Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : B

Such communities are described as a virtual community.

The term was popularised by Howard Rheingold in The Virtual Community (1993). He described virtual communities as social groupings that emerge on the Net when enough people carry on public discussions long enough, and with enough human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace, which is almost exactly the wording of the question.

An epistemic community, in Peter Haas's usage, is a network of experts who share knowledge and influence policy, and need not be online at all. 'Cyber community' and 'temporal community' are not the established terms for this idea.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : B

Sorokin's three types of culture are ideational, idealist and sensate.

In Social and Cultural Dynamics Pitirim Sorokin argued that cultures fluctuate between an ideational type, which takes ultimate reality to be spiritual and supersensory, and a sensate type, which takes reality to be what the senses perceive. The idealistic (or idealist) type lies between them and combines the two. Western history, he argued, cycles through these forms.

The other options bring in categories such as instrumental, ethical, moral or modern culture, which are not part of Sorokin's scheme.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : C

'Because motives' and 'in-order-to motives' refer to the past and the future.

Alfred Schutz distinguished two kinds of motive. An in-order-to motive refers to the future: the goal or project the actor is trying to bring about. A because motive refers to the past: the experiences, circumstances and dispositions that led the actor to form that project in the first place.

So the pair, taken in the order the question gives, is past and future. The options pairing either kind of motive with the present, or putting the future first, reverse or misplace Schutz's distinction.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : D

Anything that carries a particular meaning recognised by people who share a culture is a symbol.

This is the standard textbook definition (it appears, for example, in Macionis's Sociology). Symbols include words, gestures, flags, colours and objects; a red light or a wedding ring means something only to those who share the code. Symbolic interactionists treat the ability to create and share symbols as the basis of human society.

Values are culturally defined standards of what is good and desirable, beliefs are specific statements people hold to be true, and morals are principles of right conduct. Each of these is expressed through symbols, but none is defined as 'anything that carries a meaning'.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : B

The term 'Disneyization' was coined by Alan Bryman.

In an article of 1999 and his book The Disneyization of Society (2004), Bryman described how the principles of Disney theme parks spread through society: theming, hybrid consumption (shopping, eating and entertainment merged), merchandising, and performative labour in which workers act out a role for customers.

The concept was deliberately modelled on George Ritzer's 'McDonaldization', which is why Ritzer is the tempting distractor. Bauman wrote on liquid modernity and consumer society, and Bourdieu on capital, habitus and distinction.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : C

A building is not part of ecological infrastructure.

Ecological infrastructure means the natural ecosystems that provide services society depends on: soils that support crops and store water and carbon, plants (flora) that produce oxygen and stabilise land, animals (fauna) that pollinate and maintain food chains, together with rivers, wetlands and forests.

Soil, flora and fauna are all natural components of that system. Buildings are built or 'grey' infrastructure, made by people from manufactured materials, so they are the one item that does not belong.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : C

The programme is the National Green Corps, printed in the paper as 'National Green Crop'.

The Ministry of Environment and Forests started the National Green Corps in 2001-02 to build environmental awareness among school children. It works through Eco-clubs set up in schools, which carry out activities such as tree planting, waste management, water conservation and awareness campaigns, with teachers acting as in-charges.

'Nature Lovers' and 'Soldiers of Nature' are not the names of the government programme, and e-waste management is a regulatory subject (the E-Waste Management Rules) rather than an awareness programme for children.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : D

A survey is not used to study the dead and past society.

A social survey collects data directly from living people, by questionnaire or interview, about a defined population or area at a given time. Surveys are used for administrative purposes, such as the census, and for sociological research, and they can gather a great deal of data about people's lifestyles.

The first three options therefore all describe surveys. Past societies and people no longer alive cannot be surveyed; they are studied through historical and documentary methods, archives, records and archaeological evidence.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : B

A combination of research methods is called triangulation.

Norman Denzin (1970) set out triangulation as the use of more than one method, data source, investigator or theory to study the same phenomenon. Combining, for example, a survey with interviews and observation lets each method check the others and gives a fuller and more valid picture.

Ethnography is a single, usually observational, approach to studying a group. Ethnomethodology is Harold Garfinkel's study of the methods people use to make sense of everyday life. Positivism is an epistemological position favouring scientific methods, not a combination of methods.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : A

The oldest of these is the cyclical view of social change.

The idea that societies pass through recurring cycles of rise and decline is found in ancient thought: the Indian scheme of yugas, the Greek accounts of the cycle of constitutions in Plato and Polybius, and later Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century. It was revived in the twentieth century by Spengler, Toynbee and Sorokin, but its roots are ancient.

