Concepts · Hexa Sociology

Concepts

The core ideas, defined, situated and debated.

196 entries

Abolition of Intermediaries→The first phase of post-independence land reform, which removed zamindars, jagirdars and other rent-collecting intermediaries and brought cultivators into direct relation with the state — the most successful of the reform measures, and the one that helped create a new dominant peasantry.
Affirmative Action→Positive measures — outreach, preference and quotas — taken to improve the position of groups disadvantaged by historic discrimination, going beyond the mere prohibition of unequal treatment.
Agrarian Class Structure→The hierarchy of rural groups defined by their relation to land and to labour — from landlord and rich peasant to poor peasant and landless worker — and the caste-class overlap, land reforms and market forces that have reshaped it in India.
Agrarian Differentiation→The process by which a peasantry ceases to be a uniform mass and splits into distinct classes with opposed interests — rich, middle and poor peasants, and labourers — through unequal access to land, credit, water, markets and machinery.
Agrarian Distress→The sustained crisis of Indian agriculture — small holdings, rising input costs against volatile prices, groundwater depletion and indebtedness — read sociologically as a breakdown in the peasantry's capacity to reproduce itself socially, not merely as a shortfall in farm income.
Alienation→The condition in which human beings are estranged from their labour, their products, their fellow humans and their own nature — a central concept in Marx's early writings and in later sociology of work.
Annihilation of Caste→B. R. Ambedkar's argument that caste cannot be reformed but only destroyed, because it rests on religious sanction — the case against the authority of the shastras, the remedies of inter-dining and inter-marriage, the debate with Gandhi, and the constitutional and political routes that followed.
Anomie→A condition of normlessness in which the norms regulating individual desires and conduct break down — introduced by Durkheim and later reworked by Merton in his strain theory.
Ascription and Achievement→The contrast between statuses assigned at birth or by inherited attribute and statuses attained through performance — a distinction central to Parsons's pattern variables, to modernisation theory, and to every argument about caste and merit in India.
Assimilation→The process by which a minority group progressively takes on the culture of the dominant group until it ceases to be socially distinguishable — a process that may be voluntary or coerced, and one that Indian tribal policy debates treated as the opposite of genuine inclusion.
Associational Life→Participation in voluntary organisations occupying the space between family and state — from Tocqueville's art of association and Putnam's social capital to the dense but caste-segmented associational landscape of India.
Base and Superstructure→Marx's architectural metaphor for the relation between the economic foundation of a society — its forces and relations of production — and the legal, political and ideological forms that arise upon it and correspond to it.
Capability Approach→Amartya Sen's framework for judging well-being and justice by what people are actually able to do and be, rather than by the income they hold, the satisfaction they report or the resources they are handed.
Capitalist Farming→Agriculture organised as a profit-making enterprise on hired wage labour, reinvestment and market-oriented production, as against subsistence or peasant family farming — and the long Indian debate over whether green-revolution agriculture became capitalist or remained semi-feudal.
Changing Gender Roles→The historical shift in the tasks, authority and identities socially expected of women and men — driven by education, paid work, urbanisation and law — together with the stubborn continuities in domestic labour, care and household power that make the change uneven and incomplete.
Church-Sect Typology→The classification of religious organisations by their relation to the wider society — Troeltsch's church, sect and mysticism, Niebuhr's denomination and the sect-to-denomination cycle, Becker's four-fold scheme and Wilson's sects sorted by their response to the world — together with the objection that the scheme is built from Christian history.
Circular Migration→Repeated, temporary movement between a home village and one or more work destinations without permanent settlement at either end, so that the migrant's labour is used in the city while the costs of reproducing that labour remain in the countryside.
Circulation of Elites→Pareto's account of how ruling minorities decay and are renewed — either by absorbing capable individuals from below or by being overthrown wholesale by a counter-elite — and its use in explaining the rise of new political classes in independent India.
Citizenship→Full membership of a political community, together with the rights and obligations that membership carries — a status that has repeatedly expanded in content and that sociologists study for the distance between its legal form and its lived substance.
Civil Society→The sphere of voluntary, self-organised association lying between the family, the market and the state — a terrain of hegemony and counter-hegemony for Gramsci, of associational vitality for Tocqueville, and in India a contested space of NGOs, movements and community organisations.
Class Consciousness→A class's awareness of its own position, its opposed interests and its historical role — the subjective condition without which, for Marx, an objectively defined class cannot act as a collective agent.
Class Struggle→The antagonism between classes standing in opposed relations to the means of production, which Marx treated not as an occasional disturbance but as the mechanism by which one mode of production gives way to the next.
Class, Status and Party→Max Weber's three analytically distinct bases of stratification — economic position in the market, social honour expressed in lifestyle, and organised association for power — which may reinforce one another or diverge, making stratification irreducibly multidimensional.
Collective Action→Action undertaken by a number of people together in pursuit of a shared goal or common interest, and the analytical problem of why individuals who would all gain from such action often have no incentive to take part in it.
