| achieved status | A status that individuals secure on the basis of choice and competition.
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| acting crowd | An excited, volatile collection of people who are engaged in rioting, looting, or other forms of aggressive behavior in which established norms carry little weight.
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| age norms | Rules that define what is appropriate for people to be and to do at various ages.
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| age-specific death rate | The number of deaths per 1,000 individuals in a specific age group.
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| age-specific fertility | The number of live births per 1,000 women in a specific age group.
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| aggregate | A collection of anonymous individuals who are in one place at the same time.
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| alienation | A pervasive sense of powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation, and self-estrangement.
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| animism | A belief in spirits or otherworldly beings.
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| anomie | A social condition in which people find it difficult to guide their behavior by norms they experience as weak, unclear, or conflicting.
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| anticipatory socialization | The process in which people think about, experiment with, and try on the behaviors associated with a new role.
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| archival research | The use of existing records that have been produced or maintained by persons or organizations other than the researcher.
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| asceticism | A way of life characterized by hard work, sobriety, thrift, restraint, and the avoidance of earthly pleasures.
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| ascribed status | A status assigned to an individual by a group or society.
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| assimilation | Those processes whereby groups with distinctive identities become culturally and socially fused.
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| authoritarianism | A political system in which the government tolerates little or no opposition to its rules but permits nongovernmental centers of influence and allows debate on issues of public policy.
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| authority | Legitimate power.
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| bilineal | An arrangement based on reckoning descent and transmitting property through both the father and the mother.
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| body language | Physical motions and gestures that provide social signals.
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| bureaucracy | A social structure made up of a hierarchy of statuses and roles that is prescribed by explicit rules and procedures and based on a division of function and authority.
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| capitalist economy | An economic system relying primarily on free markets and privately held property.
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| category | A collection of people who share a characteristic that is deemed to be of social significance.
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| charismatic authority | Power that is legitimated by the extraordinary superhuman or supernatural attributes people attribute to a leader.
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| church | A religious organization that considers itself uniquely legitimate and enjoys a positive relationship with the dominant society.
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| city | A relatively dense and permanent concentration of people who secure their livelihood chiefly through nonagricultural activities.
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| civil religion | Elements of nationalism and patriotism that take on the properties of a religion.
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| class conflict | The view of Karl Marx that society is divided into those who own the means of producing wealth and those who do not, giving rise to struggles between classes.
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| closed system | A stratification system in which people have great difficulty changing their status.
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| civil society | A social realm of mediating groups, networks, and institutions that sustains public life outside the worlds of the state and the economy.
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| coercive organization | A formal organization that people become members of against their will.
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| communication | The process by which people transmit information, ideas, attitudes, and mental states to one another.
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| complementary needs | Two different personality traits that are the counterparts of each other and that provide a sense of completeness when they are joined.
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| concentric circle model | The approach to city growth stating that the modern city assumes a pattern of concentric circles, each with distinctive characteristics.
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| conditioning | A form of learning in which the consequences of behavior determine the probability of its future occurrence.
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| constructed reality | Our experience of the world. Meaning is not something that inheres in things; it is a property that derives from, or arises out of, the interaction that takes place among people in the course of their daily lives.
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| control group | The group that affords a neutral standard against which the changes in an experimental group can be measured.
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| core regions | Geographical areas that dominate the world economy and exploit the rest of the system.
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| corporate interlocks | Networks of individuals who serve on the boards of directors of multiple corporations.
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| correlation | A change in one variable associated with a change in another variable.
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| correspondence principle | The notion set forth by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis that the social relations of work find expression in the social relations of the school.
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| credentialism | The requirement that a worker have a degree that does not provide skills needed for the performance of a job.
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| crime | An act prohibited by law.
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| criminal justice system | The reactive agencies of the state that include the police, courts, and prisons.
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| crowding | The perception by people that too many other individuals are present in a situation.
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| crude birth rate | The number of live births per 1,000 members of a population in a given year.
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| crude death rate | The number of deaths per 1,000 members of a population in a given year.
