Sociological Theory Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The thesis is J. Habermas's.

In The Theory of Communicative Action, Jurgen Habermas argued that in modern societies the 'system' (the economy and the state, steered by money and power) increasingly intrudes into the 'lifeworld', the sphere of everyday communication, culture and shared meanings. He called this the colonization of the lifeworld.

Giddens, Marcuse and Adorno wrote critically about modernity in other terms, but the lifeworld and its colonization are Habermas's concepts.

Answer: B

‘Mortification of self’ is associated with E. Goffman.

In Asylums (1961) Erving Goffman described how total institutions such as mental hospitals, prisons and monasteries strip newcomers of their former identity: through admission procedures, uniforms, loss of possessions and privacy, and humiliations, the inmate's self is 'mortified' and rebuilt to suit the institution.

Parsons, Blumer and Mead are associated with other concepts: the social system, symbolic interactionism as a named perspective, and the 'I' and 'me' respectively.

Answer: A

Schutz critiqued the theory of social action of Max Weber.

In The Phenomenology of the Social World (1932), Alfred Schutz accepted Weber's aim of understanding the subjective meaning of action but argued that Weber had left the concept of meaning unexamined. Using Husserl's phenomenology, he analysed how meaning is built up in the stream of consciousness and in everyday intersubjective life.

Schutz later corresponded with Parsons about The Structure of Social Action, but his central critique was of Weber. Mead and Pareto developed different theories of action that were not his starting point.

Answer: B

The scholar is Sylvia Walby.

In Theorizing Patriarchy (1990), Walby identified six structures of patriarchy and distinguished private patriarchy, based in the household where an individual man oppresses women, from public patriarchy, based in employment and the state, where women are subordinated collectively. She argued there had been a shift from private to public forms.

Shulamith Firestone located oppression in biological reproduction, bell hooks wrote on the intersection of race, class and gender, and R. W. Connell developed the concept of hegemonic masculinity.

Answer: C

The prime mover was G. S. Ghurye.

G. S. Ghurye, who headed the Department of Sociology at Bombay University, founded the Indian Sociological Society in 1951 and started its journal, Sociological Bulletin, in 1952. He is often called the father of Indian sociology.

Radhakamal Mukerjee built the Lucknow school, Irawati Karve was an anthropologist at Pune known for her work on kinship, and M. N. Srinivas was Ghurye's student, prominent in the next generation.

Answer: A

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

• Edward Said wrote Orientalism (1978).
• Anthony Giddens wrote The Constitution of Society (1984), the main statement of structuration theory.
• Manuel Castells wrote The Rise of the Network Society (1996).
• Jurgen Habermas wrote The Theory of Communicative Action (1981).

Every other code pairs at least one author with another's book.

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.

Answer: A

According to Weber, Verstehen means Understanding.

Verstehen (German for understanding) is Weber's method of interpreting social action by grasping the subjective meaning actors attach to it, by putting oneself in their place. Weber held that sociology must achieve such interpretive understanding as well as causal explanation.

Causality, explanation and analysis are parts of sociological method Weber also discussed, but none is the meaning of the word Verstehen.

Answer: A

The theory is Structuralism.

Structuralism, especially in Claude Levi-Strauss's work, holds that underlying universal structures of the human mind, such as binary oppositions, generate the patterns found in myths, kinship systems and other cultural forms everywhere.

Functionalism explains institutions by their contribution to society, not by laws of thought. Post-modernism and post-structuralism reject universal laws and grand theories, stressing difference, discourse and the instability of meaning.

Answer: B

On the official key the answer is Self-discipline.

In Discipline and Punish Foucault takes Bentham's panopticon, a ring of cells watched from a central tower that the inmates cannot see into. Because any inmate might be observed at any moment, he comes to police himself: Foucault writes that the one who is subjected to a field of visibility 'becomes the principle of his own subjection'. What the model focusses on is thus the internalisation of surveillance, self-discipline.

Corporal punishment (A) is what Foucault says discipline replaced, and confinement (D) is only the physical setting. A disciplinary society (C) is the wider social order the panopticon exemplifies, not what the design itself works on.