Collective Conscience→Durkheim's conscience collective — the body of beliefs and sentiments common to the members of a society, which exists outside individuals, constrains them and forms the moral basis of social solidarity.
Collective Effervescence→The heightened emotional energy generated when a group assembles and focuses its attention on a common object, which Durkheim held to be the mechanism by which the sacred is created and the collective conscience renewed.
Collective Identity→The shared sense of we-ness — of belonging to a group with a common condition, memory and purpose — that turns an aggregate of individuals into an actor capable of collective action, and which is itself produced and revised through that action.
Commercialisation of Agriculture→The shift from cultivation for household subsistence to production for the market — begun under colonial revenue and cash-crop pressure, deepened after independence — and its consequences for indebtedness, food security, peasant differentiation and farmer distress.
Commodification of Women→The treatment of women — their bodies, labour and reproductive capacity — as objects of exchange and sources of profit, so that what should belong to the person becomes something priced, transacted and owned by others.
Communalism→An ideology that treats a religious community as a homogeneous political bloc with interests distinct from, and ultimately irreconcilable with, those of other communities — distinct from religious faith, from communal harmony and from secularism, and rooted in colonial and modern political competition rather than in ancient hostility.
Comparative Method→The systematic comparison of cases to establish what varies with what — sociology's substitute for the laboratory experiment, and the discipline's oldest means of turning description into explanation.
Composite Culture→The idea that Indian culture is not a single original stock but a shared formation produced by centuries of interaction, borrowing and mutual adaptation among many traditions — an idea that became the cultural foundation of Indian secularism and the chief target of exclusivist nationalism.
Core and Periphery→The division of the capitalist world economy into core regions concentrating high-value, capital-intensive production and peripheral regions supplying raw materials and cheap labour, with a semi-periphery occupying an intermediate and politically stabilising position.
Creamy Layer→The relatively advantaged section within a group eligible for affirmative action, whose exclusion from reservation the Supreme Court made a constitutional requirement for the Other Backward Classes — and the sociological question of whether caste disadvantage can be measured by income at all.
Credentialism→The escalating demand for formal qualifications as a condition of occupational entry, beyond anything the work itself requires — analysed by Randall Collins as a device of social closure and status-group competition rather than a measure of skill.
Cross-Cousin Marriage→Marriage with the child of a parent's opposite-sex sibling — mother's brother's or father's sister's child — preferred across much of south India and prohibited in the north, and the classic ethnographic case for treating marriage as an alliance between groups rather than a union of individuals.
Cultural Assertion→The deliberate public affirmation of a group's language, history, symbols and practices as a claim to dignity and recognition — a strategy that rejects emulation of the dominant culture in favour of revaluing the group's own, and which in India has reshaped Dalit, Adivasi and regional politics.
Cultural Capital→Pierre Bourdieu's term for the knowledge, tastes, dispositions and credentials that are unequally distributed by class origin and that convert into educational and occupational advantage.
Cultural Lag→William F. Ogburn's thesis that material culture changes faster than the non-material, adaptive culture attached to it, so that a period of maladjustment intervenes before institutions, law and morality catch up with technology.
Cultural Reproduction→The process by which the cultural advantages of dominant groups are passed to their children and converted into educational success, so that inherited privilege reappears in each generation looking like earned merit.
Cultural Unity of India→The argument that beneath India's linguistic, regional, sectarian and ethnic diversity there runs a shared civilisational framework — of sacred geography, epic narrative, ritual idiom and interlinked traditions — together with the critiques that read such unity as a Brahmanical and northern construction.
Dalit Assertion→The shift from reform undertaken on behalf of the untouchables to self-assertion by Dalits themselves — claiming dignity, rights and political power through electoral mobilisation, cultural production, atrocity litigation and campus politics — drawing on Phule and Ambedkar and rejecting sanskritisation as a strategy of emulation.
Decentralisation→The transfer of authority, functions and resources from central government to lower levels — administrative, agency or elected — and the sociological question of who actually gains power when power moves downward.
Demographic Transition→The model describing a society's movement from high birth and death rates to low ones, passing through a stage of rapid population growth — the organising framework of population studies, and the subject of sustained criticism.
Descent→The culturally recognised transmission of group membership, name, property and ritual status from one generation to the next — the principle that converts a chain of births into a durable social group with corporate rights.
Desecularisation→The argument that religion has not withered under modernity but has re-entered public life — through revival movements, religious nationalism, faith-based welfare and media, and the religious framing of political claims — associated with Peter Berger's revision of his own secularisation thesis and with José Casanova's account of the deprivatisation of religion.
Development-Induced Displacement→The involuntary uprooting of populations by dams, mines, industrial estates, highways, urban projects and protected areas, and the sociological analysis of the impoverishment it produces and the unequal distribution of the costs of growth.
Dialectical Materialism→The philosophical outlook, developed from Marx and systematised by Engels, which holds that reality is material and changes through internal contradiction, so that ideas are derivative of material conditions and development proceeds by leaps rather than smooth accumulation.
