SOC 0010

Relational thinking (as a way of thinking beyond “individually held” ideas)

social world not as a collection of isolated individuals with fixed traits or ideas, but as a web of relationships, interactions, and positions within structures

• ex: RESPECT ARETHA FRANKLIN v Orgininal Singer

The sociological imagination

Allows sociologists to connect individual experiences to broader social forces/issue, Post WWII so particularly existence of large organizational structures that govern or influence larger and larger numbers of people

Mill’s version of sociology

Sociology = politics, private troubles can be reimagined as public issues, de-individualize private troubles (result of broader social processes)

Weber’s vision of sociology/Science as a Vocation

Sociology ≠ politics, scientific progress causes lack of moral guidance, systems are rational but impersonal so sociologists exposes systems and values so ppl can can make their own choices (ie:math says % chance u might die when in car, science says cars contirbuted to climate change and effects are bad, but neither can determinely say society should drive cars(up to individual)

Becker’s vision of sociology

sociological research inevitably tends to have political implications, everything (research groups, problems,data interpretation) reflects a bias, researchers must be aware of their potential bias

• Problem: taking sides is wrong, however ppl take sides unintentionally

• solution: be upfront, my biases = background

Hierarchy of Credibility

From Becker, participants in ranked groups believe people @ top have the right to define the way things really are, those @ top (rank & status) might be seen as more moral therefore more right

Go

Beyond Mill’s theory, people have theories about why things work —> not just de-individualize but shine light onto how things actual work

mills = use minds (reason) to identify what we think is truth → human freedom
Go = casual explantations of why things work

both trying to understand how the world actually works in order to help ppl realize full capabilities as humans

The Social (Looking Glass) Self

in those fields, the self is internal and stable and here self is fundamentally socially constructed through interaction:

• imagined perception of others

• imagined judgement of that perception

• personal response to imagined judgement

self emerges from social reflection

Beauty as Social Structure or Institution

• informal institution

• reflect preferences of dominant groups, (media portrays certain looks, class affects acesss to grooming/certain fashion)

• ppl who already fit ideal gain more

• white gaze: lens centered on white perspectives and norms (nonwhite features judged against white standards)

• visual culture (especially film) presents women as objects of heterosexual male desire

  • Carrie

• Beauty standards are shaped by power (who defines “ideal”)

• That power is racialized (white gaze) and gendered (male gaze)

• The result is unequal outcomes (pretty privilege)

• halo effect

Power

• The capacity to make others do things

• direct coercion, instittution, bribe

Social Construction/Thomas Theorem

• human perception shapes reality

• process by which differences are produced based on instutitions and then believed to be natural

• SC: aspects (ideas,norms, race/gender) not fixed but created/maintained through social processes,shared beliefs,

• TT: even if a belief is not objectively true, if people act as though it is true, it will produce real outcomes

• how shared meanings are created & why they matter

  • think of Great Depression, ppl thought banks were failing, they pulled money out, the banks failed

Biological Sex Difference

physical and physiological distinctions between males and female & social interpretation of these distinctions

• Sex: Biological Traits

• Gender: Social roles, expectations linked to Sex

Gender v Genetic Essentialism

gender refers to social roles, norms, and expectations linked to being male, female, or nonbinary

• genetic essentialism: Human behavior, abilities, and roles are largely determined by genes/ Differences between men and women are “natural,” fixed, and inevitable

• Gender Essentialism: explains behaviour through fixed male/female nature

Gender role (role theory)

• Society is made up of a set of roles which each coming with norms and expectations —> People learn and perform these roles through socialization

• male/female as social roles, perform behaviors associated with these roles

Doing gender (gender as an achievement)

• gender is not a fixed trait, but a routine, methodic, and ongoing achievement embedded in everyday interaction,

• gender produced socially

Ethnomethology/Social Accountability

• EC: how ppl maintain social order thru small interactions,social order not fixed but rather produced

