Ch 2Terms, Concepts and their use in Sociology — Class 11 Sociology, concept-first.

This chapter builds directly on the previous one's discussion of how the individual and society shape each other.

Sociology begins with the basic observation that human beings everywhere interact, communicate and form collectivities, though the exact form these collectivities take differs from society to society.…

Sociologists and social anthropologists have proposed several overlapping ways of classifying social groups, but nearly all of them follow the same underlying pattern: they contrast the close, intimat…

Not every group we belong to matters equally to us. Sociologists mark this difference with the distinction between primary and secondary groups.

Classical sociologists were struck by how differently people related to one another in the old, agrarian, traditional way of life compared with the new, urban, modern one, and they built an entire pai…

An in-group is any group that a person identifies with strongly enough to think of its members as 'us' or 'we' — a feeling of belonging that simultaneously marks everyone outside the group as 'them' o…

A reference group is a group whose lifestyle, values or standards a person looks up to and tries to emulate — even though that person is not actually a member of the group in question.

A peer group is a particular kind of primary group formed among individuals who share a similar age, or who belong to a common professional or occupational category.

Social stratification refers to the structured inequalities that exist between groups in society in their access to material rewards (like wealth and income) and symbolic rewards (like prestige and re…

In a caste system, an individual's social position is determined almost entirely by birth — by the status attributes a person is born with — rather than by anything they personally achieve over the co…

Sociologists have offered several different accounts of what class is and why it matters, and this section briefly sketches three of the most influential: those of Marx, Weber, and the functionalists.

Status and role are often described as twin concepts because they describe two sides of the same social position.

Social control is one of the most widely used concepts in sociology, referring to the various means a society uses to bring its unruly or non-conforming members back into line.

This chapter closes with a set of terms that recur throughout sociological writing and are worth holding onto as a working vocabulary.