SOC 100 - Final exam review notes

General Information

• Sociology is a relatively young discipline

• Comte was interested in classifying sciences

• How societies organize collective life - ie how we live together - is a major object of inquiry

• Philosophers as far back as Socrates and Plato wondered what makes a good society

• Societies aren’t the same as states, as they are built on interactions among its members

• States are institutions

How We Become Social Beings

• Unlike animals, human beings are unable to survive and develop on their own

• The family is the first “point of entry” into society

• Family education in the first stages of live allows children to integrate into society

• By becoming individuals we also become members of society

• It’s through society that we become human beings

Children and Egocentrism

• In their development stages, children learn to abandon their egocentrism

• They learn to understand things through perspectives other than their own

• By learning deductive reasoning and abstract thought, we learn to think about social matters

Society

Large-scale human group sharing common territory and institutions

• Every society organizes itself on the bases of 3 main dimensions of social life:

  • Social activities: how we do/make things (material)

  • Representations: how we name things, ex. languages carry different worldviews (immaterial)

  • Social meaning: what things mean to us - every society organizes social significance, every society has their own way of defining what things mean to us, ex. 9/11 memorial (immaterial)

The Sociological Imagination

• An idea developed by C Wright Mills to help individuals see the connections between their lives and larger society

• Logic is not enough for sociology because logic is spatial, not historical

• Imagination is also important because it allows us to understand things from other people’s perspectives

• We can understand our lives in more depth if we understand the larger history of our society

Value Judgements

• Opinions about reality that are not based on empirical, factual evidence

• Cannot be used to explain social problems

• Bias and prejudice are forms of value judgements

• Draw conclusions based on a limited knowledge, an inward-looking (subjective) assessment of reality often based on hearsay, prejudice, popular opinion, and are one-sided

Three Core Foci of Sociology

• The study of social inequality

• The role of social institutions in society

• The study of social change

Social Inequality

• The gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged

• Gaps exist in terms of rights, opportunities, rewards and privileges

• Inequality is based on these differential experiences

Social Institutions

The norms, values, and rules of conduct structuring human interactions 

• Family, education, religion, economy, and government

• Research on institutions has shown the following: 

  • How they maintain the functionality of society

  • How institutions hold society back

  • How institutions facilitate social change 

  • Institutions are standardized ways of doing things, as actions become regularized, patterned, and reproduced

  • How institutions are contradictory, at times helping society run smoothly, at other times reproducing social inequality within societies, but are always potential sites of social change

Social Change

The alteration of culture and social institutions over time

• Ex. secularization, which is the process of a religion losing its authority over individuals and in social life in general

• Sociologists wonder why religion has lost some of its influence in modern societies, and might study the changing role of religion in society

Contributions to sociology

• Modern democracy

• The industrial revolution

• The scientific revolution

Sociology and Democracy

• Modern democracy is foundational to sociological thought

• The authority for the organization of society lies within it

• Society is created by the sum of collective actions

• With the change from theocracy to modern democracy, public issues become apparent as an object of concern for society

• Ex. social issues are perceived as stemming from social causes vs natural causes

The Scientific Revolution

• Reason and empiricism: use of scientific methods to know the world

• Empirical evidence of sensory experience and rational thinking are part of the production of scientific knowledge

• Advanced social values such as freedom, equality, tolerance, fraternity, etc, opposed to the absolute power of the Monarchy and the religious authorities

Industrial Revolution and Urbanization

• Industrialization brought about a period of unheralded and rapid urbanization

• Urban life changed the dynamics of social relations

• Before the 19th century, most of the world lived in rural environments, and social life was governed by traditions

• As a result of the massive change in demographics and social relations, studies of the new social realities in urbanized cities have led to the development of sociology

Three Core Aims of Sociology

1. Define general themes in everyday life - study social life and culture (seeing the general in the particular) - ex. hashtags

2. Critically determine what is familiar/common sense in human societies and why it is that way (question the familiar)

3. Examine how individuals are shaped by society and how, in turn, individuals shape their society

Studying Sociology

• Sociologists strive to find patterns in people’s behaviours (what Peter Berger called seeing the general in the particular)

• When patterns are found, sociologists do research to determine why those patterns exist

• Through systematic study, sociology can outline patterns in society, how they’re established and how they become common sense to those living them

• Sociologists examine the dual process of how we shape society and how society shapes us

• Creation of institutions is an example of this process as it is carried out by collectives of humans who determine how these institutions should function

• In turn, institutions influence the individuals who created them in terms of how they think and how they act

Questioning the Familiar

• What determines collective behaviour? Why do we do social things in a certain way and not another?