• Social Accountability: approach where citizens, civil society, and communities actively hold public officials and service providers accountable for their actions and performance,

  • question, challenge, or sanction, power

Biological Human Nature 

• “Universal” expressions of emotion

  • counterpoint, to blank state, we express emotions

• “The Blank Slate”

  • no human nature, humans can form arbitary beliefs

• ‘Underdeveloped instinctual organization’ in humans

  • ways ppl revert to baseline…

Institutionalization

• Habituation: repeated actions become routine

• Typification of Actors and Actions: categorizing people into types and they have expected behaviors

•  Sedimentation (of typification + meanings): typifications accumulate and stabilize

• Shared history (shaping institutionalization): patterns persist across generations/ New members of society inherit existing norms and meanings

When habitualized, typified, and sedimented behaviors become widely accepted and structured

Institutions

• formal: structured & officially recognized; informal: unwritten rules that guide behavior

• big: Broad systems that shape society at large (race,gender,etc); small: Immediate, everyday social contexts (this helps reproduce larger structures)

• inside: dynamics within specific groups ;above: largre systems that shape orgs

Informal norms influence formal rules/big structures (like gender or race) show up in “small” interactions/organizations operate within broader societal systems.

broader systems of norms, values, and social practices that structure behavior in society

Organizations (in contrast to institutions)

• operate within institutions

• concrete, structured groups of people created to achieve specific goals

Space (as a social construction)

• WS: white cultural norms are treated as default

• BS: paces shaped by Black cultural practices, identities, and community

shaped by power, culture, history, and social norms (welcome,access, normal behaviors), can shape social interaction

Inequality in Higher Ed

access to, and success within, colleges and universities is uneven. Students’ outcomes often differ based on factors like income, race, family education, and the type of high school they attended

• DD:students who face multiple overlapping barriers

• Privileged Poor: low-income students who attended elite private or boarding schools before going to top colleges (cultural and academic advantages)

Cultural Capital

form of power that helps ppl succeed/ non-economic resources that influence social mobility

Hidden Curriculum

unwritten, unofficial lessons, values, and norms that students learn in school —> Reinforce social inequality/Maintain cultural norms

Class Status (or Social Class) (as a social institution/structure)

• institution shape people live, interact, and experience opportunities

• income/wealth/education

• Shapes life chances (opportunities for success) —> creates patterns of inequality and privilege

Opportunity hoarding

• how people in higher social classes protect and pass on advantages to their own group

• Reinforces social class inequality/ Limits social mobility

• social closure: groups restrict access (education,network) to resources

Structural Disadvantage/Advantage

society’s systems systematically benefit some groups while putting others at a disadvantage

• elite education, networks, and financial support

Matthew Effect/Accumulated Privilege/Social Mobility Index 

• how small advantages (or disadvantages) compound over time into large gaps

• structutal advantage: Early success → more opportunities → more success

• AP: advantages can stack over time, often across generations

• SMI: colleges best for moving social classes

Inequality, Top-Down Structures, Bottom-up social signals

result of a constant feedback loop between top-down structures (institutions, rules, power) and bottom-up social signals (norms, behaviors, perceptions)

• Top-Down: formal systems that allocate resources and opportunities:

• Bottom-Up: informal but powerful(cultural beliefs,social networks,biases and stereotypes, often unconscious, onsumption and status signaling)

• institutions shapes norms, norms shape instituon

• ex:

  • A society has unequal school funding (top-down structure)

  • Students from wealthier areas perform better (outcome)

  • People start believing success = merit (bottom-up signal)

  • That belief reduces support for redistribution (norm → policy)

  • Policies stay unequal (structure reinforced)

Ethnography/“Inconvenient” Sample

research approach used mainly in anthropology and sociology to study people and cultures in their natural settings.

