Social Strat Final Study Guide

feudalism

A system in which peasants served lords who served greater lords who served the king or emperor.

household income

Because the U.S. Bureau of the Census collects data by households, which are based on place of residence, this is what the family income figure is often referred to

What is the "race to the bottom"?

Competition to attract businesses that ultimately harms local residents.

____________ tried to synthesize conflict and functionalist ideas in looking at how privilege, power, and prestige emerge from different types of societies. The debate on what constitutes a just social order and how such an order can best be achieved continues.

Gerhard Lenski

social closure (monopolization)

Groups that have attained positions of power, prestige, and privilege try to close off access to other groups; that is, they attempt to monopolize these positions. In a sense, power, prestige, and privilege are limited goods.

According to Lenski, why should Plato be understood as a radical?

He contended the poor and the rich were at war with each other.

What double divide is the world facing?

Income inequalities are increasing both between and within nations.

Athletic shoes are now often made in ______.

Indonesia and Malaysia

structural adjustment

It calls on nations to reduce government spending and bureaucracy, to encourage markets, to export, and to encourage entrepreneurship, as well as to entice foreign investment and foreign technology.

What is a major critique of modernization theory?

It is ethnocentric and biased toward the West.

Many of the world's most unequal current societies are in ______.

Latin American industrializing agrarian societies

Agrarian societies

Like horticultural societies, they are based on cultivation, but they practice intense and continuous cultivation of the land rather than rely on shifting gardens.

What do modern theorists believe?

Low-income countries need modern ideas, technology, and institutions. Dependency theorists and world systems theorists contend that poor countries face exploitation, domination, and economic distortions because of their dependence on rich countries.

neoliberalism

Many nations around the world were rediscovering the ideals of free trade and free markets. The intellectual basis for this approach comes from neoclassical economics.

Max Weber noted three types of inequality dimensions

class, status and party

Dependency theorists have maintained that a major reason poor nations stay poor is ______.

colonial imperialism

Because wealth tends to remain among elite families, scholars describe wealth as ______ in nature.

conservative

Personal earnings

consist of the money an individual receives in wages, commissions, and tips for work performed.

Patriarchal societies

controlled by senior men, any actions that bent the bounds of traditional gender roles or strict sexual norms were viewed as threats to the system of power and inheritance and were most often severely restricted

social constructions

dimensions of inequality are not facts of nature, but the results of societal forms and patterns of power

guest workers

do not get citizenship in new country. They work temporarily then return to their original homes

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

Personal income is helpful for studying ______, while family income is useful for studying ______.

gender disparity; children's well-being

Although Confucius believed in justice, his idea of a social order was ______.

hierarchical

One would expect to find the least job specialization in a(n) ______.

hunting and gathering

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

hunting and gathering societies

Reflects the order in which most human societies have developed.

hunting and gathering, horticultural, agrarian, industrial

What is progressive taxation?

imposing higher taxes on the rich

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, people coming to the United States were often employed as ______.

industrial and railroad laborers

The culture of poverty thesis argues that poverty exists across generations because of ______.

inferior norms and practices

Immigration

leaving one's country of origin to live in another country

In Weber's view, a person's social class is defined by that individual's ___________ in the marketplace.

life chances

How does the United Nations measure health?

life expectancy at birth

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

local employers and intermediaries

social contract

long-term commitments between employer and employee are replaced by temporary and flexible arrangements.

The distribution of income in the United States shows ______.

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

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

markets

central tendencies

mean(average), median(halfway point), mode(point that holds the most)

Compared to police in other countries, police in the United States are ______.

more likely to use deadly force

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

more polarized into two classes

For Karl Marx, the key determiner of social class was ______.

owning property

As blue-collar employment has declined, which sector has expanded?

pink collar

Ralf Dahrendorf contended that class conflict should be analyzed in terms of ______.

power and prestige

Gerhard Lenski termed three divisions of inequality

privilege, prestige, and power

According to Marx, industrial capitalism created the new ______.

proletariat

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

racial inequality

globalization

radically altering the world economic system. Global interconnections are affording new opportunities to some. Global markets can increase global inequalities by increasing the revenues of large corporations, while at the same time forcing wages down through increased labor competition.

conservative thesis

represents the dominant thinking that social inequality reflects basic differences among people in creation, ability, or worth and is necessary to the orderly functioning of society.

modernization school

school of thought that stresses the traditional society to modern society and the need for modern ideas, technology, and institutions for society to advance economically (also known as modernization theory)

Conflict theorists argue that stratification ______, while functionalists argue that stratification ______.

serves the interests of powerful groups; benefits all of society

In analyzing inequality, sociologists treat race and gender as ______.

social statuses

Conflict theorists drew on the work of Marx and Weber to point out how large social inequalities can function to create:

social unrest, overlook abilities, and discourage workers while promoting social misery.

