Sociology 100

Seeing the strange in the familiar

• Denaturalizing our everyday reality

• Recognizing the arbitrariness and/or the rootedness in power dynamics, of beliefs/practices we take for granted as normal

Seeing the familiar in the strange

• Empathizing across perceived difference

• Recognizing the social and historical reasons behind unfamiliar beliefs/practices

Line definition Goffman

a pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts by which a man expresses his view of the situation and through this his evaluation of the participants, especially himself

Face definition Goffman

the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact. Face is an image of self-delineation in terms of approved social attributes

The Avoidance Process (Goffman)

The process of avoiding contacts in which threats to a person’s face occurs, or withdrawing before the threat has a chance to occur

Defensive Measures (Goffman)

• Keeping off topics and away from activities that would lead to the expression of information inconsistent with the line he is maintaining

• presenting a front of diffidence and composure, suppressing feeling until he has discovered what kind of line the others will support

• claims regarding self made with

  • belittling modesty

  • strong qualifications

  • unseriousness

Protective measures (Goffman)

• showing respect and politeness

• discretion: not saying facts that might contradict claims made by others

• circumlocutions and deceptions → ambiguity to preserve the face of others

• courtesies → modifying situations so people's self respect is not threatened

• belittling demands phrased as jokes

• explanations for why others shouldn’t be offended by actions (early departures, etc)

4-step Corrective Process (Goffman)

How people react after failing to prevent the occurrence of an event impossible to overlook incompatible with the judgments of social worth that are being maintained

Challenge (Goffman)

• step 1 of the corrective process

• participants take on responsibility of calling attention to the misconduct

• implication that the threatened claims are to stand firm and the event will have to be rectified

Offering (Goffman)

• Step 2 of the corrective process

• the offender is given a chance to correct for the offense and reestablish the expressive order

• an attempt can be made to show that what appeared to be a threat is really meaningless, unintentional, a joke, or an unavoidable product of extenuating circumstances

• or the creator can be made to show that he was under the influence of something or the command of someone

• the offender can provide compensations to the injured or penance and expiation for himself

Acceptance (Goffman)

• step 3 corrective process

• the offended can accept the offer as a satisfactor means of reestablishing the expressive order and the faces supported by it

Thanks (Goffman)

• step 4 corrective process

• forgiven person conveys a sign of gratitude to the forgiver

Symbolic Interactionism (Berger/Goffman)

the study of the verbal and non-verbal communication, identity work, meaning-making, and interpretation that goes on in face-to-face interactions in social situations

Sociological Imagination (Mills)

Enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and external career of a variety of individuals. 

Troubles (Mills)

Occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his immediate relations with others; they have to do with his self and with those limited areas of social life of which he is directly and personally aware. 

Issues (Mills)

Matters that transcend local environments of the individual and range of his inner life. Have to do with the organization of many such milieux into the institutions of a historical society as a whole. 

Sociology as a science

• theories are useful for different social situations based on empirical evidence

• sociology requires statistics

Role of statistics in sociological research (Best, Schuman)

• statistics can become weapons in political struggles over social problems and policy (Best)

• early researchers believed information about society could help gvmt devise wise policies (Best)

• play a role to create or defuse claims about new social problems (Best)

2 Purposes of social statistics (Best)

1. public purpose: give an accurate, true description of society

2. private purpose: to support particular views about social problems and provide ammunition for political struggles

Ethnography in sociological research (Adler and Adler)

• ethnography requires the systematic, long-term gathering of data and engaging general theories of human behavior

• divided into data gathering, data analysis, and data presentation

• systematic, rigorous, and scientific

• should give voice to participants

Structuration of society

The ordering of social relationships, roles, beliefs, customs, meaning structures, practices, and access to social status and material resources, into non-random, detectable regularities or patterns across a society’s general population (or segments of it)

Two dimensions through which societies are structured

identities and inequalities

Identity

a collective social construction in which we all participate

Social Construction

• identity is about meaning, meaning is social

• characteristics to which we attribute meaning are arbitrary

• identity is situational

• delineates social boundaries

Achieved characteristics (Massey)

acquired in the course of living

Ascribed characteristics (Massey)

set at birth

Nominal categories (Massey)

assign labels to people on the basis of shared qualitative attributes

Graduated categories (Massey)

Rank people along some quantitative continuum (age, income class, etc)

Social Stratification (Massey)

the unequal distribution of people across social categories that are characterized by differential access to scarce resources

Exploitation (Massey)

Occurs when people in one social group expropriate a resource produced by members of another social group and prevent them from realizing the full value of their effort in producing it

Opportunity hoarding (Massey)

one social group restricts access to a scarce resource, either through outright denial or by exercising monopoly control that requires out-group members to pay rent in return for access

Emulation (Massey)

one group of people copies a set of social distinctions and interrelationships from another group or transfers the distinctions and interrelationships from one social setting to another

Adaptation (Massey)

social relations and day-to-day behaviors at the microsocial level become oriented toward ranked categories, decisions are made in ways that assume the existence and importance of asymmetric social categories

Public Policy’s affect on inequality (Fischer)

• Americans have created the extent and type of inequality we have, and Americans maintain it

