Sociology Test - 13

The correct answer is class.

Key Points The Class System

• A class system is based on both social factors and individual achievement.
• A class consists of a set of people who share similar status based on factors like wealth, income, education, family background, and occupation. Unlike caste systems, class systems are open.
• People may move to a different level (vertical movement) of education or employment status than their parents. Though family and other societal models help guide a person toward a career, personal choice and opportunity play a role.
• They can also socialize with and marry members of other classes.
• People have the option to form an exogamous marriage, a union of spouses from different social categories.
• Exogamous marriages often focus on values such as love and compatibility. Though social conformities still exist that encourage people to choose partners within their own class, called an endogamous marriage, people are not as pressured to choose marriage partners based solely on their social location.

Additional Information

• Community-  In sociology, we define community as a group who follow a social structure within a society (culture, norms, values, status). They may work together to organise social life within a particular place, or they may be bound by a sense of belonging sustained across time and space.
• Creed-That which is believed; accepted doctrine, especially religious; a particular set of beliefs; any summary of principles or opinions professed or adhered to.

• Group-In sociology, a group is usually defined as a collection of humans who share certain characteristics, interact with one another, accept expectations and obligations as members of the group, and share a common identity. Using this definition, society can appear as a large group

The correct answer is Marx.

Key Points

• Alienation is a theoretical concept developed by Karl Marx that describes the isolating, dehumanizing, and disenchanting effects of working within a capitalist system of production. Per Marx, its cause is the economic system itself.
• Marx's Theory of Alienation
  • Karl Marx's theory of alienation was central to his critique of industrial capitalism and the class-stratified social system that both resulted from it and supported it. He wrote directly about it in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and The German Ideology, though it is a concept that is central to most of his writing. The way Marx used the term and wrote about the concept shifted as he grew and developed as an intellectual, but the version of the term that is most frequently associated with Marx and taught within sociology is of the alienation of workers within a capitalist system of production.
  • According to Marx, the organization of the capitalist system of production, which features a wealthy class of owners and managers who purchase labor from workers for wages, creates the alienation of the entire working class. This arrangement leads to four distinct ways in which workers are alienated.
  • They are alienated from the product they make because it is designed and directed by others, and because it earns a profit for the capitalist, and not the worker, through the wage-labor agreement.
  • They are alienated from the production work itself, which is entirely directed by someone else, highly specific in nature, repetitive, and creatively unrewarding. Further, it is work that they do only because they need the wage for survival.
  • They are alienated from their true inner self, desires, and the pursuit of happiness by the demands placed on them by the socio-economic structure, and by their conversion into an object by the capitalist mode of production, which views and treats them not as human subjects but as replaceable elements of a system of production.
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• While Marx's observations and theories were based on the early industrial capitalism of the 19th century, his theory of the alienation of workers holds true today. Sociologists who study the conditions of labor under global capitalism find that the conditions that cause alienation and the experience of it have actually intensified and worsened.

The correct answer is slavery.

Key Points The slavery system

• It is an extreme form of inequality in which some individuals are owned by others as their property.
• The slave owner has full control including using violence over the slave.
• L.T Hobhouse defined slave as a man whom law and custom regard as the property of another. In extreme cases he is wholly without rights.
  • He is in lower condition as compared with freemen.
  • The slaves have no political rights he does not choose his government, he does not attend the public councils. Socially he is despised.
  • He is compelled to work.
• The slavery system has existed sporadically at many times and places but there are two major examples of slavery - societies of the ancient world based upon slavery (Greek and Roman) and southern states of USA in the 18th and 19th centuries.
• According to H.J Nieboer the basis of slavery is always economic because with it emerged a kind of aristocracy which lived upon slave labour.

Additional Information Caste System

• Caste is closely connected with the Hindu philosophy and religion, custom and tradition.
• It is believed to have had a divine origin and sanction.
• It is deeply rooted social institution in India.
• There are more than 2800 castes and sub-castes with all their peculiarities.
• The term caste is derived from the Spanish word caste-meaning breed or lineage. The word caste also signifies race or kind.
• The Sanskrit word for caste is Varna that means color.
• The caste stratification of the Indian society had its origin in the chaturvarna system. According to this doctrine the Hindu society was divided into four main varnas - Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras.
• The Varna system prevalent during the Vedic period was mainly based on division of labor and occupation.
• Earlier there were only three varnas, the Shudras were added later and occupational division was not rigid.
• A fifth group that falls outside the Varna system and is called Avarna or outcaste or untouchable also exists.
• Caste is an endogamous group having a relatively independent culture and structural existence. The caste system owns its origin to the Varna system.

The correct answer is Nesfield.

