Sociology Final chapter 3-6

Culture

To the shared beliefs, values, norms, behaviors, and material objects that define a way of life for a group of people.

It’s learned and passed down from one generation to the next through socialization.

ex: tipping culture-tipping can be expected from the U.S., but not from Japan or others.

3 components of culture

Material culture,non-material and symbolic culture.

Material culture includes objects like clothes, tools and artwork.

Non-material culture consists of values, beliefs,norms, and laws that guide behavior

Symbolic culture allows people to communicate and create shared meanings through language, rituals, and symbols.

Culture Shock

Occurs when a person experiences confusion, anxiety, or discomfort in a new cultural environment.

-Symptoms: feeling disoriented or out of place, struggling to understand social norms and expectations, experiencing language barriers, and feeling frustrated or homesick.

-Example: personal space- while some cultures value proximity, some want space when communicating.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

The language we speak shapes our perceptions of reality.

Values

Culturally defined standards of what is good, desirable, or proper.

Beliefs

Specific convictions that people hold to be true. Beliefs are more specific interpretations of those values.

Folkway

They are informal social norms that govern everyday behavior. Not strictly enforced, and doesn’t have moral significance.

Breaking a folkway may lead to mild disapproval or being perceived as rude, odd or different, but no severe consequences.

Mores

Social norms with moral significance.

-Breaking a more is considered ethically wrong and may result in stronger social sanctions than folkways.

-Reflect a society’s core values and moral expectations.

example: raising your hand, forming a line

Taboo

-Are the most deeply ingrained norms in society.

Provoke strong reactions of disgust, horror, or outrage.

Violating a taboo may result in severe legal, social, or even religious consequences.

-examples: serial killers, punching someone, incest.

Laws

Formally inscribed at the state or federal level. And enforced by the government.

Positive Sanction

Rewards or incentives given to individuals who conform to social norms or exceed expectations.

-Reinforce desirable behavior and encourage continued adherence to social values.

Negative Sanctions

Are punishments or disapprovals given when someone violates social norms.

-serve as deterrents, discouraging unwanted behavior.

Formal Sanctions

-Are official rewards or punishments enforced by institutions such as governments, schools and workplaces.

documented and systematic

Informal sanctions

-Are unwritten, spontaneous reactions to behavior in social settings.

Institutions don’t enforce them but ar etsill influential in shaping behavior.

Social Class

A category of people who share similar economic and social positions within a given society.

-Like wealth, income, education, occupation, and access to resources like health care and social networks.

Key components of social class

Wealth, income, education, occupation, power, prestige, and social networks.

Upper Class

Wealthy individuals with high incomes and significant economic and political influence.

example: CEOs, major business owners.

Middle class

Professionals, educators, and small business owners are often college-educated with stable incomes.

-Moderate income, stable employment, and access to educational and career opportunities.

-Upper middle: highly educated professionals and wealth

-Lower class: modest incomes than the upper middle class.

-Challenges: rise in cost of living, income stagnation, job market changes.

Working class

Blue-collar workers, often in manual labor or service industry jobs, with lower incomes and less job security.

Lower Class

Individuals with unstable employment, often experiencing poverty, rely on social assistance and have limited access to resources.

Socioeconomic Status (SES)

A measure that reflects an individual’s or a family’s economic and social position relative to others, based on a combination of factors like income, education,and occupation.

-Critical concept in sociology as it helps explain how inequality and class affect people’s lives and opportunities.

Social mobility

The ability of individuals or families to move up or down the social class hierarchy over time.Understanding how flexible or rigid class structures are within a society.

Upward mobility

When a person moves to a higher social class, often due to improved income, education, or occupation.

Downward mobility

Moving to a lower social class, the result of unemployment, loss of income, or other economic hardship.

Intergenerational mobility

Changes in social status that occur between generations within a family.

-example: child achieves a higher social class than their parents, this is considered upward intergenerational mobility.

Intragenerational mobility

Refers to changes in social status within a person’s lifetime.

-example: person who starts their career as a retail worker but, through education and promotions, eventually becomes a company executive.

Factors influencing social mobility

education, occupation and job opportunities, social networks, wealth inheritance, government policies, and social programs.

Barriers to social mobility

education access, job market shifts, and structural inequalities.

American Dream

The idea is that anyone, regardless of where they are born or what class they are born into, can achieve success through hard work, determination, and talent.