• Ex. leaving a coat on a chair in a public place. We understand this sign, and act accordingly. How did this convention come to be?

• Horace Miner’s “Body Rituals among the Nacirema” (1956) is a poignant example of an exercise in questioning the familiar

Durkheim and Suicide

• Interested in social integration and how it holds society together

• Noted how different sociology was from philosophy due to its reliance on empirical research

• Found that suicide wasn’t entirely a matter of the individual’s decision to take their own life

• He determined suicide rates differed by country, gender, and religion

• This confirmed for him that the differences in suicide rates could only be explained by considering social facts, or those elements of society beyond the individual’s control

• Integration: social bonds

• Regulation: social norms

Egoistic Suicide

• Occurs in societies with low levels of integration

• The importance of social integration

• Meaning making as a function of the religious institution

• Differences in statistics between Protestants and Catholics

• Why were there more suicides in countries that were mostly Protestant?

Altruistic Suicide

• Occurs in societies with high levels of integration

• Excessively high integration in society can lead to higher suicide rates

• Suicide for social ends

• High integration in the army

• Ex. suicides for political causes/religious cults

• Ex. jumping on a grenade to save those around you

Anomic Suicide

• Occurs in societies with excessively low regulation (lack of social integration)

• From nomos meaning the social and political norms governing individual behaviour

• Breakdown of norms and values, leading to breakdown of social bonds

• Normlessness: “man is a wolf to man”

• Durkheim refers to the loss of meaning and connection to others

• Ex. unsettlement in the great depression caused people to commit suicide

Fatalistic Suicide

• Occurs in societies with excessively high regulation

• Ex. suicide of slaves

Examples of Research Methods

• Ex. studying crime with surveys may allow sociologists to ask many different kinds of questions about crime

• Ex. studying crime with experiments may allow sociologists to understand how people perceive the perpetrators of crime

• Ex. studying crime with interviews allows sociologists to unpack more complex thought patterns that lead people to commit crimes

• Ex. studying crime with participant observation may make it easier for sociologists to understand how police enforce the law by joining them on one of their shifts

Breaching Experiments

• Argued that we could better understand social norms and how they produce order in society by breaking social rules and conventions within everyday interactions

• Breaking a social rule might reveal the unrecognized ways individuals participate in maintaining a social order in interactions

• Ex. acting like a guest in your parents’ house

Socialization

The lifelong process by which we learn about society’s norms, customs, and ideologies

• Also provides us with the skills to participate in society

• Allows individuals to find a good fit and an identity, or sense of self

• A process theorized differently depending on the sociological theory one uses

Structural Functionalism

Seeks to explain how society can function cohesively

• Metaphor of body, institutions have functions like organs

• Positive view on the process of socialization

• Looks at how different structures and institutions in society work together for its well being

• Institutions fulfill social functions

• Focus on developing autonomy to encourage ideal conditions of integration of members to society

Conflict Theory

*not a school of thought, but rather a way of grouping theories that contain some kind of conflict

• How our class positions shape who we are as social beings

• Allows us to see how society and the process of socialization is shaped by conflict between groups, causing us to think about this process critically

• Class conflict determines how individuals are raised to behave in human societies. 

• Individuals are affected by the unequal distribution of resources

  • Ex. Capitalists (people who own large businesses) have more power in society than wage workers

• The struggle over power is a key element of social life, influencing the process of socialization

• How conflict shapes social phenomena

Feminist Theory

• Has broadened the application of Marx’s theory, retaining its focus on conflict, but placing a special focus on gender

• Gender relations are defined by men possessing more social power than women so that everything in society is organized around men, their positions and their experiences

• This system of male domination that feminist theorists research in their work and resist with their activism is known as the patriarchy

Symbolic Interactionism

• How we form our sense of self through social interactions in our everyday lives

• Interactionists believe our identity and sense of self come from others

• Socialization is more of a horizontal process influenced by everyday interactions and shared experiences

3 Premises for Symbolic Interactionism

1. Humans act toward things based on the meanings they assign to them

2. The meaning of things comes from social interactions between people

3. Individuals understand and modify meanings

Stages of Role Taking

• Stage 1: Children learn language and other symbols by imitating significant others.