• immersion,oberservation,participation

• IS: group of people or a field site that is difficult to access, observe, or work with, but is still crucial for understanding the research question

  • Power dynamics hidden in formal institutions/Informal economies or social system/Marginalized or excluded populations

Front Stage/ Back Stage

• FS: public-facing part of behavior—how you act when you know other people are watching

• BS: private area where you drop the performance

constantly move between front stage and back stage depending on context

Racialization

how society creates race as a meaningful concept and then uses it to shape people’s experiences

• social construct/ context (mixed ppl in america v colored ppl in SA)

• diff immigration groups racialized in different ways at different times—sometimes considered “non-white” in earlier periods and later incorporated into “whiteness.”

Degradation (as a social, racialized process)

structured social processes that produce and reinforce inequality

degradation is racialized, it means it is tied to systems of racial classification and hierarchy

A general sense of the history of race as a biologically essentialist concept

• BE: belief that human groups possess fixed, innate, inherited characteristics that determine intelligence, behavior, morality, or social capacity

• colonialism = humans populations classified hierarchically (race is natural, craniometry)

The Color Line (as related in particular to U.S. politics and history in particular, but arguably globally) 

• WEB DuBois

• social, legal, economic, and political boundary drawn between racial groups — especially between white Americans and Black Americans — and the systems built to enforce that division.

  • blackness associated with enslavement & legally enforced in voting rights,housing,employment

W.E.B. DuBois

Exploitation (Specifically, in an economic/Marxian  sense)

• social and economic relationship in which one group benefits from the labor of another while controlling the conditions, products, or profits of that labor

• economic inequality becomes a form of social power

  • working class divided on racial class so they cant take power from those at top

Wages of Whiteness

• poor and working-class white people can receive social, psychological, and political advantages from being classified as white

  • higher social status than Black people

  • access to certain jobs

  • political privileges

  • legal protections

• helps explain how race and class interact rather than operate separately (in context of south)

• racial division can prevent class soliditary

Racialization (as a general process)

• social process through which people, groups, practices, behaviors, or even places come to be understood and treated as belonging to distinct “races,” often with unequal social meanings attached to them.

• categorize people into racial groups —> attach stereotypes or assumptions to those groups —> organize power, status, opportunities, or exclusion around those categories.

“How Jews became White folks”

• Jews eventually became incorporated into American Whiteness

• programs like the GI Bill, subsidized mortgages,access to higher education,and suburban housing expansion helped Jews move into middle class which contributed to being seen as White

• gained social access to institutions and privileges associated with whiteness.

Social policy as a mechanism of racialization

Racialization is not only produced through personal prejudice or cultural beliefs; it is also created and reinforced through state policy, law, and institutions

• Top-Down: governments define, categorize, reward, and punish groups through public policy (ie census)

• GI Bill of Rights: returning WWII veterans with social benefits( low-cost mortgages, tuition assistance, unemployment benefits) but Black veterans were systematically excluded because implementation was controlled locally through segregated institutions (schools,banks)

• Suburbanization: federal policy encouraged white suburban homeownership (Suburbs = whiteness, safety, middle-class status; urban areas = Black,poor,dangerous,)

• FHA: insured mortgages,subsidized homeownership,. standardized lending practices but redlining,refusing loans in integrated neighborhoods, favoring racially homogeneous white suburbs

• AA 4 WM: government policies historically operated as large-scale preferential programs benefiting white men

  • white Americans, especially white men, received extensive state assistance but these benefits were framed as universal or merit-based,

  • while assistance to marginalized groups is often singled out as “special treatment

Restrictive Covenants

• legal clauses historically used in property deeds to prevent certain groups of people (racial or ethnic minorities) from buying, renting, or occupying homes in particular neighborhoods

• form of institutional discrimination or structural racism

  • limit access to schools,jobs, public services

Redlining

• stuctural racism produced by institutions: how government policy, banking systems, and real estate markets can work together to produce long-term racial and class inequality

• themes: Residential segregation, Wealth inequality,Urban decline,Intergenerational effects

