BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 Sociology 2018-19 Question Paper with Solutions

In Marx's account, polarisation is the prediction that capitalist society will progressively split into two great hostile classes, with the intermediate strata disappearing.

The mechanism: competition forces capital to concentrate in fewer hands; the small producer, artisan and peasant cannot match the large one and is driven down into the ranks of those who own nothing but their labour power. Society therefore divides into the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who do not.

Marx expected polarisation to sharpen class antagonism, converting a class in itself into a class for itself, and so to produce revolution.

The distinction is from Ralph Linton, who divided the content of a culture into universals, specialties and alternatives.

Cultural universals are the traits shared by all normal adult members of a society: its language, its basic beliefs, its dress, its staple food, its forms of greeting, its rules of morality. They are what makes a culture recognisable and what every child is socialised into.

Cultural specialties are traits confined to particular groups within the society: the knowledge and skills of a caste, an occupation or a profession, such as the ritual knowledge of a priest, the surgical skill of a doctor or the technique of a weaver.

Cultural alternatives are traits open to individual choice, where more than one accepted way of doing a thing exists.

The term cultural universal is also used in a second, wider sense, from G. P. Murdock, for the institutions found in every known society: family, marriage, incest prohibition, religion, language, division of labour, property and some form of law.

Two values from Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905):

1. Work in a calling (Beruf) as a religious duty. Ascetic Protestantism treated ordinary worldly occupation as a divine summons, not merely a means of livelihood, and required that it be pursued methodically and diligently. This abolished the medieval superiority of monastic withdrawal and made systematic labour a moral obligation.
2. Worldly asceticism, that is thrift and the renunciation of luxury. Enjoyment of wealth was treated as sinful indulgence, so income was not to be consumed. Combined with hard work, this leaves only one outlet for the proceeds, which is reinvestment, and reinvestment is capital accumulation.

Two further values if wanted: rational, methodical conduct of the whole of life, including punctuality and the disciplined use of time; and honesty and reliability in dealings, since credit depends on reputation.

Two social dimensions of the division of labour, that is two respects in which it is a social rather than a merely economic fact:

1. It produces social solidarity. Durkheim's central claim: specialisation makes each person dependent on many others whom he does not know and cannot replace, and that interdependence is the bond holding a complex society together. He called it organic solidarity, and contrasted it with the mechanical solidarity of simple societies, which rests on likeness.
2. It produces social stratification and, in Marx's account, alienation. Because tasks are unequally valued and unequally rewarded, the division of labour generates a hierarchy of occupations and, where the means of production are privately owned, a division into classes. For Marx it also estranges the worker from the product, from the act of production, from his species being and from other people.

Kinship is the system of socially recognised relationships based on blood and marriage which binds people together and assigns them rights and obligations towards one another.

Its two types are:

1. Consanguineous kinship, based on blood, that is on descent from a common ancestor: parents and children, brothers and sisters, grandparents and grandchildren.
2. Affinal kinship, based on marriage: husband and wife, and the relatives acquired through marriage such as father in law and brother in law.

By degree kin are further classed as primary, the eight direct relations; secondary, the primary kin of one's primary kin; and tertiary, the secondary kin of one's primary kin.

5. It predicts within limits: census projections, crime rate forecasting, election prediction.
6. It establishes cause and effect, as Durkheim did in linking religion, marital status and nationality to suicide rates.

Arguments that it is not.

1. No laboratory experiment, since human beings cannot be isolated and manipulated, and ethics forbids the attempt.
2. Lack of objectivity, since the sociologist is part of the society he studies.
3. No exact measurement of attitudes, prestige or alienation.
4. Unreliable prediction, because behaviour is voluntary and reflexive: people change what they do when they learn what is predicted of them.
5. Imprecise terminology.
6. Few universal laws, since social phenomena are bound to time and place.

For full marks, cover: the definition and features, the three founders' treatments, the types of capitalism, its merits and defects, and the Indian position.

Definition. Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit, goods and services are exchanged in a market at prices set by supply and demand, and labour power itself is bought and sold as a commodity.

