Sociological Theory Questions and Answers

Answer: B

This is called Habitus.

Pierre Bourdieu defined habitus as the system of durable, ingrained dispositions, habits, tastes and skills that a person acquires through upbringing in a particular social position, and that guide how they perceive and act without conscious calculation.

Agency is the capacity to act independently, while growth and development refer to change and maturation, not to ingrained dispositions.

Answer: A

The perspective is the Functionalist one.

Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore (1945) argued that stratification is a functional necessity: some positions are more important and need scarce talent and long training, so society attaches higher rewards to them to ensure they are filled by the most qualified people.

Conflict theorists such as Melvin Tumin replied that stratification preserves privilege and wastes talent. Interactionist and phenomenological approaches study how inequality is experienced and constructed, not its function.

Answer: B

Flexibility is not a characteristic of Weber's bureaucracy.

Weber's ideal type of bureaucracy has a fixed division of labour with specialised offices, a hierarchy of authority, action governed by written rules, impersonal treatment of cases, appointment and promotion on merit, and records kept in files. Its strength, in Weber's account, lies in this precision, predictability and rule-bound regularity.

Flexibility is the opposite of that rule-bound regularity; critics later pointed to rigidity as bureaucracy's weakness. Specialisation, impersonality and hierarchy are all core features of the ideal type.

Answer: A

The social assets of a person that promote mobility are called cultural capital.

Pierre Bourdieu used cultural capital for education, knowledge, tastes, style of speech and similar resources, many acquired in the family, that schools and employers reward. Because the middle classes pass these on to their children, cultural capital helps explain how inequality is reproduced through education.

Economic capital is money and property. Symbolic capital is prestige and recognition. Professional capital is not one of Bourdieu's forms of capital.

Answer: D

This is the view of radical feminism.

Radical feminists, such as Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone, see patriarchy, the systematic domination of women by men, as the most fundamental form of oppression, running through the family, sexuality and culture as well as the economy and the state. Hence the slogan 'the personal is political'.

Liberal feminism looks to legal reform and equal opportunity within existing institutions. Feminist existentialism (Simone de Beauvoir) asks how woman is made the 'Other', and post-structural feminism studies how gender is constructed in discourse, without treating society as simply a patriarchy.

Answer: A

Oriental despotism is the feature of the Asiatic Mode of Production.

Marx described the Asiatic mode as one in which self-sufficient village communities hold land in common, there is no private property in land, and a centralised state extracts surplus as tribute and organises large public works such as irrigation. That all-powerful state over passive villages is the despotism later elaborated by Karl Wittfogel in Oriental Despotism.

Feudalism rests on lords and serfs, the ancient mode on slavery, and the primitive mode on communal societies without a state, so none of them is defined by oriental despotism.

Answer: D

The correct match is a-iii, b-iv, c-ii, d-i.

• The Dynamics of Culture Change is by Bronislaw Malinowski (published 1945).
• The Analysis of Social Change is by Godfrey and Monica Wilson (1945).
• Africa in Social Change is by P.C. Lloyd (1967).
• Asian Drama is Gunnar Myrdal's study of poverty in South Asia (1968).

The other codes give Myrdal one of the African studies or Malinowski a book other than his own, so they do not fit.

Answer: B

The concept is natural selection.

In Darwin's theory, individuals whose characteristics suit their environment survive and reproduce more successfully, so those characteristics spread over generations. Social Darwinists and later evolutionary sociologists applied the same idea to groups, arguing that social characteristics such as cooperation or organisation helped some groups survive in their environment.

Human ecology is the study of how human communities adapt to their environment, developed by the Chicago school rather than by Darwin. Human environment is a general term, and existential dualism is a philosophical idea, not a concept of Darwin's.

Answer: B

The opinion is Karl Marx's.

In The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850 Marx wrote that revolutions are the locomotives of history. The phrase sums up his view that history advances through class struggle, which culminates in revolutions that replace one mode of production by another.

Kant was an Enlightenment philosopher who opposed the right of revolution. Hegel saw history as the unfolding of Spirit, not as a series of class revolutions. Engels was Marx's collaborator, but the phrase is from Marx's own text.

Answer: A

Radcliffe-Brown's structural forms are abstract forms of social structure.

Radcliffe-Brown distinguished social structure, the actual network of relations between real persons observed at a given time, which is concrete, from structural form, the general or normal pattern abstracted from many such observations. Relations change as people are born and die, but the structural form can remain relatively constant.

Calling structural forms 'concrete' confuses them with the observed social structure. 'Integrative' and 'functional' forms are not his terms for this distinction.