• Stage 2: The role playing stage—children pretend to be other people in their lives

• Stage 3: The game stage—children learn complex rules to play the games they are learning to play

• Stage 4: Children think about themselves through the eyes of others

Agents of Socialization

• The significant and generalized others (people that assume social roles, ex. teacher, parent, etc) in the process of socialization.

• Many different agents of socialization exist but sociologists tend to focus on family, peer groups, and the education system

Cooley and the Looking Glass Self

• Charles Cooley explained that our sense of self is assembled and constructed from the reactions of others

• When we look at other people, they act as a mirror that helps us to understand how we appear

Dramaturgical Perspective

• When we meet others, we work to influence their impression of us

• The performance of self is a process and ongoing activity that is formed and that changes over time

• Performative: according to Goffman, we perform ritualized roles to manage social interactions by presenting a version of self adapted to the situation (think about the rules or norms that govern face to face interactions)

• We do this to make a positive impression, to avoid embarrassment and to have successful interactions

• Situational: the ways in which we perform social roles depend on situations. Interactions define situations

Face Work

• We adopt suitable social faces to control the impressions others receive of ourselves according to situations

• We do this to make a positive impression, to avoid embarrassment and to have successful interactions

Saving Face

Corrective practices that compensate for a discrediting occurrence to avoid embarrassment and to protect the impression that we work to give to others

• Preventive practices: things we do to avoid embarrassment and discrediting occurrences

• Defensive practices: things we do to protect our own projections from being discredited

• Protective practices: things we do to save the definition of a situation projected by another

Dealing with “Faux Pas”

• The pressures from social constraints may also become oppressive

• We find ways to diffuse these situations of disruption and try to resolve these

• Anecdotes, board games, carnival, dances, are cultural practices that respond to the need for a temporary release from the pressure of norms and social anxieties (ex. catharsis)

Aging and Socialization

• 18th-19th century: concept of childhood as a separate period of life

• 20th century: concept of adolescence - consciousness of a stage of emotional and psychological development

• 21st century: the concept of early adulthood - new life stage

• The socialization process of learning how to become a member of society is shaped by the society we live in during our lifetime

• The time period, culture and institutions of our societies shape this process and our understanding of it

• In other words, the experience of aging depends on social factors

Stages of Socialization

1. Primary socialization

2. Secondary socialization

3. Anticipatory socialization and resocialization

4. Gender socialization

Primary Socialization

The process by which individuals learn the unwritten rules of a society, like how to have a conversation

• Individuals learn how to become a member of society by learning and discovering the attitudes, values, and actions that are culturally and socially appropriate

• Family members in particular are very important in this process

• Applies at the societal level

Secondary Socialization

The process by which individuals learn about the attitudes and appropriate behaviours of a subculture within the larger society

• It may refer to a soccer team, for example, as individuals have to learn how to interact with their teammates

• Applies at a smaller, more local level

Anticipatory Socialization and Resocialization

1. Refers to the process by which individuals rehearse potential roles they may take on in the future, like medical students interacting with patients

2. When individuals are socialized to replace an old role in their lives with a new one, like individuals who retire, for example

Gender Socialization

The process of learning how to behave in a way that is consistent with the gender rules and norms of your society

• The play we engage in as children influences our understanding of what it means to act in a masculine or feminine fashion in ways society deems appropriate

• We are taught and retaught how to act according to our gender throughout our lives

Social construction of knowledge

• What passes for knowledge in society

• Sociologist are interested in the different “realities” that are taken for granted (social relativity) within society and between societies

• Ex. knowledge of the criminal vs knowledge of the criminologist

• Also interested in the relationship between human thought and the social context that it comes from

Social construction

• Berger and Luckmann contend that it is this knowledge that constitutes the fabric of meaning essential to the existence of society

• Knowledge is created through an interactive, relational effort and maintained by social interactions

• When we interact with others, we reinforce our common knowledge of reality

• Also based on the symbolic interactionist theory

• Social construction is a process:

1. People categorize experiences and act on these categories

2. Although these categories stem from human activity, we take these for granted

3. The relativity of social constructions doesn’t mean that “everything goes” and “nothing is ‘real’ ” - not all social constructions are equally valid

4. The social construction of knowledge is an ongoing historical process

Routinization

• The practical motive of everyday life: we have a “recipe knowledge” that supplies us with knowledge required by the routines of everyday life

