BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 Sociology 2023-24 - ATKT 60/40 Question Paper with Solutions

Status is the position a person occupies in a social system, carrying rights, duties and a place in the scale of prestige. Its types are:

1. Ascribed status, assigned at birth or acquired involuntarily, without regard to ability or effort: sex, age, caste, race, kinship position, hereditary title.
2. Achieved status, earned by effort, ability, choice or competition: advocate, graduate, husband, trade union leader, convicted offender.
3. Master status, the one status that dominates all others in how a person is perceived and treated. Caste has historically operated as a master status in India; so may sex, disability or a criminal record.

The first distinction is Ralph Linton's. Traditional societies rest mainly on ascription, modern industrial societies mainly on achievement, though no society uses one alone.

A political institution is the established system of norms, roles and organisations through which a society acquires, distributes and exercises power, maintains order, and settles conflict authoritatively.

Its central form is the state, whose four elements are population, territory, government and sovereignty. Other political institutions are the government with its legislature, executive and judiciary, political parties, pressure and interest groups, the electoral system, bureaucracy and, in India, local self government through panchayats and municipalities.

Its functions are the maintenance of internal order, defence against external threat, the making and enforcement of law, the authoritative allocation of resources, the settlement of disputes, and the protection of rights.

Both are rules of mate selection.

Endogamy is the rule that a person must marry within his or her own group, whether caste, sub caste, tribe, religion, race or class. It preserves the group's purity, property, identity and boundary. Caste endogamy is its strongest Indian form.

Exogamy is the rule that a person must marry outside a defined group. Its Indian forms are gotra exogamy, marriage outside the clan; pravara exogamy, outside the line of common ancestors; sapinda exogamy, outside the degrees of relationship set by Section 5(v) of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955; and village exogamy in parts of north India.

The two operate together: Indian rules typically require marriage outside the gotra but inside the caste.

Westernisation is M. N. Srinivas's term for the changes brought about in Indian society and culture by contact with the West, particularly during and after British rule.

It operates at several levels: technology (railways, printing, industry, medicine), institutions (the modern state, courts, codified law, bureaucracy, universities, the press), dress, food and manners, and, most importantly, values, especially humanitarianism, rationalism, equality and secularism.

Srinivas distinguished it sharply from Sanskritisation: Sanskritisation changes a group's position within the caste hierarchy while leaving the hierarchy intact, whereas Westernisation introduces values that attack the hierarchy itself.

Social stratification is the division of a society into layers or strata ranked one above another, whose members enjoy unequal shares of wealth, power and prestige.

Gisbert: "Social stratification is the division of society into permanent groups or categories linked with each other by the relationship of superiority and subordination."

Characteristics. It is social, not biological; universal, found in every known society; ancient; diverse in form, chiefly caste, class, estate and slavery; and consequential, since a person's life chances, health, education and longevity follow from his position in it.

Its principal forms are caste, closed and ascribed; class, relatively open and largely achieved; estate, the legally defined orders of feudal Europe; and slavery.

For full marks, cover: the definition, the nature and characteristics, the need for social control, the types with their agencies and means, the relation between informal and formal control, and an assessment including the conflict critique.

Definition. Social control is the sum of the ways in which a society secures conformity to its norms and regulates the behaviour of its members. Mannheim: "Social control is the sum of those methods by which a society tries to influence human behaviour to maintain a given order." E. A. Ross, who introduced the term into sociology, treated it as the means by which society secures order without which social life would be impossible.

Nature and characteristics. It is universal, present in every society; it is exercised by the group over the individual and by society over the group; it is pervasive, operating in every sphere of life; it may be conscious or unconscious; it is positive, through reward, as well as negative, through punishment; and it is necessary, since without it behaviour would be unpredictable and cooperation impossible.

• Means: law, the principal instrument, backed by the coercive power of the state; coercion, physical and non violent; codified rules of organisations; education, formal in its organisation; and propaganda.
• Agencies: the state, the legislature, the police, the courts, prisons, the bureaucracy, the military, and formal organisations generally.
• Effectiveness: necessary as societies grow large, heterogeneous and anonymous and informal control loses its grip.

Other classifications. Direct control, exercised face to face by family, neighbours and peers, against indirect control, exercised at a distance by law, custom and public opinion. Positive control, by reward, honour and recognition, against negative control, by punishment, fine and ostracism.