Features. Private property in the means of production; profit as motive and measure; free markets and competition; wage labour, that is legally free workers who own no means of production; capital accumulation through reinvestment; and limited or regulated state direction.

The three founders.

• Marx defines it by the relations of production: one class owns the means of production, another owns only its labour power. Profit is surplus value, the difference between the value labour produces and the wage paid, and exploitation is therefore built into the wage relation rather than being a matter of any employer's conduct. He predicted concentration of capital, polarisation, recurrent crises and eventual revolution.

India. A mixed economy with Five Year Plans and a large public sector after 1947; liberalisation in 1991 shifting allocation towards the market; a very large informal sector; and a constitutional framework of Article 19(1)(g), freedom of trade subject to reasonable restriction, Article 300A on property, and Article 39(b) and (c) on the distribution of material resources and the prevention of concentration of wealth.

2. Acculturation. The change produced in a culture by prolonged first hand contact with another, in which one or both cultures alter while remaining distinct. It is usually asymmetrical, the less powerful culture changing more.

• Examples: the changes in Indian dress, education, administration and law under British rule; the changes in tribal cultures in contact with settled peasant society.
• Its possible outcomes are integration, retaining one's own culture while adopting elements of the other; assimilation, giving up one's own; separation, refusing the other; and marginalisation, losing both.

3. Assimilation. The slow fusion of two or more groups into one culture, so that the differences between them disappear and a new common identity is formed. It is the terminal stage: the group that assimilates ceases to exist as a distinct group.

• Examples: the immigrant family that after three generations is indistinguishable from the host population; the absorption of tribal communities into caste Hindu society over long periods.
• It is largely unconscious and gradual, in contrast to accommodation, which is conscious and can be rapid.

For full marks, cover: the definition, the parties, the features, the functions, the two readings of it, its decline and its significance.

Definition. The Jajmani system was the traditional Indian village arrangement in which families of different castes rendered hereditary services to one another in exchange for payment in kind, chiefly a customary share of the harvest. The term derives from yajman, the patron of a sacrifice, and the system was first described in detail by William Wiser in The Hindu Jajmani System (1936).

The parties. The jajman is the patron, usually a landowning cultivating family of a dominant caste. The kamin, praja or parjan is the serving family, drawn from the artisan and service castes: carpenter, blacksmith, potter, barber, washerman, priest, water carrier, leather worker and sweeper.

Features.

1. Hereditary on both sides, passing from father to son.
2. Not contractual: neither party chose the other, and neither could ordinarily terminate the relationship.

Two readings, both of which should be given. The functionalist reading, from Wiser, emphasises reciprocity and security: every family had a guaranteed livelihood and the arrangement produced stability. The conflict reading emphasises exploitation and dependence: the terms were set by the dominant landowning caste, the serving family could not refuse or negotiate, payment was frequently below subsistence, and the system locked the lowest castes into degrading work with no exit. Both are true, and the honest statement is that it delivered security at the price of freedom.

Decline. It broke down under the money economy, which made wages preferable to grain; urbanisation and migration, which offered an exit; industrial manufacture, which destroyed the artisan's market with cheaper goods; land reform, which altered who the patrons were; education and new occupations; and the constitutional and legal order, which abolished the disabilities it rested on.

B. By the nature of the social bond. Tonnies's Gemeinschaft, community based on natural will, kinship, intimacy and tradition, against Gesellschaft, association based on rational will, contract and interest.

C. By the type of solidarity. Durkheim's mechanical solidarity, based on likeness, against organic solidarity, based on the division of labour and interdependence.

D. By the organising purpose. Spencer's militant society, organised for war with compulsory cooperation, against the industrial society, organised for peaceful production with voluntary cooperation.

E. By settlement. Rural and urban; tribal, folk and civil societies.

Three differences: society, community and association.

1. Territory. A community must have a definite locality; a society need not, since it is a network of relationships that may extend anywhere; an association need not either, though it usually has a place of business.

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

Whose law and why. The Law of Three Stages is Auguste Comte's, set out in the Course of Positive Philosophy, and he regarded it as his greatest discovery. He wrote after the French Revolution had destroyed the old order, and his enterprise answers one question: on what basis can social order be reconstructed once religion no longer commands universal assent?