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

status

dependency theory

stressed the problem of the dependency of poor nations on the whims and power of the rich,

According to Lenski, early radical social reformers included ______.

the Hebrew prophets

Extrapolating from Sernau, which of the following first contributes to the rise of increasingly patriarchal societies?

the ability of men, but not women, to own land

Industrialization

the development of industries in a country or region on a wide scale.

Emile Durkheim uses ______ to explain how societies function.

the division of labor

What does neoliberalism, neoclassical economics, and free-market economics stress?

the importance of free trade among nations and the need to reduce government interference in domestic markets.

economies of scale

the property whereby long-run average total cost falls as the quantity of output increases

reciprocity

the sharing of goods

Family income

the total amount of money coming into a family unit.

division of labor

the way tasks are evermore likely to be divided into the domains of specialists. Simple societies, according to Durkheim, have "mechanical solidarity," the solidarity that comes from shared experience in which everyone works together on common tasks. (functionalism)

What do political economists question?

the wisdom of trade liberalization in a world of vastly unequal power and access to resources.

occupation

the work we do for compensation.

One problem with free-market economies is ______.

they tend to produce great inequalities

Agribusiness

uses large amounts of investment capital coupled with large expanses of land to mass-produce agricultural products for a carefully media-cultivated consumer market.

A person who wears distinctive religious dress associated with a disprivileged group is an example of a(n) ______.

visible minority

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

wealth

bourgeoisie

were radical in their destruction of the old feudal order but ultimately conservative as they came to power as the new ruling elite. The basis of their wealth was not the land but urban production.

Early industrialization brought new demand for paid labor done by ______.

women and children

Attitudes toward race, ethnicity, and gender have shifted in the United States, yet these dimensions still divide the __________, as seen in the _________________

work space; food industry

proletariat

working class (under bourgeoisie)

dialectic

The debate between an assertion, or thesis, and its opposite, or antithesis. Hegal believed that this was the driving force in the history of ideas.

American class structure

The division of U.S. society into distinct social classes based on wealth, income, education, and occupation.

Washington consensus

The policies prescribed by neoliberalism and advanced by the IMF, emphasizing the US role

social relations of production

The positions of groups of people, social classes, in the economic process. These groups can take many forms, but essentially, Marx believed, there are two classes: those who control the means of production, the rulers, and those who work the means of production, the ruled.

deindustrialization.

The shifts from coal to electric power, from rail to air and truck, from clumsy cargo ship to giant container ship, from products forged from steel to those based on plastics and microchips, all made industry more mobile. Plants could locate where labor was the cheapest.

political economy

The term stresses the interplay of power and politics with the world of the market and exchange. The perspective of some scholars who have deep concerns about global capitalism's ability to meet the needs of the world's poor

world systems theory

Theory originated by Immanuel Wallerstein and illuminated by his three-tier structure, proposing that social change in the developing world is inextricably linked to the economic activities of the developed world.

class consciousness

They will become a "class for themselves," realizing that they are in a struggle, not against each other but ultimately against the ruling class.

hunting and gathering societies

Until about 10,000 years ago, hunting and gathering societies contained everyone in the world. These societies were largely made up of seminomadic bands of about 50, although in lush environments some could have been larger, and the bands must have interacted with one another. As a rule, hunter-gatherers have gender-divided societies: The men hunt, and the women gather

redistribution

a form of exchange in which goods flow into a central place, where they are sorted, counted, and reallocated

caste system

a social structure in which classes are determined by heredity

Labor migration

a temporary move in search of work, with the intention to return home.

The Kuznets curve implied that as societies fully industrialized, they would ______.

become more equal

According to Wallerstein and world systems theory, how can the poorest nations become economically successful?

by overturning global capitalism

Wealth is more concentrated than income in most societies; in the United States____________________________.

10% of the population controls two thirds of the wealth.

outsourcing

A decision by a corporation to turn over much of the responsibility for production to independent suppliers.

Kuznets curve

A formula showing inequality is still extreme in early industrial societies, where handfuls of individuals amass great fortunes, while workers confront long hours, miserable conditions, low wages, child labor, and cramped, wretched living conditions. As societies move into an advanced industrial stage, inequality again declines as a more complex class structure with more middle positions emerges

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

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

status

A social position that a person holds

Sociological imagination

Our ability to connect our personal biographies to the broader sweep of history and society and to see the connections between personal troubles and social conditions.

What has continued wage gaps between nations led to?

Outsourcing, labor migration, and immigration. The most rapidly growing income inequalities are now those within nations between new elites and the excluded and marginalized classes.

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

Patterns help us identify how society constrains people's choices.

Horticultural societies

Plant cultivators. They may stay in one place when they do so, such as in a village in the middle of shifting gardens. They also can produce economic surpluses and store them, thus creating commodities.

social class

Power in the economic realm. It is vested in possession of goods and opportunities: what one can sell in the commodity markets (investments) and what one can sell in the labor markets (skills and expertise).

prestige (status honor)

Power in the social realm. It is vested in respect and respectability as well as just plain showing off.