For full marks, cover: the meaning of an institution and of the economic institution, its functions, its main elements and forms, the theoretical treatments by Marx, Weber and Durkheim, the Indian context, and its relation to law.

Meaning. An institution is an established, organised system of norms, roles and procedures built around a central social need. The economic institution is the complex of norms, roles and organisations through which a society produces, distributes, exchanges and consumes goods and services, and thereby provides for the material needs of its members.

Functions.

1. Production of goods and services and the organisation of labour to that end.
2. Distribution and exchange, allocating what is produced among the members of society.
3. Consumption, and the definition of legitimate wants.
4. Division of labour and occupational specialisation, which is the source of interdependence.

• Marx treated the economic institution as the base which determines the superstructure of law, politics, religion and ideology. The mode of production, comprising the forces of production and the relations of production, defines the epoch, and the contradiction between them drives history through class struggle. Under capitalism the worker is alienated from the product, from the act of production, from his species being and from other people, and surplus value produced by labour is appropriated by the owner.
• Weber reversed the direction of the argument in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, showing that religious ideas can shape economic conduct: Calvinist worldly asceticism produced methodical work, thrift and reinvestment, which is capital accumulation. He also traced the growth of rational capitalism, which requires calculable law, free labour, rational accounting and a market.
• Durkheim analysed the division of labour not economically but morally, as the source of a new kind of solidarity. In simple societies likeness produces mechanical solidarity; as the division of labour advances, interdependence produces organic solidarity. Where the division of labour develops without adequate moral regulation, the result is the anomic division of labour, and industrial conflict follows.

For full marks, cover: whose law it is and its context, the three stages with their sub stages and their social correlates, the parallel hierarchy of the sciences, the purpose of the law within Comte's system, its criticisms, and what survives of it.

Whose law and why. The Law of Three Stages is Auguste Comte's (1798 to 1857), set out in the Course of Positive Philosophy. It is the central proposition of his sociology and, he said, his greatest discovery. He wrote after the French Revolution had destroyed the old order of monarchy, aristocracy and church, and his whole enterprise was an answer to one question: on what basis can social order be rebuilt when religion no longer commands universal assent?

The law. Human thought, and with it society, passes through three successive stages in explaining the world. The law applies at three levels at once: to the history of humanity, to the development of each individual mind, and to the growth of each separate science.

3. The positive or scientific stage. The mind abandons the search for first causes and final purposes and confines itself to observation, experiment, comparison and the discovery of invariable laws. It stops asking why and asks how.

Social correlates: dominance of scientists and industrialists; the whole of humanity as the social unit; industrial society; and authority resting on demonstrated knowledge.

The hierarchy of the sciences. Comte held that the sciences reach the positive stage in a fixed order determined by their decreasing generality and increasing complexity: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology. Each depends on those before it. Sociology is last, because it is the most complex and most dependent, which is precisely why it was the last to be founded. This is why he could claim to be founding a science rather than merely proposing a theory.

4. The hierarchy of sciences is arbitrary and does not fit how the sciences actually developed.
5. It rests on no empirical research, which is a striking omission in the founder of an empirical discipline.

What survives. Not the historical scheme but the methodological claim: that society can be studied by systematic observation and the search for regularities, and that such study should inform policy. Every social survey, every commission of enquiry and every piece of evidence based legislation is Comtean in that sense.

3. Based on economic position, chiefly wealth, income and occupation.
4. No legal or ritual barriers to marriage, eating together or occupation, unlike caste and estate.
5. A distinct style of life, in dress, speech, housing, education, leisure and consumption, by which class membership is displayed and recognised.
6. Class consciousness, the awareness of belonging to a class and of having interests distinct from other classes, which varies greatly in intensity.
7. Boundaries are indefinite, shading into one another, unlike the sharp boundaries of caste.

Criteria of class position. Wealth and income; occupation, which is the single best indicator; education; family background; style of life and consumption; and power.

Classification. The common threefold division is upper, middle and lower, each often subdivided into upper and lower segments, following W. Lloyd Warner's six class scheme derived from his study of "Yankee City": upper upper, lower upper, upper middle, lower middle, upper lower and lower lower. Marx's twofold division is bourgeoisie and proletariat, with the petty bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat as residual categories.