The linear view, of change as steady progress, belongs to the Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century such as Condorcet and to Comte. The evolutionary model is a nineteenth-century theory associated with Spencer and Morgan, and the dialectical model comes from Hegel and Marx in the nineteenth century, so all three are much later.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : B

The jajmani system is characterised by barter.

Under the jajmani system the service castes, such as the carpenter, blacksmith, barber and washerman, were paid by their patron families not in money but in kind: fixed shares of grain at harvest, food and clothes on festivals and at weddings, and sometimes a plot of land. Services were exchanged directly for goods.

A money economy is what eroded the jajmani system, as cash wages replaced customary payments. The system had political and religious aspects, but neither characterises it as the exchange in kind does.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : B

India ranked 177.

In the 2018 Environmental Performance Index, published by Yale and Columbia universities, India was 177th of 180 countries, among the lowest mainly because of poor air quality. It had been 141st in the 2016 edition.

141 is the 2016 rank, which makes it the usual trap; 147 and 167 do not match the 2018 index.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : C

It is the 5th Schedule.

The Fifth Schedule provides for the administration and control of Scheduled Areas and Scheduled Tribes in states other than Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram, including Tribes Advisory Councils and the Governor's power to modify laws in those areas. The Sixth Schedule covers the tribal areas of those four north-eastern states.

The 3rd Schedule holds oaths and the 4th the allocation of Rajya Sabha seats; the 7th lists the Union, State and Concurrent subjects and the 8th the languages; the 10th deals with anti-defection.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : A

The correct matching is (a)-(4), (b)-(3), (c)-(2), (d)-(1), the code (4) (3) (2) (1).

M. N. Srinivas's first monograph was Religion and Society Among the Coorgs of South India (1952), where he introduced the idea later named Sanskritisation. G. S. Ghurye wrote the ethnography The Mahadeo Kolis. A. R. Desai edited Peasant Struggles in India (1979), and B. R. Ambedkar wrote Annihilation of Caste (1936), his undelivered address against the caste order.

The code (1) (2) (3) (4) simply pairs the lists in order, and the codes starting with (2) give Srinivas Desai's book on peasant movements.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : C

The official key gives Wave theory as the one that is not a theory of social change.

Textbook accounts of social change group its theories as evolutionary or linear, cyclical (Spengler, Pareto, Sorokin), conflict and functional. Cyclical and linear theories are named directly in the question's options and are standard. Wave theory is not a recognised school in these standard classifications, so the key treats it as the odd one out.

A caution: popular writers speak of “waves” of change (Toffler's three waves, for example), and “Cultural Interaction theory” is not a standard heading either, so the item is loosely worded. Standard textbook lists could not be found that include either of them; the official key is followed.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : C

This is known as Homogamy.

Homogamy, or assortative mating, is marriage between people who are alike in social characteristics such as race, class, education and religion.

Endogamy is a rule requiring marriage within a defined group, such as a caste, rather than a tendency to marry similar people. Hypergamy is marriage of a woman into a higher-status group, and hypogamy into a lower one.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : A

Mannheim distinguished the total conception and the partial conception of ideology.

In Ideology and Utopia (1929) Karl Mannheim described the partial conception as one in which we doubt particular ideas of an opponent as more or less conscious disguises of his interests. The total conception goes further and treats the whole outlook of an age or a social group, its very categories of thought, as shaped by its social position.

Democratic and authoritarian, egalitarian and non-egalitarian, and radical and conservative are classifications of political systems or attitudes, not Mannheim's two types of ideology.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : D

Primacy is granted to Structure and Agency together.

Giddens' structuration theory refuses to give priority to either structure, as functionalism and structuralism do, or agency, as interpretive sociology does. Through the 'duality of structure' the two are mutually constitutive: structures are both the medium and the outcome of the practices they organise.

Choosing structure or agency alone is the dualism Giddens set out to overcome, and habitus is Bourdieu's concept.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : B

The concept was developed by G. H. Mead.

In Mind, Self and Society, George Herbert Mead described how the self develops through play and then games. In organised games the child learns to take the attitude of the whole group, the 'generalized other', which represents the shared expectations of the community.

Herbert Blumer, Mead's student, coined the term 'symbolic interactionism'. Schutz was a phenomenologist and Goffman a dramaturgical analyst; neither originated the concept.

Your Answer : (Not Answered)

Correct Answer : D

Merton held that the postulates in functionalism are little more than articles of faith.

In Social Theory and Social Structure, Merton criticised three postulates of earlier functionalism: functional unity (every part is functional for the whole system), universal functionalism (all standardised forms have positive functions), and indispensability (every institution is indispensable). He argued they were assumed rather than shown.

The other three options state exactly these postulates, which Merton rejected, so they cannot be his opinion.