Key Points Occupational theory:

• Nesfield originally gave the name  occupational theory, according to which castes in India developed as per the occupation of a person.
• Concept of superior and inferior caste also came with this as some persons were doing superior jobs and some were into lower kinds of jobs.
• All those people who were doing the task of purohits were superior and they were the ones who used to do specialization.
• Superior caste with time grouped into Brahmins. Similarly, other groups were also formed leading to different castes in India.

The correct answer is Jeremy Bentham .

Key Points Utilitarianism​

• Utilitarianism is one of the best known and most influential moral theories. Like other forms of consequentialism, its core idea is that whether actions are morally right or wrong depends on their effects. More specifically, the only effects of actions that are relevant are the good and bad results that they produce.
• A key point in this article concerns the distinction between individual actions and types of actions. Act utilitarians focus on the effects of individual actions (such as John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Abraham Lincoln) while rule utilitarians focus on the effects of types of actions (such as killing or stealing).
• Utilitarians believe that the purpose of morality is to make life better by increasing the amount of good things (such as pleasure and happiness) in the world and decreasing the amount of bad things (such as pain and unhappiness). They reject moral codes or systems that consist of commands or taboos that are based on customs, traditions, or orders given by leaders or supernatural beings. Instead, utilitarians think that what makes a morality be true or justifiable is its positive contribution to human (and perhaps non-human) beings.
• The most important classical utilitarians are Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Bentham and Mill were both important theorists and social reformers. Their theory has had a major impact both on philosophical work in moral theory and on approaches to economic, political, and social policy. Although utilitarianism has always had many critics,  there are many 21st century thinkers that support it.
• The task of determining whether utilitarianism is the correct moral theory is complicated because there are different versions of the theory, and its supporters disagree about which version is correct. This article focuses on perhaps the most important dividing line among utilitarians, the clash between act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. After a brief overall explanation of utilitarianism, the article explains both act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism, the main differences between them, and some of the key arguments for and against each view.

The correct answer is caste.

Key Points

Systems of Stratification 

• Sociologists distinguish between two types of systems of stratification. Closed systems accommodate little change in social position. They do not allow people to shift levels and do not permit social relationships between levels. Closed systems include estate, slavery, and caste systems. Open systems are based on achievement and allow for movement and interaction between layers and classes. How different systems operate reflect, emphasize, and foster specific cultural values, shaping individual beliefs. In this section, we’ll review class and caste stratification systems, plus discuss the ideal system of meritocracy.
• The Caste System
  • Caste systems are closed stratification systems where people can do little or nothing to change the social standing of their birth. The caste system determines all aspects of an individual’s life: occupations, marriage partners, and housing. Individual talents, interests, or potential do not provide opportunities to improve a person's social position.
  • In the Hindu caste tradition, people expect to work in an occupation and to enter into a marriage based on their caste. Accepting this social standing is considered a moral duty and people are socialized to accept their social standing. Cultural values reinforced the system. Caste systems promote beliefs in fate, destiny, and the will of a higher power, rather than promoting individual freedom as a value. This belief system is an ideology. Every culture has an ideology that supports its system of stratification.
  • The caste system in India has been officially dismantled, but is still deeply embedded in Indian society, particularly in rural areas. In India’s larger cities, people now have more opportunities to choose their own career paths and marriage partners. As a global center of employment, corporations have introduced merit-based hiring and employment to the nation shifting the cultural expectations of the caste system.

The correct answer is Marx.

Key Points Marx’s ideas on modes of production

• Karl Marx was a German philosopher and sociologist. Besides, he mastered many other subjects like economics, political theory, history, etc.
• In Marxism, the mode of production is a very important concept. It refers to the way in which a society is organized so as to produce goods and services. It is composed of two main aspects: forces of production which refers to the elements used in producing anything (land, raw material, labor, machinery, and capital) and relations of production which refers to the relationship between people as well as people’s relationship with the forces of production out of which crucial decisions regarding what is to be done with the output is determined. In Marxist theory, this concept was used to depict the differences among the economies of various societies.
• Marx and Friedrich Engles (another German philosopher) considered hunter-gatherers to be a form of primitive communism wherein people would produce together and share the output among themselves equally.
• Then was the Asiatic mode of production which comprised of the premier form of a society wherein classes (a tussle between the people who have lands and those that don’t) existed. This can be observed in many societies (until recent past) where rich landlords let tenants work on their lands and take a lot of the produce as rent.
• Next came slavery (which was seen in the Greek and Roman city-states). There was the development of the feudal mode of production wherein the mercantile class was served by slaves (or serfs) who neither had incomes nor any upward mobility. Slavery can be seen during the colonial rule of the British who carried slaves from Africa to the USA in order to develop the production there.
• And then developed Capitalism (due to the industrial revolution) in which people demand wages for all the labor they had been providing until then. Capitalism is such an economic system wherein private players own the means of production and they are incentivized to maximize the amount of money they earn through competing with other firms. Some capitalist countries include Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United Arab Emirates. Marx quotes the following on capitalism:
• Marx observed that the protests and revolutions led by the working class will pave the way to a communist society wherein everyone works together and distribute the products among themselves. This society stresses on the welfare of the masses in sectors like health care, housing, education, etc.
• Marx made use of this concept to explain the economic systems that could probably exist at any point in time. He also used it to mention Historical materialism (which says the structure of the society and its historical progress are determined by the material conditions of life or through their mode of production).

