BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 Sociology 2021-22 Question Paper with Solutions

The answer is (b) Ideology.

An institution is an established system of norms, roles and procedures built around a social need. On the account this question follows, an institution begins with an ideology, a set of ideas, beliefs and values which supplies the purpose the institution is to serve. From that shared idea grow the collective experiences of acting on it, which harden into traditions, and finally into mores, the rules the group regards as essential to its welfare. The idea comes first because an institution has to be for something before it can have practices at all.

Why the others are wrong.

• (a) Tradition is a later stage. A tradition is a practice already established and handed down, so it presupposes the practice rather than beginning it.

The answer is (b) Emile Durkheim.

Durkheim's first major work, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), makes exactly this claim: the division of labour is the criterion by which the development of a society is to be measured, because it determines the type of solidarity holding that society together. Simple societies, with little specialisation, are bound by likeness, which he called mechanical solidarity. Developed societies, with an advanced division of labour, are bound by interdependence, which he called organic solidarity. The degree of specialisation therefore tells you what kind of society you are looking at.

Why the others are wrong.

• (a) Karl Marx wrote a great deal about the division of labour, but as the source of alienation and of class division, not as a criterion of development. For Marx the criterion of an epoch is its mode of production, that is who owns the means of production.

The answer is (c) Social mobility.

Westernisation, in M. N. Srinivas's term, is the change brought about in Indian society by contact with the West, in technology, institutions and above all in values such as humanitarianism, rationalism and equality. Modernisation is the broader movement towards industry, urban life, science and achievement based status.

Both produce social mobility, movement between social positions, because both break the link between birth and occupation. Modern education creates achieved status, which is portable and can be acquired by anyone who qualifies; industry and the city create occupations that carry no traditional caste association; and constitutional equality removes the formal barriers. A person may therefore occupy a position his ancestors could not have held, which is precisely what mobility means.

Why the others are wrong.

The answer is (a) Caste System.

The caste system is the one form of stratification ranked by ritual purity and pollution. Its whole hierarchy rests on a scale of relative purity, from which follow the restrictions on commensality, who may eat with whom and accept food and water from whom, the restrictions on touch, the rules of endogamy, and the disabilities imposed on those treated as polluting. Ghurye's classical statement of caste lists "restrictions on feeding and social intercourse" and "civil and religious disabilities and privileges of the different sections" among its six defining features.

Why the others are wrong.

• (b) Class System is stratification too, but it is ranked by wealth, occupation and market position, not by ritual purity. A wealthy person of any background may eat where he pleases, and no purity rule attaches to class.

The answer is (b) Charles Horton Cooley.

Cooley is the founder of the sociological theory of the self. His looking glass self, set out in Human Nature and the Social Order (1902), holds that a person's conception of himself is formed from his perception of how others see him. Others are the mirror in which we see ourselves. It has three elements: our imagination of our appearance to another person; our imagination of that person's judgment of that appearance; and the resulting self feeling, of pride or of mortification.

Why the others are wrong.

• (a) Auguste Comte founded and named sociology, produced positivism and the Law of Three Stages, and worked entirely at the level of society and its stages. He has no theory of the individual self.

The answer is (b) Criminology and penology.

Sociology of law studies law as a social institution: how it arises out of society, how it operates in practice as against how it reads on paper, and how it shapes and is shaped by social change. Among the fields it takes in, the two most closely associated with it are criminology, the scientific study of crime as a social phenomenon, and penology, the study of punishment and of what is done to the offender after conviction. Of the four options, (b) is therefore the fullest and the intended answer.

Why the others are wrong.

• (a) Criminology alone is incomplete. It covers the causes of crime and the making and breaking of laws; it stops short of what happens after conviction, which is penology's subject. Where a fuller option is offered, the incomplete one is wrong.

The answer is (d) Caste system.

The Jajmani system was the traditional Indian village arrangement in which families of different castes rendered hereditary services to one another in exchange for a customary share of the harvest. The jajman was the patron, usually a landowning cultivating family; the kamin or praja was the serving family, drawn from the artisan and service castes, carpenter, blacksmith, potter, barber, washerman, priest and sweeper. The service a family rendered was fixed by the caste it was born into, and the relationship passed from father to son on both sides. It is therefore inseparable from caste.

