Terms, Concepts and their Use in Sociology

Why this chapter matters for UPSC: GS1 questions on caste, class, women's roles and social control are answered with this chapter's vocabulary: quasi group and social group, primary and secondary group, reference group, stratification, ascribed and achieved status, role conflict, formal and informal social control. NCERT presents these terms not as fixed definitions but as "keys to open locks", tools that sociologists use and keep questioning, and it shows two ways of reading every one of them: the functionalist view of society as harmonious and the conflict view of society as unequal. The chapter is unchanged in the 2026-27 reprint (word-for-word the 2021-22 text). This page teaches all of it, including NCERT's long section on social stratification (slavery, caste, estate and class), and adds the original sources of three terms NCERT uses without naming their authors.

🧠 First Principles — Read This First

Sociology needs special terms precisely because its subject is familiar. Nuclear physics obviously needs its own vocabulary because nobody has words for its subject. NCERT, quoting Peter Berger, argues that terminology "is possibly even more important for sociology", because "we are so well acquainted with the social institutions that surround us that we cannot see them clearly and precisely". Living in a family does not mean knowing what a family is; that confuses common sense with sociological knowledge, the mistake chapter 1 warned against.

Concepts are keys, not answers. Many of sociology's concepts were made to map the shift from pre-modern to modern society: close, face-to-face interaction in small traditional societies against formal interaction in large modern ones (hence primary and secondary groups, community and association), and structured inequality between groups (hence stratification). They are "entry points in our understanding, not the final answer". If a key is rusted or bent or does not fit the lock, it must be changed: sociology both uses and "constantly interrogate[s]" its concepts.

Every concept can be read two ways. For Karl Marx the key concepts were class and conflict; for Emile Durkheim, social solidarity and collective conscience. After the Second World War the structural functionalists saw society as essentially harmonious, like an organism whose parts each have a function in maintaining the whole; the conflict theorists, influenced by Marxism, saw it as essentially conflict-ridden. Some sociologists start from the individual (micro interaction: status, role); others from macro structures such as class, caste, market and state (stratification, social control). NCERT says this multiplicity of approaches is "particularly acute in sociology" and cannot be otherwise, "for society itself is diverse".

PART 1 — Quick Reference

Key Terms at a Glance (NCERT's definitions)

Functionalist and Conflict Readings of the Same Concepts

Caste and Class Compared

PART 2 — Concepts & Narrative

Social Groups and Society

A defining feature of human life is that people interact, communicate and construct social collectivities. The comparative and historical perspective of sociology shows two apparently innocuous facts: groups exist in every society, ancient, feudal or modern, Asian, European or African; and the types of groups differ from society to society.

Not every gathering is a social group. Aggregates are collections of people in the same place at the same time who share no definite connection: passengers at a railway station or bus stop, a cinema audience. Such aggregates are often called quasi groups: a combination that lacks structure or organisation and whose members may be unaware, or less aware, of the grouping. NCERT also counts social classes, status groups, age and gender groups and crowds as quasi groups, and stresses that quasi groups "may well become social groups in time". Members of a class, caste or community may not be organised or have a "we" feeling, but class and caste have over time given rise to political parties; people of different communities in India developed through the long anti-colonial struggle an identity as a nation "with a shared past and a common future"; and the women's movement created women's groups and organisations.

Types of Groups

Different sociologists classify groups differently, but NCERT points to a pattern: most typologies contrast how people form groups in traditional, small-scale societies with how they do so in modern, large-scale ones, close and face-to-face against impersonal and distant. "However a complete contrast is probably not an accurate description of reality."

Primary and secondary groups. The groups we belong to are not equally important to us. A primary group is "a small group of people connected by intimate and face-to-face association and co-operation", whose members have a sense of belonging: the family, the village, a group of friends. Secondary groups are relatively large and maintain formal and impersonal relationships: schools, government offices, hospitals, students' associations. Primary groups are person-oriented, secondary groups goal-oriented.

Community and society (association). Contrasting the old traditional, agrarian way of life with the new modern, urban one dates back to the classical sociologists. Community refers to relationships that are "highly personal, intimate and enduring", where involvement is considerable if not total. Society or association refers to everything opposite, the impersonal, superficial and transitory relationships of modern urban life: commerce and industry require a calculating, rational, self-interested approach, and "we make contracts or agreements rather than getting to know one another". Community parallels the primary group, association the secondary group. NCERT's activity adds a caution: members of a formal group such as a Residents' Welfare Association, a Mahila Samiti or a sports club may over time become close, "just like family and friends", which shows that "concepts are not fixed and frozen entities".

