Soc 302 - Structuralist Approaches to Health/Sociobiology/Socialization/Conflict Theory/Bureaucracy - Exam 1

What is the US healthcare paradox?

The US spends significantly on healthcare yet has some of the worst health outcomes.

• Demand: Tackles fundamental causes driving people to need healthcare.

• Supply: Focuses on health-oriented interventions.

What are Supply and Demand Side Health Policy Interventions?

What is the McKeown Theory?

Medicine improvements do not explain early reductions (sulfa drugs for TB); initial declines were due to non-medical factors (improvements in public cleanliness), though some declines (e.g., polio) are due to medical advances.

Define the Biomedical Industrial Complex.

A network of private corporations, healthcare personnel, and pharmaceutical companies that profit from healthcare services and products.

Dangers: prioritizes post sickness care (supply side) instead of preventative measures

What is Specific Etiology?

The specific cause (pathology) of a disease or abnormal condition.

What is the Epidemiological Transition?

A shift in a population’s primary causes of death from infectious to non-communicable diseases (chronically horrible conditions - social causes)

Shift from proximate to distal causes of disease

Fundamental Cause Theory is

a sociological theory that explains how socioeconomic status (SES) is the underlying cause of health inequities

• Structural: Rooted in social systems (e.g., systemic racism, income inequality).

• Non-Structural: Arises from individual behavior or personal circumstances (e.g., drug use).

What is a structural issue versus a non-structural issue?

• Modes of Intervention – R&D and funding.

• Supply-side: health-oriented interventions.

• Demand-side: other factors that drive people to ill-health or otherwise need to use health-care.

House’s demand side v. supply side

What is Sociobiology?

An attempt to explain human physiology and behavior through biological, evolutionary, and social/cultural mechanisms.

What is Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism?

Ideologies using Darwin's theory to justify social inequalities, based on "survival of the fittest."

extreme and merciless competition, maximal exploitation of the “weak” (i.e. the underclasses), and general suffering improved humanity

biological evolution as the surest mechanism for social
progress and the perfection of the human species

What is essentialism

Treating qualities of an individual as innate

What does Social Darwinism justify and underlie

unchecked greed

atrocities

eugenic ideology

additional stratification

Scientism: social darwinsim seemed scientific - borrowed legitimacy of evolution

essentialism: poverty/low social status seen as inherent and unalterable properties of individuals; heritable, not economic

biological reductionism: essentialist properties (innately poor) were seen as biologically innate and therefore morally and ethically justified; innately inferior no reason to invest in them as human capital (can’t and shouldn’t help them)

Major Components of Sociology in regards to its history with evolution

Who coined the terms “survival of the fittest” and “social darwinism”?

Herbert Spencer

What is Scientism?

Trusting seemingly scientific but actually non-scientific explanations, often because they use scientific terms.

Define Biological Reductionism.

The tendency to explain complex phenomena solely through biology.

What is adaptation?

A mutation that occurs to help an individual have more offspring. This trait is passed on to future generations where it can spread.

What is exaptation?

A trait originally adapted for one function gets co-opted for a new use that aids survival or reproduction. Examples include feathers, which pre-date flight, and flying fish using fins to glide.

What is no-aptation?

A trait that evolves for no specific reason, but isn’t harmful, so it persists and is passed on to future generations.

How do just-so stories work (from evolutionary psychology)

1. Take some social phenomenon that you wish to explain in evolutionary terms.

2. Assume it is or was adaptive at some point in the distant past (or we wouldn’t have it).

3. Study or just imagine backwards to prehistory to arrive at an explanation for a current behavior. Make up the prehistoric record if you need to.

Stephen Jay Gould criticized evolutionary psychologists for explaining/justifying present social conditions through evolutionary

Who criticized just-so stories?

How does Sapolsky define "Us/Them"?

"Us" refers to an in-group showing loyalty, while "Them" refers to out-groups, often viewed with suspicion or hostility.

Resource scarcity, perceived threats, dehumanization, group polarization, language barriers, authoritarian leadership.

What factors amplify Us/Them divisions?

What is in-group parochialism

the tendency to show strong preference, loyalty, and positive regard toward members of one’s own group (the “in-group”) while being suspicious, dismissive, or even hostile toward those outside the group (the “out-group”).