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

The parallel in the sciences. The sciences reach the positive stage in a fixed order set by decreasing generality and increasing complexity: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology. Sociology is last because it is the most complex and most dependent, which is why it was the last to be founded.

Its place in his system. The law is the core of Comte's social dynamics, the study of progress, paired with social statics, the study of order. His motto was order and progress.

Criticisms. It is unhistorical: the three modes of thought coexist rather than succeeding one another, and a working scientist may pray while a modern state rests on both a constitution built of abstract rights, which is metaphysical, and an administration built on statistics, which is positive. It is unilinear and Eurocentric. It underrates religion, and Comte contradicted himself by inventing his own Religion of Humanity. And it rests on no empirical research.

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.

(a) Role of mass media (in the above mentioned context) in creating awareness and bringing social change. (b) What are the other forms of discrimination that women face at their workplace?

A note on the premise. The hashtag was first used by Tarana Burke in 2006 and spread globally in October 2017. Its Indian phase came in late 2018, a few months before this paper was set, when large numbers of women named individuals in journalism, entertainment, advertising and politics.

(a) Role of mass media in creating awareness and bringing social change

How the media created awareness in this case, mechanism by mechanism:

4. Breaking the spiral of silence. Noelle Neumann's finding is that people who believe their view is in the minority keep quiet, which makes the apparent majority larger and silences dissent further. The movement worked by reversing it: once enough women spoke, silence rather than speech became the minority position.
5. Redefining the norm. Conduct previously treated as ordinary office behaviour was renamed as harassment. This is norm change through publicity, and it precedes and enables legal change.
6. Producing institutional response. Resignations, dismissals, internal inquiries, the constitution of Internal Committees that existed only on paper, and, in India, the litigation that followed.

Its limits, which an honest answer states.

• Trial by media: allegations were published without the safeguards of a legal process, and the accused had no opportunity to answer before the damage was done. This engages Article 21 and the presumption of innocence, and Indian defamation litigation followed.

3. The glass ceiling: exclusion from senior management and from boards.
4. Discrimination in recruitment, including questions about marriage and childbearing plans.
5. The motherhood penalty: loss of position after maternity leave, denial of promotion, and pressure to resign. The Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017, extended paid leave to 26 weeks, and one unintended effect has been reluctance to hire women of childbearing age.
6. Denial of training, travel, high visibility assignments and mentoring, which are what promotion actually depends on.
7. The double burden: the same person carries paid work and the whole of domestic and care work, so employment must be fitted around school hours and illness.
8. Absence of facilities: no separate toilets, no crèche, no safe transport for late shifts.
9. Exclusion from informal networks where decisions are actually made.
10. Stereotyping and everyday sexism: being interrupted, having contributions attributed to others, being assigned note taking and hospitality.

The facts, stated neutrally. The Sabarimala temple in Kerala excluded women between the ages of 10 and 50 on the ground that its deity is a naishtika brahmachari, a celibate. In Indian Young Lawyers Association v. State of Kerala (September 2018), decided a few months before this paper, the Supreme Court held by 4 to 1 that the exclusion violated Articles 14, 15, 17, 21 and 25, that the practice was not an essential religious practice, and that devotees of Ayyappa did not constitute a separate religious denomination under Article 26. Justice Indu Malhotra dissented, holding that courts should not ordinarily interfere in matters of deep religious sentiment. A review was referred to a larger bench in 2019, and the questions remain pending.

(a) The conflict and feminist perspectives

The conflict perspective holds that social arrangements are best explained by asking who benefits, and that religion is part of the superstructure, legitimating an existing distribution of power.

1. Exclusion based on menstruation rests on the notion of ritual impurity, which is not a neutral biological classification but a valuation, and it is the same logic of purity and pollution that sustains caste.
2. Autonomy and dignity: the Court's majority reasoned in terms of Article 21 and constitutional morality, holding that a woman's right to worship cannot depend on a physiological fact.
3. Article 17 was invoked by one judgment in an extended sense, treating exclusion based on notions of pollution as a form of untouchability.
4. Intersectionality: Indian feminist scholarship insists that women are not one undifferentiated class. Women of different castes, classes and communities took different positions here, and a perspective that assumes a single women's interest misdescribes what happened.
5. The standing feminist question is whether rights are best secured by courts or by movements within communities, since a right conferred and resented may be less durable than one won internally.