In-groups and out-groups. A sense of belonging marks an in-group and separates "us" from "them": children of one school as against others. An out-group is one the in-group's members do not belong to, and its members can face hostility; migrants are often treated as one. Who belongs changes with time and context. M.N. Srinivas, carrying out a census in Rampura in 1948, heard villagers describe recent immigrants almost contemptuously as nenne monne bandavartu ("came yesterday or the day before") and old ones as arsheyinda bandavaru ("came long ago") or khadeem kulagalu ("old lineages").

Peer groups are a kind of primary group, usually of people of similar age or in a common profession; peer pressure is the social pressure peers exert on what one ought or ought not to do.

Reference groups are groups whose lifestyles are emulated: "We do not belong to our reference groups but we do identify ourselves with that group", and they are sources of information about culture, lifestyle, aspiration and goals. In the colonial period many middle-class Indians aspired to behave like "proper" Englishmen. NCERT notes the process was gendered: men often wanted to dress and dine like British men but wanted Indian women to remain "Indian", or to be a bit like the proper English woman "but also not quite like her".

Social Stratification

Social stratification is "the existence of structured inequalities between groups in society, in terms of their access to material or symbolic rewards". Society is often compared to the geological layering of rock: strata in a hierarchy, the more favoured at the top and the less privileged near the bottom. Inequality of power and advantage is central to sociology because stratification affects every aspect of every life: opportunities for health, longevity, security, educational success, fulfilment in work and political influence "are all unequally distributed in systematic ways".

Historically there have been four basic systems of stratification: slavery, caste, estate and class. Slavery, in which some individuals are literally owned by others, has existed sporadically in many places; NCERT's two major examples are ancient Greece and Rome and the Southern States of the USA in the 18th and 19th centuries. As a formal institution slavery has gradually been eradicated, "but we do continue to have bonded labour, often even of children". Estates characterised feudal Europe (chapter 4's glossary: nobility, clergy and a "third estate"). NCERT treats caste and class briefly here and at length in Understanding Society.

Caste

In a caste system an individual's position depends totally on status attributes ascribed by birth rather than on anything achieved during life. Class societies also constrain achievement through ascribed attributes such as race and gender, but birth defines a person's position "more completely" in a caste society. In traditional India castes formed a hierarchy of social precedence defined by purity and pollution: the most pure, the Brahmin priestly castes, were held superior to all others, and the Panchamas, sometimes called "outcastes", inferior to all. The system is generally conceptualised as the fourfold varna of Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras, but in reality there are innumerable occupation-based caste groups, the jatis.

Caste has changed considerably. Endogamy and ritual avoidance of contact with so-called lower castes were considered critical for maintaining purity, and urbanisation inevitably challenged this. A.R. Desai observed that modern industries created cities "honeycombed" with hotels, restaurants, theatres, trams, buses and railways, crowded with people of all castes and creeds, where one occasionally "rubbed shoulders with members of the depressed classes", yet "...should not, however be supposed that caste had vanished" (Desai 1975). Discrimination was not easily done away with. A Dalit mill worker, Parmar, told researchers that though there was no open discrimination in the mill, "They will not even drink water from our hands... No matter how well we dress they are not prepared to accept certain things" (Franco et al. 2004). NCERT's conclusion holds both sides: "Even today acute caste discrimination exists. At the same time the working of democracy has affected the caste system. Castes as interest groups have gained strength", and discriminated castes are asserting their democratic rights.

Class

NCERT gives the central ideas of three approaches. In Marxist theory classes are defined by their relation to the means of production: are they owners of land or factories, or owners of nothing but their own labour? Weber used the term life-chances, "the rewards and advantages afforded by market capacity", and argued that inequality might rest on economic relations but also on prestige or political power. The functionalist theory begins from the belief that no society is "classless"; stratification is explained by the functional necessity of placing and motivating individuals in the social structure, "an unconsciously evolved device by which societies ensure that the most important positions are deliberately filled by the most qualified persons". NCERT immediately asks: "Is this true?"