• Our ladder is extended and narrow—and becoming more so

• public policies shape both the extent of equality of opportunity (where people end up on the ladder of opportunity) and the extent of equality of outcomes (how people are rewarded/punished for where they end up on that ladder)

Social construction of national identity

• pre-national modes of geopolitical identification: tribes, religion, family

• idea developed in late 18th and 19th centuries

• states made nations (not vice-versa)

• invention of tradition

• ethnic vs civic nationalism

Nationalism

ideology behind nation-state: the idea that nation and state should (or should be made to) coincide

nation

a social/cultural grouping of people thought of as sharing common historical bonds to a given place

state

administrative apparatus of government

Nation-state

modern geopolitical idea (never fully realized in practice) of a country wherein the boundaries of the nation and the boundaries of the state coincide (i.e. overlap in a one-to-one relationship)

Birthright citizenship (Shachar)

• laws that resemble ancient property regimes that shaped rigid and tightly regulated estate-transmission rules

• corresponds to strikingly different prospects for the well-being, security, and freedom of individuals

Socialization

How we learn how to act — why people have to ask to go to the bathroom, why people act certain ways do certain things, observing people around us to mimic behavior so we aren’t losing face

Social reproduction

how does society keep going, how does history repeat itself, gender- women get paid less but we do it anyway, social norms, CYCLE

Intersectionality

all of the inequalities working together, we don’t exist as just one thing. Wealth, gender, social class, race, there are multiple factors of a person that compound. Not just one identity that matters.

Attributes of American capitalism

• gigantic corporations

  • in 2012, top 10 largest corporations individually had revenues greater than the combined income of 134 million people living in the 48 poorest countries

• weak labor unions 

  • in 2012, only 11% of nonfarm-employed wage and salary workers were unionized

    • as a result, less parental leave and less right to strike

      • US is the only developed capitalist democracy in which an employer can legally hire permanent replacements during a strike

• weak public regulation of the economy

  • employers hire and fire at will (except discrimination)

  • minimum wage is low

  • low civilian spending compared to developed countries

  • low tax rates

• globalization

  • trade

  • overseas production

  • ownership of production overseas

Social Class in the US

• large differences in education, cultural resources, social connections, and motivations

  • shape opportunities, income, housing, healthcare

• opportunity hoarding: educational credentials, color bars, property rights

• domination and exploitation is connected to class division between high andlow class

Folk theories about Social Class in America

• america is a classless society

• nearly all Americans are middle class

• the ladder of social mobility provides equal opportunities for those dissatisfied w their current class position to change it

• people are sorted by natural abilities or lifestyle choice

Working Class

those employed in skilled and semi-skilled manual labor occupations, esp. industrial manufacturing

Working Poor

Those who are regularly employed (often in unskilled, service-sector occupations), but whose wages do not provide enough income to escape poverty

Living Wage

Minimum employment earnings necessary to meet a family’s basic needs while also maintaining self-sufficiency

reproduction of class relations

upper classes have the ability to purchase resources and groom their children for success, ensuring generational wealth

economic capital

wealth

social capital

networks

cultural capital

ability to navigate elite/high-status culture and spaces

symbolic capital

our reputation, prestige, status positions, awards, etc

Racial Essentialism

the idea that race/ethnicity is an essential quality of a person that it’s biologically real, that it is natural and universal

Racial Classification in US

• stark black-white distinction, based on ancestry

• hypodescent (child of a mixed race union is assigned to the subordinate racial category)

• one drop rule (1/32 rule)

Brazil (historically)

• Race understood as spectrum, based more on variation in skin tone than ancestry

• range of nuanced categories (shades of black, brown, light)

• racism is real, but operates differently (wealth “whitens”)

Social construction of race and ethnicity

• pre-racial categories: territory, religion, civilized v barbaric

• five factors made change

  • capitalism + imperialism + slave trade

  • rise of egalitarian values

  • the pre-racial concept of the savage

  • pseudo-scientific legitimization of racist theories and the racial categories behind them

  • legal enforcement of racial categories and the racial domination they were designed to support

what is race

• symbolic category

• based on phenotype or ancestry

• specific to social and historical contexts

• misrecognized as natural

Characteristics marked as signifying racial or ethnic membership

• phenotype

• ancestry

• religion

• language

• territorial ties

• cultural practices

• other beliefs

• associational practices

Why has racial and ethnic inequality persisted

• government policies

• segregated labor market

• inequalities in home ownership

• segregated cities

Gender Essentialism

• gender follows naturally from biological difference

• the resulting gender categories are naturally dimorphic, distinct, and opposed

• these categories correspond with a host of psychological and behavioral traits that can be typed as naturally masculine or feminine

Sex (West and Zimmerman)

a determination made through the application of socially agreed upon biological criteria for classifying persons as males or females

Sex categorization (West and Zimmerman

made by others on the basis of presumptions about a person’s biological sex traits, based on how that person’s identificatory display relates to how sex difference is gulturally signified in that time and place

Gender (West and Zimmerman)

the activity of managing situated conduct in light of normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for one’s sex category

Doing Gender (West and Zimmerman)

enacting those activities, qualities, and traits that mark oneself as belonging to a particular gender category

Devaluation of Female Work (England)

• occupational sex segregation

  • via hiring discrimination

  • via the gendering of work and occupation