Državna Matura Sociology flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Social fact

Durkheim's term for ways of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual and exercising constraint over them; to be explained by other social facts, not individual psychology.

Verstehen

Weber's method of interpretive understanding: the researcher reconstructs the subjective meaning an actor attaches to their own action, rather than merely observing external behaviour.

Operationalisation

The process of translating an abstract concept into observable, measurable indicators that can be recorded in research, for example turning 'social class' into income, education and occupation.

Cultural relativism

The methodological stance that beliefs and practices must be understood within their own cultural context rather than judged by the standards of the researcher's own culture.

Counterculture

A subculture whose norms and values directly oppose or reject central elements of the dominant culture, such as hippie movements or punk, often provoking formal social control.

Cultural lag

Ogburn's concept describing the delay between rapid change in material culture and technology and the slower adjustment of non-material culture such as norms, values and laws.

Looking-glass self

Cooley's idea that the self develops by imagining how we appear to others, imagining their judgement of us, and forming self-feeling such as pride or mortification.

Generalised other

Mead's term for the internalised attitudes of the whole community or organised social group, which the child adopts in the game stage to regulate conduct.

Resocialisation

The process of unlearning established norms and identities and learning new ones, typically occurring in total institutions such as prisons, military units or psychiatric hospitals.

Role strain

The tension experienced within a single social role when its various expectations conflict or cannot all be met at the same time by the role-holder.

Ascribed status

A social position assigned at birth or by inheritance and difficult to change, such as caste, sex or kinship, characteristic of closed systems of stratification.

Intergenerational mobility

Movement of individuals or groups up or down the stratification hierarchy when their position is compared with that of their parents or earlier generation.

Status group

Weber's Stand: a community sharing a specific style of life and social honour, restricting interaction and marriage, distinct from a class defined by market situation.

Intersectionality

Crenshaw's concept that class, gender, ethnicity and other social positions interact simultaneously, producing forms of disadvantage not captured by any single category.

Symmetrical family

Young and Willmott's term for a family form in which conjugal roles become more equal, with shared decision-making, domestic tasks and leisure between partners.

Cultural capital

Bourdieu's term for embodied knowledge, tastes, credentials and manners transmitted by family and converted by schools into educational advantage and social reproduction.

Correspondence principle

Bowles and Gintis's claim that school structure mirrors workplace hierarchy through rules, obedience, punctuality and extrinsic reward, preparing pupils for capitalist employment.

Charismatic authority

Weber's type of legitimate domination resting on perceived exceptional personal qualities of a leader, inherently unstable and tending toward routinisation after the leader's death.

Iron law of oligarchy

Michels's claim that all large organisations, including democratic ones, inevitably develop rule by a small leadership elite because of organisational and technical necessity.

Trained incapacity

Merton's bureaucratic dysfunction in which adherence to rules and routines becomes an end in itself, leaving officials unable to adapt to new or unusual situations.

Reference group

A group whose standards a person adopts as a frame of comparison for evaluating their own attitudes, achievements and behaviour, whether or not they belong to it.

Anomie

Durkheim's condition of normlessness in which society's regulatory norms weaken, producing unregulated aspirations and elevated rates of suicide and deviance.

Labelling theory

Becker and Lemert's view that deviance is a status conferred by audience reaction; secondary deviance follows internalisation of the label and altered self-identity.

Differential association

Sutherland's theory that criminal behaviour is learned through intimate interaction with others, including techniques of offending and rationalisations that justify it.

Merton's innovation

A mode of adaptation in which an individual accepts culturally prescribed goals such as success but rejects or lacks legitimate institutional means, resorting to illegitimate means.

Dark figure of crime

The volume of offences committed but never reported to or recorded by the police, estimated through victim surveys and self-report studies to complement official statistics.

World-systems theory

Wallerstein's model dividing the world economy into core, semi-periphery and periphery, where unequal exchange transfers surplus from periphery to core and reproduces underdevelopment.

Glocalisation

Robertson's concept that global processes are adapted and reshaped in local contexts, producing hybrid rather than uniform cultural outcomes worldwide.

Risk society

Beck's diagnosis of late modernity in which manufactured risks from technology and industry, rather than scarcity of goods, become the central distributive problem.

Structuration

Giddens's theory that structure and agency form a duality: social structures are simultaneously the medium and the outcome of the practices they recursively organise.

Manifest and latent functions

Merton's distinction between the intended, recognised consequences of a social practice and its unintended, unrecognised ones, used to analyse institutions and rituals.

Mechanical solidarity

Durkheim's term for social cohesion in small, homogeneous societies based on similarity of members and a strong collective conscience with repressive law.