Why the others are wrong.

• (a) Class system allocates position by wealth and occupation and permits movement; Jajmani relationships were hereditary and non contractual, which is the opposite of a class arrangement.

The answer is (b) 1976.

The Marriage Laws (Amendment) Act, 1976, raised the minimum age of marriage to 18 for the bride and 21 for the bridegroom, amending the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, under which the bride's minimum age had been 15, and the Special Marriage Act, 1954. That is the change the question describes, from 15 to 18, and 1976 is the only option in which it occurred.

Why the others are wrong.

• (a) 1986 saw no amendment of the marriageable age. It is the year of the Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act and of the Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act came the following year, which is probably the source of the confusion.
• (c) 1929 is the year of the Child Marriage Restraint Act itself, the Sarda Act, which first fixed a minimum age. It set the age at 14 for girls, not 18, so it is the year of the original statute and not of this amendment.
• (d) 1991 saw no relevant legislation.

• (b) Kingsley Davis, with Wilbert Moore, produced the functional theory of stratification, that unequal rewards are necessary to draw talent into important positions. A related field, a different contribution.
• (c) Charles Horton Cooley gave sociology the looking glass self and the primary group. Neither concerns status.

• (c) Emile Durkheim established sociology as an academic discipline, gave it the social fact and its method, and held the first chair; but the name was seventy years old when he wrote.
• (d) Karl Marx never described himself as a sociologist at all, and the term does not appear as his own designation of his work.

The answer is (a) the President.

Article 342 of the Constitution provides that the President may, by public notification, specify the tribes or tribal communities which shall be deemed to be Scheduled Tribes in relation to a State or Union Territory. Where the specification is in relation to a State, the President must consult the Governor of that State before doing so. Once the list is notified, Parliament alone may include or exclude a community from it by law, and no subsequent Presidential notification can vary it.

Article 341 contains the identical scheme for Scheduled Castes.

Why the others are wrong.

• (b) Chief Minister has no role whatever in the constitutional provision.

The answer is (c) Customs.

Custom is a long established habit or usage of a people, followed by common consent and repeated over generations until it acquires the force of a rule. It is transmitted by tradition rather than by enactment, and its authority rests on antiquity and general acceptance. The definition in the question, "long established habits and usages", is the standard definition of custom.

Why the others are wrong.

• (a) Norms is the wider genus, not the specific answer. A norm is any rule of expected behaviour, and custom is one kind of norm alongside folkways, mores and laws. Where a question describes a specific kind, the general category is not the answer.

The answer is (b) Human Society.

A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881 to 1955), the British social anthropologist and founder, with Malinowski, of structural functionalism, described his subject as the "natural science of human society". He conceived social anthropology as a comparative sociology whose object is to investigate social phenomena by methods essentially similar to those used in the physical and biological sciences, and to arrive at general laws governing social structure.

Why the others are wrong.

• (a) Human Relationship is the phrase associated with MacIver and Page, for whom sociology is about social relationships, the network of which is called society.
• (c) Human Behaviour is closer to the definition of psychology, and to Weber's focus on social action, which is behaviour to which the actor attaches meaning.
• (d) Human Interaction is Simmel's territory, since he defined sociology as the study of the forms of social interaction, and is also close to the interactionist tradition. It is not Radcliffe-Brown's phrase.

• (c) Guideline for socialization reverses the relationship. Socialisation is the process by which norms are learned; norms are not guidelines for that process. This distractor tests whether the candidate can tell the rule from the mechanism by which it is transmitted.
• (d) Guideline for social interaction is close and is the most tempting wrong answer. It is too vague: norms do guide interaction, but so do values, roles and statuses. What is specific to a norm is that it prescribes a definite course of action in a definite situation, which is what "specific guide to action" captures.

• (b) Coercion is the opposite of legitimacy. Power resting on coercion alone is precisely power that has failed to become authority, and it lasts only as long as the coercion is applied.
• (d) Absolute power confuses the amount of power with its quality. An absolute ruler may be entirely legitimate, as a traditional monarch was, or entirely illegitimate, as a usurper is. Legitimacy is a property of the title to power, not of its extent.

