Sociological Theory Questions and Answers

Answer: B

This is what Schutz called the stock of knowledge ('Stock knowledge' in the paper).

Alfred Schutz described the stock of knowledge at hand as the store of rules, recipes, typifications and taken-for-granted conceptions of appropriate conduct that people acquire through socialisation and use as a frame of reference to interpret situations and act in the social world.

The life world is the everyday world of taken-for-granted experience within which that stock of knowledge is used, not the stock itself. Role-taking is G.H. Mead's term for imagining oneself in another's position. Indexicality is Garfinkel's term for the dependence of meaning on context.

Answer: B

The Savage Mind was written by Claude Levi-Strauss.

Published in French as La Pensee sauvage in 1962, the book argues that so-called primitive thought is not inferior or pre-logical but a different, concrete mode of classification, a 'science of the concrete' that orders the world as rigorously as modern science. It is a central text of structural anthropology.

Karl Marx wrote Capital and works on political economy, Harold Garfinkel founded ethnomethodology with Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), and Clifford Geertz wrote The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). None wrote this book.

Answer: A

Mills's power elite is made up of the economic, political and military elites.

In The Power Elite (1956), C. Wright Mills argued that power in the United States was concentrated in three interlocking hierarchies: the heads of the big corporations, the political directorate in the executive branch, and the military leadership. People moved between these institutions and shared a common background and outlook, so that major decisions were made by a small elite.

Each of the other options adds a 'social' elite in place of one of these three. Mills discussed celebrities and high society, but they were not one of the three pillars of the power elite.

Answer: B

The perspective is socialist feminism.

Socialist feminists such as Heidi Hartmann and Zillah Eisenstein argued that women's oppression cannot be explained by capitalism alone or by patriarchy alone. In 'dual systems' theory the two are interconnected: capitalism uses patriarchal relations, for example women's unpaid domestic labour, and patriarchy takes new forms under capitalism. Eisenstein called the combined system capitalist patriarchy.

Marxist feminism tends to derive women's oppression from capitalism and class, treating patriarchy as secondary. Radical feminism sees patriarchy as the primary and universal source of oppression. Liberal feminism focuses on legal rights and equal opportunities within existing institutions.

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.

Answer: A

The life world is defined as the shared reality of everyday life.

The concept comes from Edmund Husserl and was developed in sociology by Alfred Schutz and later Jurgen Habermas. The life world (Lebenswelt) is the taken-for-granted world of everyday experience that people share intersubjectively and treat as simply real, the background against which all action and communication take place.

A life history is an individual biography, not a shared world. The world of norms, values and institutions is closer to what Habermas contrasts with the life world as the system. 'The social world of behaviour and activities' leaves out the shared, taken-for-granted meanings that define the concept.

Answer: B

Mannheim's relationism holds that certain knowledge and beliefs are true only in certain times and places.

In Ideology and Utopia (1929), Karl Mannheim argued that knowledge is bound up with the social and historical situation of those who hold it. To avoid the charge of relativism, he called his position relationism: statements are not simply arbitrary, but their validity is related to a particular standpoint, period and place.

That knowledge is a product of social conditions is the general premise of the sociology of knowledge, not the specific meaning of relationism. Knowledge true beyond time and space is the absolutist view Mannheim rejected, and 'class and nation determined' narrows his argument to two factors.

Answer: A

For Durkheim, contract law is found in industrial society.

In The Division of Labour in Society (1893), Durkheim used the type of law as an index of social solidarity. Simple societies held together by mechanical solidarity, based on likeness, have repressive, penal law. Advanced industrial societies, held together by organic solidarity, based on the interdependence of specialised roles, have restitutive law, of which contract law is the typical form.

Tribal, rural and small societies are the kinds of segmental societies Durkheim associated with mechanical solidarity and repressive law, so none of them is where contract law characteristically appears.

Answer: B

The book is Mind, Self and Society.

George Herbert Mead published little in book form during his lifetime. Mind, Self and Society (1934) was put together after his death by Charles W. Morris, largely from stenographic records and students' notes of Mead's course in social psychology at the University of Chicago. It is the main source for his ideas on the self, the 'I' and the 'me', and taking the role of the other.

The Philosophy of the Present (1932) is based on lectures Mead gave, not on student notes of his course. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is by Erving Goffman, and The Mind and Society is the English title of Vilfredo Pareto's treatise.

Answer: C

The concept is habitus.

Pierre Bourdieu defined habitus as a system of durable, transposable dispositions, the internalised mental or cognitive structures through which people perceive, understand and act in the social world. It is formed by a person's social position and upbringing and generates practices that tend to fit that position.

A field is a structured social arena, such as education or art, in which people compete for resources. Cultural capital is a resource, such as knowledge, taste and qualifications, used in that competition. Agency is a general sociological term, not Bourdieu's name for the cognitive structure.