Sociology Homework

The French social theorist Jean-François Lyotard described contemporary culture in this way: "One listens to reggae, watches a Western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and 'retro' clothes in Hong Kong." He was writing about postmodernism, but what concept can help explain this mishmash of activities?

Cultural diffusion

Conflict within mainstream society about which values and norms should be upheld is called:

Culture wars

A famous monologue from Shakespeare's As You Like It begins: All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts Which theory of social life could be seen as taking its inspiration from these lines?

Dramaturgy

What is one reason imprisonment was such a rare type of punishment before the nineteenth century?

Earlier societies did not have sufficient resources to operate prisons.

Who were the two anthropologists who studied the Hopi of the southwestern United States and concluded that language not only expresses our thoughts but also shapes the way we think?

Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf

Americans are particularly lucky to live in a country where hard work and dedication promise to lift the majority of people out of poverty.

False

Secondary groups cannot be geographically dispersed.

False

Durkheim theorized that the rapidly changing conditions of modern life lead to anomie. What is anomie?

Normlessness, or a loss of connections to the social world

What do sociologists call the webs of direct and indirect ties that connect individuals to others who may influence them?

Social networks

How is the study of culture different for sociologists than for anthropologists?

Sociologists usually study a culture to which they belong.

Max Weber believed that as the Industrial Revolution progressed, society became increasingly rationalized. How did he define rationalization?

The application of economic logic to all aspects of social life

According to George Herbert Mead, what are children learning when they begin to take the perspective of a generalized other in their games?

The attitudes and expectations of society as a whole

Sociologists observe society:

by studying the various parts of a society, and the ways they interact and influence each other.

Increasingly, even very significant events in our lives take place online. It is now common to hear stories of couples breaking up through an instant message or even a text message. Compared with similar interactions in the past, what is missing from these interactions?

copresence

Traditionally, most of the sociological literature on deviance focuses on:

crime

The values, norms, and practices of the most powerful group within a society are called:

dominant culture

The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead said that the United States of America is the best place to raise a female child. Her assertion is an example of:

ethnocentrism.

According to Karl Marx, the most important factor in social life is a person's:

relationship to the means of production.

Some municipalities in the Los Angeles area have zoning rules that prohibit multifamily dwellings and require that all homes be built on lots of a certain size. What is the effect of these policies?

residential segregation

Although branding is no longer used as a form of punishment in the United States, some subcultures have adopted it as a form of body art. This demonstrates that:

what is considered deviant changes over time.

Which of the following is an example of a total institution?

A prison

How is a subculture different from a counterculture?

Both are distinct from mainstream culture, but a counterculture actively opposes important aspects of the mainstream.

What did W.E.B. DuBois have in common with Harriet Martineau?

Both were intrigued by America's democratic promise but disappointed in its hypocritical injustices.

The textbook cites the example of a DUI offender who attends AA meetings in accordance with a court order but is doing so to avoid a jail sentence or hefty fine, not because he believes it truly matters. What do sociologists call this kind of conformity?

Compliance

According to Jack Katz, aside from material objects, what do muggers gain from their crimes?

He argues that they mug for a sense of satisfaction and excitement.

All over Los Angeles, you can see cars sporting a bumper sticker that says, "My favorite teams are UCLA and whoever's playing USC." What is this an example of?

Hostility toward an out-group

In the United States today, the richest 1 percent of Americans have 40 percent of the country's wealth. Karl Marx would call this:

In order to verify what the everyday actor might just accept or assume to be true, the social analyst must take the perspective of:

What does Marx see as the primary tool for the oppression of the lower classes in modern society?

Industrial capitalism

A producer for a cable news show is feeling insecure. She complains to her boss that she isn't very smart and that she only does well because she's scared of being yelled at. Her boss tells her to stop whining and not worry about it. He says, "I'm a results-based guy. I don't care why it works, as long as it works!" What leadership style do you think her boss has?

Instrumental

According to Émile Durkheim, industrialized societies function via an organic solidarity. What is the basis for organic solidarity?

Interdependence and individual rights

Unlike Asch's experiment, which yielded different results when other researchers tried to replicate it decades later, a recent replication of Milgram's experiment had virtually the same results. What important implications does Milgram's research have for contemporary society?

It demonstrates how the power of conformity can still lead to real-life crimes of obedience, like Abu Ghraib and the telephone hoax at fast-food restaurants.

Which of the following is a serious flaw in the way the federal government defines poverty?

It does not take into account regional differences in the cost of living.

In Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, Karen McCarthy Brown studied practitioners of the Vodou religion living in the United States. However, she went far beyond the usual role of scientific observer and became a member of the religious group she was studying. She also gave her key informant, Mama Lola, veto power over certain elements of her work. Why would this be helpful?

It helped her set aside her preconceived notions about Vodou in order to understand it on its own terms.

Which of the following statements best characterizes microsociology?

It is an approach that examines interactions between individuals and the ways those interactions reflect larger patterns within a society.

Today, using the wrong fork to eat a salad at a dinner party would NOT usually qualify as deviance. Why NOT?

It is not a serious enough norm violation to provoke sanctions.

One cost-of-living indicator available on the Internet shows that a salary of $40,000 in Santa Barbara, California, is equivalent to $14,000 in Wichita, Kansas. This is primarily because of housing, which is much less expensive in Wichita. What does this difference say about how the federal government calculates poverty?

