READINGS FOR SOC 111 (SPRING, 2002)
Copyright, Jay Coakley, 2002
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Soc 111
LAST ASSIGNMENT (8 points):
The purpose of the last 4 classes of the semester is to apply the basic sociological concepts that we have covered up until now. Your last assignment is to do a 2-page (600-700 words) paper in which you present a sociological analysis/commentary on at least one of the topics and films that we cover during the last 4 classes. Your paper may involve any of the following:
In writing the paper you must use at least 5 of the highlighted concepts from the online readings. Please give special priority to culture, ideology, social interaction, identity, social structure, social institutions, and social inequality. The paper will be evaluated in terms of your grasp of the meaning of the concepts and how you have used them to identify and discuss public issues, social policies, or social experiences in your life. Basically, I am interested in how you use your sociological imagination.
You may also use major concepts from Sernau's book, especially if you deal with issues, policies, or personal experiences related to social inequality. And if you use correctly the concept of pedagogy, as it is defined by Giroux, you will receive my admiration, if not a good grade!
The topics covered during the last four classes are:
Your paper may be handed in anytime between May 3rd and May 13th.
Social control, social justice, and social transformation
Social Control and Deviance
Social control refers to a complex set of processes through which values and norms are developed and used to guide the feelings, thoughts, and actions of people in a particular situation or in a group or society. It is through these processes that people learn what others expect from them and what others are likely to define as acceptable or unacceptable when it comes to feelings, thoughts, and actions.
For the most part, social control occurs in connection with processes of socialization through which people come to want to act as they are expected to act. However, it may be grounded in more explicit methods such as coercion or rewards, threats or promises, rejection or acceptance, negative or positive rumors, commands or encouragement, warnings or advice, and so on.
For example, social control occurs in a family as parents interact with their children in ways that promote the feelings, thoughts, and actions that parents define as appropriate and discourage those that parents define as inappropriate. In some cases, parents may clearly identify and describe the norms and values that they define as important, and give clear examples of the feelings, thoughts, and actions that are within their range of acceptance. At the same time, children in the family develop expectations for their parents and use subtle methods of encouraging their parents to conform to those expectations.
In other words, social control is not something that is imposed on some people by other as it is a set of processes through which people identify or develop values and norms and then encourage each other to use those values and norms as guides for their feelings, thoughts, and actions. Of course, values and norms often are established in situations or groups before we enter them, and we may not have much to say about what they are and how they apply to us. However, even in formally organized social structures we will have opportunities to influence or modify values and norms as they apply to particular circumstances and relationships.
Social control refers to the methods that people use to inform others of their expectations, to encourage others to meet those expectations, and to discourage others from not meeting their expectations
Formal social control "refers to efforts to enforce norms by preventing violations or discovering and apprehending violators" through organized methods and processes that are defined as legitimate within a group or society (G. T. Marx, 2001). In recent years, formal social occurs more frequently through strategic methods and the use of various forms of technology such as electronic surveillance, computers models, laboratory testing, and spacial design (panopticon). Suspects are identified by using records, data banks, and classification systems; even risks are computed when it comes to various methods of apprehension.
Organization and predictability in the social world depends on the existence of boundaries for actions and the expression of feelings and thoughts. The establishments and enforcement of these boundaries involves processes of social control.
When sociologists study social control they are concerned with four major questions:
1. How are boundaries determined and revised?
CONCLUSION: Deviance involves social definitions and social responses that occur in a political, economic, and social context where a combination of cultural factors and power relations are important
DEVIANCE = EXPECTATION + VIOLATION + RESPONSE
Deviance = observed or inferred behaviors, ideas, or characteristics that fall outside a generally accepted range, the boundaries of which are developed & revised through social interaction, both informal and formal (legal).
Social Control − NEW ISSUES:
Social Justice
Social justice is a key issue in groups and societies. Order and predictability can be coerced, but in democratic settings, they depend on the perception and existence of social justice.
For most people there are three dimensions of social justice: they want the rules to be fair, they want the rules to be applied fairly, and they want outcomes that are fair. In other words, they want fairness in standards, procedures, and distributions when it comes to important things in their lives − such as basic freedoms, political rights, legal status and treatment, opportunities for growth and education, meeting basic standards of living (food, water, clothing, housing, health care, living wage), access to power and authority, and the pursuit of happiness (Alwin, 2001, p. 2705).
This sounds straightforward, but people's ideas about what is fair are formed in particular social and cultural contexts, and they change over time and from place to place. After all, fairness can be defined in terms of merit and performance or in terms of need. When individualism is highly valued, the emphasis is usually on merit and performance; when community is valued, the emphasis is usually on need.
When sociologists study social justice they usually focus on income and welfare, education, the family, and the law. Many sociologists have studied issues of economic justice such as poverty and income inequality, issues of employment justice such as comparable worth in wages for men and women, issues of family justice such as child custody and child support, and issues of intergenerational justice such as support for dependent populations including children and the old.
Sociological concerns with formal justice focus on the law − the rules used to define criminal acts, the processes used to identify those engage in criminal acts, and processes used to determine guilt and distribute penalties. This is referred to as CRIMINAL JUSTICE and it emphasizes "due process, impartiality, and distribution according to appropriate criteria" (Marshall, p. 333). In this sense it overlaps with concerns about material or social justice which deal with who should and does receive what, and how they should and do receive it.
EXAMPLES:
Affirmative action has been a policy used to reduce systematic forms of economic inequality between socially identifiable categories of people that have experienced discrimination in a society. The major principle that underlies affirmative action is that discrimination based on ascribed statuses and physical disabilities is unjust, especially in the realm employment where rewards should be based on merit and performance and in education where there is an expectation of equal opportunity.
Comparable worth is the policy based on the notion that it is unjust when women and men do not receive equal pay for equal work.
Reparations for former slaves and their descendants are based on the notion that justice involves compensation for victims.
Issues of social and economic justice become more contentious when they are discussed in global terms and across cultures.
People want to believe that the social world is a just world − that people receive the opportunities and outcomes that they deserve based on their inputs. In fact, many people so wish to believe in a just world that they even adjust their beliefs about guilt and responsibility to preserve their sense that the world is fundamentally just (Elster, 1989, pp. 22-23). When they do this there is a tendency to sometimes "blame the victims" for their own misfortune. When victims are blames, responsibilities for initiating and maintaining social justice can be avoided.
People in the US and other societies with capitalist economies generally seek fairness in terms of "justice of rewards" rather than equality of rewards. They are happy as long as their efforts and contributions are in constant proportion to the rewards they associate with a standard of comparison that they have learned through their experience (Alwin, 2001, p. 2704). Also, most people become more upset when they see or experience underrewards than overrewards.
When it comes to distributional justice, people are more likely to be more concerned about the sources of inequality than about the objective conditions of inequality (unless there is absolute poverty that harms or kills people!)
Social Justice Issues:
Social Change and Social Transformation
There are differences in the meanings of the terms social change and social transformation:
Social change is a general term used to refer to alterations in existing social and cultural patterns. Social transformation is a more specific terms that refers to a purposive restructuring of social life for the sake of achieving a progressive goal and improving the lives of people who do not share in the advantages offered in a group or society (usually promoting some form of social justice)
Sociologists traditionally study social change, but they are increasingly concerned with social transformation − not just studying how it occurs, but actually using sociology to promote it. This is a contentious goal in all of science, and sociology is no different than other sciences.
Sociologists initially studied social change as an exception to the stability of "social systems." Then they saw social change as inherent in the social world and in all realms of social life, and their research focused on "continuous change" as it occurred incrementally over time to reveal long-term patterns of growth or decline. More recently there has been a concern with discontinuous changes that occur more frequently than earlier "systems" theorists assumed. These discontinuous changes do not assume identifiable long-term patterns and they occur as sharp departures from existing patterns or structures.
As sociologist came to see social life is a social construction, they often switched their attention to the ways that social change occurs in connection with the collective action of human beings. The emphasis now is primarily on how people have the power to make and re-make the social world − that is, to transform it in progressive ways.
GENERAL POINTS ABOUT SOCIAL CHANGE
Do you know how comforting it has been for many (not all) whites to sit in school and learn that the TRUTH about the world is consistent with their lives and their perspectives? Even when there is disagreement about what is true or what is knowledge, the competing perspectives are often consistent with some of the experiences of many whites; and the disagreements do not get identified in terms of their connections to racial or ethnic differences in experiences.
Do you know how comforting it has been for many (not all) whites to sit in school and read books written almost exclusively by other whites? Many of those over 35 years old in the US never read in their school curriculum a book written by a Black American or Latino American or Asian American. The "connection" one feels with the text is likely to be different when the reader does not see the author as coming from a different racial or ethnic perspective.
Do you know how comforting it has been for many (not all) whites to sit in school and have classes taught by other whites who often have experiences and perspectives similar to their experiences, and to see whites in positions of power and control in the school?
In such a comforting atmosphere there is likely to be much personal reaffirmation, a likelihood of thinking that "I am normal" and "I am on the track to truth" and "I can continue to see the world from perspectives that fit with my experiences and do well and get reaffirmation in the future."
Under such conditions we would expect that most white students associated with the dominant culture in the US would do better than most students from other cultural backgrounds, unless there were special circumstances or unless there was a "special fit" between a culture and the dominant culture in the school
And we might predict that students from cultural backgrounds that would lead them to see the world in slightly different ways than the ways the world is presented in class, would be more likely to fail. Is this surprising?
