Chapter Summary

• What Is Religion?  Religion has to do with those socially shared and organized ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that concern ultimate meanings and assume the existence of the supernatural or "beyond." Religion is centered in beliefs and practices that are related to sacred as opposed to profane things and often involves rituals.

• A Global View: Varieties of Religious Behavior.  Religious behavior is so varied that sociologists attempt to categorize it. One scheme distinguishes between simple supernaturalism, animism, theism, and a system of abstract ideals.

• Religious Organizations.  Sociologists distinguish between four ideal types of religious organization: churches, denominations, sects, and cults. Whereas churches and denominations exist in a state of accommodation with the larger society, sects and cults find themselves at odds with established social arrangements and practices.

• Religion and Secular Change: The Protestant Ethic.  Max Weber studied several world religions to see how a religious ethic can affect people's behavior and claimed that religion could be a source of social change. Specifically, he linked the rise of capitalism to the Protestant ethic, particularly Calvinism and asceticism.

• Adapting Tradition: Religion in Contemporary Life.  The secularization thesis states that profane considerations gain ascendancy over sacred considerations in the course of social evolution, but little evidence supports the notion that secularization is occurring in the United States.

• Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism.
  Fundamentalist and evangelical groups are on the rise in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Fundamentalism opposes modernity and reaffirms traditional authority, accepting the Bible as the literal word of God. Evangelicals profess a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

• State-Church Issues.  The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has provided the foundation for the principle of the separation of church and state. The basic tenet of civil religion is that the United States is a nation under God with a divine mission.

• The Functionalist Perspective.
  Functionalist theorists look to the contributions religion makes to societal survival and are interested in totemism. According to Émile Durkheim, religion is the symbolization of society.

• The Conflict Perspective.  Some conflict theorists depict religion as a weapon in the service of ruling elites who use it to hold in check the explosive tensions produced by social inequality and injustice. Other conflict theorists see religion as an active force shaping the contours of social life.

Social scientists view learning as a relatively permanent change in behavior or capability that results from experience. Education is one aspect of the many-sided process of socialization by which people acquire behaviors essential for effective participation in society.

• The Bureaucratic Structure of Schools.
  As schools grew larger they had to standardize and routinize many of their operations and establish formal operating and administrative procedures.

• The Effectiveness of Schools.  Successful schools foster expectations that order will prevail and that learning is a serious matter. Cross-cultural research suggests that teachers in some other countries spend more time developing concepts rather than simply stating them.

• Alternatives to Traditional Public Schools.  Parents are increasingly choosing to educate their children in ways other than in traditional public schools. Alternatives include charter schools, religious schools, nonreligious private schools, and home schooling.

• The Availability of Higher Education.  College and university student populations are highly skewed in terms of race, ethnicity, and family income. Only 20 percent of the nation's undergraduates are young people between 18 and 22 years of age who are pursuing a parent-financed education.

• The Functionalist Perspective.
  Viewed from the functionalist perspective, a specialized educational agency is needed to transmit the ways of thinking, feeling, and acting mandated by a rapidly changing urban and technologically based society.

• The Conflict Perspective.  Conflict theorists see schools as agencies that reproduce and legitimate the current social order, citing credentialism as one factor and the correspondence principle as another. By reproducing and legitimating the existing social order, the educational institution benefits some individuals and groups at the expense of others.

• The Interactionist Perspective.
  Symbolic interactionists see classrooms as "little worlds" teeming with behavior. They see U.S. schools primarily benefiting advantaged youngsters and alienating disadvantaged youngsters through the hidden curriculum and educational self—fulfilling prophecies.

The functions now carried out by the institution of medicine were once embedded in the activities of the family and religious institutions.

• The U.S. Health Care Delivery System.  In recent decades the medical care industry has grown appreciably larger, consuming about 15 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. Hospitals, physicians, and nurses comprise central roles in the health care delivery system.

• Rising Health Care Costs: Is Managed Care the Answer?  Soaring health care costs have led to new arrangements for financing it. Managed care arrangements are part of many traditional insurance plans. They also form the basis for health maintenance and preferred provider organizations.

• Alternatives to the U.S. Health Care System: A Global Perspective.
  Health care is managed differently in different countries. In China health care is provided at essentially no charge for most citizens. In Great Britain 90 percent of the funding for its National Health Service comes from general taxation. In Kenya a national health service employs physicians and owns hospitals, but health care is also available from other sources. Canada's system provides medically necessary physician and hospital services to all citizens.

• The Functionalist Perspective.
  Functionalists note that health is essential to the preservation of the human species and organized social life. One way societies contain the negative effects of health problems and disease is through institutionalizing illness in a sick role.

• The Conflict Perspective.  Conflict theorists note that some people achieve better health than others because they have access to those resources that contribute to good health and recovery should they become ill.

• The Interactionist Perspective.
  Interactionist theorists view sickness as a condition to which we attach socially devised meanings. For example, an increasing number of behaviors that earlier generations defined as immoral or sinful are coming to be seen as forms of sickness-the medicalization of deviance.