Digital Divide→The unequal distribution of access to digital technology, of the skills to use it and of the benefits derived from it — a form of stratification layered onto existing divisions of class, gender, caste, region and rural-urban location.
Disenchantment→Weber's Entzauberung — the retreat of magic, mystery and sacred meaning from the world as rationalisation advances, so that events come to be explained by calculable causes rather than by spirits, fate or grace, leaving science able to explain much and to guide little.
Distress Migration→Movement compelled by the collapse of livelihood at home rather than chosen for opportunity elsewhere — the migration of drought, debt, land loss and displacement, which typically ends in casual, low-paid and often bonded work.
Division of Labour→The differentiation of a society's work into specialised tasks performed by different people, treated by economists as a source of productivity and by Durkheim as the moral basis of solidarity in modern society.
Domestic Group→The co-residential unit organised around the domestic functions of production, consumption, reproduction and child-rearing — distinguished analytically from the family as a kinship category — and the object of Meyer Fortes's developmental cycle, which shows that the variety of household forms in a census is largely the variety of phases in one recurring cycle.
Dominant Caste→M. N. Srinivas's concept for the caste that commands a village or region through numerical strength, landholding and economic power, political clout and a not-too-low ritual rank — the key to understanding decoupled ritual and secular power in rural India.
Double Burden→The combination of paid employment with unpaid domestic and care work borne disproportionately by women — Hochschild's second shift — and its consequences for participation, promotion and leisure, together with the policy question of who bears the cost of care.
Ecological Degradation→The depletion and damage of the natural systems on which social life depends — soil, water, forest, air and biodiversity — understood not as an aggregate effect of population numbers but as a social process shaped by property regimes, technology, state policy and inequality.
Elective Affinity→Weber's notion of a relation of mutual attraction and reinforcement between a set of ideas and a form of conduct or material interest, in which neither simply causes the other — the logic that links ascetic Protestantism to the spirit of capitalism.
Elite Capture→The appropriation of the benefits, decisions and offices of a programme or institution by the locally powerful, so that a scheme meant for the poor is redirected — often lawfully — towards those who already command land, caste standing and political connection.
Elite Theory→The claim that in every society, whatever its formal constitution, effective power rests with a small organised minority — and the long argument between elite theorists, pluralists and Marxists over how that minority is composed, how it rules and whom it serves.
Empiricism→The doctrine that knowledge derives from observation and experience rather than from reason or authority, and — in its sociological form — the practice of building accounts of society from directly gathered data.
Empowerment→The expansion of the capacity of individuals and groups to make and act on consequential choices — analysed through resources, agency and achievements, and distinguished from the depoliticised version circulated by development agencies.
Encompassing of the Contrary→Louis Dumont's structural definition of hierarchy, in which the superior term does not merely outrank its opposite but includes and subsumes it at a higher level, so that hierarchy is a relation of whole to part rather than a ranking of items — the principle from which he derives the disjunction of status and power in the caste system.
Endogamy→The rule requiring marriage within a defined group, and — in the form of caste and sub-caste endogamy — the mechanism by which the Indian caste order reproduces its boundaries, its ritual rank and its control over property and women's sexuality.
Environmentalism of the Poor→The argument that environmental conflict in the global South is fought over livelihood rather than over scenery or leisure — a politics of survival waged by peasants, adivasis, fishworkers and pastoralists whose subsistence depends directly on land, forest and water.
Equality of Opportunity→The principle that positions and rewards should be open to all on the basis of ability and effort rather than birth — and the long argument over whether removing formal barriers is enough, or whether genuine openness requires actively equalising the conditions in which abilities are formed.
Ethnicity→A sense of shared descent, culture, language or history that grounds collective identity — analysed through primordialist, instrumentalist and constructivist accounts, and central to identity politics and ethnonationalism in India.
Fact-Value Distinction→The separation of statements about what is from statements about what ought to be — traced to Hume's is-ought gap, given its classic sociological form by Max Weber, and contested by Gouldner, Myrdal and standpoint theorists who argue that the pretence of value freedom conceals the values that in fact shape research.
Family Diversity→The recognition that no single family form is universal or normal, and that a plurality of household arrangements — nuclear, joint, extended, single-parent, dual-earner, transnational and others — coexists within one society and across a single life course.
Feminisation of Labour→The rising share of women in paid employment together with the spread, across the workforce as a whole, of conditions historically attached to women's work — low pay, insecurity, part-time and home-based arrangements and weak bargaining power — so that the term names both a change in who works and a degradation of how work is done.
Feminisation of Poverty→The claim that poverty is disproportionately and increasingly concentrated among women and female-headed households — a thesis coined by Diana Pearce, widely adopted in policy, and criticised for being asserted far more often than it has been demonstrated.
Functional Theory of Stratification→The Davis and Moore argument that inequality is a functional necessity, because societies must attach unequal rewards to unequally important and unequally fillable positions in order to get them staffed and conscientiously performed — and the rebuttal, associated above all with Melvin Tumin, that this reasoning is unmeasurable, self-serving and refuted by ascriptive systems such as caste.