If you are white, what would you think if you were in a school where all the books were written by blacks or Latinos and, with a few exceptions, the only whites you saw in the school were in low level service positions, such as janitor and cafeteria worker? Would this ever be an issue with you? Would you identify with the school and its curriculum and be able to "get into" the material in the same ways as your black or Latinos fellow students? Would you ever feel any frustration? When? Would you ever feel especially good? When? Would it be important for you to associate with other white students in the school? If you found an activity that would enable you to stand out and receive acclaim in the school, would it be important for you to engage in that activity and to excel at it? Would your whiteness be a basis for your identity? What would that mean in terms of how you would see yourself and your connections to the world in which you live?
And would whites from low income and working class backgrounds be as comfortable as middle class whites in all schools?
Write a 400-500-word essay in which you identify two social structures with which you are familiar.
Describe why each social structure fits the definition in the readings (see the material on Social Structure that follows) and identify the statuses and roles within each social structure. Finally, explain how each structure depends on the actions and participation of the people who occupy the statuses and play the roles, and how each structure influences the actions of those who participate in it.
If appropriate, you could also identify examples of role conflict as well as the ways that roles maximize predictability, reduce ambiguity, and promote social control in the relationships that comprise the social structures you discuss.
SOCIAL STRUCTURE
When we use the term structure we infer two things: (1) a recognizable shape or pattern, and (2) an underlying logic or organizing principle that accounts for the ordered shape or pattern that we observe.
For example, when we go to work for a large company, we may be shown an organizational chart that visually illustrates the company's internal job structure. The chart contains boxes connected by vertical and horizontal lines. The boxes represent the positions that people occupy in the company, and the lines represent the established relationships that exist between those positions. The chart enables us to see where our job fits into the overall structure of the company. It also allows us to see the "chain of command and responsibility," and to determine out how we might climb the "corporate ladder" and move to higher positions in the company structure.
If we combine our knowledge of what the company does with the patterned relationships that we see in the organizational chart we may be able to identify the logic or the organizing principles that underlie the structure. If we can do this, we can explain why the patterns are the way they are in the chart. Then the organization and the overall order of the company will "make sense" to us and we will start work with a basic understanding of how the structure works and how our job fits into the company as a whole. Whether you are a new student or a new employee, it pays to know something about the structure in which you participate.
A Sociological Definition of Social StructureWhen sociologists talk about social structure they are referring to the recurring patterns of relationships and the relatively enduring social arrangements that people establish and maintain as they live their lives together. Social structures are sometimes formally organized as in the case of corporations, government agencies, schools, hospitals, sport teams, and groups that have been formed to work on a task and achieve a particular goal. Whenever we talk about "an organization" we infer the existence of a formal structure − a pattern of positions and relationships that we can represent in the form of an organizational chart.
Formal structures have an important influence on our lives, but most of us realize that there is much more to life than we can represent in organizational charts. Think back to your high school days: Did your high school have cliques? Did certain students hang out together and separate themselves from others or even exclude others from their regular activities in the hallways, in classes, and after school? Were there insiders and outsiders in your school? Did some of the students exist on the margins of most of the activities at your school, while other students were almost always in the middle of those activities? After a couple of years at your school did the social scene become predictable in terms of who would do what and with whom?
If you answered yes to a few of these questions you have personal experience with informal social structures − those patterned relationships and social arrangements that are developed apart from or along side formal structures. The informal structures that are formed by students are part of the overall structure of the school, but they are different than the formal structures that involve the official positions and patterned relationships of administrators, staff, faculty, coaches, volunteers, and students.
When sociologists study schools or any other enduring social arrangements they must pay attention to evidence related to both the formal and informal structures that exist in the social world. As you know, high schools are more than just a collection of positions and individuals. They are social places where people form friendships, establish informal groups, develop strategies for negotiating their connections with others. They are places where some people are more popular and socially connected than others, where some people seem to have more privilege than others even to the point of getting away with things that others would not even think of doing. In fact, the social scene in most high schools consists of patterns of relationships and social arrangements that regularly bring certain people together and push others to the margins of social life in school-related activities. At the same time they are places where administrators, staff, and teachers have job descriptions and students have requirements. They also are places where relationships, the chain of responsibility and authority, and the rules for different positions are formally outlined in official the handbook that describes how the school is organized.
Social structures in everyday life are sometimes hard to "see" because they just blend in with our everyday routines. For example, families have social structures in the sense that family relationships become patterned over time, and family members develop social routines as they live together. Even groups of friends have social structures in that group members develop recurring patterns of relationships and activities with each other. Some group members may be leaders and others followers; some may talk or initiate group activities more often than others; and some may be counted on to provide emotional support to other groups members in times of stress. The social structure of a friendship group may change over time and it may take slightly different shapes in different situations. But patterns do emerge over time, and those patterns can be observed if we look closely enough at what occurs in the group.
The challenge of studying social structuresThese descriptions indicate that social structures include more than what we might see on organizational charts. In fact, social structures can be very elusive and difficult to study because much of the social world is not made up of neat sets of relationships and social arrangements. It often contains many loose ends, inconsistencies, and conflicts. Furthermore, social structures change as people give new meanings to existing relationships and social arrangements or abandon them in favor of new ones that they think are more efficient or meaningful.
Social structures are not like structures in the physical world. The structure of a tree and the structure of the human heart each come in a neater package than any structures in the social world. Furthermore, the roots, branches, and leaves of a tree do not get together and decide to change their relationships with each other, move to another tree, or form of new species of tree because they are tired of the way things have been. Nor do arteries, ventricles, valves, muscles, and cells decide to restructure the human heart or alter the relationships between the heart and the rest of the circulatory system.
The social world consists of amazingly diverse forms of social relations and social arrangements. Some are relatively easy to study because they are organized in system-like fashion, others must be studied very closely to identify subtle and hard to see patterns, and still others must be studied with extra special care and patience because they are rather disorganized, inconsistent, and even contradictory and chaotic.
We know that a social structure exists only if we can identify and provide empirical proof of enduring social arrangements in the social world. Of course, it is important to remember that even commonly accepted social arrangements change over time as some people challenge and modify existing patterns of relationships and forms of social organization. Structural changes also occur when people raise questions about the cultural meanings and ideologies that support and justify existing social arrangements.
In other words, social structures have a reality that transcends each of us as individuals and influences our actions. But at the same time, it is the collective and coordinated actions of individuals that create and maintain social structures. This complex connection between social structure and the social actions of individuals and groups is something that sociologists have discussed and debated for many years. Some sociologists take the position that social structures determine the actions and relationships of individuals. Others emphasize that individuals are active agents who create and maintain social structures through their collective actions. In other words, they debate over whether "structure" or "agency" is most important when studying the organization and dynamics of social life.
In recent years some sociologists have attempted to develop concepts that could be used to explain how structure and agency are really two interrelated parts of a larger social process. Anthony Giddens, a respected British sociologist has described this larger social process as structuration − a continuing series of everyday social practices that create and are created by structures. Giddens' point is that social structures emerge in connection with recurring patterns of actions and interaction at the same time that actions and interaction are influenced by social structures. Many others agree with him, but it has been difficult to show exactly how this process of structuration works in social life. Structure and agency are so bound together that it is very difficult to separate them for purposes of analysis.
Social Structure as an Important Concept in Sociology
Many sociologists feel that social structures are the most important aspects of social life that they study (Lemert, 2002: 117). These sociologists assume that if we can identify the patterns of social relationships and social arrangements that exist in the social world, we can understand how people are influenced by the organization of social life and the social forces that exist in the larger social world. This is an important assumption because many sociologists use it to argue that if we want to deal effectively with social problems and promote social justice, we must work to change recurring patterns of relationships and the enduring social arrangements that exist in parts of the social world. Many people define this argument as controversial because it calls for actions that go far beyond changing the personal characteristics, attitudes, and actions of individuals.
The emphasis on social structure is a defining characteristic of sociology. In fact, it is the thing that separates sociologists from psychologists and other scientists who focus their attention on individuals and individual characteristics.
The fact that social structures are elusive and difficult to study means that it is important to have a set of conceptual tools to help us get inside social structures and see how they work. The concepts that many sociologists use to do this include "statuses," "roles," "role relationships," "role conflict," and "role set," (explained below) we will find it easier to get inside social structures and see how they work.
Using Concepts to Get Inside Social StructuresWhen groups of people establish and maintain clearly organized social structures, they usually have names for particular "positions" or "statuses" that describe how individuals fit together in a relatively predictable manner. For example, when people form families they often use the terms husband, wife, father, mother, son, daughter, grandparent, uncle, aunt, cousin, and "distant relatives" to describe how they fit together. These terms describe the positions that individuals occupy in the overall family structure. Family structures that are formed by people with particular religious beliefs may include the positions of godfather and godmother. African American families have sometimes included the position of "other-mothers" in their structures. Like godparents, other-mothers are "backup parents" who has the responsibility of caring for children in emergencies or special circumstances.
The point here is that social structures consist of statuses or positions that identify how people fit together in a particular pattern of relationships or social arrangement. When we refer to a status we assume the existence of a social connection or a relationship. For example, when we talk about the status of father we assume a social connection with a child. When we talk about the status of teacher we assume a social connection with a student. When we describe a baseball or softball team we talk about an interrelated set of statuses or positions that identify the patterns of connections or relationships that exist among team members.
Statuses may be ascribed or achieved. Ascribed statuses are positions that people occupy due to birth or family background. Achieved statuses are earned through personal accomplishments. "Prince' and "woman" are ascribed statuses, while "President" (in a democracy) and "Doctor" are achieved statuses. This is because a person is born into the status of a prince, and a person has no control over her status as a woman, while a person must earn the statuses of president or doctor. So your status as a man or a woman is ascribed while your status as a college student is achieved status.