• That knowledge to allows us to typify situations/knowledge of others

• Knowledge of everyday life is structured by relevance determined by practical interests, in other words, by your situation in society

• Knowledge is socially distributed: the social stock of knowledge has a “relevance structure”

• Defining how it is shared: professional expertise, know-how, personal knowledge (systems of expertise)

Social construction of deviance

• The norms we define as important are subject to change and look different in different societies and cultures

• What we label as deviant changes when the norms and values of a society change

• E.g. we typify Banksy as a visual artist

Deviance

Any minor or serious act that breaks an accepted social standard (norm)

• Many deviant acts break norms but are not punishable by the state

• Deviance varies according to the severity of the public’s response to the act, its perceived harmfulness, and the degree of public agreement with regard to the act’s seriousness

Variability of deviance

• Severity of public response: the public’s reaction to the act, ranging from minor disapproval to severe jail time

• Perceived harmfulness: the amount of harm the perpetrator is thought to have created through the deviant act

• Degree of public agreement: the extent to which the public agrees the act is deviant or criminal

Types of crimes

• Minor deviances:

  • They are not criminal and generally not harmful to society

  • Seen as minor ways to step outside the norms of society

• Lesser crimes:

  • Criminal, but not serious violations of social norms

• Consensus crimes:

  • Illegal and thought of as extremely harmful to society

  • Produce a high level of public agreement regarding their seriousness

  • Come with serious punishments

• White-collar crimes: 

  • Have high social costs and a negative impact on society

  • Often occur in a work setting and are motivated by greed for monetary gain

  • Involve intentional acts of violence and are small or large in scale depending on the amount of money stolen

Social explanations of deviance and crime

• Deviance forces us to critically examine our social norms: are they unjust or unethical? 

• Social explanations come from theories that seek to understand criminal and deviant behaviour as a product of the influence of an individual’s environment

• Focus on why an individual might be more or less likely to commit crimes based on their social environments

• Social explanations generally advocate for rehabilitative punishments and crime prevention by focusing on the contextual factors of crime, such as eliminating poverty and facilitating access to employment and education

• Some of these theories shift the emphasis away from the offender and his environment to focus on the public reaction to the act

Why are people deviant

• Individual-level explanations focus on the deviant or criminal’s character and even biology. For e.g. “criminals are just bad people”

• Individual-level explanations tend not to believe in rehabilitation and place emphasis on punitive sentences despite the fact that there is little empirical evidence to support the claim that tougher sentences reduce crime rate

Deviance theories

1. Strain theory

2. Subcultural theory

3. Learning theory

4. Control theory

5. Labelling theory

Strain theory

• When an individual’s goals and their opportunities for success do not match

• Ex. an individual might be unable to fulfil society’s goals due to their circumstances and experience strain, turning to deviant or criminal behaviour to fulfill culturally defined goals (e.g. monetary success)

Subcultural theory

• Focuses on the role of culture in explaining criminal and deviant behaviour in human societies  

• Ex. gangs and criminal organizations are subcultures with distinct values and norms

• They are a collective adaptation to social conditions and a rejection of the establishment’s cultural goals

Learning theory

• An extension of strain and subcultural theories

• Developed by Edwin Sutherland

• Different environments provide opportunities to learn how to engage in deviance and crime

• If people interact with and are exposed to criminals, they learn to engage in criminal behaviour

Control theory

Weak social control in society (lack of integration) may lead individuals to commit criminal or deviant acts

• Developed by Travis Hirschi

• Weak social control might be the result of multiple factors

• Ex. an individual might not have a close relationship with their family, teachers or peer groups, or they might not have strong institutional involvement if not active in organizations

• Individuals might have weak beliefs in traditional values or lack employment or educational activities

Labelling theory

• Developed by Howard Becker

• Explains criminal and deviant behaviour as a process by which labelling someone as a criminal produces a self-fulfilling prophecy

• When people are viewed as deviant or a criminal, they become stigmatized and viewed as a criminal by others, and turn to crime as a result

1. Acts of primary deviance refers to early, random acts of deviance that are common

2. Acts of secondary deviance are more serious (and frequent) and may cause an individual to organize their life and identity around being deviant (possibly leading to more deviance)

• For ex. society responds differently to acts of primary deviance (e.g. public drunkenness), than to acts of secondary deviance (e.g. car theft)

Durkheim and deviance

Durkheim believed crime and deviance served a function for human societies, as they affirmed cultural values and norms

• There is, as functionalists like Durkheim suggest, a “normality of crime.”