Theories.

3. Sorokin treated economic stratification as one of three forms alongside political and occupational stratification, measured the height and profile of the economic pyramid, and argued that it fluctuates without a constant trend, being cut down when it grows too steep and rising again when flattened too far.

Class in India, and its relation to caste.

• Class and caste overlap but do not coincide. Historically the upper castes held most of the land and the professions, and Scheduled Castes were disproportionately landless, but the correlation has always been imperfect and has weakened.
• Srinivas's concept of the dominant caste is the attempt to hold the two dimensions together: a caste that combines numerical strength, land ownership and reasonable ritual standing dominates a locality regardless of its position in the classical varna order.

Assessment. The class system is more open than caste and rewards achievement, which is its justification. Against that, it produces very large inequalities of wealth and life chances; the advantages of class are transmitted to children through education, connections and inherited property, so that mobility is much less than the ideology of merit claims; and class inequality is legitimated by the belief that position reflects ability, which makes it harder to challenge than an inequality openly based on birth.

(a) Commercialisation of religion

Meaning. The commercialisation of religion is the conversion of religious belief, practice and institutions into commodities bought and sold for profit, so that what was an end in itself becomes a means to income.

Its forms in India:

1. Religion as an industry: large temple trusts and ashrams operating as commercial enterprises, with revenues that rival corporations, running schools, hospitals, hotels and consumer product businesses under a religious brand.
2. Paid access to the divine: priority darshan queues, VIP passes, paid rituals graded by price, and paid seating at religious events, which import a class hierarchy into a space that is supposed to abolish it.
3. Godmen as brands, with merchandise, subscription content, residential courses and product lines.
4. Religious tourism, in which pilgrimage becomes a packaged product with tour operators, guides and hotels.

Its effects. It excludes the poor from what is nominally open to all, since access is priced; it converts faith into transaction, so that devotion is measured by expenditure; it produces fraud and exploitation, and the concentration of unaccountable wealth and power in individuals; it feeds superstition, since miracle claims sell better than doctrine; and it discredits religion itself in the eyes of those who see the arrangement clearly.

Legal responses. The Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act, 1954, prohibits advertising miracle cures; anti superstition legislation in Maharashtra (2013) and Karnataka (2017) targets specific exploitative practices; income tax, the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010, and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 apply to religious trusts; state religious endowments legislation provides for the administration and audit of temples; and the consumer protection and cheating provisions apply to fraudulent claims. Article 25 protects religion only subject to public order, morality and health, so a practice that injures health or defrauds is not saved by calling it religious.

• Article 16(1) guarantees equality of opportunity in public employment; Article 16(4) permits reservation in appointments for backward classes not adequately represented; Article 16(4A) permits reservation in promotion for SCs and STs with consequential seniority; Article 16(4B) deals with backlog vacancies.
• Article 17 abolishes untouchability; Article 46 directs the state to promote the educational and economic interests of the weaker sections; Articles 330, 332 and 334 reserve seats in legislatures; Articles 243D and 243T reserve seats in panchayats and municipalities.
• The 103rd Amendment (2019) added Articles 15(6) and 16(6), providing 10 per cent reservation for economically weaker sections, upheld in Janhit Abhiyan v. Union of India (2022).

Assessment. Positive discrimination has produced a substantial middle class among Scheduled Castes and Tribes and has visibly changed the composition of public employment and of legislatures. It is least effective where beneficiaries are poorest, because it presupposes a qualification the very poor cannot acquire; it does not reach the private sector, now the larger employer; and it cannot touch social discrimination, which no quota reaches.

Its extent. Successive rounds of the National Family Health Survey have found that roughly one in three ever married women aged 15 to 49 reports having experienced spousal violence, and that a large majority of those who experience it never tell anyone or seek help. A significant proportion of women, and in some rounds of men, express agreement that a husband is justified in beating his wife in at least one circumstance, which is the clearest evidence that the norm is internalised.

Causes.

1. Patriarchy, which vests authority in the husband and treats correction of the wife as within it.
2. Gender socialisation, which trains girls in submission and tolerance and boys in dominance, and which makes women themselves accept the norm.
3. Economic dependence, which removes the option of leaving.
4. Dowry demands, and the treatment of marriage as a transaction that may be renegotiated by pressure.
5. The privacy of the household, which historically placed the family beyond the reach of law and of neighbours.
6. Alcohol and substance abuse, an aggravating rather than an originating cause.