In a traditional caste system hierarchy is fixed, rigid and transmitted across generations; the modern class system is in contrast open and achievement-based, and in democracies nothing legally stops a person from the most deprived class and caste from reaching the highest position. Such stories of achievement exist and inspire. "Yet for the most part the structure of the class system persists": studies of social mobility even in Western societies are far from the ideal of perfect mobility, and those at the lower levels of the caste system are disadvantaged not only socially but also economically. Sociology must be sensitive both to the challenges to caste and to the persistence of discrimination. NCERT's activity asks you to study the life of the late President K.R. Narayanan to discuss ascription and achievement, caste and class.

Status and Role

Status is simply a position in society or a group, with defined rights and duties: a mother occupies a status with norms of conduct, responsibilities and prerogatives. Role is the dynamic or behavioural aspect of status: "Status is occupied, but roles are played." NCERT also puts it the other way round: a status "is an institutionalised role", regularised, standardised and formalised.

In a modern complex society each person occupies many statuses at once (a student to a teacher, a customer to a grocer, a passenger to a bus driver, a sibling, a patient): this is the status set; the smaller and simpler the society, the fewer statuses a person can have. Statuses attained in succession at different stages of life (son, father, grandfather, great-grandfather) form a status sequence.

People perform roles according to social expectations, through role taking and role playing: a child learns to behave according to how her behaviour will be seen and judged by others. Role conflict is "the incompatibility among roles corresponding to one or more status", arising when contrary expectations come from two or more roles. NCERT's common example is the middle-class working woman juggling the roles of mother and wife at home and professional at work. It then refutes the assumption that men do not face role conflict with Tiplut Nongbri's study of Khasi matriliny in Meghalaya (2003): Khasi men are torn between their responsibilities to their natal house and to their wife and children, lack the authority to command their children's loyalty, and cannot pass on even their self-acquired property to their children; the strain affects Khasi women "in a way more intensely", since a wife can never be sure her husband does not find his sister's house more congenial than her own.

Role stereotyping reinforces particular roles for particular members: men and women socialised as breadwinner and homemaker. NCERT then corrects a common view. Roles are often wrongly seen as fixed, learnt and performed as defined. In fact socialisation is a process in which humans "can exercise agency"; they create and negotiate roles through ongoing interaction. People fight discriminatory roles and statuses based on caste, race or gender, while other sections oppose such changes, and individual violations of roles are often punished. So society functions not only with roles and status but also with social control.

Society and Social Control

Social control is one of sociology's most used concepts: "the various means used by a society to bring its recalcitrant or unruly members back into line". It covers the social processes, techniques and strategies by which the behaviour of individuals or groups is regulated, both the use of force and the enforcing of values and patterns for maintaining order.

The two perspectives read it differently. For functionalists, social control restrains deviant behaviour and mitigates tensions and conflicts among individuals and groups to maintain order and cohesion, so it is necessary to stability. Conflict theorists see it more as a mechanism by which dominant social classes impose control on the rest of society; stability is the writ of one section over the other, and law "the formal writ of the powerful and their interests on society".

Peter Berger's passage, quoted by NCERT, describes how control works in practice. "The ultimate and, no doubt, the oldest means of social control is physical violence"; no state exists without a police force or its equivalent, though violence is used economically and as a last resort, the mere threat usually sufficing. In compact groups of people tied by personal loyalty (primary groups), "very potent and simultaneously very subtle mechanisms of control" operate on the deviant. And control is frequently based on fraudulent claims: a little boy can control his peer group by having a big brother who will beat up opponents, or by inventing one.

NCERT's newspaper report of an "honour killing" (a brother beheading his 19-year-old sister in hospital for marrying outside her caste, after the panchayat had pressured the couple) asks students to identify the agencies of control at work: family, caste and the panchayat enforcing endogamy by violence, against the law of the state.

Deviance

Deviance refers to modes of action that do not conform to the norms or values held by most members of a group or society. What is regarded as deviant varies as widely as the norms and values that distinguish cultures and subcultures, and ideas of deviance change from one period to another: a woman choosing to become an astronaut may be considered deviant at one time and applauded at another, even in the same society. NCERT's glossary links norms and sanctions: norms are "rules of behaviour which reflect or embody a culture's values", always backed by sanctions "varying from informal disapproval to physical punishment or execution".