Distinguishing between ascribed and achieved statuses is not always easy because some achieved statuses are related to forms of discrimination or privilege associated with ascribed statuses. For example, the fact that all U.S. presidents have been white men indicates that achievement and ascription can be tangled together in complex ways in some social structures. In a society where equality of opportunity is highly valued there is a need to maintain the belief that ascribed statuses do not have much relevance and that individual accomplishment or failure accounts for people's positions in the social structure of society. In fact, affirmative action programs were originally developed to minimize the past relevance and current social influence of ascribed statuses in the hope that statuses in the educational and occupational structures of U.S. society would be based on achievement. However, people continue to debate the extent to which affirmative action eliminates the relevance and influence of ascribed statuses or makes them more important in the status achievement process.
Roles
All statuses in a social structure are associated with roles. A role consists of the expectations and patterns of action that are developed in connection with a particular status in a social structure. A role, as the term implies, is "performed." But it is not performed in social isolation; it is always performed in connection with a role relationship. This means that the role of mother is performed in connection with a woman's relationship with her child; the mother-child relationship is a role relationship.
Although certain roles in particular social structures may consist of clearly defined expectations and patterns of action, roles are created over time as people continually negotiate their relationships with each other. This means that when two people are married, they negotiate what expectations they will have for each other and, as they interact over time, they create the patterns of action that constitute the roles of husband and wife. This is why there are significant variations in the ways that different men play their role as husbands and different women play their roles as wives. Of course, there also may be important similarities in many husband-wife relationships because of prevailing ideas about what it means to be a husband or a wife, and because some of those ideas serve as the basis for legal definitions and responsibilities associated with those statuses. These ideas and definitions vary from culture to culture, and they reflect dominant ideas about masculinity and femininity in a particular culture.
When roles are defined in clear and explicit terms in a social structure they leave little room for interpretation when it comes to what a person in a particular status is allowed to do and how he or she is connected with others in the structure. For example, the role of inmate in a prison consists of very specific expectations and actions when it comes to a prisoner's relationships with other prisoners, guards, and prison administrators. But even in the tightly regulated and organized structure of a prison there is some latitude for prisoners to construct their roles in slightly different ways. In other words, roles do not determine action as much as they set boundaries and provide guidelines for people as they deal interact with each other. We bring our individuality to every role relationship, and every role relationship emerges in its own way as people continually negotiate their connections with each other in circumstances that often change over time.
Roles are most likely to be defined in clear and explicit terms when people feel that there is a need to maximize predictability, minimize ambiguity, and maintain tight social control within a set of relationships. When people do not feel such a need, they often define roles very loosely so that those who occupy particular statuses can create and play their roles in many different ways as they interact with others in an established set of relationships. However, even when roles are loosely defined and leave room for individual interpretation, they are performed in real relationships where people come to expect certain things from each other. For example, after a pattern of action has been established in a role relationship, each person involved comes to expect certain things from the other on the basis of their past experience. When patterns of action change so that these expectations are no longer met, it creates a challenge for those involved in the role relationship, and for others who may be connected with them in a social structure.
Even though we create roles through interaction, our past performances in a particular role lead our role partners in a social structure to expect us to act in a particular way and even count on us to do so. In fact, the stability of the social structure itself may depend on it.
In a practical sense, statuses and roles facilitate social connections between people. They do this in three ways. First, when statuses and roles are clear there is a high level of predictability in our relationships − that is, we know generally what to expect in our relationship with another person. For example, if we know the woman in the white coat is a doctor we can feel reasonably confident that she will be concerned about our medical condition and that she will act in a way that expresses that concern.
Second, when statuses and roles are clear, it reduces uncertainty and ambiguity about what we should when we interact with other people. As a patient we know that we are expected to inform our doctor about our health and illnesses. We do not have to spend valuable time figuring out who should do what because we know the general expectations associated with patient and doctor roles. If you have ever been involved in a group project where roles are unclear and ambiguous, it can be very frustrating because it takes more time to establish what you can expect from each other than it does to do the actual project. We only start to get things done when we establish a set of statuses and roles in our group.
Third, when statuses and roles are clear, there is a built in basis for social control and social order in a set of relationships. For example, when your commanding officer in basic training tells you to "act like a soldier," you know exactly what he means and you conform immediately to the expectations that have been repeated day after day since training began. When parents associate clear expectations with the age of their children, they might say "act your age" to their 16-year old son when he acts in an immature manner. The 16-year old knows exactly what they mean because he has learned the expectations that his parents associate with age roles in their family.
Statuses and roles are the building blocks for social structures. This is why sociologists use these concepts to get inside social structures and examine how they work.
Role conflict
Statuses and roles may generally facilitate social connections between people but they can also be the source of confusion and conflict. Confusion and conflict are most likely under two conditions. First, when people occupy multiple statuses at the same time it is possible them to face the challenge of meeting contradictory expectations in different role relationships. For example, a young woman who is a college student, a wife, a mother, a daughter, and a daughter-in-law may run into a set of circumstances during her spring break when expectations associates with each of those statuses are conflicting. She has papers due in three classes. She had promised her husband that they could take a few days to go away on a romantic break. Her daughter expects her to use her "free" time to spend time with her because they see so little of each other during the semester. Her mother just sent her nonrefundable airline tickets for all three of them to fly "home" for the break because she went to her in-laws during the holiday break between semesters. And her in-laws had such a great time with her and their son and granddaughter during the holiday break that they want them all to return over spring break.
There is no way that this young woman can meet the expectations for each of her roles. Her multiple roles are the source of conflict for her, and she will have to do some strategic negotiating to avoid sanctions and rejections in her role relationships. Setting priorities under these circumstances is necessary but certainly not easy. And it is doubtful that everyone will agree with how she sets her priorities. When we occupy statuses and have roles in many social structures, we are bound to face regular role conflicts such as this one.
A second type of role conflict occurs when we play a role that has a complex and diverse role set. A role set refers to all the role relationships that exist in connection with playing a single role. For example, the role of a high school basketball coach exists in a social structure where the coach has a diverse role set. In other words, playing the role of a coach involves interacting in a variety of different role relationships including relationships with players, players' parents, assistant coaches, opposing coaches, fellow teachers, the athletic director, the principal, members of the state high school activities association, local sportswriters, booster club members, secretaries who manage the athletic office, and janitors who clean the gym. This role set is so diverse that it is unlikely that the expectations that people have for a coach will be conflicting.
Of course, a coach cannot be all things to all people. Priorities must be set. Unlike the young woman who had multiple roles, the coach has one role, but it comes with a complex role set consisting of diverse role relationships. Like the young woman, the coach cannot meet everyone's expectations. This may not be a problem if the coach's team is undefeated and wins the state championship. But even then some form of role conflict may continue to make life difficult for the coach. Whenever, a role involves a diverse role set, role conflict is likely.
Social Institutions as Special Forms of Social StructuresSocial institutions are relatively stable social arrangements that identifiable collections of people establish as they work together to meet needs and accomplish goals that they define as important for their survival.
In the case of societies, social institutions would include family, education, religion, economy, politics, and health care. Many sociologists also would identify science, leisure and sports, the law (i.e., the legal system), the military, and the media as social institutions. Social institutions have an enduring quality to them, and they are difficult to change. However, under conditions of social diversity and/or rapid social and cultural change, people may become morally ambivalent about particular established or institutionalized social arrangements. This may lead some people to raise questions about the legitimacy of the rules and the authority structures that support the institutionalized social arrangements, and to call for changes that allow for the formation of new social arrangements. As values change in a culture and as the everyday social practices of people challenge established social arrangements, social institutions are likely to undergo change. We have seen this in nearly every major institutions sphere in the US over the last generation. Such changes make many people anxious and lead them to feel that the moral foundations of culture and the integrity of social structures have been compromised to the point that social order is in jeopardy.
When social scientists talk about the institution of the family, or economic and political institutions in a society they are referring to the established rules, positions, and relationships that people have established for the purpose of accomplishing particular tasks. The institution of the family consists of relatively enduring social structures that people have established to regulate reproduction, child-care and socialization, and the material support of family members. The institution of the economy consists of enduring social structures that people have established to produce, distribute, and consume goods and services in a group or society. Political structures consist of enduring social structures that people have established to make collective decisions and to "govern" their relationships with each other in a group or society.
Social Structures and Social InequalitySocial inequality, as used by sociologists refers to systematic differences related to the living conditions, opportunities, resources, and accomplishments of particular categories of people. When these differences are relatively enduring, connected with structural factors, and cause people to be ranked in terms of a vertical hierarchy, sociologists say that social stratification exists.
Social stratification is characterized by clear differences in life chances for people in particular categories. Life chances refer to a person's odds for maintaining well-being and obtaining those things that are highly valued in a culture. Social stratification generally refers to social class differences as measured by income, wealth, and power in a society. But sociologists are also concerned with systematic differences related to social categories such as gender, race, ethnicity, religion, age, and physical (dis)ability.
Inequalities related to class and to these other categories are studied in terms of their impact on social interaction, identity, and social structure. Sociologists disagree about the origins of social inequalities, how they affect social order, and how they are reproduced in everyday life. The growing realization that social inequalities are created and maintained through particular cultural practices, patterns of interaction, and social structures has fueled debates over what forms of inequalities ought to be actively opposed and how social transformations might best be achieved. Are we seeking equality in overall well-being, opportunities, or social and economic outcomes? Should equality be facilitated through affirmative actions or more passive strategies?
TOPIC 1Sociology is the study of the social world − how we human beings create, organize, maintain, and change the social world, and how the social world influences the feelings, thoughts, and actions of individuals and groups.
