I don't know squat about sociology so I wouldn't know to what extent the following is true there but keep in mind that academic jargon is typically very free from contextual baggage. Academic language needs to be more precise than common usage. When people not well versed in statistics read an advanced statistics textbook they are ascribing a lot of meaning to words that the words don't technically have in that field.

Think of when we commonly use a word like "average" when what we are normally referring to is the "arithmetic mean" or possibly even the "median" occasionally. How often do you see the error bars listed on political polls or mentions of the standard deviation?

I took some extra credit in theology at university (which turned out to be mostly classical and early medieval history) but the terms used there for "cult" and "sect" are at odds with your average dictionary definition, as were the definitions for words like "atheist", "anti-theist" and "agnostic" as well. Here's the rub: when I talk to someone who isn't aware of or doesn't use the academic definitions, I have to stick to the dictionary definitions in order for there to be a common basis for discussion.

There is nothing wrong with internal jargon. It's a tool of necessity. What is wrong is brow-beating people over the head with your own definitions in order to score some rhetorical point.

To claim that, say, racism is power + prejudice in common usage the way some people do is an example of a master suppression technique and betrays nothing but their dishonesty. In common usage, racism means the belief that some races are inherently more or less valuable than others. Even "race" when applied to humans is an example of this. To my knowledge, applying race to humans in the context of biology is questionable. Yet, in common usage, everyone knows what you mean by "race" and it's obvious that a random selection of people from Leshoto will share traits typically not shared by a random selection of people from Helsinki.