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Higher Education

Sociology: A Canadian Perspective, Third Edition — Chapter 18

Instructions: For each question, click on the radio button beside your answer. When you have completed the entire quiz, click the 'Submit my answers' button at the bottom of the page to receive your results.

Question 1:


a) power is the capacity to realize one’s will despite the resistance of others
b) power of money is socially negotiated and only has value because people agree that it does
c) in human history, different staples have been used to represent value instead of paper and metals
d) power is under constant negotiation or challenge
e) all of the above

Question 2:


a) world governments should ensure that the water remaining in the world will not become a commodity accessible only to the highest bidders
b) the decisions of government officials around the world to privatize water delivery to reduce the public cost of supplying water to their citizens means that fresh-water delivery is coming increasingly under the control of private corporations
c) since private corporations are in the business to make profits, there is a potential for the executives of these companies to increase the cost of water to consumers in order to enhance their bottom lines and their power
d) there are a number of places in the world where the cost of water to consumers has gone up by as much as 200 per cent, an increase that has, naturally, affected the poorest disproportionately
e) all of the above

Question 3:


a) It is the only institution whose officials have the right to tax people.
b) It can assault people through the police and military.
c) It can permit or force people to commit murder when conscripted into military service.
d) It can choose where people live based on their income.
e) It can set policies and laws governing personal behaviour.

Question 4:


a) credentials
b) citizenship
c) laws
d) military service
e) licences

Question 5:


a) largely contingent on whether or not people recognize it as legitimate
b) founded in its ability to use violence legitimately against those who oppose its leaders
c) based on whether or not other states, social groups, and organizations recognize its legitimacy and do not challenge its claim to hold power over its citizens
d) based on its ability to restrict the ways individuals conduct business and their personal and love relationships
e) all of the above

Question 6:


a) As societies became larger and more urbanized and work became more specialized and mechanized, older forms of social order became unworkable.
b) Peasants challenged the traditional authority of aristocracies.
c) Land ownership, which was once the epitome of material power, was replaced by capital and money as symbolic forms of material power.
d) Divine and hereditary rights, which formed the fundamental bases for power in feudal societies, were questioned as families began to marry outside of ethnic and religious lines.
e) The dominance of churches and other religious institutions was challenged by science.

Question 7:


a) The modern state
b) Rationality
c) Bureaucracy
d) The stratification system
e) The vertical mosaic

Question 8:


a) Those who owned and controlled the means of production have exercised the most power in human societies.
b) In the industrial era, those who owned machinery and factories—the proletariat—wielded much power over the workers that kept them running—the bourgeoisie.
c) A person’s power is contingent on her class position or her relationship to the means of production.
d) Other institutions that comprise a society, like the state, religion, family, and the education and legal systems—the superstructure—also reflected and sustained the power of the dominant class.
e) The subordinate class operated under a false consciousness, which masked the true reasons why elites held power, which was because they controlled or owned the means of production.

Question 9:


a) Most societies are stratified and access to material resources is an important determinant of that order.
b) Those who owned and controlled the means of production have always exercised the most power in human societies.
c) People’s capacity to participate in the economy, to produce goods or services in exchange for income, ultimately shaped their life chances.
d) Material power flows from class, status, and party.
e) Material power resides not only in the ownership of the means of production but also in the possession of other material-related assets.

Question 10:


a) John Porter
b) Max Weber
c) Lorne Tepperman
d) C. Wright Mills
e) Antonio Gramsci

Question 11:


a) Canadian society is a vertical mosaic whose own power elite was comprised of political, economic, and cultural leaders from the charter groups.
b) Charter groups, whose heritage is linked to Canada’s English and French ‘founders’, used their material and other advantages to sustain their power and hold subsequent migrants to Canada in an entrance status.
c) Non-charter groups earned lower incomes for their labour, held less prestigious positions, had fewer educational opportunities, and had less access to the state bureaucracy and political system.
d) The privileged position of charter groups has been challenged by other European ethnic groups.
e) There has been little change in the class and ethnic composition of the elites who controlled various power structures between 1931 and 1961.

Question 12:


a) lack of demand for the car
b) cost of the car
c) threat the electric car posed for the bottom line of powerful interests in the oil, gas, and hydrogen industries
d) hydrogen fuel cell being a better alternative to gas than electricity
e) all of the above

Question 13:


a) Max Weber
b) Karl Marx
c) Antonio Gramsci
d) Emile Durkheim
e) Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

Question 14:


a) Frame alignment
b) Breakdown
c) Resource mobilization
d) Solidarity
e) Power-balance

Question 15:


a) crowds and feelings of anger and injustice are sufficient to motivate people to start or join in collective action to challenge existing power structures
b) in order to sustain mobilization and generate change, groups have to draw upon and rely on various resources
c) power of partisans of change must be greater than the power of authorities in order to challenge existing power structures
d) relative deprivation is sufficient to motivate people to start or join in collective action to challenge existing power structures
e) a collective sense of injustice grows when people experience widespread social and/or psychological breakdown