Fundamentalism→The assertion of an inerrant scriptural or doctrinal foundation together with the demand that public life be reordered to conform to it — a distinctively modern reaction to secular modernity rather than a survival of ancient piety.
Gap Between Law and Practice→The persistent divergence between what statutes provide and how people actually behave — the difference between law in books and law in action — and the sociological reasons why enacted rights so often fail to reach the lives they were written for.
Gender Socialisation→The lifelong process through which individuals learn, internalise and reproduce the expectations attached to being male or female — carried out by family, school, peer group, media and religion, and traced in India by Leela Dube through the everyday training of girls.
Generalised Other→George Herbert Mead's term for the organised attitudes of the whole community, internalised by the individual so that conduct can be regulated from the standpoint of the group rather than of any particular person.
Graded Inequality→Ambedkar's characterisation of caste as an ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt — a hierarchy so finely graded that it divides the oppressed against one another and forestalls collective resistance.
Green Revolution→The mid-1960s strategy of raising food output through high-yielding seeds, irrigation, fertiliser and assured procurement — a technological success in a few regions that sharpened class differentiation, remade rural power and left an ecological reckoning behind it.
Hierarchy→The ranked ordering of statuses, roles or groups within a social whole, distinguished from mere difference by the presence of an evaluative principle — and, in Louis Dumont's account of India, resting on the opposition of pure and impure.
Historical Materialism→Marx's theory that the way people produce their material life conditions their social, political and intellectual life, and that history moves through the contradiction between developing productive forces and the existing relations of production.
Human Capital→The stock of skills, knowledge and health embodied in people, treated by economists as an investment that yields measurable returns in productivity and earnings — a powerful justification for spending on education and health, and a persistent target of sociological criticism.
Ideal Type→Weber's methodological device — a deliberately one-sided mental construct that accentuates the essential features of a phenomenon, used as a yardstick against which messy historical reality can be measured.
Identity Politics→Political mobilisation organised around a shared ascriptive or cultural identity — caste, religion, language, region, gender, tribe — rather than around class position or a programmatic ideology, and the debate between claims for recognition and claims for redistribution.
Individualisation→The process by which biography ceases to be given by tradition and becomes a task to be chosen and managed — theorised by Beck, Giddens and Bauman as a structural feature of late modernity rather than mere selfishness.
Individualism→The doctrine and the social condition in which the individual rather than the group is the primary unit of value, right and action — distinguished by Durkheim from mere egoism, contrasted by Dumont with the holism of caste society, and radicalised by Giddens and Beck into individualisation.
Industrialisation→The shift from craft and agrarian production to machine-based factory manufacture, and the reorganisation of work, family, class and community that follows from it.
Infant Mortality Rate→The number of deaths of children under one year of age per thousand live births in a given year — the single most sensitive indicator sociologists have of a society's living conditions, because infant survival responds to education, sanitation and care rather than to income alone.
Informal Sector→The vast field of unregistered, unprotected and largely self-organised economic activity that employs the overwhelming majority of Indian workers — and which, far from vanishing with growth, has spread into the formal economy itself.
Informalisation of Labour→The process by which employment becomes casual, contractual and stripped of social protection — including within registered enterprises — so that the informal condition spreads as a form of work rather than remaining confined to a separate sector.
Interest Articulation→The process by which individuals and groups formulate demands and convey them to those who make political decisions, together with the styles and channels through which such demands travel — from riot and personal contact to the organised lobby.
Intersectionality→The analysis of how axes of domination such as race, caste, class and gender interlock to produce distinctive positions that no single-axis account can capture — coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw and rooted in Black feminist thought.
Isolation versus Assimilation→The central twentieth-century debate on tribal policy in India — Verrier Elwin's case for protective isolation against G. S. Ghurye's case for assimilation of tribes as backward Hindus — and the middle path of integration set out in Nehru's tribal panchsheel.
Jajmani System→The hereditary, multi-stranded village relationship in which service and artisan castes supply customary services to landowning patron families in return for grain, land use, protection and ritual privilege — read by functionalists as interdependence and integration, and by later critics as a coercive expression of asymmetry now dissolved by monetisation, migration and Dalit refusal.
Kinship→The socially recognised network of relationships created by descent and marriage, through which societies organise property, authority, ritual and identity — and which sociology studies as a structure rather than a fact of biology.
Kinship Terminology→The vocabulary by which a society classifies its relatives — and the sociological argument that this vocabulary is not a set of labels but a map of expected conduct, revealing rules of descent, marriage and authority.
Land Alienation→The passing of land out of the hands of those who cultivate it — above all the transfer of tribal land to non-tribals through debt, fraud, marriage, encroachment and acquisition — and the failure of a dense protective legal framework to prevent it.
Liberalisation→The reduction of state control over economic life through deregulation, trade opening, privatisation and market pricing — and, in India after 1991, a reordering of class, work, consumption and opportunity as much as of economic policy.
