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SOC 101 Exam Two Study Guide
Chapter 7
 Culture – consists of patterns (implicit and explicit) for behaviors in a particular society.
These patterns are transmitted and acquired by symbols. Core facets of culture are
traditions, ideas, and attached values. Culture both shapes, and is shaped by, individuals
within a society.
 Material Culture – (artifacts) all those things that humans make or adapt from raw
materials; artifacts are by-products of human behavior.
 Nonmaterial culture – made up of intangible things. Includes five basic categories:
symbols, language, norms, values, and beliefs.
 Symbols, language/gestures – anything that represents something else to more than one
person. Symbols are important for sociologists to study because we react to them as if
they were real things; they are powerful enough to evoke emotion.
 Norms – societal rules of behavior; part of nonmaterial culture. Three Types:
o Folkways – casual norms; violations not taken seriously.
o Mores – important rules of behavior; violations taken seriously.
o Taboos – such deeply held rules that the thought of violation is upsetting.
 Sanctions – response to behavior. Four types: formal negative, informal negative, formal
positive, informal positive.
 William Graham Sumner – published Folkways in 1906: divided norms into two
categories - folkways and mores (taboo added later).
 Values – general or abstract ideas about what is good and desirable, as opposed to what
is bad and undesirable in a society; abstractness of values can cause conflict (currently
visible in US)
 Beliefs and ideas – term belief used by social scientists to refer to peoples ideas about
what is real and not real; frequently related to values (religion).
 Social institutions – set of ideas about the way a specific important social need ought to
be addressed; institutional responses tend to be justified by important social values and
beliefs and tend to be slow to change; part of nonmaterial culture. (Education,
government, marriage, etc.)
 Cultural diffusion – process by which cultural things are adopted across cultures
 Cultural leveling – as cultural diffusion increases, differences between cultures
decreases.
 Subcultures – groups of peoples within a society whose shared values, norms, beliefs, or
use of material culture sets them apart from other people in that society. Frequently
disappear as the aspects of the subculture are adopted/appropriated by the dominant
culture (hip hop culture)
 Counterculture – special form of subculture; subculture in which values, shared norms,
or use of material culture not only sets them apart, but is perceived as a threat to the
dominant culture (hippies, queers)
Chapter 8
 Status – position person occupies in social structure (family status, occupational
status, age, sex, race, ethnicity, etc.)
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Achieved status – positions in social structure that individuals achieve for
themselves (college graduate, senator, mass murderer)
Ascribed status – positions individual are placed in at birth (sex, race, ethnicity, age,
SES, etc.)
Status symbols – clues we use to detect others status (uniforms, wedding ring,
material goods)
Roles – sum of the total expectations about the behavior attached to a particular
social status (teacher, student, prisoner, guard)
Role strain – demands of a particular role are such that individual is hard-pressed
to meet them all; within role issue
Status inconsistency – individual occupies multiple statuses that do not mesh with
one another; generally involves situation in which individual with particular ascribed
status achieves an inconsistent status (nontraditional student, working-class college
student, male nurse); between status issue
Role Conflict – demands of roles clash (college student and mother, President and
Evil Overlord); between role issue
Master Status – the status through which others perceptions of us are filtered
(female professor, African-American doctor, lesbian kindergarten teacher); when
master status is linked to ascribed rather than achieved status it can be upsetting.
Groups – one or more individuals with whom we share some sense of identity or
common goals and with whom we interact within a specific social structure (family,
classmates, co-workers)
Social aggregation – some collectivity of people who happen to be in same place at
same time (fans at sporting/music event).
Primary groups – (Charles H. Cooley) location of socialization; how individuals are
taught to be functioning members of social groups (families, friendship groups)
Secondary groups – tend to be larger, end-to-a-mean relationship groups; what’s
important is an individuals status rather than personal characteristics (sociology
class, university)
Formal organizations – secondary group in which group of people band together to
achieve a specific goal and formalize their relationship with one another (companies,
universities, activist organizations). Most prevalent type is bureaucracy.
Ideal types – (Weber) pure form of bureaucracy; what is left when you strip away
all the parts of the organization that are not necessary to it being a bureaucracy
o Characteristics of Ideal-Type Bureaucracy
 Rules and administrative regulations which are fixed and official
 Firmly ordered hierarchy of authority and subordination
 Anything of significance is recorded in writing and preserved
 Hiring and promotion based on merit and training
 Specialized division of labor in which administrative tasks are fulltime responsibility of particular individuals
 Knowledge of rules of the organization represents special skill
possessed by officials
o Bureaucracies are never this pure
Bureaucracies – Weber indicated that bureaucracies had positive functions (able to
achieve efficiency), but also had dysfunctional attributes
“Iron Cage” – (Weber) effect of bureaucracies in which people become so trapped
in following procedures and rules that they lose sight of why they are working so
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hard; by getting bogged down in procedure, individuals may lose ability to adapt to
changes in social circumstances
Goal displacement – (Robert K. Merton) when the processes becomes more
important than the outcome (when the university cares more about making
themselves look good so they can collect more donations and grant money than they
do about actually serving the students).
Chapter 9
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Society – the totality of people and social relations in a given geographic space.
Self-sufficiency – distinguishing characteristic of society; no group qualifies as a society
unless it provides the resources to answer all of its members basic needs and the society
must have enough resources to meet its own survival needs (social control, defense,
member replacement, etc).
