SOC 101: Exam 2

• Material and nonmaterial culture
• Patterns
• Symbols/language
• Artifacts
• Norms
• Beliefs and values

includes things that humans make or adapt from the raw stuff of nature

• Intangible
• Symbols, language, norms, values and beliefs

Anything that represents something else to more than one person

Organized set of symbols

Thinking and perception are shaped by language

• 1) Organizes the way we think and interpret events and things in environment
• 2) Allows human experience to be culmulative
• 3) Allows shared perspective and understanding
• 4) Allows complex goal-directed behavior
• 5) Allows us to identify who people are and their social positions

Byproducts of human action

• Rules for behavior
• Socially approved ways of doing things

• Casual norms
• Violations aren't very serious

• Serious norms
• More severe reaction to violations

• Even the thought of violating upsets people
• Some can be mores

• Divided norms into two categories: folkways and mores
• Taboos were added by later sociologists

• Response from others when norms are violated or upheld
• Negative vs Positive
• Formal vs Informal

• Ranking forms of behavior in terms of their relative desirability
• Ideas about what is good and desirable vs what is bad and undesirable

• Dominant, widely held beliefs
• People's idea about what is real and what is not real

Specific set of ideas and beliefs that have been distorted by social, economic and politcal interests.

• Relatively enduring clusters of values, norms, statuses and roles that address societies' needs (purpose is to meet social needs)
• 1) Generally unplanned and developed gradually
• 2) Institutional change occurse very slowly
• 3) Institutions are highly inter-related
• 4) Norms and forms of social interactions may not be similar to the same institution in another society.

Process by which cultural things are adopted

The differences between culture decreasing as diffusion increases

Formed by groups of people within society with shared values, norms, beliefs or use of material culture thatset them apart from other people in theat society

Special form of subculture that seems to threaten the parent culture

• Culture is ubiquitous
• It exists everywhere

• Network of relationships connecting different statuses in a group, including norms for interaction among different statuses.
• Set of relatively stable rules, patterned relationship among statuses

Postion in a group, social structure

Status that is gained

Status that you are born to

Culturally inconsistant when multiple statuses are combined

• Occurs when there isn't enough time to fulfill all the roles in a status
• Demanding roles

Combination of statuses that results in conflicting roles

Status that cuts across all others

• Two or more individuals with shared sense of identity/goals, that interact within a specific social structure
• Not social aggregation

Collection of people who happen to be in the same place at the same time

• Charles Horton Cooley
• Intimate face-to-face association
• Learn rules of social life and cooperation (socialization process)
• Cooperation and competition

• Means-to-an-end relationships
• Larger groups
• Shorter lived
• More formal
• Impersonal

• Largest social structure
• 5 major qualities:
• 1) Social group w/ definite geographical boundary
• 2) Recruitment of new members through sexual reproduction
• 3) Comprehensive culture and social structures
• 4) Political independence
• 5) Long life

• Reproduction
• Socialization
• Creation of knowledge
• Selection and screening of talent
• Social control
• Mobilization of resources
• Production and exchange of goods and services
• Promote social unity

People band together to achieve a specific goal and formalize their relationship with one another

• Modern life will be increasingly played out in bureaucracies
• Ideal-type bureaucracies

• Manifestation of the trend toward the rationalization of life
• Ideal, pure form of bureacracy

Favoring one's relatives over others

Bureaucracies could become a trap where people follow procedures and rules, and they lose sight of the reason they're working so hard.

• Robert Merton
• When process becomes more important than the outcome

Able to provide resources for basic needs of its members

• Action becomes cast into a pattern
• Occurs over time

Making culture more concrete and instrumental than it actually is

Human interaction on a small scale

Looking at bigger picture like societies

• Stanley Milgram
• 6 degrees of separation

Lack cultural competency

• Id, Ego, Superego
• Sublimate

Process by which the ego finds an acceptable outlet for id that super ego finds unacceptable

• Stages of development:
• Sensorimotor (0-2 yrs)
• Preoperational (2-7 yrs)
• Concrete (7-11 yrs)
• Formal (adolescence)

• Term coined by Robert Hyman
• Functions:
• 1) Provide model of how to behave
• 2) Serve as standard against which we evaluate ourselves

Experienced when what we have is lower than reference group

Experienced when what we have is higher than reference group

Process whereby an individual is turned into a person; gain cultural competency

Values, beliefs, ideas, and decision-making strategies, and the general way in which people live their lives

• Socialization process
• We self-create base on our perception of how others see us
• Reflective process
• Primary groups

• Socialization process
• Me = How we think another person sees us
• I = Our personal reactions to situations
• Social self is ongoing intraction of Me and I

• In child play, the child becomes another to one's self
• Game, need to know what role to play, and know roles of others to know what to do

Attitude of the whole community

Take on role of another to see how things look from his or her point of view

• Family
• School (and hidden curiculum)
• Peer groups
• Workplace

Parents teach outlooks they think is suited to their own experience in their world

• Manifest function = teach skills needed for success in adult world
• Hidden curiculum = accept what teachers think will be the student's place in the social structure

• How to behave appropriately
• Independence from adult authority

• Socialization steps:
• 1) Career choice
• 2) Anticipatory socialization
• 3) Employment and learn reality of the job

Learning about and playing at a work role before entering it

Ceremony that mark transition from status to status

• Erving Goffman
• People cut off from rest of society and stripped of individuality
• Goal is to resocialize

Learning new norms, values, attitudes and behaviors

Degrade individual, take away the individual's self

• Take away individuality
• Merge into group