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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. For ...
The anticipation of rewards and punishments, as well as the satisfaction of behaving in a prosocial way, account for why agents conform to role requirements. In terms of differences among role theory, on one side there is a more functional perspective, which can be contrasted with the more micro-level approach of the symbolic interactionist ...
A role (also rôle or social role) is a set of connected behaviors, rights, obligations, beliefs, and norms as conceptualized by people in a social situation. It is an expected or free or continuously changing behavior and may have a given individual social status or social position.
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.
This category relates to specifically sociological terms and concepts. Wider societal terms that do not have a specific sociological nature about them should be added to social concepts in keeping with the WikiProject Sociology scope for the subject.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the discipline of sociology: . Sociology – the study of society [1] using various methods of empirical investigation [2] and critical analysis [3] to understand human social activity, from the micro level of individual agency and interaction to the macro level of systems and social structure.
Parsons organized social systems in terms of action units, where one action executed by an individual is one unit. He defines a social system as a network of interactions between actors. [ 4 ] According to Parsons, social systems rely on a system of language, and culture must exist in a society in order for it to qualify as a social system. [ 4 ]
A social class (or, simply, class), as in class society, is a set of subjectively defined concepts in the social sciences and political theory centered on models of social stratification in which people are grouped into a set of hierarchical social categories, [5] the most common being the upper, middle, and lower classes.