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Chapter 3
Society: Interactions, Groups, and Organizations
42
Sociology
Undergraduate 1
02/10/2010

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Term
Achieved Status
Definition
Status or social position based on one's accomplishments or activities.
Term
Ascribed Status
Definition
Status that is assigned to a person and over which he/she has no control.
Term
Bureaucracy
Definition
Originally derived fro the French word bureau, or office, a formal organization characterized by a division of labor, a hierarchy of authority, formal rules governing behavior, a logic of rationality, and an impersonality of criteria.
Term
Bureaucratic Personality
Definition
Robert Merton's term to describe those people who become more committed to following the correct procedures than they are to getting the job done.
Term
Coercive Organizations
Definition
One in which membership is not voluntary, with elaborate formal rules and sanctions and correspondingly elaborate informal cultures.
Term
Crowd
Definition
An aggregate of individuals who happen to be together but experience themselves as essentially independent.
Term
Dramaturgy
Definition
Erving Goffman's conception of social life as like a stage play wherein we all work hard to convincingly play ourselves as "characters", such as grandchild, buddy, student, employee, etc.
Term
Dyad
Definition
A group of two people, the smallest configuration defined by sociologists as a group.
Term
Ethnomethodology
Definition
The study of the social knowledge, codes, and conventions that underlie everyday interactions and allow people use to make sense of what others say and o.
Term
Face work
Definition
In dramaturgical theory, the possibile performance of ourselves, b/c when we make a mistake or do something wrong, we feel embarassed, or "lose face".
Term
Group
Definition
Collection of individuals who are aware that they share something in common and who interact with one another on the basis of their interrelated roles and statuses.
Term
Group Cohesion
Definition
The degree to which individual members of a group identify with each other and with the group as a whole.
Term
Groupthink
Definition
Irving Janis' term for social progress in which members of a group attempt to conform their opinions to what they believe to be the consensus of the group, even if, as individuals, they may consider that opinion wrong or unwise.
Term
Hardcore Members
Definition
The small number of group members, the "inner circle", who wield a great deal of power to make policy decisions.
Term
Impression Management
Definition
Erving Goffman's term for our attempts to control how others perceive us, by changing our behavior to correspond to an ideal of what they will find most appealing.
Term
In-group
Definition
A group with which you identify and that you feel positively toward, producing a "we" feeling.
Term
In-group heterogeneity
Definition
The social tendency to be keenly aware of the subtle differences among the individual members of your group (while believing that all members of out-groups are exactly the same).
Term
Leader
Definition
All groups have leaders, people in charge, whether they were elected, appointed, or just informally took control.
Term
Looking-glass self
Definition
Cooley's term for the process of how identity is formed through social interaction. We imagine how we appear to others and thus develop our sense of self based on the others' reactions, imagined or otherwise.
Term
Master Status
Definition
An ascribed or achieved status presumed so important that it overshadows all of the others, dominating our lives and controlling our position in society.
Term
Network
Definition
Often concieved of as a web of social relationships, a type of group that is both looser and denser than a formal group, but connects people to each other, and, through those connections, with other people.
Term
Normative Organizations
Definition
Voluntary organization wherein members serve because they believe in the goal of the organization.
Term
Organizations
Definition
A formal group of people with one or more shared goals.
Term
Out-group
Definition
One to which you do not belong and toward which you feel either neutral or hostile; the "they" who are perceived as different from and of lower status than ourselves.
Term
Out-group homogeneity
Definition
The social tendency to be believe that all members of an out-group are completely the same (while being keenly aware of the subtle differences among the individuals of one's own group).
Term
Primary Groups
Definition
One such as friends & family, which comes together for expressive reasons, providing emotional support, love, companionship, and security.
Term
Reference Groups
Definition
A group towards which one is so strongly committed, or one that commands so much prestige, that we orient our actions around what we perceive that group's perceptions would be.
Term
Roles
Definition
Behavior expected of people who have a particular status.
Term
Role Conflict
Definition
What happens when we try to play roles with extremely different or contradictory rules at the same time.
Term
Role Exit
Definition
The process we go through when leaving a role that is central to our identity.
Term
Role Performance
Definition
The particular emphasis or interpretation each of us gives a social role.
Term
Role Strain
Definition
The experience of difficulty in performing a role.
Term
Secondary Groups
Definition
Co-workers, club members, or another group that comes together for instrumental reasons, such as working together to reach common goals. Secondary groups make less of an emotional claim to one's identity than primary groups.
Term
Social Interaction
Definition
The foundation for societal groups & the relationships & the process of how people behave & interact w/ each other.
Term
Social Structure
Definition
A complex framework composed of both patterned social interactions & institutions that together both organize social life & provide the context for individual action.
Term
Society
Definition
An organized collection of individuals & institutions, bound by space in a coherent territory, subject to the same political authority, & organized through a shared set of cultural expectations and values.
Term
Status
Definition
One' socially defined position in a group; it is often characterized by certain expectaions & rights.
Term
Stereotypes
Definition
Generalizations about a group that are oversimplified and exaggerated & that fail to acknowledge individual differences in the group.
Term
Subordinate
Definition
Individual or group that possesses little or comparitively less social power.
Term
Superordinate
Definition
Individual or group that possesses social power.
Term
Total Institutions
Definition
An institution that completely circumscribes your everyday life, cutting you off from life before you entered & seeking to regulate every part of your behavior.
Term
Utilitarian organizations
Definition
Organization like the college we attend or the company we work for, whose members belong for a specific instrumental purpose or tangible material reward.
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