Component 1 Section A: the concept of culture, including norms, values, beliefs, customs and roles; types of culture such as subculture, high and popular culture, mass culture, folk culture and global culture; and the idea that culture is socially constructed and transmitted.

What this dot point is asking

Component 1 Section A opens with the concept of culture: its building blocks (norms, values, beliefs, customs, roles), the main types of culture (subculture, high, popular, mass, folk and global), and the central claim that culture is socially constructed and learned rather than inborn. This is the foundation of the whole A-level, because socialisation, identity and social control all depend on understanding what culture is and how it shapes us.

The answer

The building blocks of culture

The relationship between norms and values is the one examiners most want you to grasp. Values are broad, abstract principles (a society might value achievement, privacy or family loyalty). Norms are the specific, situational rules that put those values into practice: a value of privacy produces norms about knocking before entering a room. A role is the set of norms attached to a social position (the role of teacher or parent), and status is the position itself, which may be ascribed (fixed at birth, such as sex or aristocratic title) or achieved (earned, such as a profession).

Types of culture

Sociologists distinguish several kinds of culture, and being able to define and contrast them is a reliable source of marks:

• Subculture. A smaller group within a wider culture that shares some norms and values but also has its own distinctive ones, such as a youth subculture or an occupational group.
• High culture. Cultural works given elite status and seen as superior (classical music, opera, fine art), often associated with the upper class and linked by Bourdieu's idea of cultural capital to social distinction.
• Popular culture and mass culture. Culture that is widely consumed, commercially produced and accessible to the majority (television, pop music, blockbuster film). Critics such as the Frankfurt School argued mass culture is shallow and manipulative; others defend popular culture as creative and democratic.
• Folk culture. The culture of ordinary people, often rural, traditional and produced by communities themselves rather than for profit.
• Global culture. Norms, values and products shared worldwide through media, migration and consumption, raising debates about cultural homogenisation versus hybridity.

Culture as socially constructed

The key sociological claim is that culture is not natural or instinctive but socially constructed and learned. Evidence comes from cultural diversity: the huge variation in norms, family forms and beliefs between societies shows there is no single "human" way of living. This leads to cultural relativism, the principle that a culture should be understood by its own standards rather than judged against another, which guards against ethnocentrism (assuming one's own culture is superior or normal).

Examples in context

A strong answer always stresses that culture is learned, contrasts at least two types of culture accurately, and uses the norm/value distinction precisely rather than treating the words as synonyms.

Try this

Q1. Explain the difference between norms and values, using an example of each. [6 marks]

• What the marker wants. A clear distinction (AO1): norms as specific situational rules (queuing, knocking before entering), values as broad principles (privacy, achievement), with one example of each and the point that norms put values into practice.

Q2. Analyse two reasons why sociologists argue that culture is socially constructed rather than natural. [12 marks]

• Cue. Two developed points: cultural diversity between societies shows norms and family forms vary (so they cannot be instinctive), and the evidence of socialisation (children learn the culture they are raised in), each applied to an example and linked to the idea that culture is learned.