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| casual crowd | A collection of people who have little in common with one another except that they may be viewing a common event, such as looking through a department store window.
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| collective behavior | Ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that develop among a large number of people and that are relatively spontaneous and unstructured.
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| contagion theory | An approach to crowd behavior that emphasizes the part played in crowd settings by rapidly communicated and uncritically accepted feelings, attitudes, and actions.
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| conventional crowd | A number of people who have assembled for some specific purpose and who typically act in accordance with established norms, such as people attending a baseball game or concert.
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| convergence theory | An approach to crowd behavior stating that a crowd consists of a highly unrepresentative body of people who assemble because they share the same predispositions.
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| craze | A fad that becomes an all-consuming passion.
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| crowd | A temporary, relatively unorganized gathering of people who are in close physical proximity.
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| cult | A religious movement that represents a new and independent religious tradition.
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| cultural lag | The view that immaterial culture must constantly "catch up" with material culture, resulting in an adjustment gap between the two forms of culture.
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| culture of poverty | The view that the poor possess self-perpetuating lifeways characterized by weak ego structures, lack of impulse control, a present-time orientation, and a sense of resignation and fatalism.
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| cultural relativism | A value-free or neutral approach that views the behavior of a people from the perspective of their own culture.
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| cultural universals | Patterned and recurrent aspects of life that appear in all known societies.
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| culture | The social heritage of a people; those learned patterns for thinking, feeling, and acting that are transmitted from one generation to the next, including the embodiment of these patterns in material items.
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| denomination | A religious organization that accepts the legitimacy of other religious groups and enjoys a positive relationship with the dominant society.
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| disease | A condition in which an organism does not function properly because of biological causes.
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| education | The transmission of particular attitudes, knowledge, and skills to the members of a society through formal, systematic training.
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| educational self-fulfilling prophecies (also called teacher-expectation effects) | The fact that many children fail to learn, especially inner-city and minority youngsters, because those who are charged with teaching them do not believe that they will learn, do not expect that they can learn, and do not act toward them in ways that help them to learn.
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| ethic | The perspective and values engendered by a religious way of thinking.
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| definition of the situation | A concept formulated by William I. Thomas which refers to the interpretation or meaning people give to their immediate circumstances.
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| deindividualization | A psychological state of diminished identity and self-awareness.
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| democracy | A political system in which the powers of government derive from the consent of the governed and in which regular constitutional avenues exist for changing government officials.
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| demographic transition theory | A view of population change that holds that the process of modernization passes through three stages: high potential growth, transitional growth, and population stability.
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| demography | The science dealing with the size, distribution, composition, and changes in population.
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| density | The physical compactness of people in space.
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| dependent variable | The variable that is affected in an experimental setting.
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| deviance | Behavior that a considerable number of people in a society view as reprehensible and beyond the limits of tolerance.
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| dialectical materialism | The notion in Marxist theory that development depends on the clash of contradictions and the creation of new, more advanced structures out of these clashes.
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| differential association | The notion that the earlier, the more frequent, the more intense, and the longer the duration of the contacts people have in deviant settings, the greater the probability that they too will become deviant.
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| diffusion | The process by which culture traits spread from one social unit to another.
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| discovery | An addition to knowledge.
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| discrimination | The arbitrary denial of privilege, prestige, and power to members of a minority group whose qualifications are equal to those of members of the dominant group.
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| dual labor market | An economy characterized by two sectors. The primary, or core, sector offers "good jobs," and the secondary, or periphery, sector offers "bad jobs."
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| dramaturgical approach | The sociological perspective associated with Erving Goffman that views the performances staged in a theater as an analytical analogy and tool for depicting social life.
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| duties | The actions that others can legitimately insist that we perform.
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| dyad | A two-member group.
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| dysfunctions | Observed consequences that lessen the adaptation or adjustment of a system.
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| ecology | The study of the interrelations between the living and nonliving components of an ecosystem.
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| economic determinist | A believer in the doctrine that economic factors are the primary determinants of the structure of societies and social change.