How do we express parochialism

favoritism, stereotyping, exclusion, bias in decision-making, defensive reactions, symbolic displays

Things that attenuate us/them-ing:

intergroup contact (contact theory!), shared objectives, empathy and perspective-taking, intersectionality, education, humanization

According to contact theory, increased intergroup contact can reduce prejudice and hostility if certain conditions are met.

What are the effects of intergroup contact?

Describe the warmth and competence dimensions in Us/Them perceptions.

• High warmth, high competence (Us): Pride

• Low warmth, high competence: Envy

• High warmth, low competence: Pity

• Low warmth, low competence: Disgust

Who fathered us/theming

Robert Sapolsky

What is contact theory?

increased interaction between different groups can reduce prejudice, hostility, and conflict, provided certain conditions are met

inverse

This means that when inter-group conflict is high, intra-group conflict tends to be low, and vice versa.

Robert Sapolsky explains that intra-group conflict (conflict within a group) and inter-group conflict (conflict between groups) have an _______ relationship in the context of us/them thinking.

What is the Honorable Enemy phenomenon?

Showing respect or admiration for enemies who follow shared codes of conduct, such as during warfare.

What is socialization

the process wherre you learn to be a functional person w/in your particular society

important for language learning, social habits and norms

Define Concerted Cultivation (1) and Natural Growth (2).

• 1: A structured, involved parenting style. Very organized activity. entitlement and agency with authority. view that institutions serve their needs. Develops an emerging sense of empowerment and entitlement (upper class)

• 2: Less structured, children structure own time, child doesn’t question authority or directives, child learns to distrust institutions. Fosters a sense of constraint. (lower class)

• Structuralist: Integrates people into society.

• Conflict: Resisted roles can lead to change.

• Symbolic Interactionist: Sense of Self guided by social interactions.

What are the three theories of socialization?

Structuralist view of socialization

• Socialization integrates people into society
  (through roles).

• Impulse control and moderating desires.

• People come to internalize their social structures and thereby reproduce them

• learn what is valuable or meaningful

Conflict Theory view of socialization

People are pressured to fit into specific roles but people often resist and can change socialization process itself.

Particularly true for subordinated or marginalized people in a society

Symbolic interactionist theory of socialization

a process of learning and adopting the symbols and traditions of a society through language and mimicry

• Learning language helps categorize one’s self and the world.

• Everyone develops sense of “Self” guided by others and their roles

• We are all in a constant process of promoting our ideal Self while getting feedback from others about how they view our promoted Self.

What is Habitus in sociology?

Internalization of societal values, behaviors, and logic so deeply that it becomes subconscious.

• Everyone is born into a pre-existing set of social structures;

• As you grow up you begin to deeply internalize the logic, values and behaviors associated with these structures into your thought, your body, and in your actions.

• Internalization causes logic to become subconscious - Bourdieu called this having a “feeling for the game” (using a
  sports metaphor - see next slide).

• People reproduce their social structures, their social roles,
  and the socialization process without realizing it

Components of Carr’s views on socialization?

• Socialization: Learning to be functional in society.

• Resocialization: Adjusting previous socialization.

• Anticipatory Socialization: Preparation for a future role.

• Hidden Curriculum

• Changes of Socialization throughout life

Major agents of socialization

family, media, culture and subculture, school (explicitly and inexplicitly thru hidden curriculum) , religion

Modes of socialization

People are not all socialized the same, but are socialized into specific and overlapping social roles: a categorical identity imposed by one’s culture or group belonging with an expected set of norms and behaviors.

son or daughter / student, athlete, professor, etc (organizational affiliation role) / work role

Primary socialization

the first process of socialization that almost every child experiences. Mainly family, community, local culture

Anticipatory socialization

the socialization that occurs in preparation for a social role before that role is occupied (e.g. school orientation or role-playing school)

Resocialization

a process that corrects, amends, or changes prior socialization.

Doctors have to learn to control empathy in order to treat.

role strain: difficulty satisfying all roles simultaneously (time and energy constraints)

role conflict: conflict b/w different roles that are fundamentally opposed

role exit: person exists role

Aspects of social roles

hidden curriculum

refers to the implicit lessons, values, and behaviors that students learn in school outside the formal curriculum. 

