Glossary

This chapter closes with a set of terms that recur throughout sociological writing and are worth holding onto as a working vocabulary. Conflict theories describe a family of sociological perspectives, heavily shaped by Marx's writing, which see human societies as marked by tension, division and competing interests — because resources in any society are scarce and valuable, different groups end up struggling over who gets to access and control them, and this struggle, rather than harmony, is treated as the normal condition of social life. Functionalism takes the opposite starting point: it explains social events in terms of the function they perform, that is, the contribution they make to holding society together, and pictures society as a complex system whose different parts work in relation to one another and need to be understood as such.

Identity refers to the distinctive traits of a person's — or a group's — character, tied to who they are and what matters to them; gender, nationality or ethnicity, and social class are among the most important sources from which identity is built. Means of production refers to everything involved in how a society actually produces material goods — not just tools and technology, but also the social relationships between the people who do the producing, which is the sense in which the term is used to help define social class.

Microsociology and macrosociology describe two different scales of sociological analysis: microsociology studies everyday face-to-face interaction at the level of individuals or small groups, while macrosociology studies large-scale social systems such as the political or economic order; though they look at different scales, the two are closely connected rather than separate fields. Natal simply means relating to the place or time of a person's birth — as in a person's 'natal family', the family they were born into. …