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| ecosystem | A relatively stable community of organisms that have established interlocking relationships and exchanges with one another and their natural habitat.
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| egalitarian authority | An arrangement in which power and authority are equally distributed between husband and wife.
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| egocentric bias | The tendency to place ourselves at the center of events so that we overperceive ourselves as the victim or target of an action or event that in reality is not directed at us.
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| emergent-norm theory | An approach to crowd behavior stating that crowd members evolve new standards for behavior in a crowd setting and then enforce the expectations in the manner of norms.
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| endogamy | The requirement that marriage occur within a group.
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| environment | All the surrounding conditions and influences that affect an organism or group of organisms.
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| environmental racism | The practice of deliberately locating incinerators and other types of hazardous waste facilities in or next to minority communities.
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| ethnic groups | Groups identified chiefly on cultural grounds-language, religion, folk practices, dress, gestures, mannerisms.
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| ethnomethodology | Procedures-the rules and activities-that people employ in making social life and society intelligible to themselves and others.
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| ethnocentrism | The tendency to judge the behavior of other groups by the standards of one's own culture.
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| euthanasia | The painless putting to death of an individual who suffers from an incurable and painful disease.
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| exchange theory | The view proposing that people involved in a mutually satisfying relationship will exchange behaviors that have low cost and high reward.
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| experiment | A technique in which researchers work with two groups that are identical in all relevant respects. They introduce a change in one group, but not in the other group. The procedure permits researchers to test the effects of an independent variable on a dependent variable.
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| experimental group | The group in which researchers introduce a change in an experimental setting.
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| expressive crowd | An aggregation of people who have gotten together for self-stimulation and personal gratification, such as occurs at a religious revival or a rock festival.
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| expressive movement | A movement that is less concerned with institutional change than with a renovating or renewing of people from within.
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| expressive ties | Social links formed when we emotionally invest ourselves in and commit ourselves to other people.
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| exogamy | The requirement that marriage occur outside a group.
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| extended family | A family arrangement in which kin-individuals related by common ancestry-provide the core relationship; spouses are functionally marginal and peripheral.
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| fad | A folkway that lasts for a short time and enjoys acceptance among only a segment of the population.
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| family | Traditionally defined as a social group whose members are related by ancestry, marriage, or adoption and who live together, cooperate economically, and care for the young.
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| family life course | Changes and realignments related to the altered expectations and requirements imposed on a husband and a wife as children are born and grow up.
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| family of orientation | A nuclear family that consists of oneself and one's father, mother, and siblings.
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| family of procreation | A nuclear family that consists of oneself and one's spouse and children.
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| fashion | A folkway that lasts for a short time and enjoys widespread acceptance within society.
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| fecundity | The potential number of children that could be born if every woman of childbearing age bore all the children she possibly could.
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| folkways | Norms people do not deem to be of great importance and to which they exact less stringent conformity.
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| force | Power whose basis is the threat or application of punishment.
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| formal organization | A group formed deliberately for the achievement of specific objectives.
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| functions | Observed consequences that permit the adaptation or adjustment of a system.
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| futurists | Individuals specializing in the study of the future; they seek to understand, predict, and plan the future of society.
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| gatekeeping | The decision-making process whereby people are admitted to offices and positions of privilege, prestige, and power within a society.
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| gender | The sociocultural distinction between males and females.
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| gender identities | The conceptions we have of ourselves as being male or female.
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| gender roles | Sets of cultural expectations that define the ways in which the members of each sex should behave.
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| general fertility rate | The annual number of live births per 1,000 women age 15 to 44.
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| generalized other | The term George Herbert Mead applied to the social unit that gives individuals their unity of self. The attitude of the generalized other is the attitude of the larger community.
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| genocide | The deliberate and systematic extermination of a racial or ethnic group.
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| government | Those political processes that have to do with the authoritative formulating of rules and policies that are binding and pervasive throughout a society.
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| group | Two or more people who share a feeling of unity and who are bound together in relatively stable patterns of social interaction.
