agency: The capacity of individuals to act and make decisions independently.

AGIL schema: Talcott Parsons’ division of society into four functional requisites: Adaptation, Goal attainment, Integration, and Latent pattern maintenance.

anomie: A social condition or normlessness in which a lack of clear norms fails to give direction and purpose to individual actions.

capitalism: An economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership, production, and sale of goods in a competitive market.

collective representations: The shared meanings, symbols, concepts, categories and images of a social collectivity.

content: The specific reasons or drives that motivate individuals to interact.

critical sociology: A theoretical perspective that focuses on inequality and power relations in society in order to achieve social justice and emancipation through their transformation.

culture: A group’s whole way of life including shared practices, values, beliefs, norms and artifacts.

definition of the situation: The mutual understanding of the tasks or situation at hand shared among co-participants.

dialectics: A type of analysis that proposes that social contradiction, opposition, and struggle in society drive processes of social change and transformation.

disenchantment of the world: The replacement of magical thinking by science, technological rationality, and calculation.

dominant gender ideology: The belief that physiological sex differences between males and females are related to differences in their character, behaviour, and ability.

dual consciousness: The experience of a fissure or division in consciousness when one crosses a line between the abstractions of institutional knowledge and the direct, lived experiences of everyday/every night life.

dynamic equilibrium: A stable state in which all parts of a functioning society are working together properly.

dysfunctions: Social patterns that have undesirable consequences for the operation of society.

empiricism: The philosophical tradition that seeks to discover the laws of the operation of the world through careful, methodical, and detailed observation.

egoistic suicide: Suicide which results from the absence of strong social bonds tying the individual to a community.

essentialism: The idea that the characteristics of persons or groups are significantly influenced by biological factors or human nature, and are therefore largely similar in all human cultures and historical periods.

feminism: The critical analysis of the way gender differences in society structure social inequality.

figuration: The process of simultaneously analyzing the behaviour of an individual and the society that shapes that behaviour.

formal sociology: A sociology that analytically separates the contents from the forms of social interaction to study the common forms that guide human behaviour.

functionalism (or functionalist perspective): See structural functionalism.

global-level sociology: The study of structures and processes that extend beyond the boundaries of states or specific societies.

historical materialism: An approach to understanding society that explains social change, human ideas, and social organization in terms of underlying changes in the economic (or material) structure of society.

interaction ritual chain: A series of linked mechanisms of mutually focused emotion and attention, producing a continuous shared reality, which thereby generates solidarity and symbols of group membership.

interpretive sociology: A perspective that explains human behaviour in terms of the meanings individuals attribute to it.

labelling: A social process in which an individual’s social identity is established through the imposition of a definition by authorities.

latent functions: The unrecognized or unintended consequences of a social process.

macro-level sociology: The study of  society-wide social structures and processes.

manifest functions: Sought consequences of a social process.

micro-level sociology: The study of specific, local relationships between individuals or small groups.

mode of production: The way a human society acts upon its environment and its resources in order to process and distribute them to meet their needs.

multi-perspectival science: A science that is divided into competing or diverse paradigms.

paradigms: Philosophical and theoretical frameworks used within a discipline to formulate theories, generalizations, and the experiments performed in support of them.

patriarchy: Institutions of male power in society.

phenomenology: The study of social structures and processes on the basis of a systematic description of the contents of subjective experience.

positive stage: A stage of social evolution in which people explain events in terms of scientific principles and laws.

positivism (positivist perspective or positivist sociology): The scientific study of social patterns using the methodological principles of the natural sciences.

quantitative sociology: A sociological approach which transforms aspects of social life into numerical variables, such as statistical methods and surveys with large numbers of participants.

rationalization: The general tendency of modern institutions and most areas of life to be transformed by the application of instrumental reason.

rationalism: The philosophical tradition that seeks to determine the underlying laws that govern the truth of reason and ideas.

reification: Referring to abstract concepts, complex processes, or mutable social relationships as “things.”

social action: Actions to which individuals attach subjective meanings.

social constructivism: A theoretical perspective that focuses on the socially created nature of social life.

social facts: The external laws, morals, values, religious beliefs, customs, fashions, rituals, and cultural rules that govern social life.

social function: The role a social phenomenon performs in satisfying a social or biological need and ensuring the continuity of society.  

social reform: An approach to social change that advocates slow, incremental improvements in social institutions rather than rapid, revolutionary change of society as a whole.

social script: Pre-established patterns of behaviour that people are expected to follow in specific social situations.

social solidarity: The degree to which a group of people cohere or are bound together through shared consciousness, qualities or social ties.

social structure: General patterns of social behaviour and social coordination that persist through time and become habitual or routinized at micro-levels of interaction or institutionalized at macro or global levels of interaction.

society: A group of people whose members interact, reside in a definable area, and share a culture.

sociological imagination: The ability to understand how personal problems of milieu relate to public issues of social structure.

sociology: The systematic study of society and social interaction.

standpoint theory: The examination of how society is organized and coordinated from the perspective of a particular social location, group or perspective in society.

structural functionalism: A theoretical approach that sees society as a structure with interrelated parts designed to meet the biological and social needs of individuals that make up that society.

symbolic interactionism: A theoretical perspective that focuses on the relationship of individuals within society by studying their communication (language, gestures and symbols).

theory: An explanation about why something occurs.