The social world consists of the everyday actions and relationships of individuals, the organization and dynamics of groups and organizations, and the patterns of social arrangements, trends, and events in societies and around the globe. It consists of the ideas and meanings that we human beings use to guide our actions and to make sense of what occurs in our lives and the lives of others, and it consists of patterned social relationships that emerge as people make choices and engage in individual and collective actions. These patterns take the form of groups, organizations, communities, societies, and even global networks of people. Sociology studies all these things.
As you can see, sociology is a broad field and it has relevance across a wide range of topics and issues. Sociologists study the ways of life that people create as they come to terms with and sometimes struggle over how to do things, how to organize their relationships, and how to make sense of their everyday experiences. Sociologists study how people identify and influence each other in social interaction; how people organize their relationships in families, schools, religious congregations, governments, and the economy; how people use power and resources in connection with their social relationships; and how inequities in power and resources influence the dynamics of social life as well as the everyday experiences of individuals and groups.
At the heart of sociology is the notion that that none of us lives outside the influence of the social world. This does not mean that our actions and relationships are determined by our immediate social environment or by society, but it does mean that each of us is influenced by forces, processes, and events that exist in the larger social world. One of the primary goals of sociology is to enable us to identify those forces, processes, and events, and to see our lives and the lives of others "in context" − that is, in connection with a complex and constantly changing social environment. When we do this we become aware of factors that set limits as well as create possibilities in our lives.
The importance of sociology is grounded in the fact that the social world consists of more than each of us as individuals doing our own things for our own reasons. After all, we form relationships, interact with, and influence each other. We organize ourselves around interests and tasks, and establish groups, networks, communities, and societies. Over time, our actions, relationships, and collective activities lead to the creation of social arrangements that could not have been predicted simply with information about each of us as individuals. Sociology helps us to put ourselves and other people "in context" so that we can understand how people's lives, including our own lives, are related to the immediate situations and the larger social world in which we live.
The subject matter of sociology is broader than the subject matter of any other social science. In fact, research in women's studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, media studies, social work, and criminal justice all draw on the field of sociology and its subspecialties. (Remind me to talk about these subspecialties in class)
Why am I here? (just in case you asked this last Friday!)After at least 12 years of formal education you are taking an introductory sociology course. As you begin to read this material you may be asking, "How did I end up taking sociology? Am I required to read everything Coakley puts on this site? What must I do to get a good grade in this course? Is sociology related to my life today, and will I learn anything that I can use in the future?"
These questions are similar to the ones I asked when I registered for an introductory sociology course during the spring semester of my first year in college. The course instructor informed me that I was required to read the entire book (nothing was online in 1962!), and he spelled out what I had to do to get a good grade. However, it took longer to find reasonable answers to the questions about why I chose a sociology course and how sociology would be related to my life.
As I look back on why I took my first sociology course it is clear that I was influenced by history and culture. I began college at a time when social issues had a direct impact on the lives of young people. Social changes were occurring so rapidly that many of us in college felt overwhelmed. Young people in various student movements challenged traditional rules and confronted authority figures in nearly every sphere of life. Research by sociologists and social activists was exposing social problems related to poverty and social inequality in the United States. The civil rights movement and the women's liberation movement were challenging and changing how we thought about race relations and gender relations. These changes had an impact on my sense of who I was as an 18-year old white male from a middle class family. They influenced my relationships with African American classmates and teammates, and my relationships with women, including my mother, four sisters, and many friends. Given what was going on in the culture in which I lived, it was not surprising that I decided to take a course that focused on social life and social issues.
My decision to register for introductory sociology was made during a late night conversation with friends in a dorm room. As we talked about courses, teachers, and requirements I learned that a former probation officer taught the sociology course. One of my friends said that it was an interesting course and that the teacher was fair when it came to assigning work and grading tests and papers. I liked the idea of taking an interesting class and I valued fairness in a teacher. Furthermore, two friends in the room also decided to take the course. My decision that night, like many decisions that people make, occurred in connection with social interaction − that is, a process in which we take others into account in ways that influence what we feel, think, and do.
My decision was also related to my position as a student in the university. All students had course requirements for graduation. Introductory sociology fulfilled one of my requirements, and it was offered at a time that enabled me to meet the expectations of my basketball coach on whose good will I depended for my tuition, room, and meals. I knew that if my courses kept me from being suited up and on the court for a 2:30 pm practice, he would demand that I drop them and add courses that he would choose. According to the rules of the university and the National Collegiate Athletic Association, I was dependent on him for my scholarship; it was his way or the highway for me. I chose to take an 8 am introductory sociology course, but my choice was made under social conditions over which I had little control. As a student and an athlete I was part of a larger social structure that consisted of established patterns of relationships and social arrangements that exerted influence on and sometimes constrained my life.
In other words, my decision to take sociology was influenced by culture, interaction, and social structure. However, it was late in the semester before I realized that these were the most important foundational concepts in sociology. They had been used for nearly a century by over three generations of sociologists who had worked to develop explanations of social life that would be more useful and accurate than the explanations that had traditionally been given by priests and ministers, kings and nobles, and elders and storytellers.
My guess is that your decisions to take this course were also influenced by culture, interaction, and social structure. After all, social issues affect your life, and you know that social awareness is highly valued and useful today in nearly every culture around the globe. In fact, we must understand culture if we want to accurately interpret the meaning of ideas and actions that affect our lives. Interaction between you and your friends, classmates, parents, advisors, and mentors influences many if not most of your daily decisions, including what courses you take. Finally, the constraints and responsibilities that influence your choices and decisions are built right into the social structure of this university. They also are built into other recurring relationships and social arrangements such as your family, peer group, job, community, and society. All three of these "social things" − culture, interaction, and social structure -- influence your life even though they exist outside you and apart from your personality, temperament, and biological characteristics.
What is a sociological imagination?Sociologists look for connections between personal experiences and events and the social and cultural context in which they occur. When you can see and explain at least some of these connections, you possess a sociological imagination − that is the ability to see and explain what happens in peoples' lives in terms of social and cultural factors that exist in the larger social world.
If you are like most people, you already possess a variety of sociological skills and you use them regularly to get through the day, survive the social challenges you face, and connect with other people so that you can meet your needs and enjoy life. Every day you make dozens of assumptions and educated guesses about what will happen in the social situations you encounter. As you experience these situations, you may develop explanations of what and why social things happen as they do. You try to see the connections between people's lives and the social and cultural factors that exist in the larger social world, and you often use your sense of those connections to develop explanations for why social life is as it is and how it might be changed. As you use sociological skills to do these things, you are doing a form of practical and personal sociology.
My goal in this course is to enable you to convert your everyday, practical sociological skills into a well-developed sociological imagination, a more professional version of sociology that you can use to wrap your mind around social things that extend beyond your immediate experiences. At the same time you will learn to describe and understand social life from perspectives that take into account issues and things that are not part of your everyday experiences. With a few sociological tools such as concepts, interpretive frameworks, and data collection strategies you will further develop your sociological imagination in ways that will help you in this course and in many parts of your life long after this semester is over.
Sociology helps us create maps so we can see where we and other people are in the social world, how we are connected with each other, and what our location in the social world means when it comes to choices, opportunities, and limitations.
Although most of us are pretty good at managing our lives and our relationships we do not automatically see how the larger social world influences our lives and our immediate social environments. For example, if we wish to understand patterns of drug abuse and the violence associated with dealing illegal drugs it is important that we have a sense of the way drugs are produced and moved around the world and how people obtain the weapons needed to maintain the drug trade on their terms. Or if we wish to understand why women in Afghanistan would wear burkas, it is important that we know something about Islamic beliefs, how those beliefs have been applied to everyday life situations involving men and women and their relationships with each other.
When sociologist C. Wright Mills (1959) described the sociological imagination nearly 50 years ago, he wanted to explain that personal successes or failures were not simply matters of individual character and responsibility. He thought that it was important for us in the United States to be aware of the differences between personal troubles and public issues. For example, when one child in a junior high school is reading below the 6th grade level, Mills would say that this is a personal trouble for that child. Therefore, we would seek solutions by examining the characteristics and skills of that child and determining the source of his or her reading difficulties. However, if 90% of the students in a junior high school were reading below a 6th grade level, Mills would say that reading difficulties are a public issue rather than a personal trouble. Therefore, we would seek solutions by examining the organization of the curriculum and the school, and by examining the connections between the students' lives and the larger social world in which they live.
When the analysis focuses on public issues the goal is to discover why the opportunities for learning how to read have collapsed for an entire group of young people. Instead of trying to change the characteristics of the children themselves, the emphasis is on changing established social arrangements that impact the lives of these children in such a negative manner. When educator Jonathon Kozol (1991) did such an analysis in the Chicago area, he discovered that opportunities to learn in different schools were influenced by what he called "savage inequalities." These inequalities were built right into the educational system and into the everyday lives of children. Schools in low income, predominantly minority school districts received less funding and offered less support and hope to children than did schools in middle and upper income, predominantly white districts. The result was less achievement, more alienation, and a general sense of hopelessness among students in the former school districts. Kozol explained that the only way to explain the differences was to carefully view the lives of these children in context and to assess how they were influenced by the larger social world.
Mills himself used marriage to illustrate the differences between personal troubles and public issues. He explained that a man and woman may experience personal troubles in their marriage, but when half of all marriages in a particular population end in divorce, it indicates that there may be public issues associated with how marriage and the family are organized and how they are related to other aspects of social life in a community or society. While marriage counseling may be the best way to deal with personal troubles in a marriage, dealing with the public issue of a high divorce rate requires changes in the way social life is organized.
