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| the study of human society. |
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| the ability to connect the most basic, intimate aspects of an individual's like to seemingly impersonal and remote historical forces. |
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| a complex group of interdependent positions that perform a social role and reproduce themselves over time; also defined in a narrow sense as any institution in a society that works to shape the behavior of the groups or people within it. |
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| German; understanding. The concept of Verstehen forms the object of inquiry for interpretive social actors understand their actions and the social world through experience. |
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| a sense of aimlessness or despair that arises when we can no longer reasonably expect life to be predictable; too little social regulation; normlessness. |
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| a strain within sociology that believes the social world can be described and predicted by certain describable relationships (akin to a social physics). |
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| a concept conceived by W. E. B. DuBois to describe the two behavioral scripts, one for moving through the world and the only world and the other incorporating the external opinions of prejudiced onlookers, which are constantly maintained by African Americans. |
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| the theory that various social institutions and processes in society exist to serve some important (or necessary) function to keep society running. |
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| the idea that conflict between competing interests is the basic, animating force of social change and society in general. |
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| a micro-level theory in which shared meanings, orientations and assumptions form the basic motivations behind people's actions. |
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| a condition characterized by a questioning of the notion of progress and history, the replacement of narrative within pastiche, and multiple, perhaps even conflicting, identities resulting from disjointed afflictions. |
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| an entity that exists because people behave as if it exists and whose existence is perpetuated as people and social institutions act in accordance with the widely agreed upon formal rules or informal norms of behavior associated with that entity. |
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| a theory that attempts to predict how certain social institutions tend to function |
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| seeks to understand local interactional contexts; its methods of choice are ethnographic, generally including participant observation and in depth interviews. |
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| generally concerned with social dynamics at a higher level of analysis- that is, across the breadth of a society. |
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