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| group marriage | The marriage of two or more husbands and two or more wives.
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| groupthink | A decision-making process found in highly cohesive groups in which the members become so preoccupied with maintaining group consensus that their critical faculties are impaired.
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| growth rate | The difference between births and deaths, plus the difference between immigrants and emigrants per 1,000 population.
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| health | As defined by the World Health Organization, "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."
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| hermaphrodites | Individuals whose reproductive structures are sufficiently ambiguous that it is difficult to define them exclusively as male or female.
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| hidden curriculum | A complex of unarticulated values, attitudes, and behaviors that subtly fit children in the image of the dominant institutions.
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| homogamy | The tendency of like to marry like.
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| homosexuality | A preference for an individual of the same sex as a sexual partner.
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| horizontal mobility | Movement from one social status to another that is approximately equivalent in rank.
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| hospice | A program or mode of care that attempts to make the dying experience less painful and emotionally traumatic for patients and their families.
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| hypothesis | A proposition that can be tested to determine its validity.
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| ideology | A set of ideas that provides individuals with conceptions of the purposes of a social movement, a rationale for the movement's existence, an indictment of existing conditions, and a design for action.
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| impression management | The term Erving Goffman applied to the process whereby we present ourselves to others in ways that will lead them to view us in a favorable light.
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| incest taboos | Rules that prohibit sexual intercourse with close blood relatives.
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| income | The amount of money people receive.
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| independent variable | The variable that causes an effect in an experimental setting.
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| index crimes | Crimes reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in its Uniform Crime Reports. These offenses consist of four categories of violent crime against people-murder, rape, robbery, and assault-and four categories of crime against property-burglary, theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson.
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| infant mortality rate | The number of deaths among infants under one year of age per 1,000 live births.
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| informal organization | Interpersonal networks and ties that arise in a formal organization but that are not defined or prescribed by it.
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| in-group | A group with which we identify and to which we belong.
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| institutions | The principal instruments whereby the essential tasks of living are organized, directed, and executed.
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| institutional discrimination | The functioning of the institutions of society in a way that produces unequal outcomes for different groups.
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| instrumental ties | Social links formed when we cooperate with other people to achieve some goal.
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| interest groups | Organizations of people who share common concerns or points of view.
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| interests | People who share common concerns or points of view.
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| intergenerational mobility | A comparison of the social status of parents and their children at some point in their respective careers.
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| internalization | The process by which individuals incorporate within their personalities the standards of behavior prevalent within the larger society.
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| internal migration | Population movement within a nation.
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| international migration | Population movement between nations.
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| intragenerational mobility | A comparison of the social status of a person over an extended period of time.
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| invasion | A new type of people, institution, or activity that encroaches on an area occupied by a different type.
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| invention | The use of existing knowledge in a new form.
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| iron law of oligarchy | The principle that states that bureaucracies invariably lead to the concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals who use their offices to advance their own fortunes and self-interests.
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| language | A socially structured system of sound patterns (words and sentences) with specific and arbitrary meanings.
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| language acquisition device | The view associated with Noam Chomsky that human beings possess an inborn language-generating mechanism. The basic structure of language is seen as biologically channeled, forming a sort of prefabricated filing system to order the words and phrases that make up human languages.
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| latent functions | Consequences that are neither intended nor recognized by the participants in a system.
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| laws | Rules that are enforced by a special political organization composed of individuals who enjoy the right to use force.
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| learning | A relatively permanent change in behavior or capability that results from experience.
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| legal-rational authority | Power that is legitimated by explicit rules and rational procedures that define the rights and duties of the occupants of given positions.
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| life chances | The likelihood that individuals and groups will enjoy desired goods and services, fulfilling experiences, and opportunities for living healthy and long lives.
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| life course | The interweave of age-graded trajectories with the vicissitudes of changing social conditions and future options that characterize the life span from conception through old age and death.
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| life events | Turning points at which people change some direction in the course of their lives.
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| lifestyle | The overall pattern of living that people evolve to meet their biological, social, and emotional needs.