Life Chances→Max Weber's term for the probability that a person will obtain the valued goods, securities and experiences a society has to offer — a probability set less by ownership alone than by what one brings to market, and modified in turn by status and political organisation.
Little and Great Tradition→Robert Redfield and Milton Singer's distinction between the reflective, literate, city-based great tradition of a civilisation and the local, oral, folk little tradition of its villages, and Marriott's account of how the two flow into each other through universalisation and parochialisation.
Marginalisation→The process by which groups are pushed to the edge of economic, social, political and cultural life and denied effective participation in it, distinguishable from poverty and from mere numerical minority status, and closely linked to social exclusion, structural violence and the risks of displacement.
Meritocracy→The principle — and the ideology — that position should follow ability plus effort rather than birth; coined as satire by Michael Young, defended by functionalists as efficient allocation, and criticised by reproduction theorists who show that measured merit largely records inherited advantage.
Mixed Economy→An economic order combining public and private ownership of the means of production with state direction of investment, adopted in India through the Industrial Policy Resolutions and the Five Year Plans, and sociologically significant for what it did to nation-building, class formation and the character of the Indian state.
Mode of Production→Marx's central category for the way a society organises its material life — the union of forces of production and relations of production that forms the base upon which legal, political and ideological superstructures rest.
Modernisation→The theory that societies move along a broadly common path from traditional to modern forms, marked by industrialisation, urbanisation, literacy, mass media and achievement orientation — together with the critique that this path was neither universal nor innocent of colonial history.
Modernity→The historically specific form of social life that emerged in Europe with the Enlightenment, industrial capitalism and the nation-state, characterised by rationalisation, individualisation, institutional differentiation and a reflexive relation to its own traditions.
Multiculturalism→The normative position, and the family of policies flowing from it, that a state should publicly recognise and support the cultural diversity of its citizens rather than require them to conform to a single national culture as the price of equal membership.
New Farmers' Movements→The post-1970s agitations of surplus-producing cultivators in India's green-revolution regions — Shetkari Sanghatana, Bharatiya Kisan Union, Khedut Samaj, Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha — organised around prices and inputs rather than land, and distinguished from the earlier peasant movements by base, demand and idiom.
New Middle Class→The class formation associated with economic liberalisation in India — professional and managerial employment, English-medium education and a consumption-led identity — and the debate over whether it is genuinely new or a reconstitution of established upper-caste advantage.
New Religious Movements→The preferred analytical label for religious groups formed in the modern period, adopted in place of the pejorative cult; classically sorted by Roy Wallis into world-rejecting, world-accommodating and world-affirming types, and explained by rationalisation, anomie, marginality and a globalised market in spiritual goods.
New Social Movements→The family of post-1960s mobilisations organised around identity, autonomy, recognition and the quality of life rather than around class position and the redistribution of income, and conducted largely outside party structures.
Nuclear Family→The conjugal unit of a married couple and their unmarried children, treated by Murdock as a universal building block of kinship and by Parsons as the household form best fitted to industrial society — a claim contested by matrilineal, communal and Indian evidence.
Objectivity→The ideal that sociological findings should be determined by evidence rather than by the researcher's preferences, and the long argument over whether such detachment is achievable, desirable, or merely a professional pose.
Operationalisation→The procedure by which an abstract sociological concept is translated into observable indicators that can actually be counted, coded or compared, and the point at which methodological choices quietly become theoretical ones.
Orthogenetic and Heterogenetic Change→Redfield and Singer's distinction between cultural change that unfolds out of a society's own indigenous tradition and change introduced from outside through contact with alien cultures, and the contrast between the orthogenetic city that codifies local tradition and the heterogenetic city of market, administration and cultural mixing.
Over-urbanisation→A condition in which the growth of urban population runs ahead of industrial and infrastructural capacity, so that cities absorb people without absorbing them into productive employment or adequate services.
Patriarchy→A system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women — analysed by feminist sociology as a set of interlocking institutions rather than as individual prejudice.
Pattern Variables→Talcott Parsons's five paired alternatives — affectivity or neutrality, self or collectivity, universalism or particularism, ascription or achievement, specificity or diffuseness — between which every actor must choose, and by which whole societies and single roles can be characterised.
Peasant Mobilisation→The process by which cultivators are organised out of dispersed grievance into sustained collective action, and the long argument in sociology over which stratum of the peasantry rebels, on what grievance, and with whose leadership.
Pluralism→In political sociology, the view that power in a modern democracy is dispersed among many competing groups rather than concentrated in a single ruling elite; and, in its cultural form, the argument that a state should accommodate distinct communities instead of assimilating them.
Political Mobilisation→The process by which people are activated, organised and given reasons to act together politically — through resources, networks, organisation and framing — and the distinctive Indian repertoire of caste associations, patronage and vote banks that carries it out.