• Maintenance under Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code, now Section 144 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, and under the personal laws.
• Constitutional foundation: Articles 14, 15, 21, and the right to live with dignity.

(b) Measures for the empowerment of women

Meaning. Empowerment is the process by which women acquire the capacity, resources and authority to make and act on their own choices, and to participate on equal terms in economic, social and political life. It has economic, social, political, educational and legal dimensions.

1. Educational. Universal and continuing education for girls; Article 21A and the Right to Education Act, 2009; scholarships, hostels and toilets, since the absence of the last is a measurable cause of dropout at puberty; and Beti Bachao Beti Padhao. Education is the single measure with the widest effects: it raises the age at marriage, lowers fertility, improves child health and increases participation in work.

4. Legal and safety. The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013; the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, following the Justice J. S. Verma Committee; POCSO, 2012; the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006; the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994; the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017, extending paid leave to 26 weeks; legal aid under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987; and one stop crisis centres and helplines.

5. Health. Maternal and reproductive health services; nutrition programmes, given the very high prevalence of anaemia; and sanitation.

6. Social and attitudinal. Changing gender socialisation in the family, the school curriculum and the media; involving men and boys, since a change in women alone cannot alter a relationship; and the visibility of role models.

2. Hereditary occupational assignment, which confined whole communities to degrading work irrespective of ability. Manual scavenging is its worst surviving form, prohibited since 1993 and again by the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, with deaths in septic tanks and sewers still recorded every year.
3. Endogamy and the violence that enforces it, including honour crimes against couples who marry across caste, and the intervention of khap panchayats to annul such marriages.
4. Atrocities, particularly in retaliation for assertion: for contesting an election, riding a horse at a wedding, wearing certain clothes, or drawing water from a common source. The National Crime Records Bureau records tens of thousands of cases annually under the Prevention of Atrocities Act.
5. Restrictions on commensality, the rules on who may eat with whom and accept food and water from whom, which still surface in resistance to mid day meals cooked by Dalit cooks.
6. Economic exploitation and landlessness, with bonded labour and debt bondage as its extreme forms.

3. Articles 15(4), 15(5), 16(4), 330, 332 and 243D, reservation in education, employment and legislatures.
4. Article 25(2)(b), permitting the state to throw open Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes of Hindus, which is the basis of temple entry legislation.
5. The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, and mechanisation of sewer cleaning.
6. The Special Marriage Act, 1954, and protection of inter caste couples under Lata Singh (2006), Shakti Vahini (2018) and Shafin Jahan (2018), including the direction for safe houses and special cells in each district.
7. Prompt prosecution of atrocities and accountability of officers who fail to register or investigate, since impunity is the largest single incentive.

Social and economic.

1. Education, which attacks the belief on which caste rests, breaks the link between birth and occupation, and is the principal channel of mobility. Article 21A and the Right to Education Act, 2009, with its 25 per cent reservation in private unaided schools.

(a) Impact of audio visual media on children

Media as an agency of socialisation. The family, the peer group and the school were once the decisive agencies. Audio visual media, film, television and now short form video and social platforms, have become a fourth agency, and in many households the one that occupies the most hours. Unlike the others it is unsupervised, commercially motivated and algorithmically selected, which is what makes its effects distinctive.

Positive effects.

1. Information and education: exposure to knowledge, languages, science and events far beyond the child's immediate environment.
2. Awareness of rights and of the wider world, including of social problems the family may not discuss.
3. Skill development and access to instruction that the school may not provide.

5. Consumerism, since children are a commercial target and advertising is embedded in content they do not recognise as advertising.
6. Cyberbullying, which follows the child home and has no closing time.
7. Reinforcement of stereotypes of gender, caste, religion and disability, and, in the Indian context, of cultural misogyny, which normalises persistence and possessiveness as romance.
8. Misinformation and radicalisation, with algorithmic recommendation systems that reward extremity because it holds attention.
9. Privacy risks and grooming, and exposure to strangers.
10. Attention and language effects in very young children, where passive screen time displaces the interaction on which language development depends.

