PAPER – I PRINCIPLES OF SOCIOLOGY
Total Marks: 100
Table of Contents
1. INTRODUCTION
i. Definition of Sociology
ii. Culture and Society
iii. Socialization, Norms, Values, Status and Roles
iv. Sociological Perspectives
a. Structuralism
b. Interpretive theories
c. Modernism And Postmodernism
2. FAMILIES AND HOUSEHOLDS
i. Sociological perspectives on the family
a. The functionalist perspective
b. The traditional Marxist perspective
c. Marxist feminist and radical feminist perspective on the family
ii. Family ideology
iii. Politics, Social Policy and the family
iv. Is the family a declining social institution?
3. SEX AND GENDER
i. Sex: A Biological Distinction
ii. Gender: A Cultural Distinction
a. Gender in global perspective
b. Patriarchy and sexism
iii. Gender Socialization
a. Gender and the family
b. Gender and the peer group
c. Gender and schooling
d. Gender and the mass media
iv. Gender Stratification
a. Working men and women
b. Housework: women‟s “second shift”
c. Gender, income and wealth
d. Gender and education
e. Gender and politics
f. Gender and the Military
g. Are women a minority?
h. Minority women
i. Violence against women
v. Theoretical analysis of gender
a. Structural-Functional Analysis
b. Social-conflict analysis
vi. Feminism
a. Basic feminist ideas
b. Variations within feminism
c. Opposition to feminism
4. HEALTH
i. What is meant by „health‟, „illness‟ and „disease‟?
ii. Disability
iii. The medical and social models of health
a. The medical (biomedical) model of health
b. The social model of health
iv. Becoming a health statistic
v. Medicine and social control; the sick role
a. Features of the sick role
vi. The power of the medical profession
a. Protecting the patient
b. Criticisms of the medical professions
c. The erosion of medical power?
vii. Marxist approaches to health and medicine
viii. How society influences health
a. Improvements in health in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
ix. The new „disease burden‟
a. What are the causes of these new diseases?
x. Inequalities in health
a. Social class inequalities in health
b. Gender differences in health
xi. Inequalities in health
a. Funding
b. Geography
c. Social Class
d. Disability
xii. Mental illness
a. What is mental illness?
b. Care in the community
c. The biomedical approach to mental illness
d. The social construction of mental illness
5. THE MASS MEDIA
1) The power of the media
2) Ownership of the mass media
3) The mass media and ideology
4) Do the owners of the media control their content?
a. The manipulative or instrumentalist approach
b. The dominant ideology or hegemonic approach
c. The pluralist approach
5) Violence and the media
6) What affects the content of the media? Bias in the media
a. The owners
b. Making a profit
c. Organizational constraints
d. Agenda-setting
e. Gate-keeping
f. Norm-setting
7) The presentation and social construction of the news
a. Inaccurate and false reporting
b. News values and „newsworthiness‟
c. The assumptions and activities of journalists
8) The media, crime and deviance
9) Media Representation and Stereotyping
a. Media representations of age
b. Media representations of social class
c. Media representations of ethnicity
d. Media representations of gender
e. Media representations of disability
10) The mass media and mass culture
a. „Mass culture‟
b. „High culture‟
c. A Marxist view of mass culture
d. Criticism of the idea of a „mass culture‟
6. EDUCATION
1. The Function of Schooling
a. Socialization
b. Culture Innovation
c. Social Integration
d. Social Placement
e. Latent Functions of Schooling
2. Schooling and social Inequality
a. Social control
b. Standardized testing
c. School tracking
d. Inequality among schools
e. Access to higher education
f. Credentialism
g. Privilege and personal merit
7. COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
1. Localized Collectives: Crowds
a. Mobs and riots
b. Crowds, mobs and social change
c. Explaining crowd behavior
2. Dispersed collectives: mass behavior
a. Rumor and gossip
b. Public opinion and propaganda
c. Panic and mass hysteria
d. Fashions and fads
3. Social Movement
a. Types of social movements
b. Explaining social movements
c. Gender and social movements
d. Stages and social movements
e. Social movements and social change
f. Social engineering
8. ENVIRONMENT AND SOCIETY
1. Ecology: The study of the natural environment
a. The role of sociology
b. The global dimension
c. The historical dimension
d. Population increase
e. Cultural patterns: growth and limits
2. Environmental Issues
a. Solid waste: the disposable society
b. Preserving clean water
c. Cleaning the air
d. Acid rain
e. The rain forests
3. Society and the environment: theoretical analysis
a. Structural-functional analysis
b. Cultural ecology
c. Social-conflict analysis
d. Alternative dispute resolution
e. Environmental racism
9. RELIGION IN MODERN SOCIETY
a. Sociological theories and ideas
a. Sociological study of religion
b. Theories of religion
b. Real world religions
a. Totemism and animism
b. Judasim, Christianity and Islam
c. The religions of the Far East
d. Religious organizations
c. Secularization and religious revival
10. POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT
1. Power and Authority
i. Traditional authority
ii. Regional-legal authority
iii. Charismatic authority
2. Politics in global perspective
i. Monarchy
ii. Democracy
iii. Authoritarianism
iv. Totalitarianism
v. A Global political system?
3. Theoretical analysis of power in society
i. The pluralist model: the people rule
ii. The Power-elite model: a few people rule
iii. The Marxist model: bias in the system itself
4. Power beyond the rules
i. Revolution
ii. Terrorism
5. War And Peace
i. The causes of war
ii. The costs and causes of militarism
iii. Nuclear weapons
iv. The pursuit of peace
11. POPULATION AND URBANIZATION
1. Demography: the study of population
i. Fertility
ii. Mortality
iii. Migration
iv. Population growth
v. Population composition
2. History and Theory of Population Growth
i. Malthusian theory
ii. Demographic transition theory
iii. Global population today: a brief survey