Political Participation→The range of citizen activity intended to influence who governs and what governments do — from voting and campaigning to petitioning, protest and civil disobedience — and the puzzle of why India inverts the usual relationship between social advantage and turnout.
Politicisation of Caste→Rajni Kothari's argument that competitive democratic politics did not dissolve caste but drew it in as an organisational resource, so that politics became caste-based while caste itself was transformed by the encounter.
Population Ageing→The rising share of older persons in a population, produced by falling fertility at the base of the age pyramid together with rising longevity at its apex, and the social, familial and policy consequences that follow.
Positional and Structural Change→The distinction between the movement of groups or individuals within a structure that itself remains intact and change in the structure's own principles — used by M. N. Srinivas to argue that sanskritisation rearranged the occupants of caste ranks without disturbing hierarchy, and central to any assessment of whether caste is weakening or merely reordering.
Positivism→The doctrine that the social world can be studied by the same logic of observation, measurement and generalisation used in the natural sciences, and that knowledge worth having must rest on observable evidence rather than speculation.
Power Elite→C. Wright Mills's account of the small circle of men who occupy the command posts of the corporate economy, the state and the military in modern America, whose overlapping interests and interchangeable careers give them decisions of national consequence while the publics below them are reduced to a passive mass.
Precarious Work→Employment marked by insecurity of contract, income, hours and protection — casual, contractual, outsourced and platform arrangements in which the worker bears the risks that the standard employment relationship once placed on the employer or the state.
Pressure Groups→Organised bodies that seek to influence the making and implementation of public policy without contesting elections or seeking office themselves, ranging from business chambers and trade unions to caste associations and cause-based campaigns.
Public and Private Divide→The ideological separation of a public world of work, politics and citizenship from a private world of household, intimacy and care — a boundary that liberal thought treats as natural and protective, and that feminist sociology exposes as the mechanism by which women's confinement is justified and the family is shielded from scrutiny.
Public Sphere→Habermas’s term for the communicative space in which private persons reason together about matters of common concern, forming a public opinion that mediates between society and the state — and the debate over its historical exclusions and its fate under mass media and digital platforms.
Purity and Pollution→The ritual opposition between the pure and the impure that orders caste ranking, regulates food, marriage, touch and occupation, and reaches its extreme in untouchability — treated by Louis Dumont as the single principle of Indian hierarchy, and contested for exactly that reason.
Rational-Legal Authority→Weber's third type of legitimate domination, in which obedience is owed not to a person or a custom but to impersonal rules that have been deliberately enacted, and which finds its purest expression in bureaucratic administration.
Rationalisation→Weber's master concept for the historical process by which calculable, means-end reasoning displaces tradition and magic across economy, law, administration and culture — producing efficiency, disenchantment and the iron cage.
Reflexivity→The turning of sociological enquiry back upon itself — examining how the researcher's position, tools and very presence shape what is known — and, in Giddens's wider sense, the capacity of modern societies to remake themselves in the light of knowledge about themselves.
Relative Deprivation→The felt gap between what people believe they are entitled to and what they actually get — a subjective, comparative sense of disadvantage that has become a standard explanation of grievance and collective mobilisation.
Reliability and Validity→Twin standards for judging social research — reliability asks whether a measure yields consistent results on repetition, validity asks whether it measures the thing it claims to measure at all.
Religious Pluralism→The coexistence of several religious traditions within one society together with the normative acceptance of that plurality as legitimate — a positive engagement with difference rather than the mere fact of diversity or the indifference of relativism.
Religious Revivalism→The reassertion of religious identity, practice and authority in public life, frequently as a reaction to the disruptions of modernity and to the retreat of religion predicted by theories of secularisation.
Resource Mobilisation→The approach that explains social movements as rational, organised politics by other means — dependent on the supply and management of resources rather than on the intensity of grievance — and that shifts the analytical question from why people are aggrieved to how discontent gets organised.
Risk Society→Ulrich Beck's account of a society organised around the anticipation and distribution of manufactured risks produced by its own industrial and technological success, in which the politics of distributing goods gives way to the politics of distributing bads.
Role-Taking→The capacity to place oneself imaginatively in another person's position, adopt their standpoint and anticipate their response — for George Herbert Mead the mechanism by which mind, self and society are simultaneously produced, and the developmental route that runs from imitation through play and the game to the generalised other.
Sacred and Profane→Durkheim's founding dichotomy in the sociology of religion — the absolute separation of things set apart and forbidden from the ordinary world of everyday utility, through which society represents itself to itself.
Sanskritisation→M. N. Srinivas's term for the process by which a lower caste or tribal group takes over the customs, ritual, diet and lifestyle of a higher caste in order to claim a higher position — producing positional change within the caste order rather than structural change of it.
Scientific Method→The systematic procedure of observation, hypothesis, testing and generalisation by which empirical disciplines produce checkable knowledge, and the peculiar difficulties it faces when the object of study is human beings who interpret their own conduct.
Secularisation→The long-run process by which religion loses social significance — through the differentiation of institutions, the decline of practice and the privatisation of belief — together with the counter-evidence of religious revival and India’s distinctive paradox.