Elements of this: Equal opportunity: everyone has a chance,

Meritocracy: individuals are rewarded based on abilities, effort, and achievements. Rather than their social class, background or inherited wealth.

Homeownership and financial stability: Homeownership is often seen as a key marker of achieving the American dream.

Reality vs Myth in the American dream

The reality is more complex; not everyone has equal access to the same opportunities and resources.

Absolute poverty

It is a fixed condition defined by the inability to meet basic survival needs, such as access to food, clean drinking water, shelter, basic clothing, and essential healthcare.

-Example: lacking internet access, transportation.

Relative poverty

Relative poverty reflects economic inequality, not just deprivation.

-often measured as 50% or 60% of a country’s median income. It reveals how inequality is experienced and felt even when basic needs are met.

Poverty line and poverty threshold

Used to determine eligibility for social programs.

The measure is critically outdated, modern day(spend more). Fails to account for regional variation; the cost of living in rural Mississippi is not equivalent to that in San Francisco.

Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM)

This provides a more accurate assessment by including non-cash benefits.

-example: food stamps, housing subsidies.

Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)

Used globally, looks beyond income and includes indicators like years of schooling, access to clean water, electricity,hounsing conditions.

Deep poverty

To individuals of families whose incomes are less than 50% of the poverty threshold.

-Limits access to housing, food,and transportation, often resulting in chronic instability or homelessness.

Working poor

Those who maintain employment, often multiple part-time jobs, yet still don’t earn enough to rise above the poverty line.

-They don’t qualify for benefits like housing assistance, Medicaid, because their income is technically above the cutoff, even if it is insufficient to live independently.

Significance of Race and Ethnicity

Sociologists examine race and ethnicity to understand how societies assign meaning to difference and how those shape power and inequality.

Race

A socially constructed classification system based on perceived physical characteristics.Lacks scientific or biological ground but has real-world implications.

Racialization

The process by which societies assign racial meanings to groups or behaviors. Often connect those groups to assumptions, stereotypes, and power.

Ethnicity

To shared cultural heritage, like language religion, customs ancestry.

-Self defined and be fluid or situational:highlight or suppress ethic.

-They can overlap in race, but are not the same.

Pan-Ethnicity

The grouping together of multiple distinct ethnic or national-origin groups under a single, broad label.

Minority Group

Defined by social power, not population size.

-Socially disadvantaged and lacks resources.

Majority Group

(Dominat) groups hold economic,cutlural, and political power.

Prejudice

Attitude, often negative, toward a group based on stereotypes or misinformation.

-Doesn’t always lead to discrimination, but both reinforce inequality.

Discrimination

It is behavior that treats people unfairly based on group identity.

Individual Racism

Refers to racist attitudes or actions by a person in their daily interactions.

-Reflects and reinforces broader social patterns, even when the individual is unaware of their bias.

-Racial slurs, hate crimes, avoid sitting next to someone based on race.

Institutional Racism

Occurs when policies, rules, and practices within organizations or institutions result in differential treatment of racial groups.

-These policies don’t need to mention race explicitly to have racially unequal effects.

-Institutions affected are education, healthcare, law enforcement, housing, and employment.

Structural Racism

Refers to the cumulative and interlocking systems that create and maintain racial disparities across society.

-Explains why disparities persist even in the absence of individual prejudice.

Cultural Racism

Refers to the widespread belief that white culture and values are superior to those of other racial or ethnic groups.

-Often unspoken and embedded in everyday language, media, education, and professional standards.

-Frames white ways of speaking, dressing, and living as “normal”, while other cultures are seen as exotic, deviant, or inferior.

Colorism

Refers to the preferential treatment of individuals with lighter skin tones over those with darker skin tones, often within the same racial or ethnic group.

-Distinct from racism

-Has consequences in material: individuals with lighter skin tone receive higher incomes, better media representation, and less harsh criminal sentencing.

-It exists globally, and products for lighter skin are in high demand.

AAVE (African American Vernacular English), Code-switching, and cultural racism.

AAVE is a direct of English with its own grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary, developed within African American communities.

-It is not “broken English” or incorrect-it follows consistent linguistic rules and has deep cultural and historical roots.

-Cultural racism emerges when AAVE is stigmatized as unprofessional, uneducated, or lazy while white middle-class speech patterns are seen as the norm.

Segregation

Is the physical and institutional separation of racial or ethnic groups in housing, education, transportation, and public life.