• Durkheim argued crime and deviance will never go away or be eliminated because it is important and functional for human societies

• According to Durkheim, crime serves four main functions in human societies:

1. It affirms cultural values and norms

2. Society’s response to deviance and crime teach individuals what is right and wrong

3. Responding to deviance and crime unites societies

4. Deviance and crime can spur social change (when they break unjust norms, and unjust laws)

Punishment

The penalty inflicted on someone for committing a crime

• Punishment usually entails a denial of certain privileges, abilities, or rights

• In Canada this may mean fines, community service, imprisonment, or restorative justice measures

• Functions of punishment in human societies:

  • Retribution: a punishment should be comparable to the suffering caused by the crime. 

  • Deterrence: or the process of convincing individuals to not commit crimes again or commit them in the first place

  • Rehabilitation: trying to heal or reform a criminal as opposed to solely punishing them

    • Parole: the early release of a prisoner for things such as good behaviour

    • Probation: releasing a prisoner into the community under certain conditions

Power of the situation

• Milgram investigated criminal and deviant behaviour by testing to see how blindly individuals would follow orders from an authority figure

• The Milgram experiment (1963) is a famous example of the power of the situation over individual behaviour

• Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment (1971) tested the length to which individuals accepted roles and followed orders

• Both studies highlighted how deviant behaviour is more likely and more severe in certain social settings

• The studies highlight how some situations can make people act in ways contrary to their usual selves

• Ergo, deviance is more likely in certain social settings and situations

• Social forces and environmental factors influence individual behavior more than personality traits or will power

Crime rates

• Crime has consequences at both the micro-individual level and at the macro-social level

• Younger people commit more crimes than older people

• After 60, people are less likely to commit crimes

• Women only commit about 25% of all the crimes committed in Canada

• Crime by men has been in decline over the past 20 years while crime by women is on the rise

• A disproportionate number of Aboriginal and African-Canadian individuals are incarcerated in numbers that are higher than their numbers in the Canadian population 

• To conflict theorists, this disproportionate incarceration is not because of their ancestry or race but because of their lower socio-economic status

Marx and social inequality

• Because the organization of society is the result of concrete human activity throughout history, it can be changed consciously through human activity

• Theory and praxis (action) are necessary for understanding social inequality to achieve social change

• Rejects empiricism/positivism (doesn’t believe social reality can be understood objectively)

• Marx’s goal was the liberation of humankind from economic necessity and the development of his potential through freedom

• Marx therefore rejects explanations relying on determinism

• Valued equality, justice, human freedom and human development

Capitalism and social inequality

• Marx argued that society is organized around human labour

• The way in which labour is divided (exploitative under capitalism) shapes society and social relations

• Mode of production: the way that the society is organized to produce its material needs; different historical periods have different modes of production

  • Means of production

  • Class relations: social relations of production (the concrete distinctions between roles workers played)

  • The way labour is divided forms social classes

• Built-in conflict between the workers and capitalists who exploit them

• Problem of the concentration of wealth: the pint that the economic system, left unchecked, leads to disparity of wealth and gives undue political and economic control to the wealthy

• Industrial capitalism tended to cause social inequality

Unequal division of labour

• Wealth is produced by the labour of the proletarians

• Their wage represents a small fraction of the value created by their labour

• What we call “profit” is surplus value (the monetary value produced by workers beyond the cost of their wages)

• “Money moves upwards”: surplus value is concentrated into the hands of private individuals (the capitalist (bourgeoisie) who owns the factories, land, tools, primary materials - i.e. the means of production)

The contradiction

Work is a social process yet the value produced by labour is not redistributed in society

• It is concentrated in the hands of a few private individuals

• Marx argued that this is an unsustainable contradiction, and advocated for an equitable socialist economic system based on the redistribution of the value generated by human activity

• Workers produce the wealth enjoyed by capitalists, while remaining stuck in a lower class position *causes conflict between social classes

Image

Marx and social class

• Capitalism is built on class conflict

• Marx believed the core struggle in human societies was the class struggle over the division of labour. This refers to the struggle over who owns the means of production, or the means to make things society needs

• Marx theorized the class struggle was primarily between two classes or groups of people within the productive system: the bourgeoisie (capitalists) and the proletariat (workers)

Marx and class struggles

• Marx also believed the world divided into two additional classes: petite bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat