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| looking-glass self | The term that Charles Horton Cooley applied to the process by which we imaginatively assume the stance of other people and view ourselves as we believe they see us.
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| macrosociology | The study of large-scale and long-term social processes.
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| mana | The notion that there is in nature a diffuse, impersonal, supernatural force operating for good or evil.
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| manifest functions | Consequences that are intended and recognized by the participants in a system.
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| marriage | A socially approved sexual union between two or more individuals which is undertaken with some idea of permanence.
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| matching hypothesis | The notion that we typically experience the greatest payoff and the least cost when we select partners who have a degree of physical attractiveness similar to our own.
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| master status | A key or core status that carries primary weight in a person's interactions and relationships with others.
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| mass hysteria | The rapid dissemination of behaviors involving contagious anxiety, usually associated with some mysterious force.
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| mass media | Those organizations-newspapers, magazines, television, radio, and motion pictures-that undertake to convey information to a large segment of the public.
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| matriarchal authority | A family arrangement in which power is vested in women.
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| matrilineal | An arrangement based on reckoning descent and inheritance through the mother's side of the family.
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| matrilocal residence | The residence pattern in which a bride and groom live in the household or community of the wife's family.
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| medicalization of deviance | An increasing number of behaviors that earlier generations defined as being immoral or sinful are coming to be seen as forms of sickness.
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| medicine | An institution providing an enduring set of cultural patterns and social arrangements responsible for problems of health and disease.
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| megalopolis | A strip city formed when the rural interstices between metropolitan centers fill with urban development.
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| microsociology | The detailed study of what individuals say, do, and think moment by moment as they go about their daily lives.
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| minority group | A racially or culturally self-conscious population, with hereditary membership and a high degree of in-group marriage, which suffers oppression at the hands of a dominant segment of a nation-state.
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| modernization | The process by which a society moves from traditional or preindustrial social and economic arrangements to those characteristic of industrial societies.
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| monogamy | The marriage of one husband and one wife.
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| monotheism | The belief in one god.
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| mores | Norms to which people attach a good deal of importance and exact strict conformity.
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| mortification | A procedure in which rituals employed by coercive organizations render individuals vulnerable to institutional control, discipline, and resocialization.
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| multinational corporations | Firms that have their central office in one country and subsidiaries in other countries.
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| multiple nuclei model | The approach to city growth that assumes a city has several centers, each of which specializes in some activity and gives its distinctive cast to the surrounding area.
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| natural areas | Geographic areas with distinctive characteristics.
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| natural history of revolutions | The view that social revolutions pass through a set of common stages and patterns in the course of their development.
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| negotiated order | The fluid, ongoing understanding and agreements people reach as they go about their daily activities.
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| neolocal residence | The residence pattern in which newlyweds set up a new place of residence independent of either of their parents or other relatives.
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| net migration rate | The increase or decrease per 1,000 members of the population in a given year that results from people entering (immigrants) or leaving (emigrants) a society.
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| norm of legitimacy | The rule that children not be born out of wedlock.
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| norms | Social rules that specify appropriate and inappropriate behavior in given situations.
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| nuclear family | A family arrangement in which the spouses and their offspring constitute the core relationship; blood relatives are functionally marginal and peripheral.
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| objective method | An approach to the identification of social classes that employs such yardsticks as income, occupation, and education.
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| observational learning | Learning that occurs when people reproduce the responses they observe in other people, either real or fictional; also referred to as modeling or imitation.
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| oligopoly | A market dominated by a few firms.
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| open system | A stratification system in which people can change their status with relative ease.
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| operational definition | A definition developed by taking abstract concepts and putting them in a form that permits their measurement.
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| organized crime | Large-scale bureaucratic organizations that provide illegal goods and services in public demand.
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| out-group | A group with which we do not identify and to which we do not belong.
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| panic | Irrational and uncoordinated but collective action among people that is induced by the presence of an immediate, severe threat.
