UPHESC Assistant Professor Sociology 2025, 2026 PYQs

Concept: Each scholar is printed against his own book.

1. Rostow – Stages of Economic Growth (1960) → I.
2. Yogendra Singh – Modernization of Indian Tradition (1973) → II.
3. Peter Berger (with Luckmann) – The Social Construction of Reality (1966) → III.
4. Ulrich Beck – World Risk Society (1999) → IV.

Short trick: When every pair is already in a straight line, the answer is a-I, b-II, c-III, d-IV.

Concept: David Hardiman (Subaltern Studies historian) wrote 'The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India' (1987).

1. It studies the 1922–23 Devi movement among adivasis of south Gujarat – abstention from liquor and meat, boycott of Parsi liquor dealers.
2. Kathleen Gough wrote on peasant revolts and Nayar kinship; Gerda Lerner on patriarchy; Daniel Lerner on modernisation ('Passing of Traditional Society').

Short trick: Devi movement (Gujarat 1922) → Hardiman (Subaltern school).

Concept: Marx's historical materialism: material (economic) conditions shape social life and consciousness.

1. Statement I is true – Marx's whole theory rests on the materialist conception of history.
2. Statement II is false – for Marx 'it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness'. Change comes from contradictions between forces and relations of production.
3. The idea that ideas drive change is closer to Hegel (or Weber's 'Protestant Ethic').

Short trick: Marx stood Hegel on his head: matter first, ideas later.

Concept: Ernest Gellner ('Nations and Nationalism', 1983) is the leading modernist theorist of nationalism.

1. He argued that industrial society needs a mobile, literate, culturally homogeneous workforce created by mass education – this produces nationalism, nations and nation-states.
2. Benedict Anderson linked nations to print capitalism ('Imagined Communities'), not directly to the industrial revolution.
3. Martin Shaw writes on war/global state; Gus Martin on terrorism.

Short trick: Gellner = industrialism; Anderson = print capitalism.

Concept: Conflict theory (Marx, Dahrendorf, Coser, Collins) sees society as an arena of inequality and struggle over scarce resources.

1. Its central focus is struggle between groups/classes – in Marx, class struggle is the motor of history.
2. Social stability and functional harmony are the concerns of functionalism; collective consciousness is Durkheim's term.

Short trick: Functionalism = consensus; Conflict = struggle.

Concept: Robert Redfield ('The Folk Culture of Yucatan', 1941) placed communities on a continuum from folk to urban.

1. He compared four Yucatan communities (tribal village, peasant village, town, city of Merida).
2. Moving towards the urban end, there is more disorganisation, secularisation and individualisation.
3. He also gave Great and Little Tradition, used in India by Marriott and Singer.

Short trick: Redfield: Folk ↔ Urban, Great ↔ Little tradition.

Concept: In 'Modernity and Self-Identity' (1991) Giddens wrote that 'modernity is a risk culture'.

1. Late modernity produces 'manufactured risk' (ecological, nuclear, financial) created by human knowledge itself.
2. Reflexivity and trust in expert systems are central to living with such risk.
3. Ulrich Beck developed the related idea of 'risk society'; Derrida = deconstruction; Habermas = unfinished project of modernity.

Short trick: Risk: Beck = risk society; Giddens = risk culture / manufactured risk.

Concept: Georg Simmel ('The Philosophy of Money', 1900; 'The Concept and Tragedy of Culture') separated objective culture from subjective culture.

1. Objective culture = products humans create (art, science, technology, money, institutions).
2. Subjective culture = the individual's capacity to absorb and use these products.
3. The 'tragedy of culture': objective culture grows faster than subjective culture. Ogburn–Nimkoff distinguished material and non-material culture, which is different.

Short trick: Simmel = objective vs subjective; Ogburn = material vs non-material (cultural lag).

Concept: The 'Thomas theorem' comes from W. I. Thomas and Dorothy S. Thomas, 'The Child in America' (1928).

1. 'If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences' – people act on their definition of the situation.
2. Merton built his 'self-fulfilling prophecy' on it.
3. Davis–Moore = functional theory of stratification; Horton–Hunt and MacIver–Page are textbook authors.

Short trick: Definition of the situation → Thomas & Thomas → Merton's self-fulfilling prophecy.

Concept: Social movements may be reform, revolutionary, resistance (reactionary), expressive etc.

1. A resistance movement tries to block or reverse a change already under way.
2. The Ku Klux Klan (USA, from 1865) is a white-supremacist group that resisted the rights of freed Black people and later civil rights – the textbook example of a resistance/reactionary movement.
3. It is not an African tribe, a process of socialisation or a role set.