Developing a sociological imagination requires more than just logic and facts. It calls for a type of thinking that combines logic and facts with a clear sense of how the personal and social are linked together. This type of thinking does not come naturally; instead, we learn it as we make repeated efforts to see people's lives in connection with culture, interaction, and social structure.
Barriers to developing and using a sociological imagination
Instead of using a sociological imagination to explain what happens in people's lives, most people in the United States seek explanations by focusing on the characteristics and personalities of individuals. This is consistent with the value that many people in US culture place on individualism and individual responsibility.
When it comes to difficulties and problems, most people think in terms of personal troubles instead of public issues. This leads them to seek solutions that involve psychological therapy or strategies designed to change individuals. At the same time, there is less support for seeking solutions by changing how social life is organized. It's not that people ignore social and community responsibility, but when they seek solutions to difficulties and problems they often feel that it is easier to change individuals than to change how social life is organized. This means that most of us do not receive much encouragement or support when it comes to developing and using a sociological imagination.
The field of social work provides a good illustration of how these barriers operate in everyday life. There are two approaches that can be used to guide social work. The casework approach deals with the personal troubles of individual "cases," while the community development approach deals with the public issues that negatively affect the lives of large segments of the population.
The casework approach is generally used in the United States. This means that the job of most social workers is to help each individual in their caseload to cope with and adjust more successfully to social conditions in their neighborhoods and communities. The community development approach is not often used in the United States. It requires that social workers be trained as community organizers rather than caseworkers. This means that their job is to use a sociological imagination to identify public issues that negatively influence the lives of people in a particular neighborhood or community, and then to facilitate the development and training of local leaders, the formation of public interest and political groups, and the implementation of community-based strategies to change the structures and processes that are the source of their shared problems and difficulties.
Most political leaders and powerful people in US cities do not support a community development approach to social work. As they make or influence decisions about how public money will be spent they have a strong vested interest in spending it in ways that preserve the status quo. Social life is organized to their advantage and they would like to keep it that way. They do not want social workers to enable large collections of people to effectively challenge and change existing ways of doing things. Therefore, when people in positions of power talk about social work policies, they identify personal troubles as the source of problems, and they emphasize solutions that focus on changing individuals and fostering individual responsibility. From their perspective, they see a public issues approach as politically dangerous, and they see the use of the sociological imagination as inherently controversial.
An emphasis on personal troubles generally means that there is a focus on controlling troublemakers and changing the characteristics of those in trouble. The popular media and television news coverage generally reinforce this emphasis. Story after story in the media focuses on individual troublemakers and the personal troubles of individuals without putting their lives in context, without seeing connections between the personal and the social, without identifying public issues, and without using the sociological imagination. However, if we are sensitive to this, we can be critical media consumers and use those stories to identify public issues and think critically about how social life is organized and how it might be changed. Barriers to developing and using a sociological imagination exist, but they can be overcome.
The personal usefulness of a sociological imagination
Second, the sociological imagination helps us see that we share a social location and social experiences with certain other people, and that we might work with them to change the conditions that create particular problems in our lives. For example, when individuals with physical disabilities saw that they shared a social location with others who also had difficulties finding jobs in an occupational structure designed by and for able-bodied people, they established alliances for the purpose of making changes in the way the occupational world was organized. Over time, their collective political actions led to the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990. This complex legislation enabled people with disabilities to participate more fully in the major spheres of social life. Among other things, it mandated changes that made public services, transportation, and accommodations more accessible, and it prevented employers from discriminating against qualified job applicants with disabilities. It also required that employers make reasonable accommodations in working conditions so that workers with disabilities could do their jobs effectively.
The point here is that using a sociological imagination enables us to see how our personal lives are connected to the larger social world in which we live, and to identify and form political alliances with others who are similarly located in the social world. This enables us to take more control of our own lives and to develop collective strategies for engaging in assertive actions designed to change those parts of the social world that affect our lives. And that is not a bad thing − in fact, it is a good way to maintain a viable democracy.
Topic 2:
Producing
knowledge about the social world: Developing theories and doing research
Most of the theorizing sociologists have done over the past 150 years has been motivated by a desire to synthesize information about the social world and develop general explanations for how and why social life is organized in particular ways. Underlying this motivation has been the belief that if we could identify the key forces that drive and shape social life, we could become masters of our own destiny. In other words, if we developed a valid and reliable theory about how the social world works, we could outline rational strategies for organizing societies in progressively efficient and satisfying ways.
This hope that humans could make the world better and more controllable through the use of knowledge and science was the foundation of the Enlightenment period in the eighteenth century, and marked the beginning of what we call "modernism" in Western societies. Modernism is an approach to life based on the idea that humankind can achieve progress through the use of rationality, science, and technology. Modernism gave rise to the belief that people could use social science to discover the knowledge needed to make societies more efficient, just, and harmonious. And as knowledge accumulated, human beings could bring societies closer and closer to perfection.
Most sociologists traditionally have wanted to be a part of this process of collecting information, testing theories, and eventually discovering scientific "truths" about how the social world works and how it might be controlled. Many have searched for "social laws" and "cause-effect relationships" that would explain all social life?regardless of time, place, and culture. These sociologists have tried to find the building blocks of social life by identifying the types of relationships and organizational structures that enable people to live satisfying lives in groups and societies. This search for the general foundations and building blocks of all societies has taken sociologists in different directions depending on their assumptions and viewpoints, as you will see in the following sections of this chapter.
But not all sociologists have joined in the search for a general theory of social life. Some have argued that it is not possible to develop a theory that explains all social life, and that the search for such a theory leads sociologists to ignore the diversity, complexity, and contradictions that are clearly a part of everyday life. Others argue that the quest for a general theory of society distracts sociologists from focusing on specific problems and identifying practical ways for people to solve problems fairly as they live their lives together. Finally, some sociologists have abandoned the search for a general theory of social life because they realize there are many different perspectives or standpoints from which to study and understand the world.
My point in this section is that sociologists in the 1990s use many different theoretical approaches as they ask questions and think about social life, and as they study sports. This means that people in the sociology of sport take many different directions when it comes to theorizing and doing research on sports. But before I discuss social theories and sports, I want to provide additional reasons for the many different theoretical approaches used in sociology and the sociology of sport. Why are there so many?
Theoretical diversity in sociology reflects the diversity and complexity of social life itself. Societies are complex phenomena. They have their own histories, dynamics, and cultures. And they can be viewed from many different perspectives. The diversity of theoretical approaches used in sociology today results from the recognition that no single perspective can tell us all we need to know about social life. Some very important changes in our world have promoted this recognition.
During this semester many of my comments and my description of sociology will be informed with a form of "critical theory." This means that when it comes to asking questions about the social world I tend to focus on the following:
(Please read for 2/8)
Culture consists of the ways of life that are produced and maintained over time by identifiable collections of people. "Ways of life" is an encompassing term. It includes ideas and images, fantasies and myths, stories and legends, symbols and language, attitudes and beliefs, values and norms, customs and rituals, processes and practices. It even includes the material objects and products that we create and use. For many sociologists today, two of the most important aspects of culture are the meanings that people give to aspects of social reality, and the processes through which meanings are produced and used in everyday life. The diversity and fluidity of the meanings that people produce and use as they create, maintain, and change their ways of life means that cultures are very complex. It also means that cultures are usually characterized by inconsistencies, contradictions, and conflicts as well as coherence, integration, and consensus. Therefore, as we study processes of cultural formation and cultural reproduction we must also study the forms of opposition and resistance that inspire and fuel cultural transformation.
Ideology consists of interrelated ideas and meanings that we use to explain how the social world is organized, how it does and should work, and how we and others are "positioned" in the established social arrangements and recurring processes that make up the social world. In the case of our own ideologies we usually take them for granted and seldom subject them to critical examination ("ideology is like body odor − we are seldom aware of our own"!). Ideologies are most likely to be questioned and critically examined when they are held by others and when they conflict with our own. Ideologies, regardless of who holds them, are used to explain and justify, or to question and challenge particular aspects of the social world, especially established forms of power relations. As such, they often become meanings used to preserve power, or meanings used to challenge power (Johnson, 1990). When sociologists study ideology we focus on the ways in which ideas and meanings are developed, how they are supported in the culture, how they are used social interaction, and how they are related to social structures, social institutions, and social inequalities. Ideologies may serve as a form of social cement that holds people together. However, because people often struggle over their ideas about what is important and how things should be done in the social world, ideological diversity and conflict is common. This has made the media especially important because highly publicized images and narratives are powerful tools in the process of establishing ideological consensus among people. To the extent that ideology involves the complex interplay between meanings and power, those who create and distribute media content become powerful players in the social world.
Social interaction is the process of people taking each other into account and engaging them in ways that influences their feelings, thoughts, and/or actions. Interaction involves reciprocity − a social give and take between people. It is through social interaction that culture and ideology as well as social structure, social institutions, and social inequality are revealed and become real in our lives. Additionally, identity is revealed through interaction. This is why sociologists study what might be described as "micro-contexts" − specific social sites where we can closely observe the everyday implications of larger social and cultural patterns. For example, one way to study globalization is to focus on a local setting and identify the manner in which global processes are incorporated and expressed in everyday interaction.
Identity is our sense of who we are and how we are identified by others. Because identities are formed, maintained, and changed in connection with our experiences and relationships, we say that they are contextual and relational. To the extent that our experiences, relationships, and connections to the social world are stable, our identities remain relatively stable. However, in social environments where experiences, relationships, and connections to the social world change rapidly, identities are fluid and sometimes even fragmented. Identities are constructed in connection with changes in cultural meanings associated with experiences and characteristics, with social interaction and social relationships, and with our positions in social institutions and social structures. Because each of us has different resources for successfully claiming identities, the process of identity construction is also influenced by social inequalities. Identities are "embodied," and this makes it important to understand social definitions and meanings associated with the body in a culture. Identity politics is a term that refers to the negotiation that occurs during processes of making, establishing, and maintaining identity claims. This means that identities are forms of social identification that others loan to us more than they are things that we create and own by ourselves.