Question 16:


a) Herbert J. Gans
b) Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno
c) Pierre Bourdieu
d) Antonio Gramsci
e) Raymond Breton

Question 17:


a) people who embrace recent trends in organic/local/fair trade foods come from a variety of classes
b) most of the people who embrace recent trends in organic/local/fair trade are white and affluent
c) we cannot distinguish the privileged from other based on their food choices
d) most people are knowledgeable about organic/local/fair trade foods
e) food choice is an insignificant status marker

Question 18:


a) cultural
b) human
c) financial
d) social
e) social network

Question 19:


a) the US was experiencing increasing rates of participation in social clubs, which he interpreted as an indication of the continuing importance of civil society
b) fewer people were acquiring and cultivating the social capital necessary to sustain an effective political community
c) there was an increase in people’s access to the bridging social capital that voluntary associations fostered
d) it is important to foster the growth of bonding social capital, which is essential to the unity of North American society
e) all of the above

Question 20:


a) high rates of union membership in Canada as compared to the US
b) Americans tended to be more conservative and supportive of tradition and collective politics than Canadians, owing to America’s history of commitment to loyalist traditions
c) Canada was born of rebellion
d) Canada has a history that fostered a culture of individualism that discouraged collective responses such as unionism
e) Canadian attitudes are not significantly different from those of Americans

Question 21:


a) the new ‘Knowledge Age’ came about because communication technology, most significantly the Internet, liberated knowledge from its physical environment and led to a democratization of power that would shake up the old authority structures
b) access to the new technologies is limited to the world’s most materially-privileged populations
c) control over the production and distribution of new technologies has, with the support of most governments, remained in the hands of huge private corporations
d) new technologies actually sustain, even strengthen, existing power arrangements, allowing the most materially powerful people and private interests to determine who possesses and uses technology and in what sorts of ways
e) the new network technologies allow for interaction among people in boundless communication space

Question 22:


a) the shift in cultural and material conditions among the francophone population fostered ethnic solidarity with Anglo groups
b) as the Catholic Church came to play an increasingly smaller role in provincial affairs, and as Quebec experienced the Quiet Revolution, the province witnessed unprecedented educational attainment, middle-class wealth, and urbanization among francophones
c) Quebecois nationalism grew when Anglo groups gained economic superiority over the francophones
d) colonial and post-colonial grievances associated with self-identity are a necessary means to mobilization
e) all of the above

Question 23:


a) traced the impetus for revolution in each case to the incapacity of existing state structures to meet or resolve crises arising in the international realm, from war, or economic troubles
b) argued that whichever subordinate groups ended up exploiting situations and fostering revolution depended on the relationships that had been conditioned by the state institutions in crisis
c) argued that democratic state institutions do not always foster peace by permitting everyone access to the state so they can resolve group conflicts in an orderly manner
d) found that the elite power-holding groups in these countries define who has legitimate citizenry in ethnic terms
e) all of the above

Question 24:


a) is a terrible manifestation of rabid ‘tribal’ racisms
b) occurs mostly in undemocratic countries
c) does not result in democratic countries because they permit everyone access to the state so they can resolve group conflicts in an orderly manner
d) results in places where elite power-holding groups define certain groups as non-persons without legitimate citizenry, which leads to these minorities to be liable to persecution or repression or mass murder
e) all of the above

Question 25:


a) bureaucratization has proliferated because of its efficiency
b) bureaucratization has become the primary way that organizations are structured because there are forces present in modern societies that press them all to look the same
c) there is an extraordinary heterogeneity of organizational forms across the social spectrum, which conform to the institutional arrangements configuring the state
d) it is much more difficult for organizational leaders to communicate with and abide by the directives of the state if their organizations align with the ordering of state agencies with which they deal
e) contention emerges when political institutions are ‘closed’ or unresponsive enough to create dissent or ‘open’ or accessible enough not to repress it

Question 26:


a) Organizational
b) Power-balance
c) Political process
d) Resource mobilization
e) Post-colonial

Question 27:


a) export processing zones
b) transnationalism
c) free trade agreements
d) global commodity chains
e) peripheralization

Question 28:


a) that a global proletariat created out of the relentless advance of capitalism would eventually realize their shared class position, rise up en masse to overthrow the ruling bourgeoisie, and establish the conditions necessary for communism
b) that developments in transportation and communication technologies would facilitate contact between far-flung workers and foster the unity and common cause required to incite the revolution
c) the spread of capitalism to all corners of the globe
d) the subjugation of local economies to the demands of capitalist enterprise
e) all of the above

Question 29:


a) the number of social movements that transcend local or national boundaries have increased over time
b) all social movements are class based
c) the majority of social movements involve labourers
d) the most successful social movements are led by people who are well-informed about national rather than global issues
e) the physical proximity of activists is not as crucial anymore to the capacity of a social movement to challenge power successfully

Question 30:


a) multilateral
b) global
c) bilateral
d) influenced by international organizations rather than states
e) influenced by nationalist groups