Secularisation of Caste→The process by which caste sheds its ritual and religious content — purity, pollution, commensal restriction — while surviving, and often strengthening, as a secular basis of identity, association, marriage and political mobilisation.
Secularism→The political principle governing the relation between state and religion — ranging from the Western model of separation to the Indian model of principled distance and equal respect for all faiths — together with its constitutional expression and the critiques of its fit with Indian religiosity.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy→Robert Merton's concept for a false definition of a situation that provokes behaviour which makes the false definition come true, so that the prophet cites the outcome as proof he was right all along.
Sex Ratio→The number of females per thousand males, the Indian convention for measuring the sex composition of a population, together with its variants — overall ratio, child sex ratio and sex ratio at birth — and the social rather than biological explanations for a persistently male-biased ratio.
Sexual Division of Labour→The allocation of tasks by sex — and its naturalisation as biological destiny — which assigns women reproductive and unpaid work while valuing men's productive labour, sustaining patriarchy through the economy itself.
Social Capital→The networks, norms and trust that allow individuals and groups to act together for shared ends — theorised as a private resource by Bourdieu and as a civic asset by Putnam.
Social Change→Significant alteration over time in social structure, institutions, roles or culture — analysed through evolutionary, cyclical, functionalist, conflict and modernisation-dependency accounts, and in India through the tradition-modernity debate.
Social Exclusion→A multidimensional process by which individuals or groups are systematically shut out of the relationships, institutions and entitlements that constitute full membership of a society — not merely a shortage of income.
Social Exclusion and Inclusion Policy→The translation of the exclusion concept into public policy — the instruments, from reservation and anti-discrimination law to rights-based entitlements and financial inclusion, that attempt to change the relations and institutions which keep groups out, not merely to raise their incomes.
Social Fact→Durkheim's foundational concept: ways of acting, thinking and feeling that are external to the individual, general across a society, and exercise a constraining power over conduct.
Social Integration→The processes by which individuals and groups are bound into a functioning whole — through attachment, shared norms, interdependence and institutional fit — and the sociological insight that integration is a matter of degree, not a state that societies either possess or lack.
Social Justice→The fair distribution of advantages, burdens and recognition across the members of a society, judged not by individual transactions but by the arrangement of institutions that shapes life chances from birth.
Social Mobility→The movement of individuals, families or groups between positions in a system of social stratification — its types, its sources, and the limits of mobility in societies whose structures of inequality remain intact.
Social Movement→Sustained collective action by a body of people outside routine institutional channels, organised around a shared ideology, to promote or resist change in society or in the distribution of power within it.
Social Reform→Organised effort to alter specific social institutions and practices from within an existing order — distinguished from revolution and from legislation alone — and the defining preoccupation of nineteenth-century Indian public life, from Brahmo Samaj to the Self-Respect movement.
Social Reproduction→The set of processes — economic, domestic, educational and ritual — by which a society renews its structures, classes and relations of domination from one day and one generation to the next.
Social Security→Collective provision against the contingencies that interrupt a livelihood — illness, old age, unemployment, maternity, disability and death of a breadwinner — organised either as contributory insurance or as tax-financed assistance, and increasingly claimed in India as a right of citizenship rather than a reward of formal employment.
Social Security Deficit→The gap between the population that needs protection against contingencies such as illness, old age, unemployment and injury, and the population that is actually covered — a gap that in India follows the boundary between formal and informal employment.
Social Solidarity→The cohesion that binds the members of a society to one another and to the whole, produced in Durkheim's account either by likeness and a shared moral order or by the interdependence that specialisation creates.
Social System→Talcott Parsons's conception of society as a system of interaction among plural actors oriented to a common situation, held together by institutionalised value patterns, whose survival depends on meeting four functional prerequisites.
Socialisation→The lifelong process through which individuals acquire the culture, norms, roles and sense of self of the groups they belong to, becoming persons capable of social life and, in the process, carrying society forward through time.
Sociological Imagination→C. Wright Mills's name for the quality of mind that connects a person's private troubles to the public issues of social structure and history — the capacity to see one's own life as a point where biography and epoch intersect.
Sociology of Knowledge→The study of the social conditions under which thought arises, circulates and is accepted as true — from Marx on ideology and Mannheim on the social determination of thought to the social construction of reality and the sociology of science.
Son Preference→The cultural and structural valuation of male over female children, rooted in patrilineal kinship, dowry, inheritance and ritual obligation — expressed in sex-selective abortion, skewed sex ratios at birth and the neglect of girls.
Sons of the Soil→The nativist claim that the original or long-settled inhabitants of a region hold a prior entitlement to its land, jobs and political office, asserted against internal migrants who are treated as outsiders despite sharing the same citizenship.
Species-Being→Marx's conception of the human being as a creature conscious of itself as a species, which realises its nature through free, purposive, social and creative labour — and which capitalist production estranges from that nature.