The answer is (d) Secondary kin.

Kin are classified by degree into three: primary kin, one's direct relations, eight in number; secondary kin, the primary kin of one's primary kin; and tertiary kin, the secondary kin of one's primary kin, or the primary kin of one's secondary kin.

The wife is a primary kin, one of the eight direct relations. The wife's brother is a primary kin of that primary kin, and is therefore a secondary kin. The standard textbook list of secondary kin gives exactly this example alongside father's brother and sister's husband.

Why the others are wrong.

• (a) Primary kin are the eight direct relations only: father and son, mother and daughter, father and daughter, mother and son, husband and wife, elder and younger brother, elder and younger sister, and brother and sister. The wife's brother is one step beyond that circle.

The answer is (a) Slavery, feudalism and capitalism.

Marx held that history proceeds through a succession of modes of production, each defined by its relations of production, that is by who owns the means of production and how the surplus is extracted. His sequence is: primitive communism, which is classless and therefore not exploitative; then the three exploitative modes, slavery, in which the master owns the labourer himself; feudalism, in which the lord owns the land and extracts labour rent or produce from the serf; and capitalism, in which the capitalist owns the means of production and extracts surplus value from a legally free wage labourer. These are followed, in his prediction, by socialism and finally communism, which are again classless.

Why the others are wrong.

The answer is (a) Theory.

Socialism is a theory or doctrine of social and economic organisation: it holds that the means of production, distribution and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole, in the interest of all, rather than by private individuals for profit. Its central commitments are social ownership, planned allocation, distribution according to need or work rather than according to property, and the reduction of class inequality. It is a body of ideas, a doctrine, and not itself a process of change.

Why the others are wrong.

• (b) Virtue is a quality of character. Socialism may be advocated on moral grounds, but the doctrine is not itself a virtue.

5. Social statics and social dynamics, the study of order and of progress, which is his division of the subject matter and survives today as structure and change.
6. Methods: observation, experiment understood as the study of pathological cases, comparison and the historical method.

Criticisms. The Law of Three Stages is unhistorical, since the three modes of thought coexist; it is unilinear and Eurocentric; he underestimated religion and then contradicted himself by founding a Religion of Humanity; and he did no empirical research.

How politics shapes society.

1. Law as an instrument of planned social change: Article 17, the reservation scheme, the Right to Education Act, 2009.
2. Redistribution through land reform, welfare and employment guarantee.
3. Creation of new institutions: panchayati raj under the 73rd Amendment, with reservation for women and for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, which brought very large numbers of new people into public office.
4. Recognition and identity: notification as a Scheduled Tribe or Backward Class changes a group's standing and its access to resources.

Features of the present scenario. Increasing political participation by groups formerly excluded; caste and communal polarisation; criminalisation of politics and the role of money; the transformation of campaigning by social media, with the attendant problems of misinformation and echo chambers; judicial activism filling gaps left by the political process; and coalition and regional politics giving states a larger voice.

• Agencies: the state, the legislature, the police, the courts, prisons, the bureaucracy and the military.
• Necessary as societies become large, mobile, heterogeneous and anonymous.

Relation. Informal control precedes formal control and remains the more important, because an internalised norm needs no supervision. Formal control operates at the margin, on those in whom informal control has failed. Sumner: "the mores can make anything right", so a law lacking their support must supply the whole of the enforcement and usually cannot.

Negative influence.

1. Misinformation and rumour, which spread faster than correction and have directly produced mob lynching.
2. Polarisation and echo chambers, since recommendation algorithms reward extremity because it holds attention.
3. Hate speech and communal mobilisation.
4. Trial by media, the pronouncement of guilt before adjudication.
5. Privacy violations and surveillance, since the business model depends on collecting personal data.
6. Mental health effects, particularly on adolescents.
7. The digital divide, so that a platform appearing open in fact amplifies some voices over others.

Regulation. Article 19(1)(a) with the restrictions in Article 19(2); the Information Technology Act, 2000, with the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules, 2021; the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023; and Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015), which struck down Section 66A as unconstitutionally vague.

