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16 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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a strain within sociology that believes the social world can be described and predicted by certain describable relationships (akin to a social physics). (page 25) |
positivist sociology |
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the study of human society. (page 3) |
sociology |
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the idea that conflict between competing interests is the basic, animating force of social change and society in general. (page 30) |
conflict theory |
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an entity that exists because people behave as if it exists and whose existence is perpetuated as people and social institutions act in accordance with the widely agreed-upon formal rules or informal norms of behavior associated with that entity. (page 32) |
social construction |
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a complex group of interdependent positions that, together, perform a social role and reproduce themselves over time; also defined in a narrow sense as any institution in a society that works to shape the behavior of the groups or people within it. (page 13) |
social institution |
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the theory that various social institutions and processes in society exist to serve some important (or necessary) function to keep society running. (page 29) |
functionalism |
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comes from Max Weber and is the basis of interpretive sociology in which researchers imagine themselves experiencing the life positions of the social actors they want to understand rather than treating those people as objects to be examined. (page 24) |
Verstehen |
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a sense of aimlessness or despair that arises when we can no longer reasonably expect life to be predictable; too little social regulation; normlessness. (page 25) |
anomie |
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a branch of sociology generally concerned with social dynamics at a higher level of analysis—that is, across the breadth of a society. (page 39) |
Macrosociology |
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a theory that attempts to predict how certain social institutions tend to function. (page 32) |
midrange theory |
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a micro-level theory in which shared meanings, orientations, and assumptions form the basic motivations behind people's actions. (page 31) |
symbolic interactionism |
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a concept conceived by W. E. B. Du Bois to describe the two behavioral scripts, one for moving through the world and the other incorporating the external opinions of prejudiced onlookers, which are constantly maintained by African Americans. (page 28) |
double consciousness |
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a branch of sociology that seeks to understand local interactional contexts; its methods of choice are ethnographic, generally including participant observation and in-depth interviews. (page 39) |
microsociology |
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the idea that conflict between competing interests is the basic, animating force of social change and society in general. (page 30) |
conflict theory |
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the ability to connect the most basic, intimate aspects of an individual's life to seemingly impersonal and remote historical forces. (page 4) |
sociological imagination |
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a condition characterized by a questioning of the notion of progress and history, the replacement of narrative within pastiche, and multiple, perhaps even conflicting, identities resulting from disjointed affiliations. (page 32) |
postmodernism |