Social structure refers to the recurring patterns of relationships and social arrangements that are established and maintained by a collection of people as they attempt to live their lives in satisfying and meaningful ways. Whenever we use the term structure we refer to some sort of recognizable pattern. For example, when we talk about the economic and political systems in various nations we infer the existence of established rules, positions, and relationships that people use to accomplish particular tasks and meet particular goals. When we go to work for a large company, we may be shown an organizational chart that illustrates the social structure of the company. In each of these cases we are inferring the existence of an identifiable pattern things or processes that are connected with each other and organized so that particular goals are met. Sociologist Charles Lemert (2002: 117) says, "Of all the things sociologists concern themselves with, structures are, . . .the most distinctive subject of their professional attentions." The problem with most social structures is that they have many loose ends! They are not like structures in the physical world, such as the structure of a maple leaf or a rocking chair that come in neater packages. The social world consists of varied forms of social relations and social arrangements. Some are organized in system-like fashion, some manifest recognizable patterns only if you look very closely, and others seem to be rather disorganized, inconsistent, and even contradictory and chaotic. This means that it can be difficult to identify certain forms of social structures. We can only know for sure that a social structure exists if we are able to identify patterns as we look at social arrangements over time. Of course, it is important to remember that all social relationships and arrangements are subject to change as people challenge existing forms of social relations along with the cultural meanings and ideologies that support and justify them.
Social institutions are relatively stable social arrangements that identifiable collections of people establish to meet needs and accomplish goals that they define as important. In the case of societies, social institutions would include family, education, religion, economy, politics, law, and health care. Many sociologists also would identify science, leisure and sports, the law (i.e., the legal system), the military, and the media as social institutions. Social institutions have an enduring quality to them, and they are difficult to change. However, under conditions of social diversity and/or rapid social and cultural change, people may become morally ambivalent about particular established or institutionalized social arrangements. This may lead some people to raise questions about the legitimacy of the rules and the authority structures that support the institutionalized social arrangements, and to call for changes that allow for the formation of new social arrangements. As values change in a culture and as the everyday social practices of people challenge established social arrangements, social institutions are likely to undergo change. We have seen this in nearly every major institutions sphere in the US over the last generation. Such changes make many people anxious and lead them to feel that the moral foundations of culture and the integrity of social structures have been compromised to the point that social order is in jeopardy.
Social inequality refers to systematic differences related to the living conditions, opportunities, resources, and accomplishments of particular categories of people. When these differences are relatively enduring, connected with established patterns of social relationships (social structure), and cause people to be ranked in terms of their relative advantage in a group or society, sociologists say that social stratification exists. Social stratification is characterized by clear differences in life chances for people in particular categories. Life chances refer to a person's odds for maintaining well-being and obtaining those things that are highly valued in a culture. Social stratification generally refers to social class differences as measured by income, wealth, and power in a society. Sociologists are also concerned with the relationships between social class and lifestyle differences and the dynamics of social relations as they are influenced by social meanings given to gender, race, ethnicity, religion, age, and physical (dis)ability. Social inequalities are generally studied in terms of their impact on social interaction, identity, and social structure. Sociologists disagree about the origins of social inequalities, how they affect social order, and how they are reproduced in everyday life. The growing realization that social inequalities are created and maintained through particular cultural practices, patterns of interaction, and social structures has fueled debates over what forms of inequalities ought to be actively opposed and how social transformations might best be achieved. Are we seeking equality in overall well-being, opportunities, or social and economic outcomes? Should equality be facilitated through affirmative actions or more passive strategies?
The Concept of Culture
As noted above, CULTURE consists of the ways of life that are produced and maintained over time by identifiable collections of people as they interact and live their lives in connection with each other. "Ways of life" is an encompassing term. It includes ideas and images, fantasies and myths, stories and legends, symbols and language, attitudes and beliefs, values and norms, customs and rituals, processes and practices. It even includes the material objects and products that we create and use. For example, music and art, money and legal documents, clothing and shelter, technology and forms of transportation are all elements of culture. Some people describe culture as a toolkit that we use to make sense of and navigate the social world (Swindler, 1999); others describe culture as the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and want to be (Wilson, 2000)
For many sociologists today, two of the most important elements of culture are the meanings that people give to aspects of social reality, and the processes through which meanings are produced and used in everyday life. The diversity and fluidity of the meanings that people produce and use today as they create, maintain, and change their ways of life means that most contemporary cultures tend to be complex, adaptive, and malleable. Just think of how meanings associated with the body and body shape by many people have changed over the past generation. The ideal of being a slender young man in the 60' and 70s has morphed into the ideal of being a muscular hard body in the 90s and 00s. The ideal of being a relatively full bodied woman in the 50s and 60s has morphed into the ideal of being a firmed sized 6 or smaller.
The diversity and fluidity of meanings today also means that contemporary cultures typically contain inconsistencies, contradictions, conflicts, and disagreements among segments of people, as well as consistencies, coherence, harmony, and consensus among people. Therefore, as we study culture we must be sensitive to forms of opposition and resistance that inspire and fuel cultural transformation and the development of new cultural practices as well as the shared meanings and expectations that reproduce existing cultural practices and patterns.
Elements of culture come into existence and are changed as people in a particular group or society come to terms with and often struggle over what is important in their lives, how to do things, how to relate to one another, and how to make sense out of the things and events encountered in their everyday experiences. Culture is not something that is imposed by some people on others as much as it is socially constructed as people interact with each other, and revise and invent ways of feeling, thinking, and acting as they try to survive, meet their needs, and achieve a sense of significance in the process. Of course, some people have more power and resources than others have to use in the process of cultural formation.
Your own family can be used to illustrate the process of cultural formation. As people come together form a family unit they develop a way of life that they hope will work for them. This way of life changes as the people change, as circumstances change, and as new members are added to the family. If you think of your own experience, it is likely that one or both of your parents had more to say about the way of life in your family than you had to say. But chances are good that you were not silent or powerless in this process of forming the way of life in your family. As you moved through childhood and adolescence you probably "debated" with your parents about family rules and rituals, pushed the boundaries of rules to allow for more freedom, control over how your bedroom was decorated, later curfews, greater access to a car, and more freedom to act on your own decisions. In the process you changed you family's way of life. You did it through interaction with other family members, and you had less power in the process than your parents had, but you were involved.
One of the reasons we are reading Henry Giroux's book is because culture is at least partially produced and reproduced through the stories we tell ourselves about "who we are and want to be, individually and collectively" (Maxwell, 2001, p. 1). Although there are multiple storytellers in all cultures, those who have the authority or the power and resources to tell stories to large numbers of people and to make those stories engaging and entertaining exert strong influence in the processes of cultural production, reproduction, and transformation. Of course, this power can be made to serve many ends, and those who listen to the stories have the ability to interpret and apply them to their lives them in a variety of ways. However, it is clear that over the past half century the Disney Corporation has become a key storyteller in the US and around the world, especially when it comes to stories for children. This means that it is worth paying attention to the stories they tell and how children incorporate them into their lives.
Culture as a Key Concept in Sociology
Throughout human history people from different cultures and societies have always mixed, influenced each other, and developed social arrangements to fit their needs and interests. But people, ideas, and things move much faster today than ever before and they are mixed with ever changing images created and transmitted through forms of telecommunications technology that draw people into each other's lives in new and sometimes contentious ways. Forms of material and social inequality are more visible than ever before, those without power feel vulnerable and dependent on those with power, and the pressures for economic growth often subvert the very traditions that give people a sense of identity and solidarity.
Ties between everyday life, media, and cultural ideology
Human beings are "meaning makers." The people, things, and events around us are real, and their impact on our lives is real. However, the reality of the world and its impact on our lives is mediated by the meanings that we give to people, things, and events.
For example, differences in skin color among human beings are real. However the importance and implications of skin color in our lives is mediated by the meanings we give to it. In U.S. culture people have given meaning to skin color in connection with particular ideas about race and racial classification. Even though real differences in skin color fall along a continuum that ranges from snow-white to midnight-black people have been classified into one of two racial categories that emerged and have been maintained in connection with powerful economic, social, political factors over the past 400 years of U.S. history.
The meaning making process is influenced by many things, including all the aspects of culture we have discussed, our experiences, and our vantage point for recognizing, defining, and assessing the world around us. Although meaning-making has obvious relevance for each of us personally, it occurs in connection with social interaction and the images, narratives, and discourses that are a part of our lives.
Our relationships with others depend on communication, and communication depends on meanings that are developed and shared with others. These meanings emerge in connection with discussions, debates, and negotiations -- and in connection with the media images and narratives that pervade the cultural landscape. Of course, meanings change over time and from one situation to another, but they constitute a key part of the foundation for social life. When interrelated meanings are widely shared social scientists often refer to them as ideologies.
Ideology is an interrelated set of cultural meanings and ideas that we use to guide our understanding of the social world, inform our actions, and develop visions of how the social world ought to be organized and ought to operate. We learn ideologies as we interact with others and develop shared perspectives that enable us to collectively give meaning to and make sense of the social world. We also use ideologies to determine what is important and unimportant and right and natural in the world (Hall, 1985). We could say that cultural ideology is a window into the underlying practical "logic" that we and others use as we participate in and interpret our lives and the world around us.
