ISS 215 Midterm

Modernization theorists maintain that the people of developing nations need ____ to become better off.

An achievement orientation

Karl Marx's theories emphasized ___.

Class and Conflict

What is the "race to the bottom"?

Competition to attract businesses that ultimately harms local residents

Because wealth tends to remain along elite families, scholars describe wealth as ____ in nature.

Conservative

Marx maintained that history has been shaped by_____.

Economic relations

How can social scientists better understand the world around them?

Empirical testing (Making Educated Guesses About Social Reality)

Due to high levels of immigration, more of the US is foreign-born than ever before.

False

Karl Marx believed that capitalism could be fully reformed over time.

False

Markets work best when there are high levels of inequality.

False

Men have been highly dominant in all societies.

False

Poor countries often have little inequality

False

Since the 1970s, the movement of workers from industry to service jobs has resulted in substantial increases in wages.

False

Sociologists strive to analyze if class, race, or gender is more critical for understanding inequality

False

True/False: A good example of a scientific survey is a survey of Twitter followers conducted by Fox News.

False

True/False: The Stanford Prison Experiment is an example of a study that was conducted with excellent ethical standards.

False

True/False: Sociology is considered to be a natural science akin to biology.

False (Social Science)

The sector of the economy experiencing the greatest decline in percentage of the labor force has been _______?

Farm labor

Neoliberalism is an economic approach that emphasizes the benefits of _____.

Free markets and free trade

Marx believed that socialist revolutions would occur when industrial workers became_____.

Fully class conscious

The double divide refers to what consequence of globalization?

Growing inequality between and within nations

When a social scientist makes a research prediction based on existing empirical evidence, they are formulating a ___.

Hypothesis

What is progressive taxation?

Imposing higher taxes on the rich

What was a major effect of deindustrialization on industry itself?

Industry became more mobile

What is a major critique of modernization theory?

It is ethnocentric and biased towards the West

Conflict theory is rooted in the work of_____.

Karl Marx and Max Weber

Max Weber argued that social class is determined by an individual's_____.

Life chances

How does the United Nation measure health?

Life expectancy at birth

What is most likely to perpetrate human rights abuses in factories?

Local employers and intermediaries

In agrarian societies, the management of goods shifted from redistribution to ____.

Markets

What best characterizes the relationship between genders in horticultural societies?

Men were often leaders, but women helped organize society.

World systems theory sees the world economic system as divided into ______.

core, semi-periphery, periphery

Some of the most egalitarian societies in human experience have been ______.

hunting and gathering societies

We see evidence of social stratification in production plants when ______.

jobs are assigned based on race and gender

The distribution of income in the United States shows _____.

many clustered in the lower middle with a tower of high incomes

Frontier societies refer to those that form when ______.

newcomers displace native populations

A system of inequality that involves distinct levels of privilege is called ______.

social stratification

According to Max Weber, privileged groups can maintain their power via

Social closure

According to Max Weber, people can signal their _____ by buying fancy clothes and luxury items.

Status

One problem with free market economies is ________?

Tends to lead to higher inequalities.

The definition of "median" is ___.

The Midpoint Value

Emile Durkheim uses ____ to explain how societies function.

The division of labor

Postindustrial economies are characterized by the development of ______.

The service sector

As complex civilizations emerged, societies became more unequal.

True

Functionalists argue that inequality is necessary to keep society operating

True

Karl Marx contended that human history was the history of class struggle

True

Max Weber argued that social class is shaped by one's power in the economic market.

True

Most people in the United States identify themselves as belonging to the middle class.

True

Neoliberal economists argue that free markets rather than government programs promote economic growth.

True

One of the occupations with the lowest wages is personal care and service.

True

People who control the redistribution of goods tend to get more power.

True

The income gap between the capitalist class and the rest of the population continues to grow.

True

The new international division of labor contributes to inequality with nations.

True

The wealthiest people could make or lose billions of dollars in a single day.

True

Today, most people would identify themselves as being in the middle class.

True

True/False: Data Reliability is defined as "the extent to which a measure produces consistent results."

True

True/False: Scientific evidence is observable.

True

Secondary data analysis occurs when a social scientist ___.

Uses Existing, Publicly Available Dataset to Achieve Research Objectives ?

The accumulated property that a person owns is referred to as ______.

Wealth

In their search for cheap labor for assembly work, multinational corporations have tended to hire___.

Young Women

According to Marx industrial capitalism created the new ___.

Proletariat

What are the two general approaches to sociological investigation?

Qualitative and quantitative

Today, former frontier societies can most often be identified by their ____.

Racial inequality

Which of the following most accurately describes the demographics of white-collar workers?

A growing percentage are female and/or non-white.

What does it mean to say that the income distribution in the United States is skewed?

A handful of extraordinarily wealthy people pull the average income upward.

Most sociologists argue that inequality is _____.

A social construction

Marx contends that under capitalism, a society's class structure becomes___.

More polarized into two classes

In the United States, the distribution of wealth is _______?

More unequal then the distribution of income

The poorest 45% of the U.S. population controls _______?

No net wealth

Why is it important to study patterns and not just individual cases?

Patterns help us identify how society constrains people's choices

The new social contract of the 18th century drew on_____ rather than _____ reform.

Political; economic