SOME DEFINITIONS OF CONCEPTS USED IN CLASS
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| SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS (aka institutional spheres) | |
| Organized patterns of beliefs and behaviour (major areas of organized social activity) centered on and designed to meet basic social needs; relatively enduring clusters of values, norms, social statuses, roles and groups that address fundamental social needs. | |
| SOCIAL STRUCTURE | |
| The way in which a society is organized into predictable relationships; a collective reality that exists apart from individuals, constructing the context in which people interact; ordered relationships and patterned expectations that guide social interaction | |
| SOCIAL STATUS | |
| socially defined position in a social structure | |
| ACHIEVED STATUSES | |
| statuses secured through effort and ability, e.g. education level attained | |
| ASCRIBED STATUSES | |
| statuses assigned to individuals without reference to their abilities or efforts, e.g. gender, race, age | |
| MASTER STATUS | |
| dominant status | |
| ROLE | |
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a set of expectations, rights, duties that are attached to a particular status NB: We occupy statuses, we play roles |
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| VALUES | |
| collective conceptions of what is considered good, proper, desirable and/or bad, undesirable and improper | |
| NORMS | |
| established standards of behaviour | |
| (SOCIAL) STRATIFICATION | |
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ranking some individuals and groups as more deserving than others; from this a social hierarchy is formed which is a set of ranked statuses from highest to lowest. (The word social is in parentheses because in sociology it is often presumed you are referring to the social, i.e. groups of people interacting together rather than one individual by themselves.) or a form of inequality in which categories of people are systematically ranked in a hierarchy on the basis of their access to scarce but valued resources. This is different from social inequality which is a condition in which people have unequal access to wealth, power and prestige; and social differentiation which is a process in which people are set apart for differential treatment by virtue of their statuses, roles, and other social characteristics. |
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| Sources: various introductory sociology textbooks authored by Macionis, Schaefer, Hess, Thompson & Hickey | |