Cultural ideology does not come in a neat package, especially in highly diverse and rapidly changing societies. Different groups in any society develop their own perspectives and ideas for making sense of the social world, and they may not always agree with each another. In fact, different groups often struggle over whose way of making sense of the world is the best way, or the right way, or the moral way. This is where popular cultural practices and major media events such as the Super Bowl and the Olympics become sociologically relevant.
Cultural practices consist of activities and situations that either embrace or challenge particular ideologies. For example, as sports are created by people, they may develop around particular ideas about the body and human nature, about how people should relate to each other, about expression and competence, about human abilities and potential, about manhood and womanhood, and about what is important and unimportant in life. These ideas usually support and reproduce what might be called the dominant ideology in a society, but this is not always the case. Dominant ideology is built on the perspectives and ideas favored and promoted by dominant and powerful groups in a society, and it serves the interests of those groups.
We can use gender ideology in North America to show how sports as cultural practices are connected with cultural ideology. In North American culture there are many different perspectives and ideas about gender, about masculinity and femininity, and about relationships between men and women. As sports were developed and became increasingly organized, they were associated with a gender logic that was consistent with dominant forms of gender ideology in the culture as a whole. This gender logic usually worked to the advantage of men, while it disadvantaged women. Therefore, when people participated in sports, they often learned a form of "common sense" that led to the conclusion that women were "naturally" inferior to men in any activity requiring strength, physical skills, and emotional control.
This conclusion about male superiority and female inferiority even informed the vocabulary used in connection with many sports. When someone threw a ball correctly, many people would say that he or she threw "like a boy" or "like a man." When someone threw a ball incorrectly, many would say that he or she threw "like a girl." The same was true when running or other physical skills were assessed. If the skill was done right, it was done the way a boy or man would do it. If it was done wrong, it was done the way a girl or woman would do it. In fact, people generally understood that doing sports, especially sports that were physically demanding, would make a boy into a man. When women excelled at these sports, ideology led them to be confused and to say that playing sports were "unnatural" for "real" women. Their gender logic even led them to see strong, competent women athletes as "dykes," or lesbians. They thought that heterosexual femininity and excellence in sports, especially physically demanding and heavy contact sports, could not go together.
This gender logic became such a central part of many sports that some coaches of men's teams even used it to motivate players. These coaches would criticize male players who made mistakes or did not play aggressively enough by "accusing" them of "playing like a bunch of girls." Thus, according to the gender logic they used, being a female meant being a failure. This "logic" clearly served for many years to privilege boys and men in sports and disadvantage girls and women, who were never considered to be equal to males when it came to allocating resources and providing opportunities and encouragement to play sports. Although this gender logic has been challenged and discredited in recent years, its legacy continues to privilege some boys and men and disadvantage some girls and women.
The traditional gender logic used in sports, especially 0popular media sports, usually has promoted or reproduced dominant gender ideology in the society as a whole, which has, in turn, privileged men and disadvantaged women in economic, political, legal, and educational spheres of life. Similarly, the gender logic in many sports over the years has reproduced ideas about masculinity, promoting the notion that manhood is based on being hard, big, tough, strong, aggressive, and willing to endure pain without showing weakness.
However, cultural ideology is never established "once and for all time." People constantly question and struggle over it. They challenge the cultural logic used by others, and they even may mount challenges that produce changes in deeply felt and widely accepted perspectives and ideas. In the case of gender ideology, sports have been a "social place" [Sociologists often refer to the "social places" or "social locations" where significant social occasions or developments occur as sites.] for mounting such challenges to dominant ideas about what is natural and feminine. For example, the history of these struggles over the meaning and implications of gender in sports is complex, but recent challenges by both women and men who do not accept the logic used widely in the past have led to important revisions in dominant cultural ideology. Women athletes have illustrated clearly that females can be physically powerful and capable of noteworthy physical achievements surpassing those of the vast majority of men in the world. Furthermore, the accomplishments of women athletes have raised serious questions about what is "natural" when it comes to gender.
Studying popular culture, media representations, and everyday cultural practices is important because they are sites for many important ideological struggles. For example, ideas about socio-economic differences and social class are built into dominant forms of sports in many cultures. In other words, many sports are associated with a class logic. This class logic serves as a basis for explaining economic success and failure, generally leading to favorable conclusions about the characters and qualifications of those who are wealthy and powerful, and to negative conclusions about the characters and qualifications of poor people and those who lack power in society.
Many sports also are associated with a race logic related to dominant ideas about racial categories and sport-related physical skills. When using this race logic, people often have associated light or "white" skin with certain athletic abilities and dark or "black" skin with other abilities. Like other forms of cultural ideology, this race logic varies from one culture to another. However, it can be a very powerful force in social relations.
People also associate what we might call character logic with sports in certain cultures. For example, many sport programs in Western Europe and North America have been organized around particular beliefs about what character is and how it is developed and expressed. Consequently, many people assume that playing sports teaches people valuable lessons and develops positive character traits.
As we think about the impact of cultural ideology in our lives, we must remember that ideology is complex and sometimes inconsistent, and that cultural practices and media representations come in many forms and have many different meanings associated with them. Therefore, many aspects of everyday life connect with ideology in various and sometimes contradictory ways. We saw this in the example showing that sports are sites for simultaneously reproducing and challenging dominant gender ideology in society.
Ideology: The media as sites for struggling over how we think and what we do
The media are sites where people in society create and learn "stories" that they can use as they make sense out of the world and their lives. For example, the stories that revolve around sports and athletes have their own vocabularies and images; their meanings shift depending on the settings in which people tell them and hear them, and they often identify important cultural issues in people's lives. Researchers try to identify these stories and then determine how they fit into the culture and how people use them in connection with what they think and do.
Researchers also are concerned with whose stories about sports that become dominant in the culture, since there are so many stories that could be told about sports. These dominant stories are culturally important because they are used as a framework by many people as they identify what is natural, normal and legitimate. These frameworks give priority to ideas and orientations that tend to privilege some people more than others, some interests more than other interests. For example, the stories and vocabulary frequently used in discourse about sports revolve around heroic figures that are big, strong, aggressive, record-setting, champions. Political scientist Varda Burstyn (1999) says that they "celebrate the notion of `higher, faster, stronger' that today serves the interests of capitalist expansion and traditional manly values associated with conquest. This is an important way in which socialization occurs in connection with sports.
Researchers are also concerned with whose stories are not told, and with who is silenced or even "erased" from the stories that are told in the dominant culture. For example, researchers may study media coverage to learn about what is not contained in narratives and images as much as what is contained in them. After all, we can learn about culture by seeing what is not represented in cultural discourses and images as well as by seeing what is represented.
Research on ideology is difficult to do, because it requires knowledge of history and a deep understanding of the settings in which cultural practices and "stories" come to be a part of people's lives. Research on ideology is partly inspired by the ideas of Italian sociologist Antonio Gramsci. When fascists in Italy imprisoned Gramsci for speaking out against their political ideas, he spent time in prison thinking about why people had not revolted against repressive forms of capitalism in Western societies. Gramsci concluded that it was important to understand how people throughout a society formed definitions of common sense and ideas about how society ought to be organized socially, politically, and economically. He thought that one of the most effective ways for powerful people to influence popular definitions and ideas, and thereby win support from the general population in a society, was to sponsor and control major sources of pleasure and joy in people's lives -- in other words, to control people's entertainment would be a major source of power in any culture..
Gramsci suspected that most people use the cultural messages associated with everyday pleasure and joy in their lives to inform their ideas about the organization and operation of society as a whole. Therefore, if dominant groups in a society could influence the language, images, and messages tied to the fun and excitement in people's lives, they could encourage agreement with their ideas, or at least defuse the extent to which people might disagree with them. Therefore, the sponsorship and control of sports, entertainment, and others sources of pleasure was a useful strategy for maintaining power and privilege.
Gramsci's analysis helps us understand why large corporations spend millions of dollars to sponsor sports and advertise in connection with sports. For example, when Coca-Cola spent over $500 million in connection with the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and is willing to spend even greater amounts to sponsor the 2000 Sydney Games, is it only because Coca-Cola executives think that advertising in connection with sports will make them more money? Of course, this is an important consideration, but more important for Coke, General Motors, and other corporations is the fact that they can use the Olympics and other sports as vehicles for delivering cultural messages they want people in the world to hear. They want people watching the Olympics to agree that competition is the best way to allocate rewards in life and that successful and powerful people (and corporations) really deserve their money and power.
The people who run Coca-Cola and General Motors want people to drink Coke and drive Chevy trucks, but they also want them to develop an approach to life that associates pleasure with consumption, and social status with corporate logos. They want people to say, "These large companies are important in our lives, because without them we would not have the sports we love so dearly." They want people to think that enjoyment and pleasure in life depends on large corporations and their products. They want to establish consumption as a way of life, as the foundation for culture itself. Their profits and power depend on it, and their marketing people know it. They are selling a whole way of life, and an ideology in which people express their identity through competitive success and consumption. To the extent that people in society adopt this way of viewing the world and their relationship to it, corporate interests gain more power in society. Many sociologists refer to this process of forming consent around a particular ideology as the process of establishing hegemony.
The cultural messages associated with sports have become a part of our lives as we enter the twenty-first century. It is difficult to determine how these messages are heard around the world, but it is clear that major corporations see sports as important vehicles for delivering them. People in corporations know that their interests depend on establishing "ideological outposts" in people's heads. Sports, because they are pleasurable activities for so many people, are logical avenues through which these outposts can be built. Once established, these outposts are useful to corporations. In fact, they become terminals through which a range of corporate messages can be delivered effectively. To paraphrase Gramsci's conclusion about hegemony: it is difficult to fight an enemy that has outposts in your head.
