MODUE 3, PRE FINALS

• A culture is a group's beliefs and practices, whereas society is the individuals who share those ideas and customs.
• Culture is defined as that complex totality that comprises knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, tradition, and any other capacities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
• Culture is transmitted down from generation to generation or "horizontally" between and among people in a way that entails "social learning" rather than unique genetic programming
• A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations.
• Societies are characterized by patterns of relationships (social relations) between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions
• In the social sciences, a social group is two or more humans who interact with one another, share similar characteristics, and have a collective sense of unity
• Society can also be viewed as people who interact with one another, sharing similarities pertaining to culture and territorial boundaries.
• A social group exhibits some degree of social cohesion and is more than a simple collection or aggregate of individuals, such as people waiting at a bus stop or people waiting in a line. Characteristics shared by members of a group may include interests, values, representations, ethnic or social background, and kinship ties
• . Primary Groups A primary group is typically a small social group whose members share close, personal, enduring relationships.
• Secondary Groups Secondary groups are large groups whose relationships are impersonal and goal-oriented; their relationships are temporary.
• In-Groups and Out-Groups - In-groups are social groups to which an individual feels he or she belongs, while an individual doesn’t identify with the out-group
• Reference Groups Sociologists call any group that individuals use as a standard for evaluating themselves and their own behavior a reference group.
• Social Networks A social network is a social structure between actors, connecting them through various social familiarities
• Online Communities On the Internet, social interactions can occur in online communities that preclude the need to be face-to-face
• Sociology is the study of social life and the social causes and consequences of human behavior.
• A sociologist understands unemployment, for example, not as the problem of one person who can't find a job, but as the interaction of economic, political, and social forces that determine the number of jobs and who has access to them.
• Anthropology is a broad, holistic study of human beings and includes the subfields of archaeology, physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology
• sociology focuses on social structures while anthropology focuses more on culture
• SOCIETY is a humanly created organization or system of interrelationships that connects individuals in a common culture
• CULTURE: sets of traditions, rules, symbols that shape and are enacted as feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of groups of people
• LANGUAGE: a system of verbal symbols through which humans communicate ideas, feelings, experiences.
• VALUES: ideas people share about what is good, bad, desirable, undesirable. These are usually very general, abstract, cut across variations in situations.
• NORMS: behavioral rules or standards for social interaction. These often derive from values but also contradict values, and serve as both guides and criticisms for individual behavior. Norms establish expectations that shape interaction
• SOCIAL ORGANIZATION: the arrangement of the parts that constitute society, the organization of social positions, and the distribution of people within those positions.
• STATUS: socially defined niches, positions (student, professor, administrator).
• ROLE: every status carries a cluster of expected behaviors, how a person in that status is expected to think, feel, as well as expectations about how they should be treated by others. The cluster of expected duties and behaviors that has become fixed in a consistent and reiterated pattern of conduct.
• GROUP: two or more people regularly interacting on the basis of shared expectations of others’ behavior; interrelated statuses and roles.
• INSTITUTIONS: patterns of activity reproduced across time and space. Practices that are regularly and continuously repeated.
• SOCIAL STRUCTURE: Structure refers to the pattern within culture and organization through which social action takes place; arrangements of roles, organizations, institutions, and cultural symbols that are stable over time, often unnoticed, and changing almost invisibly
• SOCIAL STRATIFICATION: the division of people socioeconomically into layers or strata.