Provisions for advancement.

• Article 15(4) and 15(5): special provision for the advancement of Scheduled Castes and Tribes, including in admissions to private educational institutions.
• Article 16(4), 16(4A) and 16(4B): reservation in appointments, in promotion with consequential seniority, and in respect of backlog vacancies.
• Article 46: a Directive Principle requiring the state to promote their educational and economic interests with special care and to protect them from social injustice and exploitation.
• Article 335: their claims to services to be taken into consideration consistently with the maintenance of efficiency.

Political and administrative provisions.

• Articles 330 and 332: reserved seats in the Lok Sabha and in State Legislative Assemblies; Article 334 limits the period. Articles 243D and 243T: reservation in panchayats and municipalities.

Marriage is the socially approved union which establishes a family and regulates sexual relations, descent and mutual obligation. What is changing is its basis and its content, not its existence.

The changes.

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; the dominant expectation now is companionship, with emotional satisfaction treated as its purpose.
2. From an alliance of families to a relationship between individuals. Traditional marriage was a kinship transaction in which the couple were the instruments; they are now the principals.
3. From arrangement to choice, with the intermediate "arranged love marriage" and matrimonial platforms replacing the caste network.
4. Rising age at marriage, in law under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006, and in practice through education and employment.

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

Marx's account.

1. Class is determined objectively by the relationship to the means of production, not by income, occupation or self perception.
2. Every society since primitive communism has two fundamental classes: those who own the means of production and those who do not. Master and slave, lord and serf, bourgeoisie and proletariat.
3. The relationship is one of exploitation. The value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labour time in it; the worker is paid the cost of reproducing his labour power, which is less than the value he produces; and the difference, surplus value, is appropriated by the owner. Exploitation is therefore built into the wage relation and is not a matter of any employer's conduct.

What science means. A body of systematic knowledge acquired by objective observation, classification, experiment where possible, and the formulation of general laws permitting prediction. The test is the method, not the subject matter.

Arguments for.

1. It uses scientific methods: survey, case study, controlled comparison, statistical analysis and sampling.
2. It is systematic and cumulative.
3. Facts are observed and verified. Durkheim insisted that social facts be treated as "things".
4. It formulates laws, probabilistic rather than absolute: that suicide rates vary inversely with social integration is one.
5. It predicts within limits: census projections, crime rate forecasting, election prediction.
6. It establishes cause and effect, as Durkheim did in Suicide.

Arguments against.

The main theories are the divine origin theory, the force theory, the patriarchal and matriarchal theories, the social contract theory and the evolutionary theory. The social contract theory is set out here, and the evolutionary theory, which is the one modern sociology accepts, follows for comparison.

The social contract theory

The claim. Society and the state did not grow naturally; they were deliberately created by an agreement among individuals who previously lived in a state of nature, a condition without government, law or organised authority. Its three great exponents differ on what the state of nature was like and therefore on what the contract contains.

Criticisms. The state of nature is historically unfounded; there is no evidence any society was formed by agreement. It is logically circular, since making a binding contract presupposes the very social rules and mutual trust it claims to create. And it treats man as prior to society, whereas sociology holds that the self is formed in society.

The evolutionary theory, which sociology accepts

Society was not made at any moment; it grew, gradually and unplanned, out of several factors operating together: kinship, which is the earliest bond; religion, which supplied common belief and ritual; property and the division of labour, which created interdependence; force and conquest, which consolidated larger units out of smaller; and political consciousness, the recognition of common needs. MacIver and Page, Spencer and Maine are its exponents, and Spencer's account of societies compounding from simple to trebly compound is its fullest statement.

7. They vary in intensity, from folkways, whose breach brings mild disapproval, through mores, whose breach brings severe disapproval, to taboos and laws.
8. They are internalised. The most effective norms are those a person applies to himself without supervision, which is what conscience is.
9. They change, with social change and with the deliberate action of law and of reform movements.
10. They are not always obeyed. Every society has a gap between its ideal norm, the rule as professed, and its practical norm, the rule as observed.
11. They are functional: they make behaviour predictable, which is the condition of all cooperation.