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| paralanguage | Nonverbal cues surrounding speech-voice, pitch, volume, pacing of speech, silent pauses, and sighs-that provide a rich source of communicative information.
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| Parkinson's law | The principle that states that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
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| participant observation | A technique in which researchers engage in activities with the people that they are observing.
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| patriarchy | A system of social organization in which men have a disproportionate share of power.
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| patriarchal authority | A family arrangement in which power is vested in men.
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| patrilineal | An arrangement based on reckoning descent and inheritance through the father's side of the family.
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| patrilocal residence | The residence pattern in which a bride and groom live in the household or community of the husband's family.
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| periphery regions | Geographical areas that provide raw materials to the core and are exploited by it.
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| personal efficacy | The belief that one can overcome obstacles and achieve goals.
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| pluralism | A situation where diverse groups coexist side by side and mutually accommodate themselves to their differences.
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| political action committees (PACs) | Interest groups set up to elect or defeat candidates, but not through the organization of a political party.
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| political party | An organization designed to gain control of the government by putting its people in public office.
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| political power | Power that is organized and wielded by the state.
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| politics | The processes by which people and groups acquire and exercise power.
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| polyandry | The marriage of two or more husbands and one wife.
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| polygyny | The marriage of one husband and two or more wives.
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| polytheism | The belief in many gods with equal or relatively similar power.
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| population pyramid | The age and sex composition of a population as portrayed in the tree of ages.
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| power | The ability to control the behavior of others, even against their will.
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| prejudice | Attitudes of aversion and hostility toward the members of a group simply because they belong to it and hence are presumed to have the objectionable qualities ascribed to it.
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| prestige | The social respect, admiration, and recognition associated with a particular social status.
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| primary deviance | Behavior that violates social norms but usually goes unnoticed by the agents of social control.
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| primary group | Two or more people who enjoy a direct, intimate, cohesive relationship with one another.
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| profane | Those aspects of social reality that are everyday and commonplace.
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| Protestant ethic | The Calvinist ethos that embodied the spirit of capitalism.
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| proxemics | The way we employ social and personal space to transmit messages.
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| puberty rites | Initiation ceremonies that symbolize the transition from childhood to adulthood.
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| public-interest groups | Interest groups that pursue policies that presumably would be of no greater benefit to their members than to the larger society.
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| race | A population that differs from other populations in the incidence of various hereditary traits.
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| racism | The belief that some racial groups are naturally superior and others are inferior.
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| random sample | A sampling procedure in which researchers select subjects on the basis of chance so that every individual in the population has the same opportunity to be chosen.
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| recidivism | Relapse into criminal behavior.
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| reference group | A social unit we use for appraising and shaping our attitudes, feelings, and actions.
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| reflected appraisals | Appraisals of ourselves that we see reflected in the behavior of others.
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| reflexive behavior | Actions through which people observe, interpret, evaluate, communicate with, and attempt to control themselves.
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| reform movement | A social movement that pursues changes that will implement the existing value scheme of a society more adequately.
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| relationship | An association that lasts long enough for two people to become linked together by a relatively stable set of expectations.
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| relative deprivation | Discontent associated with the gap between what we have and what we believe we should have.
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| religion | Those socially shared and organized ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that concern ultimate meanings and assume the existence of the supernatural or "beyond" and that are centered in beliefs and practices related to sacred things.
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| reputational method | An approach to identifying social classes that involves asking people how they classify others.
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| resistance movement | A social movement that arises to block change or eliminate a previously instituted change.
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| resocialization | A process by which a person's old roles and identities are stripped away and new ones are created.
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| revolutionary movement | A social movement that advocates the replacement of a society's existing value scheme.
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| rights | Actions that we can legitimately insist that others perform.
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| rituals | Social acts prescribed by rules that dictate how human beings should comport themselves in the presence of the sacred.
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| role | A set of expectations (rights and duties) that define the behavior people view as appropriate and inappropriate for the occupant of a status.
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| role conflict | The situation in which individuals are confronted with conflicting expectations stemming from their simultaneous occupancy of two or more statuses.