-De jure segregation is enforced by law(Jim Crow laws in the U.S. South)

-De facto segregation occurs in practices due to residential patterns, economic inequality, and informal social norms.

RedLining

Refers to the government-sanctioned practice of mapping out neighborhoods and denying loans and investment based on racial demographics.

-1930s-1960s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and private banks marked Black and immigrant neighborhoods as “high risk” in red ink.

Jim Crow Laws

Were a series of state and local statutes that enforced racial segregation in the American South from the late 1800s to the 1960s.

-Laws were upheld white supremacy by separating Black and White people unschools,transportation, restaurants and public restrooms.

-Voter suppression tactics like poll taxes and literacy tests to keep Black people out.

-violence occurred and lynching, the KKK.

Indian Removal Act

The U.S. government wanted Indigenous people to leave their ancestral homes.

-Trail of Tears: Tribes were forced to move.

Gender

Is the social meaning society attaches to being a girl/women and boy/girl.

-Influences how we are expected to act, dress, and relate to others.

-Gender is learned, not simply given by biology.

-Different cultures have different gender categories.

Biological Sex

Based on physical characteristics like chromosomes (XX or XY), hormones, and reproductive organs.

-Often divided into male, female, or intersex.

-Sometimes socially interpreted (doctors making decisions about intersex infants).

-Sociologists recognize that the relationship between sex and gender is complex, not one-to-one.

Primary Sex Characteristics

Are physical traits related to reproduction present at birth.

-examples:having a penis,vagina, uterus, or testes.

-Primary sex characteristics are used to assign sex at birth.

1.7% of people born with intersex traits.

Secondary Sex Characteristics

Develop during puberty and are not directly related to reproduction.

-examples: breast development, body hair, voice deepening, and changes in body shape.

-Traits often become social markers for gendered attractiveness.

-Media often idealizes specific secondary sex characteristics (muscular men, thin women.)

Nature vs Nurture

Nature focuses on biological explanations for behavior.(genes and hormones)

Nuture: focuses on socialization and environment.

-Sociologists emphasize nurture, pointing to cultural differences in gender roles.

Gender Identity

Refers to a person’s internal understanding of their gender.

-May or may not match the sex they had at birth.

-can be fluid, nonbinary, or fixed depending on the individual.

Gender roles

Are social expectations about behavior, jobs, and appearance based on gender.

-Taught from early childhood and shape life choices.

-Differ across societies and change over time.

-reinforced through media, family, school, and peer interactions.

Gender Norms

Are social rules and expectations about how individuals should behave based on their perceived gender.

-Dictate appearance, personality traits, professions, hobbies, and family roles.

Gender Stereotypes

Oversimplified beliefs that assign traits based on gender.

-Exaggerate differences between genders and ignore similarities.

-Sterotypes limit career paths, hobbies, emotions, and relationships.

Patriarchy

A social system where men hold more power in public and private life.

-Limit women’s rights and opportunities.

Gender Socialization

The process of learning gender roles through interaction with others.

-reinforced by family, peers, schools, media,religion, and workplaces.

-Shapes career goals, hobbies, emotional expression, and appearance standards.

Family as the agent of socialization

Families are the first teachers of gender norms.

-choose gendered clothes, toys, activities, and language for their children

-Parents may encourage their kid to behave according to their gender.

-Attitutdes about gender often reflect larger cultural beliefs.

Schooling as an agent of socialization

Schools teach both formal education and hidden messages about gender.

-Curriculum content may emphasize male historical figures more than female ones.

-Dress codes more focused on girl than boys.

-Teachers are calling more on boys than girls.

Media as an agent of socialization

The media shows idealized images of gender behavior, beauty, and relationships.

-Social media reinforces gendered expectations for appearance and lifestyle.

Religion as agent in socialization

Religion often prescribes specific roles for men and women.

-Some assign leadership positions to men only.

-Gendered teachings influence family life, work roles, and social behavior.

Workplace as an agent of socialization

Workplace teaches professional gender norms (how men and women “should” behave at work).

-Certain jobs are stereotyped as male or female.

-Men are discouraged to go into nursing or teaching because it seen more for women.

"Glass Ceiling”

Women face barriers to promotion.

occupational segregation

Unequal distribution of men and women from different demographic groups across various jobs and industries.

-key concept in understanding issues like the gender wage gap and racial inequalities.