Sociological Theory Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Habitus is not permanent.

Bourdieu defined habitus as a system of durable, transposable dispositions, 'structured structures' that also structure practice. It is inculcated through upbringing and experience, especially in early life, and is structured by the person's class position. It is durable, so it persists and is carried across situations.

But it is not fixed for ever. Bourdieu held that the habitus can be modified by new experiences, education and changed conditions, so 'durable' does not mean 'permanent'. Structured, durable and inculcated are all part of his definition.

Answer: B

The rational-legal type of authority is bureaucracy.

Weber distinguished traditional, charismatic and rational-legal authority. Rational-legal authority rests on belief in the legality of impersonal rules and the right of those appointed under them to give orders. Its purest form is bureaucratic administration, staffed by appointed officials acting according to rules.

Feudalism is a form of traditional authority based on personal loyalty and inherited status. Autocracy is personal rule, and slavery is a relation of domination by force, not authority based on legal rules.

Answer: C

The Sociology of Knowledge is not a book by Karl Mannheim.

The Sociology of Knowledge (1958) is by Werner Stark. Mannheim's own writings on the subject appeared as Ideology and Utopia and the posthumous collection Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge.

The other three are Mannheim's: Diagnosis of Our Time (1943), a set of wartime essays on planning and democracy; Structures of Thinking, early manuscripts published posthumously; and Conservatism, his study of conservative thought, also published posthumously in English.

Answer: A

For Durkheim the subject matter of sociology is social facts.

In The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) Durkheim defined social facts as ways of acting, thinking and feeling that are external to the individual and exercise constraint over him, such as law, morality, language and religious belief. He insisted that social facts must be treated as things and explained by other social facts.

Social action is Weber's subject matter, the social system is Parsons's, and social patterns is a general phrase rather than Durkheim's definition.

Answer: D

The incorrect statement is that ethnomethodology emphasizes the study of macro structures in society.

Ethnomethodology, founded by Harold Garfinkel, studies the 'folk' or members' methods by which people in everyday interaction make sense of their situation and produce social order. It is a micro-sociology of how ordinary people accomplish order moment by moment.

The other statements are accepted: it examines folk methods, it questions the idea of an objective social reality existing apart from members' accounts, and it uses an interpretative rather than a normative approach, so it does not study macro structures.

Answer: D

Action is understood through its subjective meaning by Max Weber.

Weber defined sociology as the science that seeks the interpretive understanding (Verstehen) of social action, action to which the actor attaches a subjective meaning and which takes account of the behaviour of others. He classified such action as instrumentally rational, value-rational, affectual and traditional.

Durkheim studied social facts that are external to individuals, not their subjective meanings. Pareto classified non-logical action through residues and derivations, and Parsons built a general theory of action systems on Weber's foundation, but the interpretive understanding of meaning is Weber's.

Answer: A

Marx called this process fetishism, the fetishism of commodities.

In Capital, volume I, Marx argued that in a market economy the social relations between producers appear as relations between things. People see value as a natural property of the commodity and of its price, and fail to recognise that it is their own labour that gives commodities their value, much as worshippers attribute power to a fetish they have made themselves.

Emancipation is the freeing of people from domination, socialism is the society Marx expected to replace capitalism, and contradiction refers to the conflicting forces within a mode of production.

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.

Answer: C

The correct match is a-4, b-1, c-2, d-3.

• A.R. Radcliffe-Brown - structural functionalism, explaining institutions by their contribution to the social structure.
• B. Malinowski - cultural (individualistic) functionalism, explaining culture by how it satisfies human needs.
• T. Parsons - analytical functionalism, building abstract systems of action such as AGIL.
• R. Merton - empirical functionalism, testing functional claims through middle-range theory, manifest and latent functions and dysfunctions.

The fourth code swaps Parsons and Merton, and the first two misplace Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, so only the third fits.

Answer: C

The correct match is a-3, b-4, c-1, d-2.

In Talcott Parsons's AGIL scheme each functional requirement of a society is met mainly by one sub-system:

• Law meets integration, coordinating the parts and regulating conflict.
• Family meets latency (pattern maintenance), transmitting values and managing tension.
• Economy meets adaptation, obtaining and distributing resources from the environment.
• Polity meets goal attainment, setting and pursuing collective goals.

The second code swaps economy and polity, giving the economy goal attainment, and the first and fourth codes misplace law and family.