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18 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Was Confucius (551-479 BCE) the first sociologist? |
No, he was “perhaps the earliest person whose recorded writings reflect a true sociological imagination” (p.10).
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Was Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) the first sociologist? |
No, he was “the first person to carry out a systematic study of sociological subjects and set his thoughts down in writing” (ibid.).
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Who coined the term sociology?
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Auguste Compte
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What are Compte's three stages?
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The theological stage (characterized by a relgious outlook), the metaphysical stage (characterized by people questioning everything) and the Positive Stage (characterized by the world being interpreted through a scientific lens.)
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Why are Compte's stages not considered relevant today?
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People still have a religious outlook, people did not just suddenly start questioning things in the renaissance, and many people still don't view the world scientifically.
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What is positivism?
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Positivism has three assumptions. 1) There exists an objective and knowable reality. 2) Since all the sciences explore the same, singular reality, over time all sciences will become more alike. 3) There is no room in science for value judgments.
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Who established sociology as a seious discipline?
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Emile Durkheim
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What are social facts and who first theorized them?
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Emile Durkheim theorized them. They are patterned ways of acting, thinking, and feeling that exist outside of any one individual but exert social control over all people. All exert a compelling social force over you and lead you to act in sociologically predictable ways. Social facts can be altered depending on the social environment
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Are social facts empirical?
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No, Social facts can only be shown to exist indirectly.
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What are the characteristics of Social Facts?
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1) It developed prior to and separate from any individual (you didn’t invent it). 2) It can be seen as being characteristic of a particular group (young Canadian men watching sports and drinking beer). 3) It involves a constraining or coercing force that pushes individuals into acting in a particular way (not demanding or requiring washroom facilities while tree planting).
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What was Max Weber's main sociological theory?
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Weber tried to explain capitalism through the idea of the Protestant work ethic.
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How does the protestant work ethic relate to capitalism?
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Success in business thought to be an indicator of salvation. You have a “calling” from God to work hard in the Bible. Business profits should not be spent on yourself, so they get reinvested in your business. The Spirit of Capitalism – to work hard, not for material gain, but to have increasingly successful businesses and to earn more and more money. In other words, profit is an end in itself.
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What was Herbert Spencer's theory?
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Social Darwinism
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What is social darwinism and why is it not accepted today?
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Social Darwinism is the idea of survival of the fittest. It was used to rationalize Euro-centrism, Eugenics, the Slave trade, and discrimination. It is not accepted by sociologists today.
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Who coined the term "the sociological imagination"?
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C.Wright Mills
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What is the sociological imagination?
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“the capacity to shift from one perspective to another – from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world…. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self – and to see the relationship between the two” (Mills 1959: 4).
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What is a personal schema?
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Your intuition, personal experience, biases, etc. A mental map of the world.
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What are the three most general sociological perspectives?
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Structural Functionalism, Conflict perspective, and Symbolic Interactionism. |
