Exam Appointments Here

Instructions: show up a few minutes early and knock with vigor when your time comes. I'll have a selection of 3 to 6 questions for you. Answer in a manner that best shows what you know.

Question Universe

Q69. Define "coordination" and give five examples of coordination problems that you dealt with today.

Q70. If social order equals coordination and cooperation, provide some illustrations that support the authors' contention that "the problem of social order underlies questions of central concern to sociologists in substantive areas as diverse as crime and deviance, social movements, organizations, politics, religion, international relations, and the family" (xiii.1). Use this an opportunity to show you can distinguish cooperation and coordination and in general "get" the course. Perhaps add a category or two of your own.

Q162. Explain this passage by Durkheim:

In “The Origin of Beliefs,” Emile Durkheim writes

" Thus it is not the intrinsic nature of the thing who name the clan bore that set it apart as the object of worship. Furthermore, if the emotion elicited by the thing itself really was the determining cause of totemic rites and beliefs, then this thing would also be the sacred being par excellence, and the animals and plants used as totems would play the leading role in religious life. But we know that the focus of the cult is elsewhere. It is symbolic representations of this or that plant or animal. It is totemic emblems and symbols of all kinds that possess the greatest sanctity. And so it is in totemic emblems and symbols that the religious source is to be found, while the real objects, represented by those emblems receive only a reflection” (49).

The totem is above all a symbol, a tangible expression of something else. But of what? (49)

Q163. Work through this passage by Durkheim:

…it is with the people of his clan that he has most in common, and it is the influence of this group that he feels most immediately, and so it is also this influence, more than any other, that was bound to find expression in religious symbols” (55).

Can you make any connections to Mead's generalized other? Or the generic idea of having some of our mental content being social?

Q334. Describe, with examples, the policy implications of a theory that has individuals and their shared meanings as the main source of social order.

Q336. What does Ludwick Fleck mean by a "thought collective"?

Q339. Ludwik Fleck wrote: "what actually thinks within a person is not the individual himself but his social community" (Hechter & Horne 59.5). Explain what Fleck's theory of thought collectives is all about by explaining what this means.

Q341. Explain what George Herbert Mead means when he describes "self consciousness" as becoming aware of oneself as an object for others. How is it that this is what gives rise to the "social self"?

Q343. Dov Cohen and Joe Vandello report on several lab experiments in the article on cultures of violence. One experiment involved "annoying" subjects who thought they were doing an experiment on "art therapy." Describe the design of this experiment, its findings, and their relevance to the theoretical ideas explored in Cohen and Vandello's article.

Q345. Explicate and explain this selection from Cohen and Vandello's "Meanings of Violence":

As Reed has suggested, Southerners "actually don't see much of the violence around them, don't register it as 'lawlessness,' because it isn't 'lawless.' It is lawful violence in the sociological if not the legal sense: more-or-less predictable, more-or-less expected, (in consequence) more or less taken for granted. It's effectively invisible-something like wallpaper." (Reed 1981)

Q346. Cohen and Vandello describe a world that may not be politically or morally attractive to you. And yet we read it in a section of the course where we are saying that collective beliefs can be a source of coordination and social order. How does this article illustrate the theoretical points being made by Marx, Durkheim, Mead, and Fleck, indeed of the entire section of the course, that shared meanings can produce order?

Q347. George Herbert Mead writes of "taking the attitude of the other" as a necessary part of social life.

"…the complex co-operative processes … organized human society are also possible only in so far as every individual involved in them … can take the general attitudes of all other such individuals … and can direct his own behavior accordingly" (61.5).

Give an example of a social situation that bears this out, describing the various participants and how they can "take the attitude of the others" and what would happen if they got it wrong, or in situations where people do this less well or less completely.

Q349. Language is the paramount example of a SOCIAL phenomenon - the "code system" of language exists in our collective, shared consciousness and anyone who wishes to communicate has to participate in this. Use language and the acquisition and use of language to explain Mead's idea of taking the role of the other, the generalized other, etc.

Q351. Define cooperation and give five examples where you have seen it (or its absence) recently.

Q352. Explain what Hedstrom ("Dissecting the Social") meant when he said "differences in some social states or events are considered explained if the decomposition eliminates them" (13.8)?

Q355. Explain what Marx means by "It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness" (47.7).

Q356. Demonstrate your understanding of the George Herbert Mead excerpt and its connection to ideas about how the nature of the social individual is a "source" of social order by explaining this diagram. Use examples to illustrate your ideas.

sharedmeaningToOrderMead.png

Q357. Demonstrate your understanding of the Durkheim excerpt and its connection to ideas about how the nature of the social individual is a "source" of social order by explaining this diagram. Use examples to illustrate your ideas.

sharedmeaningToOrderDurkheim.png

Q358. Demonstrate your understanding of the Ludwik Fleck excerpt and its connection to ideas about how the nature of the social individual is a "source" of social order by explaining this diagram. Use examples to illustrate your ideas.

sharedmeaningToOrderFleck.png

Q359. Demonstrate your understanding of the Karl Marx excerpt and its connection to ideas about how the nature of the social individual is a "source" of social order by explaining this diagram. Use examples to illustrate your ideas.

sharedmeaningToOrderMarx.png

Q361. In the public goods game described by Fehr and Gintis, explain why we impose a cost on the punishER for each punishment issued. What does willingness to impose a punishment despite a cost suggest about the actor who does so?

Q362. The theorists whose work was included in the section on individuals and social order each suggest mechanisms for how shared meaning happens through actual social interaction. Describe how each thinker is saying that the picture below is NOT how it happens - that is, we don't just magically have a bunch of social/cultural content in our heads; it gets there through a process, there's a mechanism that we can describe.

If it's later in the course, relate this to life in groups - how is this social content connected to ideas on internalization and socialization of group members?

shared-meaning-painted-by-culture.png

Q363. Demonstrate your understanding of Weber's typology of social action in the context of this course by explaining this diagram.

weber-types-of-action-01.png

Q364. Thinking back to the Kanazawa article on evolutionary biology, use this diagram to talk about at least six different ideas from this course.

action-time-self-01.gif

Q372. Explain the difference between cooperation and coordination as we are using them in this course. Give examples to support your explanation.