Social structures and institutions practice questions.

Weber describes a long-run process in which calculation, written rules and the pursuit of efficiency come to govern administration, work and eventually private life, displacing tradition and personal judgement. His image of the iron cage expresses the claim that

• this order was imposed by a small group of administrators against the wishes of everyone else
• an order created because it was efficient comes to constrain even those who built it and cannot easily be left
• modern societies will inevitably return to traditional forms of authority within a few generations, once the costs become apparent
• rules and calculation have no advantages over the personal judgement they replaced

Answer: an order created because it was efficient comes to constrain even those who built it and cannot easily be left

Weber grants the gains in reliability and impersonality; the diagnosis is that the same features which make the order effective also make it inescapable, and that ends chosen for their value end up subordinated to procedures chosen for their efficiency.

A town's annual festival is organised in order to mark the end of the harvest. Researchers observe that it is also the occasion on which most marriages between neighbouring villages are arranged, and that this is not among the participants' stated purposes. In Merton's vocabulary, this second effect is

• a manifest function, since it is a recognised consequence of the festival
• a dysfunction, since it interferes with the festival's stated purpose
• a latent function, since it is an unrecognised consequence that helps sustain the practice
• an accident, since consequences that nobody intends cannot be functions at all, however regular they may be

Answer: a latent function, since it is an unrecognised consequence that helps sustain the practice

The pair separates what participants say a practice is for from what it does, and the second may explain the practice's persistence better than the first. The standard caution is that showing a practice has a useful effect does not show it exists because of that effect.

In the Marxist tradition, the charge that a set of beliefs is ideological is the claim that

• they are held sincerely by those who express them rather than cynically, which is what distinguishes ideology from a deliberate lie
• they present arrangements that serve particular interests as natural, necessary or in everyone's interest
• they are political rather than religious in content
• they are demonstrably false and therefore easily refuted by evidence

Answer: they present arrangements that serve particular interests as natural, necessary or in everyone's interest

The claim is functional rather than a simple charge of error: the beliefs may contain much that is true, and sincerity is assumed rather than denied. What makes them ideological is the work they do in making a contestable arrangement look like the way things are.

Goffman's category of the total institution is defined by the fact that

• the residents are held against their will and have committed some offence, which is what distinguishes such a place from a school
• the institution is funded by the state rather than by private means
• sleep, work and leisure occur in one place under one authority, on a schedule imposed from above
• the staff greatly outnumber those in their charge

Answer: sleep, work and leisure occur in one place under one authority, on a schedule imposed from above

The definition is structural, which is why it groups prisons with monasteries, barracks, boarding schools and long-stay hospitals: the philosophically interesting consequence is what such an arrangement does to a person's sense of self when every sphere of life is administered by the same authority.

A social theorist holds that rules and resources exist only in being drawn on by agents, so that social structures are at once the medium and the outcome of the practices they organise. This position is best described as

• Giddens' structuration theory, with its thesis of the duality of structure
• Durkheim's account of social facts as external to and constraining upon individuals
• Bourdieu's account of habitus as dispositions acquired in a social position
• methodological individualism, which reduces structures to the actions of individuals

Answer: Giddens' structuration theory, with its thesis of the duality of structure

Giddens is answering the standoff between the other two families: Durkheim treats structure as given to the individual from outside, methodological individualism denies it any standing of its own, and structuration makes reproduction the point at which both meet.

Weber builds concepts such as bureaucracy by accentuating certain features of the observed cases and combining them into a coherent picture that no actual case matches exactly. On his own account such a construct is

• an average of the observed cases, from which individual cases deviate at random
• a deliberately one-sided measuring rod against which actual cases are compared
• a statement of how the institution ought to be arranged if it is to be just
• a law connecting the institution with the conditions that always produce it

Answer: a deliberately one-sided measuring rod against which actual cases are compared

The ideal type is a methodological instrument, not a description and not a norm: its value lies in how instructively real cases fail to fit it, which is why calling something an ideal type in Weber's sense carries no praise.