Sociology

Since the 1980s, an awareness of the growing social problems of unemployment, crime, urban deprivation, and industrial disputes, has led to an increased emphasis on law and order. However, the state’s apparatus for maintaining law and order has been increasingly privatized, in three main ways: the expansion of private security companies (employing guards and bouncers) alongside the state police, the private financing and management of some prisons, and active citizenship, whereby private citizens become involved in police activities, such as Neighbourhood Watch. 608-610

The service class is Goldthorpe’s term for a certain type of middle class occupation that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. This reflected the growth of large scale organizations and professional, managerial and bureaucratic occupations within them. Goldthorpe said that these were members of a service class because they served the interests of the organizations by exercising authority that was delegated by the state. 793

Gender socialization is the process by which people learn how to play the gender roles expected of them in a particular culture. Nancy Chodorow was a psychoanalyst who said that this process began in infancy: all children begin with a close, intimate bond with their mothers as the main care-giver, but this develops in different ways. While girls identify with their mothers and learn ‘feminine’ ways of behaving, boys have to break the attachment and associate with men in order to learn how to be ‘masculine’. 160

The term ‘racialization’ refers to the definition of ethnic groups or drawing of ethnic boundaries in terms of racial characteristics, such as skin colour. Language can therefore be used to impose a racial identity upon a minority ethnic group by a powerful majority, as it suggests absolute, fixed, and biologically based differences between ethnic groups. 201-202

Parsons argued that being ill was not simply a biological process but also a social one, involving what he called the ‘sick role’. This is a set of normative expectations about how the sick person should behave, to minimise the disruption to social life. Thus the sick person is exempted from their normal roles and responsibilities and permitted to withdraw from social life, providing they are willing to seek medical help and show a desire to get better. 295

The term ‘urbanization’ refers to the movement of large numbers of people from rural to urban areas, and the subsequent growth of cities. This shift in population can be attributed to the rise of industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth century, as factories were built in cities and the transport system was developed, for example through the building of the railway system. Leisure industries also emerged, for instance cinemas, theatres, and seaside holiday resorts. 501-502

Foucault argued that we live in a ‘disciplinary society’, based upon the techniques developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in ‘carceral organizations’ such as prisons. For Foucault, discipline involved control over the body, through the regulation and timetabling of physical activity; surveillance, or continued visibility and openness to scrutiny (making people feel as if they were being watched until they began to monitor themselves); and punishment through imprisonment and the restriction of freedom. 541-542

There are two main theories of development: modernization and dependency. Modernization theory emphasized the differences between ‘modern’ (Western) and ‘traditional’ societies, suggesting that the latter had to become more like the former in order to develop. This usually involved countries acquiring Western style democracies, market-based economies and industrial capitalism. 621-622

New religious movements, sometimes known as cults, have become increasingly significant in otherwise secular societies. There has been a growth of activity in Inspirational Pentecostalism, world-affirming religions, world-rejecting religions, and religions of ethnic protest. Wallis (1984) distinguished between world-rejecting religions, such as Hare Krishnas, which retreat from mainstream society and reject many of its values, and world-affirming religions, such as Scientology, which tolerate or even embrace these cultural values but suggest alternative means of achieving them, such as meditation or yoga. 430-433

In everyday life, people think and act on the basis of ‘common sense’: we are so immersed in local norms, routines, and practices that we think of them as natural and inevitable. By contrast, sociologists think critically about how these rules have been created; they distinguish between the way the world is and the way they think it ought to be. They build up a cumulative knowledge, drawing on the research of other sociologists, and so can make some more general statements about society. 16