A necessary qualification. The evidence supports correlation and moderate effects, not simple causation. Media is one influence among many, and its effect depends on the child's age, family, peer group and what is being watched. Overstating it is as unhelpful as denying it, and the responsible statement is that media shapes the environment in which socialisation occurs rather than determining outcomes by itself.

• Certification and classification of films by the Central Board of Film Certification under the Cinematograph Act, 1952, and age ratings on streaming platforms.
• Advertising standards, particularly on advertising directed at children.
• Platform design: default protections for minors, limits on autoplay and infinite scroll, and restrictions on recommending harmful content to young accounts.

4. Law and regulation.

• The Cinematograph Act, 1952, and the certification regime.
• The Information Technology Act, 2000, and the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, which impose a three tier grievance mechanism and require age classification for streaming content.
• The POCSO Act, 2012, and Section 67B of the Information Technology Act, on child sexual abuse material.
• The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, which requires verifiable parental consent for processing the data of children under 18 and prohibits tracking and targeted advertising directed at them.

2. Base and superstructure. The economic base, comprising the forces of production (technology, tools, labour, raw materials) and the relations of production (the property relations, who owns what), determines the superstructure of law, politics, religion, education, art and ideology. The superstructure in turn legitimates and stabilises the base.

3. Modes of production and the stages of history. Primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and, he predicted, socialism and then communism. Each stage contains a contradiction between its forces and its relations of production, which eventually bursts it.

4. Class and class struggle. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle." Class is defined objectively by the relationship to the means of production; in every epoch there are fundamentally two classes, owners and non owners. He distinguished a class in itself, an objective category, from a class for itself, conscious and organised, the transition being obstructed by false consciousness.

5. Surplus value and exploitation. Labour produces value greater than the wage paid for it; the difference, surplus value, is appropriated by the capitalist. Exploitation is therefore built into the wage relation itself, not a matter of individual unfairness.

Emile Durkheim (1858 to 1917)

Place. French sociologist, the first professor of the subject, and the founder of sociology as an academic discipline. Principal works: The Division of Labour in Society (1893), The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Suicide (1897) and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912).

1. Social facts. Durkheim's foundational rule. A social fact is a way of acting, thinking or feeling which is external to the individual and exercises constraint over him, and which is general throughout a society. Language, law, currency, custom and religion are social facts: none was invented by the individual and none can be altered by him at will. His methodological rule: "treat social facts as things", that is, study them objectively from outside, and explain a social fact only by another social fact, never by psychology or biology.

2. Division of labour and the two solidarities. In simple societies, people are alike and are bound by shared beliefs and sentiments, the collective conscience; Durkheim called this mechanical solidarity. As the division of labour advances, people become specialised and unlike one another, and are bound instead by interdependence; this is organic solidarity. The transition is the central fact of modernisation.

5. Suicide. The demonstration that even the most private act has social causes. Durkheim showed that suicide rates are stable and vary systematically with religion, marital status, nationality and economic conditions, and explained them by two variables, integration and regulation, giving four types: egoistic suicide, from too little integration; altruistic, from too much; anomic, from too little regulation; and fatalistic, from too much. The study is the model of positivist sociological method.

6. Religion. In The Elementary Forms he studied Australian totemism and concluded that the totem is a symbol of the clan, so that in worshipping it the clan worships itself. Religion's essential distinction is between the sacred and the profane, and its essential function is social integration: ritual assembles people, produces collective effervescence, and renews the collective conscience.

7. Sociology as a discipline. Durkheim established its subject matter, its method and its independence from psychology and philosophy, founded the journal L'Année Sociologique, and secured its place in the university.

For full marks, cover: the definition, the characteristics, the functions in Murdock's and Parsons's terms, the types by structure, authority, descent and residence, then the changing patterns with their causes, the problems, and an assessment of the institution's future.

Definition

The family is the basic social institution, a group of persons united by ties of marriage, blood or adoption, forming a single household, interacting in their respective social roles, and creating and maintaining a common culture.

Burgess and Locke: "The family is a group of persons united by the ties of marriage, blood or adoption, constituting a single household, interacting and inter communicating with each other in their respective social roles of husband and wife, mother and father, son and daughter, brother and sister, creating a common culture."