Childhood → teenager (act like adults but are treated by law as children) → young adulthood (personal and sexual development in modern societies) → midlife (psychological turning point) → later life (much less respect in modern society for elders)

changes of socialization through the life course

What did Keefe discuss about Arthur Sackler and marketing medications?

Sackler used aggressive marketing and gifts to influence doctors, a tactic repeated later by Richard Sackler for OxyContin.

Used gifts as a marketing tool: reinforces social bonds by creating relationships of reciprocity.

“The company convinced doctors of the drug’s safety with literature that had been produced by doctors who were paid, or funded, by the company.”

• Base: Economic arrangement (production relations). Everything is in service to- or a product of the economic system

• Superstructure: Society's institutions (e.g., religion). outcomes of the Base

• Examples of superstructure: Politics and the political system, Legal system, Entertainment Media, News Media, Religion

Explain Marx’s concepts of Base and Superstructure.

Structuralists vs. conflict theorists

• Structuralists focused on stability in society; Focuses on the underlying structures that shape human behavior and social institutions

• Conflict Theorists Marx & Engels argued that society is fundamentally about change and change is fundamentally about the struggle of classes to control the means of production

What is Commodity Fetishism according to Marx?

The perception of a direct relationship with products rather than recognizing the social relations involved in production.

Summarize Marx’s predictions about capitalism.

• Expanding markets will eventually reach limits.

• Workers feel alienated from product, process, and each other.

• Creative destruction continuously pushes new production methods.

Define Weber’s Life Chances.

The likelihood that one can achieve their will, often determined by social standing.

Power

the ability for an individual or a group to realize their (collective) will even against the opposition of others

Marx: Religion’s purpose was to make ppl complicit with their own oppression

Weber: religion is source of ppls values, how they orient their place in world, and the lens thru which they see reality

Weber contrasted with Marx (religion)

Weber’s Switchman analogy

Social structures and conflicts drive change, but ideas, values, and beliefs also shape society.

• agreed with Marx that social structures and material conflicts are the major drivers of our economic, political, and social reality/change. It’s mostly struggles among economic actors that shapes society.

• Ideas, beliefs, and values, however, still matter. They are not simply superstructure.

• As a power that shapes society, material conflicts over MoP are like a train: powerful, fast-moving, and you can’t stop it. Ideas, beliefs, and values (particularly religious) are like a train switchman. They can very slightly alter the trajectory of this Behemoth and drive social change over time

What is an Ideal Type according to Weber?

A conceptual model of something in its purest form, used for comparative analysis.

Weber’s description of bureaucracy is an ideal type

Demystification: the world is stripped of mystery, individual creativity, and richness in favor of ever more rational processes

• Bureaucracies and rationalization are fundamentally amoral (note: not immoral);

• Actors within bureaucracies can only do their singular function according to the
  formal rules. No special cases allowed.

• Spiritual, religious, or moral considerations come to seem irrational for a modern
  bureaucratic order; Weber: “The modern world has been deserted by the gods.”

• Leads to form of disillusionment with modern life similar to Marx’s alienations of
  labor and to Durkheim’s anomie.

Explain Demystification in Weber’s theory.

What is the Iron Law of Oligarchy?

All bureaucracies, regardless of values or systems, will eventually become oligarchies.

• Power corrupts - human psychology predisposed towards
  greed, self-interest, and self-dealing

• Self interest + power of bureaucratic office —> Special interests emerge —> Interests of party trump interests of the public good —> democracy becomes oligarchy

McDonaldization

Ritzer recognized corporate bureaucracy as the most pervasive and all-encompassing application of rationality, calculability and predictability. - bureacracy

Max Weber’s view of Rationalization and Bureacracy

• Weber saw all of society becoming
  increasingly bureaucratized

• Bureaucracy is a particular kind of
  Durkhiem’s emergent social form or social fact

• Weber feared that it had the power to control society irrespective of social values, morality or society’s actual needs.

• Humans would become a means to an end (efficiency) instead of an end in themselves.

• Traditional: Based on long-standing customs.

• Charismatic: Based on personal qualities.

• Rational-Legal: Based on established laws and regulations.

What are Weber’s Three Types of Authority?