Spirit of Capitalism→Weber's name for the ethos of methodical, disciplined and rational acquisition pursued as a duty rather than out of greed — an attitude to work and money that he traced, by elective affinity, to the ascetic Protestant idea of the calling.
Strain Theory→Robert Merton's explanation of deviance as the predictable outcome of a gap between the goals a culture teaches everyone to want and the legitimate means for reaching them, which the social structure distributes unequally.
Structural Differentiation→The process by which functions once performed by a single institution are progressively distributed among specialised structures — a core mechanism of social change in evolutionary and functionalist sociology.
Structural Violence→Johan Galtung's concept for avoidable harm that is built into the ordinary workings of social structures rather than inflicted by an identifiable actor, so that deprivation of life chances counts as violence even where no one strikes a blow.
Structuralism→The approach that explains social and cultural phenomena by the underlying relational structures which generate them, rather than by the intentions of actors or the functions institutions perform.
Surplus Extraction→The appropriation by non-producers of the product of labour beyond what the producer needs for subsistence, accomplished by open coercion in slavery and feudalism and concealed by the wage form under capitalism.
Sustainable Development→Development that meets present needs without foreclosing the ability of future generations to meet theirs — an idea of intergenerational equity that in India runs through displacement, environmental movements and the politics of who pays for growth.
Syncretism→The blending of elements drawn from different religious traditions into shared belief and practice, so that the boundary between traditions becomes porous — distinct from tolerance, from pluralism and from conversion, and politically vulnerable wherever movements demand pure and bounded religious identities.
Technological Determinism→The claim that technology is the primary independent driver of social change, shaping institutions, relations and consciousness — and the counter-position that technologies are themselves socially shaped.
The I and the Me→George Herbert Mead's distinction between the Me — the self as an object, composed of the organised attitudes of others taken over into the person — and the I, the spontaneous and unpredictable response of the organism to those attitudes, whose inner conversation constitutes thought and accounts for both social conformity and social creativity.
Totemism→The institution in which a clan takes a natural species or object as its sacred emblem, and which Durkheim treated as the elementary form of religion and therefore as proof that the object of worship is society itself.
Tradition→Beliefs and practices handed down from the past and invested with authority because of that transmission — less a survival of what once was than a claim made in the present about what the past requires.
Tradition and Modernity→The conventional opposition between inherited authority and rational innovation, and the reasons sociology has largely abandoned it as a dichotomy — with Yogendra Singh, Srinivas and the Rudolphs showing that Indian modernisation proceeded through tradition rather than against it.
Triangulation→The strategy of studying one problem through more than one method, data source, investigator or theory, so that the bias peculiar to any single approach does not become the finding — a discipline of cross-checking rather than a guarantee of truth.
Tribe-Caste Continuum→The argument that tribe and caste are not sharply bounded types but ends of a continuum along which groups have historically moved, absorbed into the Hindu order through Sanskritisation and claims to clean-caste or Kshatriya status — and the political stakes of the classification today.
Unequal Exchange→The argument that trade between rich and poor countries is not mutually beneficial exchange between equals but a systematic transfer of value from the periphery to the core, built into prices, wages and terms of trade.
Uneven Development→The argument that capitalist development is inherently unequal across regions and sectors rather than tending towards convergence, because the same processes that concentrate growth in some places drain and subordinate others.
Untouchability→The practice of treating certain castes as permanently and inherently polluting, entailing their exclusion from wells, temples, streets, schools and shared eating, and their confinement to stigmatised work — a disability of birth that Indian law abolished in 1950 but which survives in altered forms.
Urban Poverty→Deprivation as it takes shape in cities — monetised, casualised and spatially concentrated — where almost every necessity must be purchased, work is insecure and shelter is held without legal title.
Urbanisation→The rising share of a population living in urban settlements, together with the spread of urban ways of life beyond city limits — a process that is at once demographic, structural and behavioural.
Value Consensus→The shared commitment to core values that functionalist theory treats as the foundation of social order, and the conflict and interpretive objections that such consensus is either manufactured by the powerful or improvised in local encounters.
Value Neutrality→Weber's methodological rule that a social scientist must not pass value judgements in the name of science — separating what is from what ought to be — together with the criticisms that have gathered around it.
Value Relevance→Weber's principle that values legitimately govern the selection of research problems and what counts as significant, while the analysis that follows must be conducted without value judgement — the move that makes objectivity possible in a value-saturated discipline.
Verstehen→Interpretive understanding — Max Weber's method of grasping the subjective meanings actors attach to their conduct, central to interpretive sociology.
Vote Bank→M. N. Srinivas's coinage for a bloc of votes that a patron or leader can deliver to a party, originally resting on the economic dependence of client castes on a dominant caste — and a phenomenon that competitive politics has since made negotiated and volatile rather than deliverable.
Westernisation→M. N. Srinivas's term for the whole range of changes brought about in Indian society by over a century and a half of British rule — in technology, institutions, ideology and values — and a concept deliberately kept separate from both modernisation and sanskritisation.