Social construction of reality The process of socially creating definitions of situations so that they appear to be natural. Social categories Groups of people who may not interact but who share certain social characteristics or statuses. Secondary deviance Behavior discovered by others and publicly labeled by them as deviant. Sanction A social reward or punishment for approved or disapproved behavior; can be positive or negative, formal or informal. Sample survey A systematic method of collecting information from respondents, using personal interviews or written questionnaires. Role expectations Commonly shared norms about how a person is supposed to behave in a particular role.

Marx believed that these aspects of society were responsible for producing the social order, while others—including social institutions and the state—were responsible for maintaining it. He referred to these two components of society as the base and the superstructure. Durkheim’s view became the foundation for the functionalist perspective, which views society as the sum of interlocking and interdependent parts that evolve together to maintain social order. Durkheim theorized that it was through the culture shared by a group, community, or society that a sense of social connection—what he called solidarity—emerged between and among people and that worked to bind them together into a collective.

A personality system, concerning human motivation and orientation, underlies the social system. These are action systems in the sense that they involve social action, and each system has certain emalayalee newspaper needs or conditions that are necessary for the survival and continued operation of the system. Examples of systems are the social, cultural, and personality systems (Wallace and Wolf, p. 28).

_____ view society as a structure with interrelated parts designed to meet the biological and social needs of individuals who make up that society. Developed by researchers at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, social disorganization theory asserts that crime is most likely to occur in communities with weak social ties and the absence of social control. Rather than deviance being a force that reinforces moral and social solidarity, it is the absence of moral and social solidarity that provides the conditions for social deviance to emerge. Sociologists who follow the functionalist approach are concerned with how the different elements of a society contribute to the whole. Social disorganization theory, strain theory, and cultural deviance theory represent three functionalist perspectives on deviance in society.

This adaptation does not involve deviant behavior but is a logical response to the strain poor people experience. Several explanations may be grouped under the functionalist perspective in sociology, as they all share this perspective’s central view on the importance of various aspects of society for social stability and other social needs. The result was a hierarchical class-based society in which a small minority held power over the majority, whose labor they used for their own financial gain. Marx believed social institutions did the work of spreading the values and beliefs of the ruling class to maintain a social order that would serve their interests and protect their power.

He was born in 1798, year 6 of the new French Republic, to staunch monarchist and Catholic parents, who lived comfortably off the father’s earnings as a minor bureaucrat in the tax office. Spontaneity allows for the realization of the “true” self, an idealized type of interaction that allows the individual to realize a desired face. In The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim describes a macro-sociological model of spontaneity, a “finely articulated organisation in which each social value…is appreciated at its true worth” . Official records and survey research techniques are usually inappropriate for relativistic research on definitional processes. These sources of data can, at best, provide only very indirect measures of dynamic processes that occur in social situations. Therefore, descriptions of definitional processes are typically based on direct observation of social interaction between social audiences and the people they define as deviant.