Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Family Questions: Final Exam & Reminders

Below are the family questions I accepted for the final exam. They will be on the final, so copy them down. Each participating family member listed will receive 7 activity points for one question, and a bonus point for each additional question I accept.

BLACK FAMILY: (Jessie, MC) 7 points +2 bonus points

QUESTION: What did Rosa Luxemburg believe was needed to relieve some of the economic pressures due to overproduction in capitalist society? (1)
ANSWER: militarism. With imperialism and militarism comes war, which acts as a single phenomenon of capitalist expansion and profit making.

QUESTION: Define Weber's concept of "ideal type" and give one example. (2)
ANSWER: Ideal types are abstractions that emphasize the central elements of a phenomenon and have no moral or ethical implications. Eg. bureaucracy

QUESTION: What meaning of "corporate" does Ahrens use throughout his lectures, "Order and Disorder in Society?" (1)
ANSWER: The original Latin meaning: to make into a body; to unite or combine.


BLUE FAMILY: (Patrick, Scott, Shane, Jessica) 7 points (no bonus points)

QUESTION: In the context of Weber's contributions to methodology, what is "verstehen" sociology? (1)
ANSWER: empathetic understanding or trying to understand the subjective motivations behind social action.


YELLOW FAMILY: (Tye, McKenzie, Jennie, Brent, Justin) 7 points (no bonus points)

QUESTION: Name George Herbert Mead's three states of personality development. (3)
ANSWER: Play, Game, and Generalized Other Stages

_______________________________

I have just gotten into your Ahrens' essays, so I don't think I'll be able to turn them back tomorrow. I'll put them on my door on Friday. To start off our last class we need to do that Assessment Survey again (which should just take a few minutes). We'll wrap up Ahrens, then review for the final exam which is scheduled for MONDAY, (5/12) 2-5PM.

I was not very happy with my stumbling lecture yesterday. Let me just stress one point about how Ahrens tends to look at things, and that is that he focuses on the way human beings have physically modified their world (as do the human ecologists) and draws conclusions from that about our thought life (rather than the other way around). Hope that helps a bit.