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Manifest functions are the consequences that people see, observe or even expect. It is explicitly stated and understood by the participants in the relevant action. The manifest function of a rain dance, according to Merton in his 1957 Social Theory and Social Structure, is to produce rain, and this outcome is intended and desired by people participating in the ritual.
In sociology, social facts are values, cultural norms, and social structures that transcend the individual and can exercise social control. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim defined the term, and argued that the discipline of sociology should be understood as the empirical study of social facts. For Durkheim, social facts "consist of ...
The first English use of the expression "meaning of life" appears in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), book II chapter IX, "The Everlasting Yea". [1]Our Life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force: thus have we a warfare; in the beginning, especially, a hard-fought battle.
Life chances (Lebenschancen in German) is a theory in sociology which refers to the opportunities each individual has to improve their quality of life. The concept was introduced by German sociologist Max Weber in the 1920s. [ 1 ]
Life history is an interviewing method used to record autobiographical history from an ordinary person's perspective, often gathered from traditionally marginalized groups. It was begun by anthropologists studying Native American groups around the 1900s, and was taken up by sociologists and other scholars, though its popularity has waxed and ...
Pure sociology is a theoretical paradigm, developed by Donald Black, that explains variation in social life through social geometry, meaning through locations in social space. A recent extension of this idea is that fluctuations in social space—i.e., social time —are the cause of social conflict.
Role theory is a concept in sociology and in social psychology that considers most of everyday activity to be the acting-out of socially defined categories (e.g., mother, manager, teacher). Each role is a set of rights, duties, expectations, norms, and behaviors that a person has to face and fulfill. [ 1 ]
The term master status is defined as "a status that has exceptional importance for social identity, often shaping a person's entire life." [ 1 ] In other words, a personal characteristic is a master status when that one characteristic overshadows or even redefines one's other personal characteristics and/or shapes a person's life course.