Glossary
Glossary
Fast, precise definitions for every term you meet.
60 entries
- Agenda-Setting→The capacity of the mass media to shape which issues the public regards as important — telling audiences what to think about rather than what to think.
- Animism→The attribution of a spiritual essence or soul to natural objects, places, animals and the dead — proposed by E. B. Tylor as the earliest form of religion and the minimum definition of religion itself.
- Book View versus Field View→The contrast in Indian sociology between reconstructing society from classical texts and describing it from direct fieldwork observation.
- Bullock Capitalists→Rudolph and Rudolph’s term for the self-employed middle proprietor cultivators — large enough to own bullocks and market a surplus, too small to hire much labour — who became the decisive rural political force after the green revolution.
- Civil Religion→Robert Bellah's term for the sacralisation of a nation's own history, symbols and values, which supplies a shared moral framework standing apart from any particular church.
- Class-Caste Nexus→The shifting relationship between ritual rank and economic position in India — historically close to congruent, increasingly disjunct — which is why neither caste nor class can be reduced to the other.
- Common Sense→The taken-for-granted stock of everyday knowledge people use to make sense of their world, which sociology takes as an object of study rather than as a source of explanation.
- Consolidation of Holdings→The legal reorganisation of a cultivator's scattered fragments of land into one or two compact blocks, undertaken to make irrigation, mechanisation and field boundaries economically workable.
- Constitutional Morality→Ambedkar’s term, borrowed from George Grote, for the settled habit of working through constitutional forms and settling conflict within them — a disposition a society must cultivate rather than a rule it can simply obey.
- Cooperative Federalism→A federal arrangement in which the union and the states function as partners sharing policy responsibility and finance, rather than as rivals guarding watertight jurisdictions.
- Correlation and Causation→Correlation is a measured association between two variables; causation is the claim that one of them produces change in the other, and requires evidence correlation alone cannot supply.
- Cult→A small, loosely organised religious grouping centred on individual experience or a charismatic figure, which arises alongside established religion rather than by breaking away from a church.
- Cumulative versus Dispersed Inequality→The question of whether advantages in wealth, status and power pile up in the same hands or are spread across different groups — the difference between a single ruling stratum and a plurality of unequal ones.
- Depeasantisation→The process by which peasants lose land and independent cultivation and are converted into wage labourers, migrants or petty traders — a structural transformation of the countryside rather than a run of individual misfortunes.
- Enlightenment→The eighteenth-century European intellectual movement that asserted reason, science, progress and human autonomy against tradition and revealed religious authority, and in doing so made a science of society thinkable.
- Flexible Accumulation→David Harvey's term for the post-Fordist regime in which capital secures profit through flexible labour, small-batch production, subcontracting and rapid geographical mobility rather than through mass production and stable employment.
- Glass Ceiling→The invisible but effective barrier that halts the advance of women and minority groups towards senior positions, even where formal equality of opportunity exists and entry-level access has been achieved.
- Globalisation→The intensifying interconnection of economies, states, cultures and populations across national borders, such that distant events and local lives are increasingly bound together.
- Governing and Non-Governing Elite→Pareto's distinction within the elite between those who actually hold and exercise political power and those who possess superior capacity or distinction without any share in government.
- Harmonic and Disharmonic Systems→Dumont’s contrast between social systems whose ideology of inequality matches their lived inequality and those in which an egalitarian ideology coexists with persistent hierarchy — used by Béteille to characterise modern India.
- Hegemony→Gramsci's term for the leadership a dominant class exercises through the consent it manufactures in civil society, making its own outlook appear as ordinary common sense rather than as rule imposed by force.
- Hidden Curriculum→The unstated lessons in punctuality, obedience, competition and hierarchy that schooling transmits through its routines alongside the formal syllabus.
- Ideology→A system of beliefs, values and images that gives coherence to social experience and characteristically works to legitimate a social order or the interests of a particular group.
- Impoverishment Risks→Michael Cernea's model identifying eight recurrent risks that development-induced displacement imposes on those uprooted, and the corresponding reconstruction each risk demands.
- Inclusive Development→Development in which the benefits of growth reach groups historically excluded from them, judged by participation, capability and the reduction of disparity rather than by aggregate output alone.
- Independent and Dependent Variables→The independent variable is the presumed cause in a hypothesis and the dependent variable the presumed effect whose variation is to be explained.
- Industrial Revolution→The transformation, beginning in late eighteenth-century Britain, from agrarian and handicraft production to machine-based factory manufacture, which created wage labour, industrial cities and the social problems out of which sociology emerged.
- Informal Labour→Work carried on outside the reach of labour regulation and social security — whether in unregistered enterprises or on informal terms inside formal ones — and the condition of the overwhelming majority of India's workforce.
- Joint Family→A co-residential and commensal group of two or more related conjugal units that hold property, income and authority in common.