• Latent functions, unintended and unrecognised: social integration, since the pilgrimage assembles men from many castes and states and is famously indifferent to caste, which is a genuine and often overlooked point in its favour; the reinforcement of male solidarity and of a distinct male social world; a substantial local economy; and the maintenance of the authority of the priesthood.
• Dysfunctions, consequences that damage the system: the exclusion of half the potential worshippers; the reinforcement of the association between menstruation and impurity, which has consequences far beyond the temple, in schools, homes and workplaces; and the conflict the practice generates, which in 2018 and 2019 produced serious public disorder.

The legal frame in one line. Article 25 protects religion subject to public order, morality and health and to the other fundamental rights, and the essential religious practices test asks whether a practice is so integral that removing it would change the religion's character. The majority held it was not; the dissent held that the question was not for a court.

Why it was struck down. Section 497 punished only the man, treated the woman as incapable of being an offender or even an abettor, and, decisively, provided that there was no offence at all if the husband consented. The Court held that this treated a wife as her husband's property and his chattel, that it violated Article 14 by an arbitrary and under inclusive classification, Article 15 by discriminating on the ground of sex, and Article 21 by denying a woman's sexual autonomy, dignity and privacy following K. S. Puttaswamy (2017). It also held that a crime is committed against society, whereas adultery is a wrong within a marriage, and that criminal law is the wrong instrument for it. Adultery remains a ground for divorce under Section 13(1)(i) of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, and the corresponding provisions of the other marriage laws.

(a) Changes taking place in the institution of marriage

1. From sacrament to contract to companionship. Classical Hindu law treated marriage as an indissoluble sacrament; the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, made it statutory and dissoluble under Section 13; and the dominant expectation today is companionship, with emotional satisfaction treated as its purpose and its absence as a reason to end it.

10. Privacy entering the marriage. After Puttaswamy (2017) and Joseph Shine (2018), the constitutional position is that marriage does not extinguish a person's individual rights of autonomy and privacy. This is the deepest change of all, and it is the one the case turns on.
11. What has not changed: caste endogamy, which remains nearly intact, and dowry, which persists in substance while declining in form.

(b) Rule of law as an agent of change in this case

The rule of law means that all persons and authorities are subject to law which is publicly made, prospectively applicable and administered by independent courts; that everyone is equal before the law; and that arbitrary power is unlawful.

How it operated as an agent of change here:

4. The declaratory effect. Even where behaviour is unaffected, a judgment states publicly what the community's law holds to be right. The proposition that a wife is not her husband's property is now a statement of Indian law, and that changes the terms on which every related argument is conducted.
5. Consistency of the legal order. The judgment aligned the criminal law with the constitutional position established in Puttaswamy on privacy and in Navtej Singh Johar, decided in the same month, on autonomy. A legal system that contains contradictory propositions is under pressure to resolve them, and that internal pressure is itself a source of change.

The limits. Decriminalisation does not by itself alter conduct or attitudes; adultery remains a civil wrong and a ground for divorce; and the change was made by a court rather than won through political mobilisation, which some argue makes it less durable.

A note on the quotation. The words echo Ambedkar, who wrote in Annihilation of Caste and repeated in the Constituent Assembly that his ideal society would be based on liberty, equality and fraternity, and who held that of the three, fraternity is the hardest and the most important, because caste destroys it. The three words stand in the Preamble of the Constitution.

For full marks, cover: the meaning and characteristics of stratification, its forms, the theories, then caste in detail, its features, theories of origin, its relation to class, the changes in it, the constitutional response, and Ambedkar's analysis.

Social stratification

Definition. The division of a society into layers or strata ranked one above another, whose members enjoy unequal shares of wealth, power and prestige. Gisbert: "the division of society into permanent groups or categories linked with each other by the relationship of superiority and subordination."