• The petite bourgeoisie are small-scale capitalists (ex. shopkeepers)

• The lumpenproletariat is a class Marx theorized as representing what he thought of as the lowest layer of the working class

Marx and ideology

• Marx theorized that workers did not organize and resist capitalists more forcefully because of ideology: systems of conscious and unconscious beliefs and ideas that govern people’s lives

• Capitalist ideology blunts the workers’ revolutionary potential by creating a false consciousness among them (a false representation of social reality/relations of production/social problems)

  • The belief that what’s good for capitalists is good for the workers (which often isn’t true but the working class internalize it anyway)

• Internalize the interests of the capitalists as their own

False consciousness

The elite create a narrative that furthers their agenda that average people accept because they see it as normal and unchanging

• False consciousness mistakenly conflates the self-interest of the rulers as the interests of the ruled

• Evidently, the capitalist elite have different interests than workers

Class consciousness

A term used in Marxist theory to explain how people see their social class position and their class interests

• Marx’s term for social cohesion

• “Class in itself” refers to a category of people with a common relation to the means of production

• “Class for itself” refers to a category of people organized in pursuit of their class interests

• Class consciousness represents a change of mentality focused on unity: A sense of solidarity rooted in the recognition of our belonging to society as members of the public. 

• A recognition of the importance of universal solidarity to overcome injustice, inequality and threats to liberty (as when everything is appropriated by a small class). 

• Ultimately, this mentality is necessary to achieve common goals that are impossible when the social body is fractured and divided into parochial interests

Trade union density

The percentage of wage earners in a population who are part of a union

• Trade union density is on the decline

• This fact demonstrates how public policies and laws shape larger social structures such as unions (e.g. labour laws in the US harm unionization processes)

Income inequality

Wealth is not equitably/unevenly distributed within society

• Income inequality = economic need

• Our current economic organization is incompatible with social equality

• While the measure of a country’s GDP measures the size and growth of the economy

• A greater percentage of the country’s total income is owned by a smaller percentage of Canadians which enjoy wage increases, while low and middle income earners have seen a stagnation, or negligible increases of their income

Start of income inequality

• Fall of the Berlin wall (1989) ushered in a new form of capitalism

• Neoliberalism (free trade, globalization, deregulation)

• Thatcher and Regan’s economic policies marked a shift to market triumphalism as a governing philosophy: the idea that market mechanisms are the primary instruments for achieving public good;

• Neoliberal capitalism was believed to be the only economic arrangement that could produce growth and that no alternatives exist

• The combination of low taxes, mobility of capital, and free trade did not immediately made social justice and social programs insupportable, although deficits were created and corporate taxes were cut

• The first phase of neoliberalism de-legitimized taxation, reduced trade union influence, destroyed socialist alternatives, increased militarization and surveillance and imposed free trade. The social safety net was maintained in the 90s

• The second phase is marked by the consequences of debt:

  • The social system and safety net cannot survive indebtedness, low taxes, a high degree of military and security expenditure, and free trade at the same time

  • Ex. reducing old age protection for employees, raising the retirement age

• We cannot refuse to raise taxes, insist dogmatically on free trade, and balance budgets at all costs without sacrificing social justice and safety

• …indicating the need to redistribute excess wealth through taxation and regulation to address income inequality

Neoliberalism

1. The beneficial effect of the rules of the market and competition, with only limited intervention

2. The promotion of international free trade as always preferable to any form of protectionism, except in the most unusual situations

3. The belief that private enterprise is always more efficient than public and that most enterprises should be privatized 

• Hard work will be rewarded, winner takes all, best and the brightest will rise to the top

Social justice

• Income equity: a narrowed gap between the rich and poor

• Universal access to social services such as health care, education, legal services

• Free access to post secondary education

• Real possibility to achieve success in any career regardless of your family's economic situation

• Human rights, labour rights, etc

• Non-discriminatory

• Protection of freedoms

Meritocracy

• Most Canadaians believe in the principle of equal opportunity

• That is, that everyone should be given a fair chance to develop their talents and skills, and should have equal chances in life

• This notion means that where children will end up on the income ladder depends on their individual talents and hard work, not on the income and status of their parents

• This depends on the degree of social mobility: the ability to move up or down the economic ladder based on individual achievements

Ideal of meritocracy

• This principle is what we call meritocracy: a notion that places great stress (perhaps even obsession) on the hard work ethic and on individual responsibility for economic successes or failures

• In principle, meritocracy looks good - it focuses on your accomplishments - it’s certainly better than the obvious issues of an ascription based system of stratification based on fixed characteristics

• HOWEVER, although hard work is generally rewarded, not all that have succeeded have done so through hard work

Critique of meritocracy

• Why should the fact that a person has the ability to produce more than others make him infinitely richer? What makes the results of the market just?

