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Definitions of Paradigm, Ideology, Culture, and Schemata

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What, by definition, is a paradigm, and how is it similar to and different from ideology, culture and schemata? Moreover, how is the answer to this question relevant to social change?

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Solution Summary

By definition, this solution explains the meaning of the concept paradigm, and then explains how is it similar to and different from ideology, culture and schemata. Finally, it explains how the answer to this question is relevant to social change. Social change theories are also addressed (functionalism, conflict, etc.). References provided.

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1. What, by definition is a paradigm, and how is it similar to and different from ideology, culture and schemata?

A paradigm is a set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline. It serves as a pattern or model. A paradigm is a model or theory, a set of assumptions that is worthy of imitation or duplication: beau ideal, example, exemplar, ideal, mirror, model, pattern, standard. See good/bad. http://www.answers.com/topic/paradigm

Ideology is somewhat similar, as it is defined as a unifying system of beliefs, attitudes, and values expressed in the superstructure of a culture. For example, it could be the body of thought and ideas that guides a society and perpetuates the status quo of the bourgeoisie
www2.cumberlandcollege.edu/acad/english/litcritweb/glossary.htm. Thus, ideology can be considered a comprehensive set of political, economic, and social views or ideas, particularly concerned with the form and role of government www.imuna.org/c2c/app_a.html.

Whereas ideology is a relatively coherent system of values, beliefs, or ideas shared by some social group and often taken for granted as natural or inherently true (static),
www.mhhe.com/socscience/art-film/bordwell_6_filmart/student/olc/glossary.mhtml paradigms are often models that change and evolve as new information either supports or refutes the basic assumptions or tents of the paradigm.

Culture, on the other hand, it more comprehensive than either a paradigm or ideology, as it refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. It is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people. Culture is also defined as communication; communication is culture. Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience, which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning. A culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next. Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group's skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions. In fact, culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action. Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from generation to generation. Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another. http://www.tamu.edu/classes/cosc/choudhury/culture.html

In contrast, a schemata is narrower in scope, as it is a term used in certain cognitive theories about the mental representation of events and situations. They are data structures constructed in a person's mind for representing both generic and specific concepts about the outside ...

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