The caste system

Definition. Caste is a form of stratification in which membership is ascribed by birth, marriage is endogamous, occupation was traditionally hereditary, and groups are ranked by ritual purity and pollution.

Ghurye's six features, the standard statement:

1. Segmental division of society into groups whose membership is determined by birth.
2. Hierarchy, a settled order of precedence.
3. Restrictions on feeding and social intercourse, the rules of commensality.
4. Civil and religious disabilities and privileges of the different sections.
5. Lack of unrestricted choice of occupation, since occupation followed birth.
6. Restrictions on marriage, that is endogamy.

Varna and jati must be distinguished. Varna is the fourfold textual scheme, Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra, with the "untouchable" castes outside it; it is pan Indian and theoretical. Jati is the actual endogamous group, of which there are thousands, local, ranked differently in different regions, and it is what people actually belong to.

Changes in the caste system. Untouchability abolished in law; the link between caste and occupation broken by new occupations; commensality restrictions weakened in cities; a substantial middle class among Scheduled Castes and Tribes produced by reservation; increased mobility; and broadened political representation. What has not changed: endogamy, residential segregation, atrocities, landlessness and manual scavenging. What is new: caste as a political category of mobilisation, organised horizontally across villages rather than vertically within them.

Constitutional response. Articles 14, 15, 15(4), 15(5), 16, 16(4), 17, 25(2)(b), 46, 330, 332, 338 and 243D; the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955; the Prevention of Atrocities Act, 1989; and the manual scavenging prohibitions of 1993 and 2013.

2. Exercised by the group over the individual, and by society over the group. It is a social rather than an individual process.
3. Pervasive. It operates in every sphere of life, in the family, at work, in worship, in public and in private.
4. Conscious or unconscious. A statute is a conscious instrument; a raised eyebrow is not.
5. Positive as well as negative. It rewards conformity as well as punishing deviation, and the reward is the cheaper mechanism.
6. Both internal and external. External control operates through sanctions applied by others; internal control operates through the conscience, which is the internalised norm, and is by far the more effective.
7. Continuous, operating at every waking moment rather than intermittently.
8. Necessary, since without it behaviour would be unpredictable and cooperation impossible.
9. Variable, differing in form and intensity between societies and over time; simple societies rely on informal means, complex ones on formal.
10. It has an object, which is the maintenance of order and the survival of the group.

5. Religion, controlling through belief, conscience, sin and the fear of divine sanction, and reaching where no law can.
6. Morality and conscience.
7. Public opinion, gossip, praise, ridicule, satire, sarcasm, sympathy and ostracism. Ostracism is the heaviest sanction a small community possesses.
8. Art, literature and proverbs, which teach by example and by memorable phrase.

Agencies: the family, the neighbourhood, the peer group, caste, religion and public opinion.

B. Formal means

Deliberately created, written, enforced by specialised agencies with defined penalties.

1. Law, the principal instrument: general, definite, uniform, backed by the coercive power of the state, and enforceable against the powerful as well as the weak.
2. Coercion, physical and non violent, the latter including strikes, boycotts and non cooperation.
3. Codified rules of organisations: service rules, professional codes, university regulations.
4. Education, formal in its organisation and largely informal in its effect.

Theoretical accounts

Durkheim: control expresses the collective conscience, and punishment's chief function is not deterrence but the reaffirmation of shared values; law moves from repressive to restitutive as societies differentiate. Parsons: control maintains system equilibrium. Marx: control maintains an order benefiting the dominant class. Weber: modern control rests on legal rational authority. Labelling theory: the agencies of control help to create the deviance they respond to.

Characteristics

Lifelong, not confined to childhood; learned, not inherited; both conscious and unconscious; continuous; universal; variable between societies, so that the same biological material produces very different persons; and it performs two tasks at once, forming the individual's personality and transmitting the culture so that society continues across generations.

Aims

To develop the self and personality; to transmit culture; to train the individual in the skills and roles society needs performed; to instil discipline and self control; to create aspirations and ambitions appropriate to the society; and to secure conformity, which is the foundation of social control.

Stages

• The oral stage: infancy, total dependence, the child learns to signal need and forms the first attachment.
• The anal stage: toilet training, the first sustained experience of discipline and of doing what is required rather than what is wanted.
• The oedipal stage: identification with the parent of the same sex and the learning of gender roles.

