Sociological Theory Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The theory is structuration.

Anthony Giddens developed structuration theory through the 1970s and set it out fully in The Constitution of Society (1984). It draws together his work on classical theory, agency and structure, time and space and social reproduction, and is widely regarded as the summary of his sociological writing.

Structuralism, from Saussure and Levi-Strauss, is a tradition Giddens criticised. Deconstruction is Derrida's method, and post-modernism is a position Giddens rejected, arguing that we live in 'high' or 'late' modernity rather than a post-modern age.

Answer: A

Post-modernism is associated with post-industrial society.

Theorists such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition (1979), linked the post-modern outlook to the post-industrial society described by Daniel Bell, in which services, information and knowledge replace manufacturing as the basis of the economy, and grand narratives lose their authority.

Modern, industrial and capitalist society is what modernist sociology from Marx to Weber described. Post-modernism is defined as a break from that phase, so it is tied to the society that follows industrialism.

Answer: C

The answer is (I), (II) and (III): psychiatry, medicine and penology.

Michel Foucault's major historical studies dealt with madness and the rise of psychiatry in Madness and Civilization (1961), clinical medicine in The Birth of the Clinic (1963), and the prison and punishment in Discipline and Punish (1975).

Education was not one of his three fields of historical research. Schools appear in Discipline and Punish only as one of the disciplinary institutions alongside barracks and factories, so the codes that include (IV) are wrong.

Answer: B

The correct statement about neo-functionalism is Deviance and social control are realities within social system.

Neo-functionalists such as Jeffrey Alexander kept the idea of society as a system but dropped classical functionalism's assumption of harmony. They accept that deviance, conflict and the efforts to control them are normal and lasting features of any social system.

The other three statements are claims of the older structural functionalism that neo-functionalism set out to correct: that institutions have universal positive functions, that only shared values provide order, and that order and stability are essential to the system.

Answer: A

It was Erving Goffman.

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), Goffman studied ordinary social interaction through the metaphor of the theatre, his dramaturgical approach: people are actors who manage impressions before audiences, with front-stage and back-stage regions, roles, scripts and props.

Garfinkel studied everyday life through ethnomethodology and breaching experiments, Luckmann (with Berger) through the social construction of reality, and Alexander through neo-functionalism; none of them built his analysis on a sustained metaphor in this way.

Answer: A

Phenomenology focuses on intersubjective consciousness of individual.

Following Edmund Husserl, the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz studies how individuals experience the world in consciousness and how they build a shared, intersubjective world of everyday meanings, which they take for granted. Berger and Luckmann developed this into the social construction of reality.

Social structure and the functions of social institutions are the concerns of structural functionalism, and conflicts in society of conflict theory. Phenomenology turns away from these to the meanings people give to their experience.

Answer: A

The concept of indexicality was used by Garfinkel.

Harold Garfinkel, founder of ethnomethodology in Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), took the term from linguistics to describe how the meaning of an expression or action depends on its context: words such as 'here', 'now' or 'that' make sense only in the situation where they are used, and ordinary talk is full of such indexical expressions.

Goffman studied the dramaturgy of interaction, and Schutz and Berger worked in phenomenology. They influenced ethnomethodology but did not develop indexicality within it.

Answer: A

The position is Interpretivism.

Interpretivism holds that social action can only be understood through the meanings actors give it, so research must study subjective viewpoints in their context. It draws on Weber's Verstehen, phenomenology and symbolic interactionism, and favours qualitative methods.

Positivism takes the opposite view, modelling sociology on the natural sciences and seeking objective, measurable regularities; objectivism likewise treats social reality as existing independently of actors' meanings. 'Negativism' is not an epistemological position in this sense.

Answer: C

On the official key the answer is Social, political and economic development.

Gandhi did not separate the spheres of life. His constructive programme joined social reform (removal of untouchability, communal harmony, village sanitation and education), political freedom (swaraj, reached through non-violent mass action) and economic self-reliance (khadi, village industries, trusteeship), and he held that none of them could succeed alone. That is the reading behind 'equal importance'.

Option A pairs technology with spiritual growth, but Gandhi was wary of heavy machinery. Option D leaves out the social and economic side. Option B has the social and political parts but omits the economic one.

What could not be confirmed: no source consulted states 'equal importance to social, political and economic development' as a Gandhian formula; the answer rests on his constructive programme and on the key.

Answer: D

In Giddens' structuration theory, structure consists of Rules and Resources.

Giddens defines structure as the rules and resources that actors draw on in producing and reproducing social life. Structure exists only as it is instantiated in action; this 'duality of structure' means it both constrains and enables agency.

Values and norms are the classic functionalist building blocks, statuses and roles are Parsons' and Linton's units of social structure, and actors and interactions belong to agency rather than structure in Giddens' scheme.