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| The view that material conditions (usually economic and technological factors) play the central role in determining social stability and change. |
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| The pursuit of one’s values and beliefs, often to the exclusion of practical reality. |
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| The specialization of work tasks or occupations and their interrelationships. |
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| Term for natural needs that we are born with, including the need for food, water, and shelter. See also Secondary needs. |
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| Historically, the merchant class in feudal societies. Today, the term is often used as a synonym for the middle class. |
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| Term for the class of industrial workers who have nothing to sell on the free market except their labour. |
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| An economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and distribution in which the goal is to produce profit. |
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| The confiscation of property or labour from an individual. |
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| The act or process of impoverishing someone. |
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| Socio-economic differences between groups of individuals that create differences in their life chances and power. |
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| The sense that one has lost control over social institutions that one has participated in creating. |
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| Marx's term referring to the inanimate part of the forces of production. This includes land, raw materials, tools, machinery, and factories, bridges, canals, and ships--everything within the forces of production except labor-power. |
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| The application of logic, reason, and knowledge to the problems of exploiting raw materials from the environment. Social technologies employ the same thought processes in addressing problems of human organization. |
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| The interface between a sociocultural system and its environment. |
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| In sociocultural materialism, the symbolic universe—the shared meanings, ideas, beliefs, values, and ideologies that people associate with the physical and social world. |
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| A term popularized by Marx that refers to the legions of unemployed within a society dominated by capital. |
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| The legal right to the possession of an object or thing. |
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| In sociology, all human institutions, groups, and organizations. |
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| The overall term for the type of production that characterizes a sociocultural system. |
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| The means of production plus the labor-power, or the knowledge and skills of those directly involved in the production process as well as the organization of collective labor. |
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| The social relations people enter into through their participation in economic life. They are socially patterned, independent of the wills and purposes of the individuals involved. |
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| A concept much used by Karl Marx, it refers to abstract human labor that is used in exchange for money. |
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| Marx's concept for the value of an individual's labor power (calculated by the amount of value the labor contributes to the product minus the amount of money paid to the worker by the capitalist). The conventional name for this difference is profit. |
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