Chapter 1. An Introduction to Sociology
Chapter 1 Resources and Activities
Key Terms
agency: The capacity of individuals to act and make decisions independently.
AGIL schema: Talcott Parsons’ division of society into four functional requisites: Adaptation, Goal attainment, Integration, and Latent pattern maintenance.
anomie: A social condition or normlessness in which a lack of clear norms fails to give direction and purpose to individual actions.
capitalism: An economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership, production, and sale of goods in a competitive market.
collective representations: The shared meanings, symbols, concepts, categories and images of a social collectivity.
content: The specific reasons or drives that motivate individuals to interact.
critical sociology: A theoretical perspective that focuses on inequality and power relations in society in order to achieve social justice and emancipation through their transformation.
culture: A group’s whole way of life including shared practices, values, beliefs, norms and artifacts.
definition of the situation: The mutual understanding of the tasks or situation at hand shared among co-participants.
dialectics: A type of analysis that proposes that social contradiction, opposition, and struggle in society drive processes of social change and transformation.
disenchantment of the world: The replacement of magical thinking by science, technological rationality, and calculation.
dominant gender ideology: The belief that physiological sex differences between males and females are related to differences in their character, behaviour, and ability.
dual consciousness: The experience of a fissure or division in consciousness when one crosses a line between the abstractions of institutional knowledge and the direct, lived experiences of everyday/every night life.
dynamic equilibrium: A stable state in which all parts of a functioning society are working together properly.
dysfunctions: Social patterns that have undesirable consequences for the operation of society.
empiricism: The philosophical tradition that seeks to discover the laws of the operation of the world through careful, methodical, and detailed observation.
egoistic suicide: Suicide which results from the absence of strong social bonds tying the individual to a community.
essentialism: The idea that the characteristics of persons or groups are significantly influenced by biological factors or human nature, and are therefore largely similar in all human cultures and historical periods.
feminism: The critical analysis of the way gender differences in society structure social inequality.
figuration: The process of simultaneously analyzing the behaviour of an individual and the society that shapes that behaviour.
formal sociology: A sociology that analytically separates the contents from the forms of social interaction to study the common forms that guide human behaviour.
functionalism (or functionalist perspective): See struc