A system by which society ranks categories of people in a hierarchy.
Four fundamental principles of stratification:
Social stratification is a characteristic of society.
Social stratification persists over generations.
Most societies allow some sort of social mobility or changes in people’s positions in a system of social stratification.
Social mobility may be upwards, downward, or horizontal.
Intragenerational Social Mobility:
A change in social position occurring during a person’s lifetime.
Intergenerational Social Mobility:
Upward or Downward social mobility of children relative to their parents.
Structural Social Mobility:
A shift in the social position of large numbers of people due more to changes in society than to individual efforts.
Closed system:
Allow little change in social position.
Open system:
Permit much more social mobility.
Schooling and skills lead to social mobility.
Work is no longer fixed at birth but involves some personal choices
Social stratification based on personal merit.
The degree of consistency in a person’s social standing across various dimensions of social inequality.
Social stratification based on ascription or birth.
Little or no social mobility.
Caste guides everyday life by keeping people in the company of their “own kind.”
Typically agrarian because agriculture demands a lifelong routine of work.
Cultural beliefs that justify particular social arrangements, including patterns of inequality.
Every culture considers some type of inequality fair.
Ideology changes with a society’s economy.
Historically, challenges to the status quo always arise.
Social stratification is a characteristics of society.
Social stratification persists over generations.
Social stratification is universal but variable.
Social stratification involves both inequality and beliefs.
Saying that inequality is patterned indicates that the differences occur:
On a wide-scale basis
With regularity
And along lines of certain specific identifiable characteristics
Power:
The ability to impose one’s will on others
Property:
Forms of wealth
Prestige:
The respect given by others
Life chances
Opportunities that individuals do or do not have to engage in certain activities
Opportunities that they do or do not have to accomplish certain goals
Capitalists/Bourgeoisie:
People who own and operate factories and other business in pursuit of profit
Proletariat:
Working people who sell their labor for wages
Class:
Determined mainly by economic standings or wealth
Party:
Which was equivalent to political power
Status:
Social prestige and honor
A composite ranking based on various dimensions of social inequality
Education
Wealth
Assets
Income
Occupational Prestige
Micro-level analysis (symbolic interactionism)
Social standing affects everyday interactions
People with different social standing keep their distance from one another
Conspicuous consumption
Buying and using products with an eye to the “statement” they make about social position.
Relative poverty:
The deprivation of some people in relation who have more
Absolute poverty:
A life-threatening deprivation of resources
Poverty Line:
Government determination of what poverty is
Blame the poor:
The poor are responsible for their own poverty
Culture of poverty:
A lower class subculture that can destroy people’s ambition to improve their lives
Blame society:
Society is primarily responsible for poverty
Primary cause is loss of jobs in inner cities
Government should fund jobs and provide affordable child care for low-income mothers and father
The truly disadvantaged
A group of people who live predominantly in the inner city and who are trapped in a cycle of joblessness, deviance, crime, welfare, dependency, and unstable family life.
Race:
A category composed of men and women who share biologically transmitted traits that members of a society deem socially significant
Race is a significant concept only because most people consider it to be
Europeans began to use them the term “race” to refer to the categories of people they encountered in 1500s
People who have common cultural characteristics and an ethnic identity (common ancestors, language, religion, etc.)
Race can be analyzed as ethnic categories in many cases
They share a common culture and a common identity
Were racist because we made this society racist
A scientific standpoint, physical variation is real, but racial categories do not deserve human variation.
No biologically Because of migration, there is there is physical diversity everywhere
Physical Whites has dropped because they are having less kids
Ethnicity:
A shared culture heritage
Nationality:
the status of belonging to a particular nation
An ethnic group forming a part of one or more political nations
Dominant Group:
Those who control the central institutional spheres, including power to define standards of beauty and social worth.
The most powerful group in the united states
Dominant group does not have to be a numerical majority, but mainly deals with actual powers and perception power in society.
In the U.S. White Anglo-Saxon Protests (WASPs) are the dominant group, but they comprise only a function of the population.
Power Structure
Minority:
A group that has less power than the dominant group, and therefore is usually poorer than the majority, has less prestige, and suffers from discrimination.
The sociological meaning minority does not refer to the numerical size of a group.
Minority Group Status
Involves four major elements
Visible ascribed trait by which a person can be clearly recognize
Differential (unequal) treatment on the basis of this trait
Organization of one’s own self- image around this identity
Awareness of a shared identity with similar other
White Privileges:
Implicit or systemic advantages that people who are deemed white have relative to people who are not deemed white
Not having to experience suspicion and other adverse reactions to one’s race is also often termed a type if white privilege.
Peggy McIntosh “The Invisible Knapsack”
Prejudice and attitude, which predisposes an individual to prejudge entire categories of people unfairly.
This attitude is rigid, emotionally loaded, and resistant to change
Stereotypes:
a rigid and inaccurate image that summarizes a belief.
Because stereotypes reflects beliefs rather than facts, they are illogical and self-serving
Racism:
the belief that race determines human ability and as a result, certain races deserve to be treated as inferior while other races deserve to be treated as superior.
Racism refers to the belief that one racial category is innately superior or inferior to another
Discrimination
Discrimination is a behavior, or and the unfair and harmful treatment of people based on their group membership
It is an action that involves treating various categories of people unequally
Focuses on the practice of treating people unequally
Scapegoat theory
argues that prejudice results from frustrations among the disadvantaged
A scapegoat is a person or category of people, typically with little power whom people unfairly blame of their own troubles
Authoritarian personality
theory views prejudice as a personality-level trait
Cultural theory of prejudice
notes that prejudice may Be embedded in popular cultural values
Symbolic Racism: The belief in equal rights couples with the belief that certain racial and ethnic groups have achieved an unfair advantage over whites
Conflict theory:
views prejudice as a product of social struggles
Assimilation
Anglo-conformity
Melting pot assimilation
Pluralism
Segregation
Hyper-segregation
De facto vs de jure
Internal colonialism
Expulsion (population movement)
Annihilation (Genocide)
Sex:
the biological distinction between females and males
Intersexed:
Individuals with anatomical categories that are not easily identifiable with either sex
Gender:
the significance a society attaches to biological categories of females and males
Gender identity:
Traits that females and males, guided by their culture, incorporate into their perspective personalities
Gender socialization
Gender socialization begins virtually at the moment of birth and as consequences of early experiences
Gender roles
are attitudes and activities that a culture links to each sex
By the tenth month of life children are already identifying themselves as masculine or feminine and not too long after that, their gender identity is firmly fixed
In No sex is inherently inferior or superior to the other - society defines these attitudes.
Every society goes beyond biology to establish to more complex social concept of gender: the cultural and attitudinal, which are associated with being male and female
In many small-scale hunting and gathering societies men and women play complementary roles and their lives revolve around many shared activities
In industrial societies the male roles comes to be defined by:
success on the job
independence
aggressiveness
The female role comes to be defined by:
child-nurturing activities
subjectivity
dependence on men
Gender market
American society is filled with gender markers: Symbols and signs that identify a person’s gender
As people mature, gender markers become more prominent, and much of gender socialization involves learning, which are appropriate for women
Sociology Notes