2. The peer group. The first setting of equality. Here the child learns cooperation and competition among equals rather than obedience to superiors, and it is the first group whose norms may conflict with the family's, which is why adolescence is a period of tension.
3. The school. Formal knowledge, and, through timetables, rules and assessment, training in impersonal authority and in achievement. Its hidden curriculum, punctuality, queueing, uniform and acceptance of grading, teaches the dispositions a bureaucratic society requires.
4. Religion. Values, sanctions and a moral vocabulary; and, through ritual, the experience of belonging.
5. The workplace, which socialises the adult into occupational roles and professional norms.
6. Mass and social media, now a fourth primary agency, and the one with none of the safeguards the others have: it does not know the child, has no stake in the child's welfare and is answerable to no one.
7. The state and the political system, through law, civic education and the experience of citizenship.

Theories of the self

Importance

It transmits culture and makes society continuous; it develops personality and the capacity for self control; it teaches roles; it produces conformity and predictability; it is the foundation of social control; and it integrates the individual into society and gives him an identity.

Failures of socialisation

Inadequate socialisation, producing a person unable to function in the group; faulty socialisation, which criminology treats as a standard cause of delinquency; conflicting socialisation, where family, peer group and media transmit incompatible norms, which produces anomie; and the extreme case of the isolated child.

1. Cooperation

Working together for a common goal. It is the most basic social process, and no group can exist without it. Merrill and Eldredge: "Cooperation is a form of social interaction wherein two or more persons work together to gain a common end."

Forms.

• Direct cooperation, where people do the same work together: harvesting, building, playing a team game.
• Indirect cooperation, where people do different tasks towards a common end, which is the division of labour and the basis of modern economic life.
• Primary cooperation, in primary groups, where cooperation is an end in itself and the group's interest absorbs the individual's.
• Secondary cooperation, in formal organisations, where it is a means to an end and each participant has his own reason.
• Tertiary cooperation, between groups whose attitudes to one another may be antagonistic but who cooperate for a limited purpose. Sumner called this antagonistic cooperation, and a coalition government or a cartel is an example.

3. Assimilation

The slow fusion of two or more groups into one culture, so that the differences between them disappear and a new common identity is formed. Park and Burgess: "Assimilation is a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments and attitudes of other persons or groups, and by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life."

It is largely unconscious and gradual. Its favouring conditions are close and prolonged contact, intermarriage, cultural similarity, a shared language, equal status and the absence of prejudice; segregation is the most effective obstacle.

4. Acculturation and integration

Acculturation is the change produced in a culture by prolonged contact with another, in which both may alter while remaining distinct. Integration is the fitting together of differentiated parts into a functioning whole.

B. Dissociative processes

Forms: personal; group; class; racial; caste; communal; political; industrial; and international. Further classed as corporate against personal, direct against indirect, and latent against manifest.

Functions, following Simmel and Coser: it strengthens internal cohesion; clarifies issues and boundaries; releases tension; produces social change; and generates new rules. Dysfunctions: destruction, hatred, diversion of resources and disintegration.

3. Contravention

An intermediate process between competition and conflict, in which one party obstructs another without open hostility, through disparagement, withholding cooperation or spreading doubt.

The Park and Burgess sequence

Robert Park and Ernest Burgess identified four processes as fundamental and arranged them in a sequence: competition, conflict, accommodation, assimilation. Competition is continuous and largely unconscious; when it becomes conscious and personal it turns into conflict; conflict cannot be sustained indefinitely, so it is halted by accommodation; and accommodation, if it lasts, may ripen into assimilation, which alone dissolves the difference.

• Weaknesses: superficial; depends on the respondent's honesty and understanding; suffers from social desirability bias on precisely the sensitive topics this subject cares about.
• Indian examples: the Census, the National Sample Survey, the National Family Health Survey.

2. The case study

Intensive study of a single unit, a person, family, institution, village or community, in depth and over time.

