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| Sociology Terms –D
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| Eugenics |
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Eugenics is derived from the Greek work eugenés with éu meaning ‘well’ and genos meaning born. It is a science that is concerned with improving the quality of the human race with special attention towards the control of hereditary factors. It is concerned with the current direction of human evolution. It was first discovered by Francis Galton in 1883 who used the word eugenics to describe the science for the biological improvement of the human race but has since then been widely abused by politicians such as the German Adolf Hitler who segregated people whom he viewed to be mentally and physically unfit from those that were said to have “good” genes, so as to maintain a “pure” German race.
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| Exclusion |
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Social exclusion the failure of society to provide certain people with those rights normally available to its members, such as employment, health care, education, etc. Social exclusion is about more than income poverty. It is a short-hand term for what can happen when people or areas face a combination of linked problems, such as unemployment, discrimination, poor skills, low incomes, poor housing, high crime and family breakdown. These problems are linked and mutually reinforcing.
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| Feminism |
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Feminism is: (a) a belief that women universally face some form of oppression or exploitation; (b) a commitment to uncover and understand what causes and sustains oppression, in all its forms and (c) a commitment to work individually and collectively in everyday life to end all forms of oppression.
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| Feminist methodology |
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Judith Cook and Mary Margaret Fonow identify 5 basic epistemological principles in feminist methodology.
women and gender as the focus of analysis;
the importance of consciousness raising (feminist researcher inhabits a double world of women/researcher and brings feminist knowledge into process);
the rejection of subject and object (between researcher and participant - means valuing the knowledge held by the participant as being expert knowledge; how research valued as objective is still biased);
a concern with ethics (ex. use of language, use of research results);
and an intention to empower women and change power relations and inequality (new knowledge is generated when one challenges the inequalities in society between women and men and amongst women - validates a new perspective and definition of events).
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| Grand theory |
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Grand theory : Theories that are concerned with the “broad sweep” of human society, with how human social structures in general behave – like feminism or Marxism.
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| Grounded theory |
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Grounded theory (GT) is a popular methodology in qualitative research, and is founded on an iterative inductive and deductive cycle where theory is allowed to emerge directly from data and is ultimately tested (grounded) against ‘the real world’. Grounded theory was developed by sociologists, and it remains more commonly used within sociology and other areas of business and social research than economics. The key feature of grounded theory is that it provides a framework for generating conceptual theory from data. In its initial stages it is an inductive approach to theory generation. In comparison with the more orthodox forms of hypothesis formation and data collection used in economics, grounded theory gives a low priority to a priori theorising or relying upon existing theoretical models.
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| Historical materialism |
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Men have history because they must produce their life, and because they must produce it moreover in a certain way: this is determined by their physical organisation; their consciousness is determined in just the same way. The determinist relationship between the economic base and social superstructure, known as Historical Materialism, is first described in The German Ideology. Historic materialism contends that the catalyst behind societal evolution is materially determined, being predicated on contradictions between the forces and means of production. As “it is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness”, law is a reflection of the economic base, rather than the reserve as liberals such as Dworkin would propose.
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| Human nature |
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Marx based his theory on his own understanding of HUMAN NATURE.
current notions of human nature: COMPETITIVE, SELFISH, GREEDY, VIOLENT.
But Marx argued that we need to look at HISTORY to understand “True” human nature = how humans act “regardless” of location or time period.
HUMAN NATURE = humans are
PRODUCTIVE = survival
SOCIAL – producers, procreation, etc.
CONSCIOUS (creative) – we keep using our intelligence to cut corners and reduce the amount of work it takes to produce so that we can have free time, because what we try to achieve is FREE CONSCIOUS PRODUCTION (e.g. cave paintings, music, dancing, loving, etc.) instead of NECESSITY/SURVIVAL PRODUCTION – which chains you to your belly
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