MacIver and Page: "Family is a group defined by sex relationship sufficiently precise and enduring to provide for the procreation and upbringing of children."

9. A system of nomenclature, a reckoning of descent and a mode of inheritance.
10. A common habitation, and an economic provision for its members.

Functions

Murdock identified four functions he regarded as universal: sexual, reproductive, economic and educational, meaning socialisation.

Talcott Parsons argued that in modern industrial society the family has lost many functions to other institutions and retains two basic and irreducible ones: the primary socialisation of children, and the stabilisation of adult personalities, the family serving as the setting in which adults are emotionally restored.

A fuller list of functions, distinguishing the essential from those since transferred:

• Essential: satisfaction of sexual needs; reproduction and the rearing of children; socialisation; provision of affection, security and emotional support; assignment of status, since a child's initial class, caste and religion come from the family.

By marriage: monogamous and polygamous, the latter dividing into polygynous and polyandrous.

The Indian joint family deserves separate treatment. Its features are common residence, a common kitchen, common property, a common place of worship, and the authority of the karta, the eldest male, who manages the property and represents the family. It is recognised in law as the Hindu Undivided Family and the Mitakshara coparcenary, in which sons acquired an interest by birth, and daughters were made coparceners by the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, confirmed as a birth right in Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020).

Changing patterns of the family

1. From joint to nuclear. The most visible change. Urban households are predominantly nuclear, though the joint family often survives in a modified form, as a functional joint family whose members live apart but pool obligations, remittances and decisions.
2. Decline in size, with falling fertility as India's total fertility rate approaches replacement level.
3. Change in the authority structure, from patriarchal command towards a more egalitarian and consultative pattern, particularly where the wife earns.

10. Weakening of kinship obligations, and the decline of care for the aged within the household, which produced the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007.
11. Legal regulation replacing custom: the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act, 1956, the Special Marriage Act, 1954, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, and the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006.

Causes of these changes. Industrialisation, which separated home from workplace and required a mobile workforce; urbanisation, with small dwellings and high costs; education, particularly of women; employment of women, and economic independence; individualism and the assertion of personal choice; legislation, which gave individual rights against the group; Westernisation in Srinivas's sense; and improved communication and transport, which made migration possible without total separation.

For full marks, cover: the meaning and characteristics of social change, then the factors in turn with Indian illustrations, then the four families of theory, and finally an assessment of how factors and theories relate.

Meaning and characteristics

Social change is a change in the structure and functioning of society: in its institutions, its patterns of social relationship, its norms and its values.

Kingsley Davis: "By social change is meant only such alterations as occur in social organisation, that is, the structure and functions of society." MacIver and Page confine it to changes in social relationships.

Characteristics. It is universal, occurring in every society; continuous, never absent; variable in speed, faster in modern than in traditional societies; the product of many causes rather than one; often unpredictable in its exact form; it produces chain reactions, since change in one institution forces change in others; and it is not the same as progress, since change may be for the worse, and "progress" imports a value judgment that "change" does not.

3. Economic factors. Industrialisation separated the home from the workplace, destroyed the artisan economy, created the factory and with it the working class and the trade union, and made the nuclear family the fitting household form. Marx made the economic factor decisive: the contradiction between the forces and the relations of production drives history. India's liberalisation of 1991 is the clearest recent instance of an economic change with wide social consequences.

4. Cultural and ideational factors. Ideas, values and beliefs are causes as well as effects. Weber's demonstration that ascetic Protestantism shaped the conduct that capitalism required is the standing argument against treating culture as merely derivative. Diffusion, the spread of cultural traits between societies, is the commonest mechanism, and Srinivas's Sanskritisation and Westernisation are two Indian forms of it.

5. Educational factors. Education changes the beliefs on which an order rests, breaks the link between birth and occupation, creates achieved status, and is the principal channel of mobility. In India it has been the route by which Scheduled Caste and Tribe families entered public employment, and female education is the single strongest predictor of falling fertility and rising age at marriage.

Theories of social change

1. Evolutionary or linear theories. Society moves in one direction, from simple to complex, through fixed stages.

• Comte's Law of Three Stages: theological, metaphysical, positive.
• Spencer: from incoherent homogeneity to coherent heterogeneity, and from militant to industrial society; the phrase survival of the fittest is his.
• Durkheim: from mechanical solidarity, based on likeness, to organic solidarity, based on the division of labour.
• Morgan: savagery to barbarism to civilisation.
• Criticism: assumes a single universal path, treats the writer's own society as the endpoint, and cannot account for decline.