Social institution – (also see chapter 7) an accepted and persistent constellation of
statuses, roles, values, and norms that respond to important societal needs (education,
religion, government, military)
Ideal Type – (also see chapter 8) idea that a particular type of social institution (ie,
particular type of family) ought to be followed (nuclear family is current ideal type)
Habitualized action – an action that is repeated frequently and becomes cast into a
pattern. Routine behaviors are how we do things, institutionalized behaviors are the way
things must be done.
Interdependency of institutions – a particular society’s institutions are interdependent;
because of this, a change in one institution tends to bring about change in others
(WWII and labor market changes for women)
Chapter 10
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Socialization – the process by which people acquire cultural competency and through
which society perpetuates the fundamental nature of existing social structures; most
intense in youth, but is a lifelong process
Social self – the values, beliefs, ideas, and decision-making strategies, and the general
way in which people live their lives; sociologists believe that these personal attributes
are best explained by social rather than biological factors.
Looking-Glass Self – (Cooley) social self arises through interaction with others; based on
our perceptions of how others see us, we develop our reflected selves.
o Three principle elements –
 We imagine how we look to the other person
 We imagine that other person’s reaction to our appearance
 We have some self-feeling such as pride or shame
Me and I – (Mead) self actually involves two phases; the Me is the part of the self that
is based on how one sees others as seeing oneself. The I is the part that is uniquely you
– your personal reactions to situation. The social self is the product of the ongoing
interaction between the Me and the I.
Play and games – means by which children develop the Me and I
o Play – simple imitative behaviors (pretending to be a role)
 Through play, children begin to appreciate the perspectives of other
people and build up a sense of themselves as something that other
people look at and make judgements about.
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o Games – play that has specific rules that specify the roles people play and the
behaviors associated with those roles.
 Participating in games enhances childrens ability to do role-taking
Role taking – to take on the role of another and see how things look from his or her
point of view (children do this via games)
Generalized other – ability to take on point of view of others
Agents of socialization – continual interaction with various groups and institutions
o Family – first agent of socialization; children acquire some competency in
material and nonmaterial culture; main source of ascribed statuses; parents tend
to pass on to children the outlooks that are suited to their own experiences in
the world (thus working-class parents encourage development of different
attributes that middle-class parents based on experiential differences).
o School – children learn that everyone can expect to be treated in relatively the
same impersonal manner; manifest function is to provide skills and knowledge.
 Hidden curriculum – prepare students to accept what teachers and
administrators believe will be the students places in the social structure
(latent function). Example – tracking
o Peer groups – manifest function is to have fun; latent function is socializing
agent; socializes children to be independent from adults; much of what is
learned acts to reinforce existing social structure.
o Workplace – involves several steps:
 Career choice
 Anticipatory socialization – learning about/playing work role before
entering it; rehearsal for future.
 Employment – typically involves learning new advantages and
disadvantages of job reality
Rites of Passage – ceremonies or traditions that mark important transitions from status
to status within the life cycle (graduations, marriage ceremonies, etc)
Total Institutions – (Goffman) people are cut off from the rest of society and stripped
of their individuality (prison, boot camp, mental hospitals)
Resocialization – goal of total institutions; take away individual’s self and replace it with
one more in keeping with the needs of the institution
Degradation ceremonies – first step of resocialization ; degrade the individual, take away
their self in preparation for giving them a new one
Depersonalization – means of resocialization; used in military training: take away name
and possession, subject them to new rules, force them to merge with group, take away
individuality
Lecture
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Tabula rasa – blank slate; how human infants were assumed to be before Kant
A priori “filters” – (Kant) built-in mental filters which we use as categories of thought
or analytic constructs to make sense of experience.
Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis – Thinking and perception are not only expressed by, but also
shaped through language.
Intersexuals- individuals born with mixed-sex genitalia or chromosomes
Microcosms –
Microsociology – sociology of small group interactions and other small scale phenomena
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Macrosociology – sociology of large-scale structures and processes.
Transitional status – statuses that a person occupies only for a limited time; a bridge to
a more permanent status (assistant professor).
Situational status – individual occupies status only under certain circumstances
(customer in store).
Role sets – all the roles an individual places in society
Small world hypothesis – (Milgram) members of any large social network (in his case,
the population of the United States) would be connected to each other through short
chains of intermediate acquaintances.
Feral children – children who grow up isolated from other humans; cases typically
dismissed by social scientists today
Nonsociological theories of human development –
o Freud – (id, ego, super-ego, sublimation) stressed that development was a
period of learning self control
o Piaget – (stages of cognitive development) believed that people’s capacities for
developing a true human personality through interactions with the surrounding
world depended upon their cognitive ability; dependent upon maturation:
 Birth -24 months – sensorimotor
 10 months – 7 years – preoperational
 7 years – 11 years – concrete operational
 11 years+ - formal operational stage
Self-fulfilling prophecy – (Merton) Related to Cooley’s “Looking Glass Self”; used to
refer to instances in which someone has made a false definition of the situation; distorts
individuals view of self.
SES – socioeconomic status; includes occupation + education + income
Kohn’s study of parenting differences by SES – found tendencies of working-class
parents to stress importance on values of external judgment (pleasing others) and that
middle-class parents stressed values involving internal judgments (pleasing oneself);
Kohn indicated that these differences are a reflection of the parents experience of how
the world works
Family as gender factory – not all children are socialized alike, even in the same family;
family is chief site of gender role socialization
Cultural capital –
Reference groups – (Hyman)
Relative deprivation and gratification –