Sociological Theory Questions and Answers

Answer: D

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

• Role taking, putting oneself in another's position, is G.H. Mead's concept and central to symbolic interactionism (2).
• The public, intersubjective world shared with others is a theme of Alfred Schutz's phenomenology (4).
• Impression management, controlling how others see us, is the core of Goffman's dramaturgical analysis (3).
• Breaching experiments, disrupting taken-for-granted routines to reveal hidden rules, are Garfinkel's ethnomethodology (1).

Only the last code gives (2), (4), (3), (1). The others misplace impression management or role taking, for instance by giving role taking to ethnomethodology.

Answer: D

The line opens Part I of The Communist Manifesto.

Marx and Engels's Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) begins its first section, 'Bourgeois and Proletarians', with the sentence that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, going on to name freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman.

The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) was Marx's polemic against Proudhon, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) contains the famous preface on base and superstructure, and Capital analyses the capitalist mode of production. None begins with this line.

Answer: B

An ideal type is not a hypothesis.

Max Weber described the ideal type as an analytical construct formed by the one-sided accentuation of certain features of reality, combined into a logically consistent mental picture. It is an abstraction; it is a tool for comparing and measuring actual cases; and in its conceptual purity it cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality. These are the other three options.

Weber said explicitly that the ideal type is not a hypothesis, though it can guide the construction of hypotheses. It is not a statement that can be true or false about the world, but a yardstick against which the world is compared.

Answer: D

Habitus does not focus on the rejection of belief and values.

In Pierre Bourdieu's theory, habitus is the system of durable, embodied dispositions that people acquire through their upbringing and social position. It shapes how they act, feel, think and perceive, usually without conscious reflection, and so explains why practices tend to reproduce the conditions in which the habitus was formed.

Acting, feeling and thinking are therefore exactly what habitus covers. Because it works by internalising the values and expectations of one's social world, its focus is on reproducing them, not on rejecting beliefs and values, which is why that option is the exception.

Answer: C

The statement is Foucault's.

Michel Foucault argued in Discipline and Punish (1975) and in the essays collected as Power/Knowledge (1980) that power and knowledge directly imply one another. There is no power relation without a field of knowledge that goes with it, and no knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute power relations. Medicine, psychiatry and criminology, for example, both produce knowledge about people and give the means to classify, discipline and control them.

Bourdieu is known for habitus, field and forms of capital, Giddens for structuration theory and reflexive modernity, and Ulrich Beck for the risk society. None of them is the author of the power/knowledge thesis.

Answer: A

Agency is reflected in a student challenging caste based discrimination in university.

In sociology, agency is the capacity of people to act purposively and make choices that can resist or change the social structures constraining them. A student who confronts caste discrimination is acting knowingly against an entrenched structure of inequality, which is the clearest case of agency in the list.

A daughter demanding dowry and a mother-in-law exercising power over her daughter-in-law both act within, and reproduce, patriarchal family structures rather than challenging them. A youth stealing money for drugs is an example of deviance driven by addiction, not of purposive action against a social structure, so it does not illustrate agency in the sense the question intends.

Answer: A

The argument is Radhakamal Mukerjee's.

Mukerjee, a founder of the Lucknow school, built his sociology around values. In works such as The Social Structure of Values (1949) he argued that social facts are always bound up with human values, so that a study of society which strips away values gives an unreal and incomplete picture. He called for a transdisciplinary social science centred on values.

G.S. Ghurye is known for his historical and Indological work on caste and culture, Irawati Karve for kinship organisation in India, and M.N. Srinivas for field studies and concepts such as Sanskritization and dominant caste. None made the value-component argument central.

Answer: A

Zweckrational action involves a means-end relationship.

Weber distinguished four types of social action. Zweckrational, or instrumentally rational, action is directed to an end, with the actor calculating the most effective means of reaching it. Wertrational action is guided by belief in a value for its own sake, affectual action by emotion, and traditional action by habit.

So 'habits of the actor' describes traditional action and 'emotions of the actor' affectual action. 'Only means' misses the point: what defines instrumental rationality is the calculated relation of means to ends, not means alone.

Answer: B

Durkheim's term is the collective conscience.

The quoted definition comes from The Division of Labour in Society (1893), where Durkheim called this totality of shared beliefs and sentiments the collective or common conscience. It exists independently of any one individual and has a life of its own, constraining the members of society.

Mechanical solidarity is the type of social bond in simple societies that rests on a strong collective conscience, so it is closely related but is not the term for the beliefs themselves. Organic solidarity is the bond of interdependence in complex societies, and the division of labour is the process that produces it.

Answer: B

The correct matching is (3) (4) (2) (1).

• (a) K. Marx: The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), his reply to Proudhon (3).
• (b) E. Durkheim: The Division of Labour in Society (1893) (4).
• (c) M. Weber: Economy and Society, published in 1922 after his death (2).
• (d) T. Parsons: The Social System (1951) (1).

The first option swaps Marx and Durkheim, the third pairs Marx with Parsons's book, and the fourth gives Marx Economy and Society, so only (3) (4) (2) (1) is right.