It points to a flaw in the way the government calculates the poverty line, as the standard is uniformly applied without regard to regional differences.

Many everyday cultural practices—such as greeting a friend, giving someone flowers, or using the thumbs-up sign—seem like natural ways of acting. Why does having an awareness of how these practices vary across cultures demonstrate a healthy sociological imagination?

It reminds us that everyday interactions are connected to larger social structures.

Researcher Christine Williams looked at patterns of occupational sex segregation, examining the ways large-scale social structures create the constraints within which individuals live their lives. Her work would be characterized as what kind of sociology?

Macrosociology

Why did C. Wright Mills think that it is important for everyone, even people who will never take a sociology class, to develop a sociological imagination?

Many people remain unaware of the intricate connections between the patterns of their own lives and the larger course of history.

Greg J. Duncan and a team of researchers analyzed the effect of parental income on the academic achievement of children. Given what you have read about socioeconomic status and life chances, what do you think Duncan found?

Parental income is strongly correlated with academic achievement, especially in low-income families.

A high school decides that its band needs to wear uniforms. To be more efficient, the school only buys uniforms in three sizes and forces students to pick the size that comes closest to fitting. What does this exemplify?

Rationalization

In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Émile Durkheim argued that religion was a powerful source of social solidarity. Why?

Religion reinforced collective bonds and cultivated shared moral values.

What is wrong with treating Oprah Winfrey as the ultimate symbol of the American Dream?

She represents the exception rather than the rule.

Have you ever grumbled because your instructor assigned group work? One of the biggest problems associated with group assignments is that one person often ends up doing most of the work while others take it easy. This is called:

Social loafing

In many Middle Eastern countries, showing someone the bottom of your foot or shoe is considered very rude, so American military personnel stationed in the Middle East are instructed to keep their feet inside helicopters when flying low. Why is this instruction needed?

The meaning of gestures is not universal.

What was the Asch experiment measuring?

The power of peer pressure

Simon Langlois studied government employment in Quebec. He found that even though the government had made efforts to formalize recruitment, more than 40 percent of the people he surveyed found their jobs through personal contacts. In the majority of those cases, the personal contacts were fairly casual acquaintances, not close friends. What principle is demonstrated here?

The strength of weak ties

What happened to the pseudopatients in David Rosenhan's "On Being Sane in Insane Places"?

They were all finally released, but the diagnoses were that their "illnesses" were "in remission."

According to Chapter 6, in colonial America, corporal punishments like branding or amputation were commonly used. What were these punishments designed to do?

They were designed to mark the offender.

How do self-fulfilling prophecies work?

We respond not only to the objective features of a situation but also to its meaning. Once meaning has been assigned to our behavior, the consequences of that behavior are determined by the meaning.

Which of these factors makes sociologists question the relationship between youth and crime?

Young people may commit crimes that are more visible and therefore are arrested more often.

If a bride is upset on her wedding day because her family members don't seem excited enough for her, sociologists might argue that the family members are violating:

a feeling rule.

Although many people believe that expectations for personal space (usually about eighteen inches for Americans) are innate, members of many cultures are accustomed to noticeably less personal space than we are. This helps demonstrate that people's expectations for personal space are:

a part of our culture and as such are learned rather than innate.

Several members of the Indian government have argued that poverty in India should be calculated according to how many calories per day people consume, not in relation to their incomes. What sort of measure of poverty would this be?

absolute

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, some people placed signs with crudely painted skeletons holding cell phones near roadways, usually facing freeway ramps. These signs indicated disapproval of using cell phones while driving, a practice some states have now made illegal. As a result of these laws:

an informal norm has become a law.

What do sociologists call it when an individual changes his or her career but remains within the same social class?

horizontal social mobility

Unlike earlier religious traditions that attempted to determine the ultimate cause or source of reality, Auguste Comte developed positivism in order to:

identify laws that describe the behavior of a particular reality.

Many people today argue that convicted sex offenders should be chemically castrated or held in protective custody beyond their original sentences. What is the logic of these punishments?

incapacitation

Patrick Radden Keefe's The Snakehead describes (mostly) illegal immigrants to America from Fujian, a province in China. Many of the immigrants took incredible risks to get to the United States and have a hard time assimilating, but Keefe is very optimistic that their children will assimilate and have a much higher standard of living than their parents. What does Keefe believe the children will experience?

intergenerational mobility

Harriet Martineau supported many ideas that were radical for her time, including:

labor unions and the abolition of slavery.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that:

language can structure our perception of reality.

Although we usually think of social mobility as a result of individual effort, during the "dot-com boom" of the late 1990s, many people became instant millionaires. This is an example of:

structural mobility.

Manohla Dargis called the movie The Pursuit of Happyness "the same old bootstraps story, an American Dream artfully told, skillfully sold. How you respond to this man's moving story may depend on whether you find Mr. Smith's and his son's performances so overwhelmingly winning that you buy the idea that poverty is a function of bad luck and bad choices, and success the result of heroic toil and dreams." What idea is being expressed here?

that the American Dream is an ideology

Many people, especially young women, worry about maintaining a tan. Sometimes, if they do not have the time to tan naturally, they go to a tanning salon or use chemicals to simulate a tan. In some cultures, this might seem bizarre, which can help us realize that:

the line between beauty and deviance is fluid and changes across time and place.