47

ideologies of dominant groups.
-justify inequality and dominant group's power
-portrays interests of dominant group as being in the best interest of all groups
-generalize interests of dominant group to all groups

Front 48

Marxist Alienation

Back 48

1. process whereby workers are seperated from their labor, the procuts of their labor, their innate humanity and other workers
2. process whereby worker through the exploitation they experience at work, create an economic and social system that dominates them and is alien to them

Front 49

ideology

Back 49

logically interrelated set of ideas that justifies some set of social relationships (can justify an existing set of social relationships or a set of social relationships proposed as an alternative to existing social relationships)

Front 50

false consciousness

Back 50

when dominant groups are able to generate ideologies that convince subordinate groups that the current class system benefits them and is better than any possible alternative economic system

Front 51

occupational structure
educational system
cycle of poverty
globalization and downsizing
unemployment, part time employment, low wages, and the reserve army of labor

Back 51

5 factors that play a role in creating and maintaining poverty in the US

Front 52

Sutherland's Differential Association Theory

Back 52

you are who you hang out with
justify rulebreaking

Front 53

Hirschi's Control Theory

Back 53

social control will prevent deviance
social control ability to make people conformist

Front 54

1. attachment
2. commitment
3. involvement
4. belief

Back 54

4 types of social control

Front 55

Hirschi's Deterrence Theory

Back 55

punishment must be swift and certain to deter deviance

Front 56

Social Disorganization Theory

Back 56

deviance most likely to occur with people who have weak social ties and litte/no supervision

Front 57

commodity fetishism

Back 57

consumers good and money that we fail to realize represent social relationships

Front 58

1. heirarchy of authority
2. numerous rules and regulations
3. impersonal social relations
4. career ladders
5. efficiency
6. high division of labor

Back 58

6 characteristics of bureaucratic organization

Front 59

1. red tape
2. lose individuality
3. deskilling
4. alienation
5. cogs in a machine
6. workers knowleghe of production process decreases
7. easy to replace workers
8. lower wages, benefits
9. weakening of union

Back 59

problems with bureaucracy

Front 60

1. slavery
2. caste system
3. feudal/ estate
4. class

Back 60

4 stratifications

Front 61

1. fluid
2. positions are somewhat achieved
3. impersonal, no obligations to other classes
4. economically based

Back 61

4 ways class-based systems differ

Front 62

1. institutional processes feine goods and services as valuable
2. various social positions and occupations within the structure
3. rules of allocation distribute various goods to different positions
4. specific links to different positions in the structure

Back 62

4 components of stratification system

Front 63

Marxist free labor

Back 63

laborers have no choice but to sell their labor because have nothing else to see

Front 64

ignores other forms of inequality
capitalists do contribute

Back 64

weaknesses of marxist theory

Front 65

small groups control wealth and ideas
control state=control communication
capitalists act together

Back 65

strengths of marxist theory