The key sociological concepts of culture, norms, values, roles, status, sanctions and subculture, and how they make up the shared way of life of a society.

What this dot point is asking

Eduqas wants you to define and use the key sociological concepts that describe a society's way of life: culture, norms, values, roles, status, sanctions and subculture. These are the building blocks of Component 1 and they reappear throughout Component 2, so the exam tests them directly with short describe and explain questions and expects you to use them accurately in longer answers.

Culture

Because culture is learned and shared, it gives the members of a society a common identity and a predictable way of behaving together. Cultures differ between societies (what is polite in one may be rude in another) and they change over time, which is why sociologists treat behaviour as social rather than simply natural.

Norms and values

Sociologists use precise terms for the rules and ideals that make up a culture, and the exam tests the difference directly:

• Norms are the expected rules of behaviour in a particular situation, such as queuing, saying please, or not talking loudly in a library. They are specific and can change from one setting to another.
• Values are the general beliefs about what is important and worthwhile in a society, such as honesty, respect for life, or the importance of education. They are broad ideals that underpin many norms.

The link between them is that values are the broad beliefs and norms are the concrete behaviours that put those values into practice. The value placed on respect for others, for example, produces norms such as saying please and not pushing in.

Roles and status

People hold many statuses at once (student, friend, daughter) and play the matching roles, which is how social life stays orderly and predictable. When the demands of two roles clash, sociologists call it role conflict.

Sanctions and subcultures

Two further concepts complete the toolkit. Sanctions are the rewards and punishments societies use to encourage people to keep to the norms. Positive sanctions reward conformity (praise, prizes, promotion); negative sanctions punish deviance (fines, telling-off, prison). Sanctions can be formal (written rules backed by official bodies, such as the law) or informal (unwritten, such as a disapproving look).

A subculture is a smaller group within the wider society that shares some of the main culture but also has some distinctive norms, values or styles of its own, such as a youth subculture or a religious group. Subcultures show that a society is not always a single, uniform culture.