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| role performance | The actual behavior of the person who occupies a status.
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| role set | The multiple roles associated with a single status.
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| role strain | The situation in which individuals find the expectations of a single role incompatible, so that they have difficulty performing the role.
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| romantic love | The strong physical and emotional attraction between a man and a woman.
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| rumor | A difficult-to-verify piece of information that is transmitted from person to person in relatively rapid fashion.
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| sacred | Those aspects of social reality that are set apart and forbidden.
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| secondary deviance | Deviance that individuals adopt in response to the reactions of other individuals.
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| secondary group | Two or more people who are involved in an impersonal relationship and have come together for a specific, practical purpose.
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| sect | A religious organization that stands apart from the dominant society but is rooted in established religious traditions.
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| sector model | The approach to city growth that assumes that large cities are made up of sectors-wedge-shaped areas-rather than concentric circles.
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| secularization thesis | The notion that profane (nonreligious) considerations gain ascendancy over sacred (religious) considerations in the course of social evolution.
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| segregation | A process of clustering wherein individuals and groups are sifted and sorted out in space based on their sharing certain traits or activities in common.
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| self | The set of concepts we use in defining who we are.
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| self-conception | An overriding view of ourselves; a sense of self through time.
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| self-esteem | The belief that one is a good and valuable person.
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| self-image | A mental conception or picture we have of ourselves that is relatively temporary; it changes as we move from one context to another.
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| self-placement method | An approach to identifying social classes that involves self-classification.
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| sex | A reference to whether one is genetically male or female; determines the biological role that one will play in reproduction.
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| sexism | The set of cultural and social processes that justify and promote disadvantage for women.
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| sick role | A set of cultural expectations that define what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior for people with a disease or health problem.
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| significant other | The term George Herbert Mead applied to a social model, usually an important person in an individual's life.
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| social change | Fundamental alterations in the patterns of culture, structure, and social behavior over time.
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| social clock | A cultural timetable based on age norms and used by individuals to pace the major events of their lives.
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| social comparisons | Comparing one's performance, ability, or characteristics with those of others and rating oneself as positive, neutral, or negative.
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| social control | Methods and strategies that regulate behavior within society.
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| Social Darwinism | The application of evolutionary notions and the concept of survival of the fittest to the social world.
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| social differentiation | The process by which a society becomes increasingly specialized over time.
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| social dilemma | A situation in which members of a group are faced with a conflict between maximizing their personal interests and maximizing the collective welfare.
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| social dynamics | Those aspects of social life that pattern institutional development and have to do with social change.
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| social-emotional specialist | A leadership role that focuses on overcoming interpersonal problems in a group, defusing tension, and promoting solidarity.
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| social facts | Those aspects of social life that cannot be explained in terms of the biological or mental characteristics of the individual. People experience the social fact as external to themselves in the sense that it has an independent reality and forms a part of their objective environment.
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| socialist economy | An economic system relying primarily on state planning and publicly held property.
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| socialization | A process of social interaction by which people acquire the knowledge, attitudes, values, and behaviors essential for effective participation in society.
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| social loafing | The process in which individuals work less hard when working in groups than they do when working individually.
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| social mobility | The process in which individuals or groups move from one level (stratum) to another in the stratification system.
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| social movement | A more-or-less persistent and organized effort on the part of a relatively large number of people to bring about or resist change.
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| social revolution | The overthrow of a society's state and class structures and the fashioning of new social arrangements.
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| social statics | Those aspects of social life that have to do with order and stability and that allow societies to hold together and endure.
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| social stratification | The structured ranking of individuals and groups; their grading into hierarchical layers or strata.
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| social structure | The interweaving of people's interactions and relationships in more or less recurrent and stable patterns.
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| society | A group of people who live within the same territory and share a common culture.
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| sociology | The scientific study of social interaction and social organization.
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| socioeconomic life cycle | A sequence of stages that begins with birth into a family with a specific social status and proceeds through childhood, socialization, schooling, job seeking, occupational achievement, marriage, and the formation and functioning of a new family unit.