Micro and Macro

NCERT's glossary closes the loop with the chapter's opening contrast. Microsociology studies everyday behaviour in face-to-face interaction, at the level of individuals or small groups (status, role, peer pressure); macrosociology studies large-scale systems such as the political system or the economic order (stratification, the state, law). "Though they appear to be distinct, they are closely connected": a role conflict in one Khasi household is also an effect of a kinship system and of property law.

PART 3 — UPSC Integration

Applying the Terms

Exam Strategy

For Prelims: be exact on NCERT's definitions and examples: aggregate vs quasi group vs social group (six characteristics); primary group (person-oriented) vs secondary (goal-oriented); the four systems of stratification and NCERT's two examples of slavery; status set vs status sequence; ascribed vs achieved status with their usual bases; Weber's life-chances; formal vs informal control. Know the classic sources of the terms: Cooley (primary group, 1909), Sumner (in-group and out-group, and the definition of ethnocentrism, 1906).

For Mains: NCERT's exercises ask why sociology needs special terms, how groups look sociologically, how stratification affects lives, how social control differs across spheres, and how roles and status change. Use both perspectives: a functionalist reading and a conflict reading of the same institution earn more than one alone. Bring in NCERT's Indian cases: Srinivas's Rampura migrants, Desai on caste in cities, Parmar's testimony, Khasi matriliny, the honour-killing report.

Avoid: calling every collection of people a group; treating caste as either unchanged or vanished (NCERT says it has changed and persists); describing roles as fixed scripts (NCERT stresses agency).

Practice Questions

Practice (UPSC-pattern, not past papers). Mains items 1 to 5 are NCERT's own exercises.

Prelims:

1. Passengers waiting at a railway station are, in NCERT's terms, an example of:
   (a) a primary group (b) a secondary group (c) an aggregate, often termed a quasi group (d) a reference group

2. Consider the following statements:
   

   1. Primary groups are person-oriented while secondary groups are goal-oriented.
      
   2. A status sequence is the set of statuses a person holds at the same time.
      
   3. Prestige is attached to the social position rather than to the person who occupies it.
      Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
      (a) 1 and 2 only (b) 1 and 3 only (c) 2 and 3 only (d) 1, 2 and 3

3. Which one of the following is NOT among the four basic systems of stratification named by NCERT?
   (a) Slavery (b) Estate (c) Caste (d) Bureaucracy

4. The term "life-chances", referring to the rewards and advantages afforded by market capacity, is associated in NCERT with:
   (a) Karl Marx (b) Max Weber (c) Emile Durkheim (d) the functionalist theory of stratification

5. "By primary groups I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face association and co-operation." This definition was given by:
   (a) W.G. Sumner (b) C.H. Cooley (c) Ferdinand Tönnies (d) Robert Merton

6. NCERT uses Tiplut Nongbri's study of Khasi matriliny to show that:
   (a) matriliny gives men complete authority over their children
   (b) men too face role conflict, torn between their natal house and their wife and children
   (c) Khasi society is matriarchal
   (d) role conflict is found only among working women

Answers: 1 (c); 2 (b), since the statuses held at the same time form the status set; 3 (d); 4 (b); 5 (b); 6 (b).

Mains:

1. Why do we need to use special terms and concepts in sociology? (150 words)
2. As a member of society you interact with and in different groups. How do you see these groups from a sociological perspective? (150 words)
3. What have you observed about the stratification system in your society? How are individual lives affected by stratification? (250 words)
4. What is social control? Are the modes of social control different in different spheres of society? Discuss. (150 words)
5. Identify the different roles and statuses you play and are located in. Do roles and statuses change? Discuss when and how. (150 words)
6. "Castes as interest groups have gained strength even as ritual hierarchy weakens." Examine with reference to urbanisation and democracy. (250 words)

📦 Revision Capsule

Sources

• NCERT, Introducing Sociology (Class XI), ch. 2 "Terms, Concepts and their Use in Sociology", Reprint 2026-27: ncert.nic.in PDF; 2021-22 print in the book archive, Wayback copy (the texts are identical).
• NCERT, Understanding Society (Class XI), ch. 4 "Introducing Western Sociologists" (mechanical and organic solidarity), Reprint 2026-27: kesy204 PDF.
• Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (New York: Scribner's, 1909), ch. III: Project Gutenberg #72636.
• William Graham Sumner, Folkways (Boston: Ginn, 1906), sections 13-15: Project Gutenberg #24253.
• Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), trans. C.P. Loomis (1957): Internet Archive catalogue record.