- Labour Market Segmentation→The division of a labour market into distinct, non-competing segments whose workers face systematically different wages, security and prospects of advancement regardless of comparable skill.
- Land Ceiling and Redistribution→The third phase of Indian land reform, which set statutory limits on how much land a family could hold and provided for the surplus above that limit to be taken over and distributed among the landless.
- Material Culture→The physical, tangible products of a society — its tools, technology, buildings and artefacts — as distinct from the intangible beliefs, norms and values that make up non-material culture.
- Matriliny→A system in which descent, and often inheritance and residence too, is traced through the female line, so that a person belongs to the mother's group rather than the father's.
- Modes of Adaptation→Merton’s typology of the five ways individuals respond to a gap between culturally prescribed goals and the legitimate means available for reaching them — conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism and rebellion.
- Nationalism→The ideology and political movement holding that a people constituting a nation is entitled to political self-determination, usually in a state of its own.
- Non-Material Culture→The intangible elements of culture — beliefs, norms, values, language, law and knowledge — which typically change more slowly than the material culture of tools and technology.
- Old and New Middle Class→The contrast between the colonial-era salaried and professional middle class, created by English education and state employment, and the post-liberalisation middle class defined by private-sector work and conspicuous consumption.
- Participatory Democracy→A model of democracy that treats direct and continuous involvement of citizens in decisions affecting their lives as the substance of self-government, rather than periodic voting for representatives.
- Post-Industrial Society→Daniel Bell's term for a society in which services rather than manufacturing dominate employment, theoretical knowledge becomes the source of innovation, and a professional-technical class occupies the centre of the occupational structure.
- Private Property→Exclusive, legally enforced rights of individuals or corporate bodies to use, exclude others from, and transfer productive resources such as land, capital and the means of production.
- Privatisation of Religion→The confinement of religion to private conscience, family life and voluntary association, withdrawing it from public authority — one of the dimensions of secularisation, and the one Casanova argues has been reversed.
- Protective Discrimination→The constitutionally sanctioned policy of preferential treatment for historically disadvantaged groups in India, chiefly through reservation of seats in education, public employment and legislatures.
- Reflexive Self→The self understood as an object to itself — able to observe, judge and revise its own conduct rather than merely enact it.
- Regional Disparity→The persistent inequality between the regions of a country in income, human development and infrastructure, which tends to reproduce itself rather than even out as growth proceeds.
- Religious Identity→The sense of belonging to a religious community that shapes self-understanding and becomes a basis for political claim-making, distinct both from personal faith and from communal hostility.
- Residues and Derivations→Pareto's paired concepts distinguishing the enduring non-logical sentiments that actually drive human conduct (residues) from the shifting rational-sounding justifications people offer for it (derivations).
- Scope of Sociology→The long-running debate over how widely sociology's subject matter extends — whether it studies only the forms of social relationships or society as a whole.
- Sect→A voluntary, exclusive and demanding religious body that stands in tension with the wider society and is usually formed by schism from an established church.
- Sex-Selective Abortion→The termination of a pregnancy on the basis of the sex of the foetus — in India overwhelmingly the elimination of female foetuses.
- Significant Symbols→George Herbert Mead's term for gestures that arouse the same response in the one who makes them as in the one who receives them, making shared meaning and thought possible.
- Social Action→Max Weber's term for conduct to which the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning and which is oriented towards the behaviour of others.
- Social Equilibrium→The tendency of a social system towards a balanced state in which its parts are mutually adjusted and disturbances are absorbed.
- Subjective Meaning→The sense an actor attaches to their own conduct, which interpretive sociology takes as its distinctive object of study.
- Substantive Equality→Equality judged by the actual outcomes and capabilities people achieve rather than by the uniformity of the rules applied to them — the principle that makes affirmative action a part of equality rather than an exception to it.
- Tenancy Reform→The second phase of Indian land reform, which sought to secure tenants against eviction, regulate the rent they paid and ultimately confer ownership on them — and which, outside a few states, was largely defeated in implementation.
- Terms of Trade→The ratio at which one set of goods exchanges for another — between countries or between sectors — and therefore a measure of how the gains from exchange are divided.
- Unilineal Descent→Descent traced through one line only, either the father's or the mother's, which produces bounded corporate groups such as lineages and clans.
- Unmet Need for Contraception→The proportion of women who want to delay or avoid a pregnancy but are not using any method of contraception, taken as a measure of the gap between reproductive intention and reproductive control.
- Vernacularisation of Politics→The shift of Indian political language, leadership and style away from an English-speaking metropolitan elite towards regional-language, locally rooted actors who work in idioms drawn from everyday life.
- Village Studies→The tradition of intensive fieldwork monographs on single Indian villages, mainly of the 1950s and 1960s, which established the field view of Indian society.