Textbook Vocabulary Flashcards
(82 cards)
Agency
The ability of individuals and groups to act independently in a goal-directed manner to shape society.
Culture
The activities, norms, customs, values, symbols, and shared meanings and materials that are part of the day-to-day lives of those in groups and societies as well as the symbols and practices that not only bring people together, but also used to disrupt and contest.
Democratization
The process of social change toward greater levels of social equality.
Hegemony
The process through which dominant individuals and groups are able to exert moral and intellectual leadership to establish ideological systems of meanings and values as “common sense” in democratic societies.
Ideology
Common sense ideas and beliefs that serve the interests of dominant groups and that work to legitimize and sustain their positions of power and influence.
Institutionalization
The process of established dominant sets of patterns, rules, social norms, and relations in society.
Physical culture
How the physical body (i.e., how it moves, is represented, is treated, and under-stood) is embedded in and shaped by the activities, norms, customs, values, symbols, materials, shared meanings, and power relations that are part of day-to-day life in groups and societies.
Power
The ability of an individual or a group of individuals to employ resources to secure outcomes even when opposed by others.
Practical consciousness
Tacitly accepted and taken-for-granted beliefs that are shaped by experiences of and interactions with various social structures, institutions, and ideologies, and are subject to ongoing refinement.
Resources
The various capacities that enable and constrain individuals or groups to engage in practices and social relations.
Rules
The internal assumptions and ideologies embraced by men and women as common sense and the external laws, regulations, and policies that set limits and possibilities with respect to how we can act in our social lives.
Social construction
The historical process through which people collectively invent and reinvent their shared understandings of the social world and its institutions.
Social structure
The patterned relationships that connect different parts of society to one another and that simultaneously enable and constrain social action.
Society
The structured social relations and institutions among a large community of people which cannot be reduced to a simple collection or aggregation of individuals.
Sociology
The disciplined study of human social behaviour, including the analysis of the ori-gins, classifications, institutions, and development of human society.
Sociological imagination
The ability to go beyond personal issues and to make connections to social structures, history, and broader power relations.
Sport
Any formally organized, competitive activity that involves vigorous physical exertion or the execution of complex physical skills with rules enforced by a regulatory body. Informal physical activities, on the other hand, are often self-initiated, may or may not have fixed start or stop times, and generally have some agreed upon rule system.
Sociology of Sport
A sub-discipline of sociology that examines the relationships between sport and society, and studies sport as a central part of social and cultural life.
Alienation
In general, alienation is a feeling of isolation or detachment from the social world However, the concept for Karl Marx was specific to workers’ detachment from the fruits of their labour under the capitalist profit system-workers do not realize the full potential of their labour and are therefore alienated.
Democratic revolutions
Social and political changes starting in the 1700s that led to democratic forms of government, greater participation of citizens in the affairs of the state and in society in general, and the idea that elected representatives are responsible to their citizens.
Conflict Thoery
General theory developed in sociology from the mid-20th century on, based primarily on the work of Karl Marx and Max Weber, that recognized the ubiquitous roll conflict plays in social life.
Feminist studies
General perspectives in sociology that attempt to understand and change gender inequality, the social construction of gender, sexuality, and other issues.
Goal-rational action
The concept developed by Max Weber to describe human action involving the most calculated means toward achieving a particular end or goal. Weber believed goal-rational action or “rationality” would come to be an all-encompassing force in modern social life.
I and me
Concepts developed by George Herbert Mead to describe, first, the part of people’s self that subjectively experiences and initiates people’s action in the world (I), and second, the image people have of themselves based on how we believe others view us (Me). The I and Me combine to form the self.
