- •4. What factors influence the rate of change experienced by a society?
- •5.Discuss the pros and cons of considering the economy as part of the infrastructure of sociocultural systems
- •6 Who are the power elite? What is the source of their power?
- •7.What social forces have made the masses (and even the middle level) powerless?
- •8.Population, Urbanization, & Environoment
- •9. Government & Politics
- •10. Role of religion in society
- •11) Role of education in society
- •12) The role of family in socialization
- •13) The problem of stratification in Sociology
- •14) Hawthorne experiment
- •16) Scope of the subject of sociology and comparison with other social sciences.
- •17) Sociology and common sense.
- •18) Sociology as Science
- •19) Positivism and its critique
- •20) Research Methods and Analysis
- •21) Techniques of data collection
- •22) Variables, sampling, hypothesis, reliability and validity.
- •23) Sociological Thinkers
- •24) Karl Marx - Historical materialism, mode of production, alienation, class struggle.
- •25) Emile Durkheim- Division of labour, social fact, suicide, religion and society
- •26) Robert k. Merton- Latent and manifest functions, conformity and deviance, reference groups
- •27) Mead - Self and identity
- •28) Stratification and Mobility
- •29. Dimensions – Social stratification of class, status groups, gender, ethnicity and race
- •31. Social organization of work in different types of society- slave society, feudal society, industrial /capitalist society
- •32. Labour and society
- •34 Power elite, bureaucracy, pressure groups, and political parties
- •35 Protest, agitation, social movements, collective action, revolution
- •36 Religion and Society
- •37. Sociological theories of religion
- •38 Types of religious practices: animism, monism, pluralism, sects, cults
- •39. Religion in modern society: religion and science, secularization, religious revivalism, fundamentalism
- •40. The object and the subject of Sociology
- •41. The main categories (terms) of Sociology
- •42. Specializations of Sociology
- •43. The main techniques (methods) of Sociology
- •1 Please explain how Durkheim’s study of suicide and d. Snow’s study of homelessness reflected both a sociological and a scientific approach to their topics
- •2 What is the difference between micro-sociology and macro-sociology
- •3.Why does this course focus exclusively on macro-sociology
- •4. What is a paradigm?
- •5.Of what use is social theory?
- •6. How is this different than earlier industrial societies?
- •7. How does the capitalist world-system maintain political stability?
- •8. Describe the social condition Durkheim calls "anomie.
- •10) What is the role of religion in society?
- •11) What are manifest and latent functions? What is a dysfunction?
- •12) What is Durkheim's anomie theory of deviance?
- •13) Conflict Theory
- •14) Social Classes
- •15 Social mobility
- •16) Race and Ethnicity
- •17) Minority Groups
- •18 Money, economy and social relevance
- •19 The role of mass media in our life
- •20 Censorship and freedom of speech
- •21 Environmental health
- •23) How has television affected social and political discourse in modern society?
- •24) In what sense is technological change "ecological" in nature?
- •25) In what ways has our production system become hostile to the environment?
- •26) Why did America go into Iraq?
- •27) Why did nato help to drive out Muamar Kaddafi in Libya?
- •28) Please explain the significance of the Hawthorne experiment to the development of applied Sociology.
- •29 Is it possible to replicate Hawthorne experiment in nowadays (you can try and remember the case from the text “Replication as a research tool
- •30 How to avoid the Hawthorne Effect?
- •31. How do sociologists use scientific method?
- •32. How can researchers develop a sample of homeless persons in order to study the issue of homelessness?
- •33. Why does the conclusion of a sociological study invariably point the way to new research?
- •36, Why is it valuable for sociologists to have a code of professional ethics?
- •38. Please explain and describe the difficulties that you can encounter in defining a problem when you are conducting a sociological research
- •39. Please explain how sociologists define operational definitions in their sociological project
- •40. Please explain and give reasons why sociologists review special literature on their social problem
- •41. Please explain and define how sociologists give variables in their sociological research
- •42. Explain how sociologists use definite method(s) for gathering data
- •6) Social ideas of Herbert Spencer
- •8) The problems of social interaction and reality in sociology
- •10) The meaning of ascribed and achieved status. Master status.
- •11) Conflict view to the social institutions
- •12) The problems of social structure and modern society
- •13) The problem of anomie in sociology
- •14) Interactionist view to the social institutions
- •15)Functionalist view to the social institutions.
- •16) How has the socialization process changed in the 20th century? How have these changes affected childhood?
- •17) Patriarchy and sexual division of labour
- •18) Agents of social change
- •19) Education and social change
- •20) Science, technology and social change
- •21) Society, community, association, institution
- •22) Social Groups - primary, secondary and reference groups.
- •23) Social structure, social system, social action
- •24) Status and role
- •25) Norms and values-conformity and deviance.
- •26) Social stratification: forms and functions
- •27) Types of society: tribal, agrarian, industrial and post-industrial
- •28) Marriage : types and norms, marriage as contract, and as a sacrament.