General sense of the historical creation of the Hispanic racial/ethnic category in the late-20th century

federal classification that aggregated multiple national-origin populations into a single “pan-ethnic” identity, shaped both “top-down” by the state (especially the census) and “bottom-up” by social movements

• BU: shaped thru social/political organizations (Civil rights-era organizing, Coalition-building across national-origin groups, institutional incentives)

• Origins: distinct national-origin identities which had had different legal statuses, migration histories, and racial positioning

• Role of census categories:

  • created a single statistical category that grouped diverse populations/ It established “Hispanic” as an ethnicity distinct from racial classification, even though in practice many Hispanics also experienced racialization as nonwhite/It made “Hispanic” visible in policy, education, and civil rights enforcement, reinforcing its social reality

• Role of media and advocacy groups

  • Groups (National Council of La Raza (now UnidosUS)) promoted a shared Latino identity for political mobilization, civil rights and labor organizations helped frame shared issues

  • Spanish-language media (especially TV, radio, and newspapers) expanded rapidly in the late 20th century/National advertisers and broadcasters increasingly targeted a unified “Hispanic market,” reinforcing the idea of a cohesive group.

Self-fulfilling prophecies

• People’s beliefs about reality can shape reality itself

• Self-fulfilling prophecy = one important mechanism predicted by the Thomas Theorem

• bank runs, teacher labeling certain students as smart

Broken windows policing

• strategy based on the idea that visible signs of disorder—like broken windows, graffiti, vandalism, public drinking, or fare evasion—encourage more serious crime if left unchecked

Stop and Frisk (esp. In New York City)

• officers temporarily stop a person they consider suspicious and may pat down (“frisk”) the outside of their clothing for weapons or contraband

• broken windows policing → stop and frisk (inflation of crimes being reported, decline in crime, s&f working) → unconstittutional and crimes still going down

General sense of murder rate in NYC now and in historical context

• historical lows of murder rates in NYC despite perceptions of violent criminal

Effects of the “mark of a criminal record”

• social stigma attached to having a criminal history

• racialized

  • criminal record significantly reduces employment opportunities for everyone but negative effect is stronger for Black applicants than for White applicants

• Institutional discrimination

Audit Study (as method for social research)

• research method used in sociology and social science to detect discrimination or unequal treatment in real-world settings

• matched individuals (called “testers”) or equivalent applications to organizations or institutions. The testers are similar in all important characteristics except for one factor being studied

Race as a social construction

• racial categories are created and defined by society rather than based on clear biological differences

• categories change across time and place & social meanings attached to race influence people’s opportunities, identities, and treatment

Race as real

• socially real because it has real effects on people’s lives, opportunities, and experiences

• Racial classifications influence:

  • education opportunities,

  • employment,

  • housing,

  • healthcare,

  • policing,

Socially constructed difference (e.g. racial identity) as grounds for exclusion/oppression

• differences that societies create, define, and give meaning to — rather than differences that naturally determine social value or ability

• Dominant groups may use to justify unequal treatment/limit access to resources

Socially constructed difference (e.g. racial identity)  as grounds for social power

• societies attach meanings, value, and hierarchy to them which means these categories can be used as a basis for social power

• real” in practice when they are used to distribute power unequally/justify privilege,

Social mobility

• movement of individuals or families within a society’s economic or social hierarchy over time

• Rags to Riches: Upward mobility

• Riches to rags: downward mobility

• not distributed evenly across racial and ethnic groups due to historical and structural conditions (nequal schooling, housing segregation, labor market bias)

Mechanisms (as explanatory devices in social science)

explanatory process that shows how and why one social outcome leads to another

• Mass incarceration operates as a mechanism of downward mobility and intergenerational inequality

  • reduced access to jobs, housing, netowrks

• Marriage can function as a mechanism for both upward mobility and class reproduction (but also assortive mating)

  • Marriage can provide access to wealth, elite networks

• Education is one of the central mechanisms of mobility in modern societies but also repdocue inequalities

• Entry into elite occupations (politics, law, finance, academia, executive leadership) is a mechanism shaping mobility and elite reproduction

A general sense of how elite students get jobs in elite professional services firms (law, finance, consulting)

process of social reproduction rather than pure meritocracy.

