Flashcards: Sociological theories

The Protestant work ethic (or Puritan work ethic) is a concept in theology, sociology, economics and history which emphasizes that hard work, discipline and frugality are a result of a person's subscription to the values espoused by the Protestant faith, particularly Calvinism, in contrast to the focus upon religious attendance, confession, and ceremonial sacrament in the Roman Catholic tradition.

Positivism is a philosophical theory stating that positive knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations.

Anomie (/ˈænəˌmi/) is a "condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals".

Phenomenological sociology is the study of the formal structures of concrete social existence as made available in and through the analytical description of acts of intentional consciousness.

Social constructionism or the social construction of reality (also social concept) is a theory of knowledge in sociology and communication theory that examines the development of jointly constructed understandings of the world that form the basis for shared assumptions about reality.

World-systems theory (also known as world-systems analysis or the world-systems perspective), a multidisciplinary, macro-scale approach to world history and social change, emphasizes the world-system (and not nation states) as the primary (but not exclusive) unit of social analysis.

In sociology and later criminology, the Chicago School (sometimes described as the Ecological School) was the first major body of works emerging during the 1920s and 1930s specializing in urban sociology, and the research into the urban environment by combining theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, now applied elsewhere.

Symbolic interactionism is a sociological perspective which developed around the middle of the twentieth century and that continues to be influential in some areas of the discipline.

Ethnomethodology is the study of methods people use for understanding and producing the social order in which they live.

Bodily integrity is the inviolability of the physical body and emphasizes the importance of personal autonomy and the self-determination of human beings over their own bodies.

In sociology, field theory examines how individuals construct social fields, and how they are affected by such fields.

The theory of structuration is a social theory of the creation and reproduction of social systems that is based in the analysis of both structure and agents (see structure and agency), without giving primacy to either.

Social threefolding is a sociological theory suggesting the progressive independence of society's economic, political and cultural institutions.

The term new social movements (NSMs) is a theory of social movements that attempts to explain the plethora of new movements that have come up in various western societies roughly since the mid-1960s (i.e. in a post-industrial economy) which are claimed to depart significantly from the conventional social movement paradigm.

Technology society and life or technology and culture refers to cyclical co-dependence, co-influence, and co-production of technology and society upon the other (technology upon culture, and vice versa).

Orthodox Marxism is the body of Marxist thought that emerged following the death of Karl Marx which became the official philosophy of the socialist movement as represented in the Second International until the First World War.

Theory of generations (or sociology of generations) is a theory posed by Karl Mannheim in his 1923 essay, "The Problem of Generations.

The Sociological Imagination is a 1959 book by American sociologist C.

Classical Marxism refers to the economic, philosophical, and sociological theories expounded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as contrasted with later developments in Marxism, especially Leninism and Marxism–Leninism.