The correct answer is tawney.

Key Points

• According to Tawney, in estate system inequality is not primarily economic but judicial.
• The Estate system is a form of stratification established by law in which the ownership of land leads to the monopolization of power. 
• “A stratified system consisting of the clergy, nobility, and commoners; with interlocking legal rights and obligations.” French Old Regime is an example of this system.

The correct answer is strectural mobility.

Key PointsStructural mobility

• Structural mobility is a kind of vertical mobility.
• Structural mobility refers to mobility that is brought about by changes in stratification hierarchy itself.
• It is a vertical movement of a specific group, class or occupation relative to others in the stratification system.
• It is a type of forced mobility for it takes place because of the structural changes and not because of individual attempts.
• For example historical circumstances or labor market changes may lead to the rise of decline of an occupational group within the social hierarchy.
• An influx of immigrants may also alter class alignments -especially if the new arrivals are disproportionately highly skilled or unskilled.

The correct answer is social mobility. 

Key Points Social Mobility

• Social mobility is defined as a transition of individuals or groups from one position in the social hierarchy to another.
• The concept of social mobility is closely linked to the concept of stratification.
• As hierarchical patterns evolve in the society, a tendency of shifting these patterns at individual and structural level also evolves.
• Mobility can be at an individual level or at collective level termed as structural mobility.
• Functionalists like Parsons believed that mobility is a result of the process of differentiation in society and role filling by those who suit them the most.
• Marx on the other hand believed that the high rate of social mobility, embourgeoisement will weaken class solidarity.
• He foresees downward mobility in capitalism when petite bourgeoisie will sink down into the proletariat class.
• Frank Parkin and Dahrendorf believe that social mobility also acts as a safety valve in the society as the built up frustrations are vented through the route of social mobility.
• Andre Beteille in his Caste, Class and Power, 1971 has shown how mobility in a closed and stratified caste system is difficult.
• MN Srinivas in his study of Coorgs showed that in such a system alternate methods like sanskritization are evolved to move up socially but it affects only the cultural aspects and not the structural aspects.
• A distinction is made between horizontal and vertical social mobility. The former refers to change of occupational position or role of an individual or a group without involving any change in its position in the social hierarchy, the latter refers essentially to changes in the position of an individual or a group along the social hierarchy.
• When a rural laborer comes to the city and becomes an industrial worker or a manager takes a position in another company there are no significant changes in their position in the hierarchy.
• Those are the examples of horizontal mobility. Horizontal mobility is a change in position without the change in statue. It indicates a change in position within the range of the same status. 
• It is a movement from one status to its equivalent. But if an industrial worker becomes a businessman or lawyer he has radically changed his position in the stratification system. This is an example of vertical mobility. Vertical mobility refers to a movement of an individual or people or groups from one status to another. It involves change within the lifetime of an individual to a higher or lower status than the person had to begin with.
• Forms Of Vertical Social Mobility
  • The vertical mobility can take place in two ways - individuals and groups may improve their position in the hierarchy by moving upwards or their position might worsen and they may fall down the hierarchy.
  • When individuals get into seats of political position; acquire money and exert influence over others because of their new status they are said to have achieved individual mobility. Like individuals even groups also attain high social mobility.
  • When a Dalit from a village becomes an important official it is a case of upward mobility.
  • On the other hand an aristocrat or a member of an upper class may be dispossessed of his wealth and he is forced to enter a manual occupation. This is an example of downward mobility.
• Inter-Generational Social Mobility
  • Time factor is an important element in social mobility. On the basis of the time factor involved in social mobility there is another type of inter-generational mobility. It is a change in status from that which a child began within the parents, household to that of the child upon reaching adulthood. It refers to a change in the status of family members from one generation to the next. For example a farmer's son becoming an officer.
  • It is important because the amount of this mobility in a society tells us to what extent inequalities are passed on from one generation to the next. If there is very little inter-generational mobility, Inequality is clearly deeply built into the society for people' life chances are being determined at the moment of birth.
  • When there is a mobility people are clearly able to achieve new statuses through their own efforts, regardless of the circumstances of their birth.