• Strengths: depth, context and insight into process rather than mere outcome; generates hypotheses.
• Weaknesses: cannot be generalised; slow and expensive; open to the investigator's selection.
• Classical example: Le Play's studies of family budgets; in India, the village studies of Srinivas and others.

3. Observation

• Participant observation: the investigator joins the group and takes part in its life. Gives access to meanings no questionnaire reaches; costs objectivity, and raises ethical questions about disclosure.

7. The statistical method

Quantification, sampling, correlation and tests of significance. Gives precision to what can be counted, and only to that.

8. The functional method

Explaining an institution by the contribution it makes to the working of the whole, with Merton's refinement into manifest and latent functions and dysfunctions.

9. The ideal type (Weber)

A deliberately constructed pure model formed by accentuating essential features, used as a yardstick against which real cases are measured. Bureaucracy and the three types of authority are examples. "Ideal" means logically pure, not desirable.

10. Content analysis and documentary methods

Systematic analysis of texts, newspapers, textbooks, judgments and now digital records, to establish patterns in what is said.

2. The synthetic school. Sociology is a general science of society as a whole: Durkheim, dividing it into social morphology, social physiology and general sociology; Sorokin; Ginsberg, dividing it into social morphology, social control, social processes and social pathology; and Hobhouse. Criticism: the field becomes so wide it risks superficiality.

The prevailing position is synthetic, worked out through specialised branches.

The subject matter itself

Society, community and association; social institutions, family, marriage, kinship, religion, education, economy and polity; groups and their types; culture, norms and values; status and role; socialisation; social control; social stratification and mobility; social processes; social change; and social problems.

The specialised branches

Sociology of law; sociology of the family; sociology of religion; sociology of education; industrial sociology; medical sociology; criminology and penology; rural and urban sociology; political sociology; demography; and social psychology.

For full marks, cover: the definition and characteristics of a social institution, the basic institutions and why they are universal, then education in detail with its functions and the conflict critique, then the family in detail with its functions, types and changes, and the relation between the two.

What social institutions are

A social institution is an established, organised system of norms, roles and procedures built around a central social need, which persists across generations and regulates the behaviour of individuals in that sphere of life.

MacIver and Page: "Institutions may be defined as the established forms or conditions of procedure characteristic of group activity." Sumner: an institution consists of a concept, the idea or interest, and a structure, the apparatus through which it operates. Ginsberg: recognised and established usages governing the relations between individuals and groups.

Functions.

Manifest, that is intended and recognised:

1. Transmission of knowledge and skills.
2. Secondary socialisation, transmitting values and norms beyond the family.
3. Preparation for occupational roles, and the certification that occupations require.
4. Development of personality and rationality.
5. Social integration, in Durkheim's account, by attaching the child to a society larger than his family, which he regarded as the school's essential moral function.
6. Political socialisation and the making of citizens.

Latent, that is unintended and unrecognised, in Merton's sense:

1. Supervision of children while parents work.
2. Formation of friendship networks and future marriage partners.
3. Delaying entry into the labour market.

In India. Article 21A and the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, with 25 per cent of places in private unaided schools reserved for disadvantaged children; Article 45; Article 46; reservation under Articles 15(4) and 15(5); the Mid Day Meal scheme; and the National Education Policy, 2020.

B. The family

Meaning. The family is the basic social institution, a group of persons united by ties of marriage, blood or adoption, forming a household, interacting in defined roles and creating a common culture. Burgess and Locke's definition is the standard one.

Characteristics. Universality; an emotional basis; formative influence, since it is the first and most powerful agency of socialisation; limited size; a nuclear position in the social structure, since all larger groupings are built out of families; heavy responsibility of members; social regulation, since every society regulates its formation and dissolution more closely than any other institution; and permanence as an institution combined with transience of the particular family.

Functions.

The Indian joint family, with common residence, a common kitchen, common property, common worship and the authority of the karta, recognised in law as the Hindu Undivided Family and the Mitakshara coparcenary, to which daughters were admitted by the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, confirmed in Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020).

Changes. From joint to nuclear residence, with the joint family surviving as a functional unit; smaller size; a more consultative authority structure; changed status of women; loss of functions; individual choice of partner; rising divorce; and new forms including single parent and dual career households.