• The abilities required for success vary from society to society:

  • Ex. the importance of mathematical ability has risen while general humanistic culture has declined

  • Elements like mental and physical health, stamina, good looks according to society’s standards, and especially belonging to a successful class or ethnic group play a part in determining success

  • Being able to afford risk also seems to determine chances of success

Neoliberalism’s tendency toward inequality

• Speculation

• Defeating competition

• Concentration of wealth

• Political side of inequality

• Adverse effects of technology

• Instability of income

• Expansionism

• Dangers of constant expansionism

Speculation

• Today’s capitalism, even more than its 19th and 20th century form, is a system which favours speculation

• The possibility of making money through split second computer-driven purchases and sales, the decline of traditional heavy industry which required more entrepreneurship and administration, the dominance of information technology, and ease of cross-border transactions all favour speculation as the best road to wealth

• That is why honest, transparent capitalism is unattainable

Defeating competition

• Success depends on outmaneuvering and deceiving the competition and therefore one cannot require open books and regulated conduct without transforming the system into something very different

• The system always functions in a corrupt manner and “open,” honest capitalism is unlikely to occur

• The way to defeat the competition is to pay less to workers, to avoid unionization, to evade taxes, to cover up pollution, and to bribe third-world potentates

• Anyone who tries to act differently will be out of business very quickly even if, in the long run, his more enlightened policies prove wiser

Concentration of wealth

• Left unchecked, the system leads to a disparity of wealth and gives undue economic and political control to the wealthy

• One of the most telling statistics of the thirty year-old “neo-liberal” model is that virtually all of the increase in wealth during these decades accrued to the richest one percent of the population

• The average man is no better off and, if one includes the non-financial disadvantages of two-income households, growing health costs, and the almost universal loss of security both in the family and the working place, he is probably worse off than before

Political side of inequality

Those who have the funds inevitably obtain a disproportionate influence in government and media and succeed in increasing their share even more, through fiscal, trade, and labour policies and through the constant assault on public opinion

Adverse effects of technology

The modern surge in technology shifts the negotiating equilibrium further in favour of capital and against labour

• Jobs are disappearing, machines can perform all but the most complex ones as well, or better, than humans and therefore the inequalities are bound to increase if the present system is not drastically changed

Instability of income

While receiving an enhanced income may produce a short-lived sense of well-being, and even a sense of being wealthy, the instability of a fluctuating income generally creates misery and puts the wage earner into a position of being unable to meet obligations which characteristically vary less than income

Expansionism and dangers of constant expansionism

1. Constant expansion relies on credit, i.e. capital that one does not have, and this leads to economic crashes (2008 recession) creating what we call a “bubble economy”

2. Environmental (climate change); drastic changes in population levels, emission levels, food production levels

Consequences of income inequality

If the new capitalism continues unabated, it will inevitably lead to a new, even more unjust class system because of the growing inequality of distribution of both income and capital, and to insecurity, poverty, and ecological catastrophe 

Democracy and income inequality

• Democracy needs to provide real access to government, to justice, and to social services for the ordinary citizens and not be purely procedural and offer theoretical rights which the ordinary person has little hope of enforcing

• At present, citizens in most countries have little access to assemblies or politicians and know that those with money and class advantage will always beat them

• When citizens feel powerless to effect change through the state, there is a loss of trust in the electoral system which serves those that benefit from income inequality

• High inequality raises questions about fairness and leads to divisions in society

• Income inequality undermines democracy because of the need to make use of force to maintain a regime of inequality, which is also maintained through a mechanism of repression to produce conformity (soft totalitarianism)

• Ex. attacks on free speech repress dissenting views creating a pensee unique that serves the status quo

Problem of the media

• Control of media by capital has a prejudicial effect on our freedom of thought and on our ability to have different viewpoints as well as complex discussion

• Big corporations set the terms of debate, and constantly manipulate public opinion. The right has acquired a stranglehold on privately-owned media which determines the content that we are exposed to

• This is largely a defense mechanism of global capitalism: social control of technology is used to brainwash much of the population, to detect potential enemies and to isolate those who cannot be neutralized