• educational credentials not simply to measure skill, but to sort status groups

  • Elite students often possess ease with elite interaction, confidence in institutional settings,

• Lauren Rivera shows interviewers prioritize “chemistry,” extracurriculars matter heavily

• internships often require social capital & interview performance depends on coaching;

Homophily

• tendency of people to associate with others who are similar to themselves (status or values)

• creates self-reinforcing elite networks: Elite schools → elite internships → elite firms → elite friendships/marriages → elite children

Meritocracy

• an ideal system where rewards are distributed according to ability and effort and a critical concept used to analyze how societies justify inequality

• counts as “merit” changes historically and institutionally

  • elite firms often reward confidence, ease with authority, elite cultural fluency (class socialization)

Power of macro-structural explanations for explaining broad social patterns

• shift attention away from individual choices or isolated interactions and toward the large-scale institutions, historical processes, and distributions of power that systematically shape outcomes across populations

  • connect group-level regularities & why inequality persists despite formal equality

• racialized mobility patterns, the strongest explanations tend to show how:

  1. historical inequalities create structural constraints,

  2. institutions reproduce them,

  3. everyday interactions reinforce them,

  4. and individuals navigate these conditions unevenly

Inadequacy of macro-structural explanations for explaining more detailed social patterns

“structure” alone often cannot explain the detailed texture of social life bc fails to explain

• why some individuals or communities deviate from broader patterns (within group variation)

• why similar institutions produce different outcomes in different contexts

• undervalue of agency

Role of social capital (esp. education) in explaining social mobility

• differences in intergenerational mobility across immigrant groups is immigrant selectivity

  • imigration often selects people with unusually high motivation, education, ambition, or human capital relative to the society they came from

  • parents have cultural/social nettworks they can utlize

Social construction of “brilliance” and “badness” in school settings

• race,gender, and class

• teachers impact perceptions of intelligence

• boys in higher-tier classes almost encouraged to shout out answers (brilliance), boys in lower-tier classes disciplined more(badness)

• girls in higher-tier classes got there based on hardwork, boys had gift

  • cultivated by other students & teachers (teachers seeing outbursts by white/asian boys as signifier of intelligence, outbursts by hispanic boys more disciplined)

Methods basics

• Quantitative methods → patterns, correlations, population-level trends (ehtnograpy, interviews)

• Qualitative methods → meanings, experiences, social processes

• Community-engaged approaches → collaboration, public relevance, empowerment

• interviews are supported by additional evidence or sources (corrobation)

  • Triangulation means using multiple methods, data ,sources, theories, or researchers to study the same phenomenon.

Sociological approaches to value

• “value” isn’t treated as a purely economic or subjective preference/ socially produced through relationships, meanings, and power structures

  • Hostile Worlds: Money and markets “corrupt” non-market values

  • value is nothing but

    • money/culture/ power

    • rational actions

  • different kinds of social relationships (“ties”) that shape value differently

    • Value is not inherent in objects or individuals but emerges from networks of relations

Embeddedness

have social relations to other people which condition of behavior, not all about rational thoughts or social institutions

• Under-socialized Account: social institutions have no real role/shape behavior

• Over-socialized Account: social institutions completely shape behavior/outcomes

Strong/Weak Social Ties

• ST: close, frequent, emotionally intense relationships

• WT: more distant, less frequent, and less emotionally intense relationships

Strength of Weak ties (As relates to finding work)

• weak ties give new information

• occupy different social spaces (firm hiring or how to tailor application to job)

• overides benefit of strong ties

Seven lessons in sociology:

• Social Constuction Matters

• Instuttions are Everywhere

• Inequality is endemic to scoail life

• History is essential

• Social science is different from natural science

• social explanation is hard

• social explanion is power