Short trick: KKK = resist change → resistance (reactionary) movement.

Concept: Piaget gave four invariant stages of cognitive development.

1. Sensori-motor (0–2 yrs): object permanence.
2. Pre-operational (2–7): symbolic thought, egocentrism.
3. Concrete operational (7–11): conservation, logical thinking about concrete things.
4. Formal operational (11+): abstract, hypothetical reasoning. Order: iii, i, ii, iv.

Short trick: S-P-C-F: Sensori → Pre → Concrete → Formal.

Concept: In 'Social and Cultural Dynamics' (1937–41) Sorokin gave a cyclical (pendulum) theory of change between cultural mentalities.

1. Ideational – truth from faith/supersensory reality.
2. Sensate – truth from the senses, material and hedonistic.
3. Idealistic – a balanced mix of the two.
4. 'Systematic' is not one of Sorokin's types.

Short trick: Sorokin's pendulum: Ideational ↔ Idealistic ↔ Sensate.

Concept: Neil Smelser, 'Theory of Collective Behaviour' (1962), gave the structural-strain (value-added) theory.

1. Six determinants in sequence: structural conduciveness, structural strain, growth of generalised belief, precipitating factors, mobilisation for action, operation of social control.
2. Strain in the social structure is the key cause of movements.
3. Resource mobilisation (not 'deficit') theory is by McCarthy and Zald.

Short trick: Smelser = Strain → Value-added (6 stages).

Concept: Georg Simmel's formal sociology analysed how the number of members shapes group interaction.

1. Isolated individual (monad), dyad (two – intimate but fragile; ends if one leaves), triad (three – roles of mediator, 'tertius gaudens', divide and rule).
2. Adding a third member changes the form of interaction fundamentally.
3. Sumner gave in-group/out-group and folkways; Sorokin gave cultural dynamics.

Short trick: Simmel counts members: 1-2-3 → monad-dyad-triad.

Concept: Melvin Tumin ('Social Stratification', 1967) listed five features of stratification.

1. It is social; it is ancient; it is ubiquitous (universal); it is diverse in its forms; it is consequential (far-reaching consequences for life chances and life styles).
2. 'Analogous' (similar everywhere) contradicts 'diverse in forms' and is not in his list.

Short trick: Tumin's 5: Social, Ancient, Ubiquitous, Diverse, Consequential – 'SAUDC'.

Concept: S. C. Dube's 'Indian Village' (1955) is a study of Shamirpet, near Hyderabad (then Hyderabad state).

1. Rampur (Delhi) – Oscar Lewis; Rampura (Mysore) – M. N. Srinivas.
2. Sripuram (Tanjore) – André Béteille, 'Caste, Class and Power'.
3. Shivapur is not linked with Dube.

Short trick: Dube = Shamirpet; Béteille = Sripuram; Lewis = Rampur; Srinivas = Rampura.

Concept: The differential scale (method of equal-appearing intervals) was developed by L. L. Thurstone (with Chave, 1929).

1. Judges sort statements into 11 piles; each statement gets a scale value; respondents agree/disagree.
2. Likert = summated rating scale; Guttman = cumulative (scalogram) scale; Pearson = correlation coefficient.

Short trick: Thurstone = Differential; Likert = Summated; Guttman = Cumulative.

Concept: Lundberg defined a hypothesis as 'a tentative generalisation, the validity of which remains to be tested'.

1. It guides data collection and is accepted or rejected after testing.
2. Intuition and imaginative ideas are not testable propositions; sampling is a method of selecting units.

Short trick: Hypothesis = tentative, testable guess (Lundberg).

Concept: 'The Fields and Methods of Sociology' is a collection edited by L. L. Bernard with many contributors (first published 1934; later reprinted, e.g. 2012).

1. Its chapters by different sociologists survey the fields and research methods of sociology – hence 'and others'.
2. Lundberg wrote 'Social Research'; Goode and Hatt wrote 'Methods in Social Research'; Pearson wrote 'The Grammar of Science'.

Short trick: Fields and Methods = L. L. Bernard (ed.) & others.

Concept: The product-moment coefficient of correlation, $r$, is Karl Pearson's.

1. $r=\frac{\sum (x-\overline{x})(y-\overline{y})}{\sqrt{\sum (x-\overline{x}{)}^2\sum (y-\overline{y}{)}^2}}$, ranging from −1 to +1.
2. Mannheim – sociology of knowledge; Popper – falsifiability; Polanyi – 'The Great Transformation'.

Short trick: Four Karls: Pearson = statistics, Popper = falsification, Mannheim = knowledge, Polanyi = economy.