- •29. Family : types, functions and changes.
- •30 Kinships : terms and usages, rules of residence, descent, inheritance.
- •31. What is the difference between micro-sociology and macro-sociology?
- •32 Why does this course focus exclusively on macro-sociology?
- •33 What is a paradigm in Sociology?
- •34 Of what use is social theory?
- •35 What is positivism?
- •36, What was Comte’s favored (principal) method of inquiry?
- •37, The role of social institutions in a modern society.
- •38. The problem of suicide in sociology.
- •39. Society as a category of Sociology.
- •40. Durkheim’s Study of Suicide.
- •41. Comte believed all human life had passed through the same 3 distinct historical stages – theology, … , … .Please complete the sentence and explain what Comte meant.
- •42. Sociologists often conduct research using the scientific method. Please, explain how they do it. Give definite example from your hand-outs.
- •43 Max Weber suggested that the best way to understand human behavior is by a direct ″sympathetic understanding″. Please, explain what Weber meant.
- •44 It is sometimes charged by nonsociologists that sociology is a science of the obvious. Please, give your own opinion about this problem.
- •45 There is a traditional commonsense explanation (statement) that more young people than old people commit suicide. How to prove or reject this statement using the method of natural science.
- •49 Please, examine sociological and psychological approaches to the issue of gambling.
- •50 Please, explain why Herbert Spencer did not feel compelled to correct or improve society.
- •52 Durkheim insisted that the growing division of labor found in industrial societies led to what he called anomie. Please, explain what Durkheim meant and what sociologists call anomie.
- •II Durkheim's Theory on Anomie
7.What social forces have made the masses (and even the middle level) powerless?
Whatever else it is [the United States], surely this is evident: it is a society in which functionally rational bureaucracies are increasingly used in human affairs and in history-making decisions. Not all periods are alike in the degree to which historical changes within them are independent of the willful control, go on behind all men's backs. Ours seems to be a period in which key decisions or their lack by bureaucratically instituted elites are increasingly sources of historical change. Moreover, it is a period and a society in which the enlargement and the centralization of the means of control, of power, now include quite widely the use of social science for whatever ends those in control of these means may assign to it"
"From the individual's standpoint, much that happens seems the result of manipulation, of management, of blind drift; authority is often not explicit; those with power often feel no need to make it explicit and justify it. That is one reason why ordinary men, when they are in trouble or when they sense that they are up against issues, cannot get clear targets for thought and action; they cannot determine what it is that imperils the values they vaguely discern as theirs"
"Men are free to make history, but some men are much freer than others. Such freedom requires access to the means of decisions and of power by which history may now be made. It is not always so made; in the following, I am speaking only of the contemporary period in which the means of history-making power have become so enlarged and so centralized. It is with reference to this period that I am contending that if men do not make history, they tend increasingly to become the utensils of history-makers and also the mere objects of history-making
"But consider now, the major clue to our condition: Is it not, in a word, the enormous enlargement and the decisive centralization of all the means of power and decision, which is to say--all the means of history-making? In modern industrial society, the facilities of economic production are developed and centralized--as peasants and artisans are replaced by private corporations and government industries. In the modern nation-state, the means of violence and of political administration undergo similar development--as kings control nobles, and self-equipped knights are replaced by standing armies and now by fearful military machines"
8.Population, Urbanization, & Environoment
A population is all the organisms of the same group or species who live in the same geographical area and are capable of interbreeding. In ecology the population of a certain species in a certain area is estimated using the Lincoln Index. The area that is used to define a sexual population is such that inter-breeding is possible between any pair within the area and more probable than cross-breeding with individuals from other areas. Normally breeding is substantially more common within the area than across the border.
In sociology, population refers to a collection of human beings. Demography is a social science which entails the statistical study of human populations. This article refers mainly to human population.
Urbanization, or urban drift is the physical growth of urban areas as a result of rural migration and even suburban concentration into cities, particularly the very largest ones. Urbanization is closely linked to modernisation, industrialisation, and the sociological process of rationalisation. Urbanisation can describe a specific condition at a set time, i.e. the proportion of total population or area in cities or towns, or the term can describe the increase of this proportion over time. So the term urbanisation can represent the level of urban relative to overall population, or it can represent the rate at which the urban proportion is increasing. Urbanisation is not merely a modern phenomenon, but a rapid and historic transformation of human social roots on a global scale, whereby predominantly village culture is being rapidly replaced by predominantly urban culture.
The social environment, social context, sociocultural context, or milieu, refers to the immediate physical and social setting in which people live or in which something happens or develops. It includes the culture that the individual was educated or lives in, and the people and institutions with whom they interact.
The interaction may be in person or through communication media, even anonymous or one-way, and may not imply equality of social status. Therefore the social environment is a broader concept than that of social class or social circle.