2. Cyclical theories. Change is a repeating cycle of rise, maturity and decay.

• Spengler, The Decline of the West: every culture passes through birth, growth, maturity and decay like an organism, and none escapes.

4. Conflict theory. Marx: change is driven by the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, working itself out as class struggle, through primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism. Change comes from within, by conflict, and at the decisive moments by revolution. Dahrendorf restated conflict theory around authority rather than property, arguing that conflict arises wherever some command and others obey, which is everywhere.

• Criticism: one dimensional, and its central predictions about polarisation and revolution in industrial societies have not been borne out.

How factors and theories relate

The factors answer the question "what caused this change?"; the theories answer "what shape does change take, and where does it come from?" The two are frequently confused in answers, and keeping them apart is worth a mark.

The theories also fall into two natural pairs. Evolutionary and cyclical theories disagree about the shape of change, a line or a circle. Functionalist and conflict theories disagree about its source, outside the system as a disturbance to be absorbed, or inside it as a contradiction that must eventually break it.

For full marks, cover: the definition of a social group and what distinguishes it from an aggregate and a category, the characteristics, the full range of classifications with their criteria and exponents, and then the importance of group life set out systematically.

Definition

A social group is a collection of two or more persons who interact with one another, are conscious of belonging together, and share expectations about one another's behaviour.

MacIver and Page: "Any collection of human beings who are brought into social relationships with one another." Ogburn and Nimkoff: "Whenever two or more individuals come together and influence one another, they may be said to constitute a social group."

Characteristics. A plurality of persons; reciprocal interaction, which is the essential condition; a we feeling or sense of unity; common interests and goals; shared norms; a structure of statuses and roles; relative permanence; and control over members.

2. In group and out group (W. G. Sumner). The in group is the "we" group, marked by loyalty, cooperation and mutual support. The out group is the "they" group, regarded with indifference, suspicion or hostility. The distinction generates ethnocentrism, the judging of other groups by the standards of one's own, which strengthens internal solidarity and produces prejudice at the same time.

3. Formal and informal groups. Formal groups have written rules, defined offices, prescribed procedures and explicit membership: a registered society, a company, a court. Informal groups arise spontaneously out of personal liking and shared interest, with no constitution: a friendship circle, a group of colleagues who lunch together.

4. Reference groups (Robert Merton). A group whose standards a person adopts as a frame of reference for evaluating himself and guiding his conduct, whether or not he belongs to it. It explains anticipatory socialisation, in which a person adopts the ways of a group he hopes to join, and in India it explains much of Sanskritisation, where a lower caste treats a higher one as its reference group.

5. Voluntary and involuntary groups. One joins a club, a party or a union; one does not join a family of birth, a caste or, in most cases, a nationality.

Importance of group life

1. The group makes the individual human. Man becomes a social being only in a group. The evidence is the isolated and feral children, Kamala and Amala of Midnapore and Anna and Isabelle in the United States, who lacked speech, upright walking and social response until socialised. The capacities we call human do not appear without group life.

2. Socialisation and the formation of the self. The group is the medium through which culture is transmitted and personality formed. Cooley's looking glass self describes the mechanism: we form our conception of ourselves out of our imagination of how others see us and their judgment of it. Mead traced the same development through play, the game and the generalised other.

3. Satisfaction of needs. Physical needs of food, shelter and safety; social needs of belonging, affection and recognition; and psychological needs of security and identity. No individual can meet them alone.

9. Emotional and material security, particularly in crisis, illness and old age, which is what primary groups supply and secondary groups cannot.

10. Social change. Groups are the vehicles of movements. Reform movements, trade unions, caste associations and political parties are how change is organised and delivered.

A necessary qualification. Group life is not an unmixed good. Groups also produce conformity at the expense of individuality, prejudice through the in group and out group distinction, groupthink, in which the desire for agreement suppresses dissent, and collective violence, since a crowd's anonymity dissolves individual restraint. An answer that notes the dysfunctions alongside the functions is more complete than one that praises group life throughout.