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| sociological imagination | The ability to see our private experiences and personal difficulties as entwined with the structural arrangements of our society and the historical times in which we live.
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| split labor market | An economic arena in which large differences exist in the price of labor at the same occupational level.
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| special-interest groups | Interest groups that primarily seek benefits from which their members would derive more gains than the society as a whole.
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| spurious correlation | The apparent relationship between two variables produced by a third variable that influences the original variables.
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| state | An arrangement that consists of people who exercise an effective monopoly in the use of physical coercion within a given territory.
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| status | A position within a group or society; a location in a social structure.
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| stratified random sample | A sampling procedure in which researchers divide a population into relevant categories and draw a random sample from each of the categories.
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| structural conduciveness | Social conditions that permit a particular variety of collective behavior to occur.
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| structural strain | A condition in which important aspects of a social system are "out of joint."
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| style of life | The magnitude and manner of people's consumption of goods and services.
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| succession | Invasion that continues until the encroaching type of people, institution, or activity displaces the previous type.
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| subculture | A group whose members participate in the main culture of a society while simultaneously sharing a number of unique values, norms, traditions, and lifestyles.
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| survey | A method for gathering data on people's beliefs, values, attitudes, perceptions, motivations, and feelings. The data can be derived from interviews or questionnaires.
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| symbolic racism | A form of racism in which whites feel that blacks are too aggressive, do not play by the rules, and have negative characteristics.
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| symbols | Acts or objects that have come to be socially accepted as standing for something else.
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| task specialist | A leadership role that focuses on appraising the problem at hand and organizing people's activity to deal with it.
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| terrorism | The use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, a formal organization, or a civilian population in furtherance of political, religious, or social objectives.
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| theism | A religion centered in a belief in gods who are thought to be powerful, to have an interest in human affairs, and to merit worship.
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| Thomas theorem | The notion that our definitions influence our construction of reality; as stated by William I. Thomas and Dorothy S. Thomas: "If [people] define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."
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| totalitarianism | A "total state" in which the government undertakes to control all parts of the society and all aspects of social life.
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| totemism | A religious system in which a clan (a kin group) takes the name of, claims descent from, and attributes sacred properties to a plant or animal.
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| traditional authority | Power that is legitimated by the sanctity of age-old customs.
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| trained incapacity | The term Thorstein Veblen applied to the tendency within bureaucracies for members to rely on established rules and regulations and to apply them in an unimaginative and mechanical fashion.
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| triad | A three-member group.
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| utilitarian organization | A formal organization set up to achieve practical ends.
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| unobtrusive observation | A technique in which researchers observe the activities of people without intruding or participating in the activities.
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| urban gentrification | The return of the middle class-usually young, white, childless professionals-to older urban neighborhoods.
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| value-added | The idea that each step in the production process-from raw materials to the finished product-increases the economic value of manufactured goods.
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| values | Broad ideas regarding what is desirable, correct, and good that most members of a society share.
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| value-free sociology | The view of Max Weber that sociologists must not allow their personal biases to affect the conduct of their scientific research.
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| variable | A concept that can take on different values; the term scientists apply to something they think influences (or is influenced by) something else.
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| Verstehen | An approach to the study of social life developed by Max Weber in which sociologists mentally attempt to place themselves in the shoes of other people and identify what they think and how they feel; translates roughly as "understanding."
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| vertical mobility | Movement of individuals from one social status to another of higher or lower rank.
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| victimless crime | An offense in which no one involved is considered a victim.
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| voluntary organization | A formal organization that people enter and leave freely.
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| wealth | What people own.
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| white-collar crime | Crime committed by relatively affluent persons, often in the course of business activities.
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| world system | An approach that views development as involving an unequal exchange between core and periphery nations, with development at the former end of the chain coming at the cost of underdevelopment at the other end.
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| zero population growth | The point at which a modern population replaces itself without immigration- 2.1 children per woman.
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2002 McGraw-Hill Higher Education