Problem of a two-tier system

• Classes are formed by the existence of separate institutions for different groups of citizens

• Two track system or public/private partnerships create two classes of product, one for the elite and one for the others

• Differences in wealth should not extend to health and educational opportunities. This does not necessarily mean that public systems couldn’t be privately managed 

• Ex. the state of the present day system of justice is an eloquent illustration of the perils of two tier systems

  • The cost of defence is prohibitive. There have been higher numbers of guilty pleas motivated by fact that legal bills are simply unaffordable

Economic segregation

• Causes an imbalance of power among citizens

• “The uneven distribution of capital allows those with relative wealth to monopolize the desirable and scarce commodities, notably access to power, health, education, and culture. 

• Even if, in absolute terms, the relatively poor person will continue to be able to afford most material goods, he will be excluded from the elite schools, the private hospitals, and the elite cultural institutions which will serve the new ruling class. 

• After a generation or two, this class will indeed appear to be superior, more refined, and more cultured than those left behind.”

II and life chances

Undermining life chances

• When income is not redistributed, this creates a huge gap between workers and senior management, as well as more arbitrary wage disparities between co-workers

• “A truly meritocratic society is undercut by extremes of wealth and income which allow the rich to buy advantage for their children…”

• Public investments give a good start and high-quality education to future citizens

II and economic performance

Undermining economic performance

• In a healthy economy, wages rise in line with growing productivity, maintaining the growth in spending which, in turn, supports new business investment. But the stagnation of the wages of the middle class and the poor meant that the U.S. and Canadian economies, over the past decade and beyond, were increasingly driven by the growth of household debt…”

• People seek to copy the consumer patterns and lifestyle of the more affluent, but unable to afford to do so, they sink deeper into debt (Robert Frank, 2005)

• Inequality “diverts money we need for public investment and social development to the management of the crises and pathologies that income inequality inevitably produces.”

II and public safety and wellbeing

• Undermining wellbeing

• “More equal countries, such as Sweden and Germany, do better than more unequal countries, such as the U.S. and Canada, when it comes to the level of trust in society, life expectancy, the incidence of mental illness, infant mortality and obesity, as well as children’s educational performance, homicide rates, and levels of crime.”

• The obsession with growth and hyper-competitivity also produces undue strain on individual physical and mental wellbeing

Possible alternatives

• A healthy public sector: keeping services like health, education, social security, and central banking in the public domain

• Equality through both a minimum and maximum income and wealth

• Economic regulation

• Value placed on leisure and culture

• Personal freedom 

• There is no great change without a price tag and we cannot keep both the benefits of primitive capitalism and of social justice

• Grey argues that we can’t guarantee a decent minimum (such as a universal basic income) without imposing a maximum on wealth and income. His point is that if we do not tolerate profound poverty then that means that we cannot tolerate great accumulation of wealth

Economic regulation

• Social justice can only be achieved through a fair redistribution of wealth

• Changes to the taxation system are needed to reduce income inequality

• The very rich have profited inordinately from all the gains in production since 1980 and the wealth held by the top 1% is staggering. Taxing them would now really assist public finances. In the long run, the present system will create new, impermeable classes served by separate schools and health institutions

• To counter this trend, we should determine the maximum tolerable income differential between the richest and poorest and tax excess amounts for the express purpose of sustaining relative equality

• There is no great change without a price tag and we cannot keep both the benefits of primitive capitalism and of social justice.

• Grey argues that we can’t guarantee a decent minimum (such as a universal basic income) without imposing a maximum on wealth and income. His point is that if we do not tolerate profound poverty than that means that we cannot tolerate great accumulation of wealth

Promoting culture and leisure

• A relative equality of income would enable us to move away from the ethic of severity and hard work, removing the pressure to perform. A more balanced lifestyle would assist in promoting equality in the workforce between men and women

• There is now considerable evidence that generous holidays and frequent rest increase productivity and that the attenuation of the extreme pressure of the protestant model will not lead to a decline in output

Globalization

A process of increasing interconnectedness of people, products, ideas, and places

• Increases interconnectedness in 3 main ways:

  • The increase in physical or material connectedness

  • The spatio-temporal element - places feel a lot closer

  • The cognitive element - the dissemination of ideas and culture throughout the world

• The division of labour is globalized, so we don’t see the work behind the food we eat, computers we use, and videos we stream