SOCIAL INTERACTION
Neither culture nor ideology is established once and for all time. Not everyone shares the same perspectives or ideas about what is important in their lives, how to define and give meaning to social reality, or how social life ought to be organized. This means that the social world is a "negotiated world" − one that is constantly produced, reproduced, and transformed through everyday social interaction. Similarly, the established patterns of social relationships that sociologists refer to as social structure rest on a foundation of interaction, and social structures are also subject to change as people interact with each other in new and different ways over time.
Social interaction is the process of people taking each other into account and engaging them in ways that influence their feelings, thoughts, and/or actions. Interaction may be impersonal and fleeting such as two strangers making eye contact, acknowledging each other's presence on a crowded sidewalk, and slightly altering their paths to avoid a collision. Or interaction may be personal and enduring such as a wife and husband acknowledging each other's deeply held feelings about religion as they decide how they should include their different religious beliefs into their children's lives. Social interaction also occurs more and more frequently in virtual settings − through e-mail, electronic message boards, chat rooms, and computer games that involve two or more players. Virtual interaction is a relatively new topic of research among sociologists. As studies are done, we are learning more about the similarities and differences between virtual and "real-time" social interaction.
Regardless of the setting or circumstances, if we did not take each other into account it would be impossible to maintain any form of coordinated or cooperative group life, even online. In fact, many sociologists argue that one of the indicators of a socially healthy group or society is the extent to which people take each other into account in accurate, predictable, and responsive ways.
Social Interaction as a Key Concept in Sociology
Social interaction is a key concept in sociology because it is through everyday interaction that culture and ideology as well as social structure, social institutions, and social inequality are revealed and become real in our lives.
For example, we "do" culture when we tell our little brother to stand up and be quiet during national anthem before a varsity basketball game on campus. We "do" ideology when we say nothing after two friends make negative comments about a gay couple holding hands in the hall outside of class. We "do" social structure when we use "Doctor" or "Professor" to address our teachers in college. We "do" the social institution of the economy when we buy things on credit even though we have a large amount of credit card debt that we cannot pay off. We "do" social inequality when we describe fellow students as "losers" because they do not meet the social standards used by the socially popular students in our high school.
In other words, the social world does not "just happen." It is produced and reproduced through social interaction. We can be involved in this process actively or passively, but we all participate in it whether we want to or not. If we accept the social world as it is or if we express no opposition or resistance to it, our interaction with others reproduces what already exists or it passively reaffirms the forms of social life that others are producing. Change and transformation occur only when we raise questions about or resist what already exists in ways that inspire collective commitments to alternative ways of life, ideas, and social arrangements.
Rosa Parks is often used as an example of how the actions of one person can influence the feelings, thoughts, and actions of others to the point of changing culture, ideology, and social structure. Ms. Parks was a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama. For many years, she and other black people in the local NAACP in Montgomery had met and discussed how they might resist the personal and institutional forms of racial discrimination they experienced in their everyday lives. They had tried a number of strategies through the early 1950's but they had been unsuccessful in bringing about social transformation. Then on December 1, 1955, after a long, tiring day at work, Rosa Parks boarded a local bus and sat in an empty seat. When a white man later boarded the bus, Ms. Parks refused to obey the law that required her to give up her seat to the white person. She was arrested by a member of the all white police force and taken to jail.
While Ms. Parks was awaiting trial the local Women's Political Caucus organized blacks to boycott the local bus system. The boycott continued as Ms. Parks was convicted and sentenced in a 30 minute trial. Later that day, local black activists formed the Montgomery Improvement Association and elected as their president a young minister from the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. That minister, the Reverend Martin Luther King, addressed a crowd that evening and stated, "There comes a time when people get tired." His words and Rosa Parks' actions sparked the momentum for a nationwide civil rights movement that has changed the culture and social structure in the United States and influenced race relations around the world.
Rosa Parks made an individual decision on that day in 1955, but what she did was strongly influenced by her past interaction with black women and men and their collective interaction experiences with whites. The changes that followed were the result of subsequent forms of social interaction that challenged the existing social order. Social transformation seldom comes without struggle, and it always occurs in connection with processes of social interaction through which individuals influence the feelings, thoughts, and actions of others.
Social Interaction and Power Relations
Of course, each of us does not have the same power to influence the feelings, thoughts, and actions of others. Social interaction involves reciprocity − a social give and take between people, but the relative amount of giving and taking that occurs in interaction varies with the power and resources of those involved. For example, in the social interaction that occurs in my introductory sociology course, I have more power than the students have when it comes to identifying the topics included in the course, structuring class sessions in terms of lectures or discussions, deciding who will be allowed to talk during class, and devising the criteria by which grades will be earned.
However, that does not mean that students are powerless − remember Rosa Parks and her friends. In fact, my power depends on the very students over whom it is exercised. Let me explain: If students do not accept the general cultural norm that teachers have the right to organize courses and the norm that students are obliged to accept that organization, my power is in jeopardy. If students actively question the educational ideology that assumes it to be normal and natural for teacher to be source of knowledge while students are the receivers of that knowledge, my power is questionable. If students do not accept my identity claims as a competent sociologist and a fair evaluator of their work, they can challenge my credibility and my power in the classroom. And finally, if students do not accept the legitimacy of the structure in which I have formal authority to evaluate them and award them credit for what they do in my course, my power disappears.
In other words, power rests in the teacher-student relationship, and it is both expressed and resisted through the interaction between a teacher and students. Furthermore, the student-teacher relationships exists within a larger set of cultural and social conditions over which individual teachers and students have little or no control. These larger conditions set limits and provide opportunities when it comes to how relationships are formed and how interaction occurs. For example, students may successfully challenge the power of a teacher in their lives by rejecting the legitimacy of the very structure of the university, but in doing so they may destroy their chances of obtaining a degree. And in a society where people value educational credentials, this may interfere with achieving other goals in their lives.
On the other hand, students could take advantage of their common interests and form an organization that would lobby for curriculum changes that would enable them to influence topics and issues covered in certain courses. Through such an organization the students might transform educational ideology by arguing to both faculty and administration that new developments in technology make everyone a potential expert and a valuable source of knowledge in a classroom. They could also use the organization in more traditional ways by designating representatives to go to a department chairperson to raise questions about a faculty member, or to the dean to raise questions about an entire department.
Social Interaction and Socialization
When sociologists study social interaction one of their primary concerns is how people influence each other's feelings, thoughts, and actions. This process of social influence is part of a larger process described by sociologists as socialization.
Socialization is a process of influence, learning, and social development that occurs as we interact with one another and become aware of the social world and participation in it. It is through social interaction that we come to know what we know about the social world and form ideas about who we are and how we are connected with the social world.
We are not simply passive learners in the socialization process. We actively participate in our own socialization as we influence those who influence us, and as we give meaning to and apply the things that we learn through social interaction. We actively interpret what we see and hear, and we accept, resist, or revise the messages we receive about who we are, about the world, and about how we should act as we make our way in the world. Therefore, socialization is not a one-way process of social influence and development through which we are molded and shaped in the image of our culture and society. Instead, it refers to an interactive process through which we actively connect with others, synthesize information, make decisions, and take actions that construct our lives and the social world around us.
Socialization, power relations, and social and cultural conditions
The point that socialization is an interactive process through which we construct our lives and the social world must be qualified in two respects. First, social interaction does not always involve an even give and take when it comes to social influence. For example, in the socialization that occurs between parents and children in a family, parents exert more influence on the socialization experiences of their children than children exert on the socialization experiences of their parents. This is because parents have more power than children in the context of the family: they control economic resources in the family, they are physically stronger (at least until children reach adolescence), the state gives them legal control of their children, and dominant cultural norms and ideology reaffirms that parents not only have the right but also the obligation to control their children.
Second, we have little control over the general social and cultural conditions under which socialization occurs. For example, if I have white skin and whiteness has been given particular meanings in the culture and society in which I live, those meanings will influence the interactive processes through which I actively connect with others, synthesize information, make decisions, and take actions. In other words, my whiteness will influence my socialization experiences and those experiences will be associated with both limits and possibilities when it comes to constructing my life and the world around me.
Socialization and significant others
Sociologists refer to parents as significant others in the lives of their children. This is because parents, along with others who strong influence on what young people learn about themselves and the social world, are especially significant in the socialization experiences of those young people. Whenever certain people exert an especially strong influence on the socialization experiences of individuals or groups, we refer to them as significant others.
In my research on sports in society I often hear athletes describe their coaches as significant others, even though they do not use those exact words. In the same sense, many students identify certain teachers as significant others, and many younger children in families identify older siblings in the same terms. Significant others exist throughout our lives: our friends influence our socialization experiences, as do mentors who give us advice, as do peers who provide us with valuable information about various aspects of the social world.
But significant others are not always older, wiser, and more socially powerful than those they influence through the socialization process. For example, children often are significant others in the lives of their parents. Even as toddlers they may do things that influence their parents' actions and knowledge about the social world. Certainly, teenagers can be significant others in parents' lives − as they introduce them to new ways of thinking about and doing things, and as they bring new forms of popular culture and recreational activities into parents' lives, and when they sit their parents down and help them develop the computer skills they need to be successful in their jobs! And as parents age, they often look to their children for advice on finances, health issues, and living arrangements.
Socialization involves mutual influence, even when there are power differences in the relationships involved. Strange as it may sound, oppressors are influenced by the social interaction they have with those they oppress. They control the conditions under which the interaction occurs, and the mutual influence is dramatically unequal, but the powerful oppressors do not escape influence. This is why slaveholders often develop ideologies that justify their exploitation of the human beings they own as slaves. Those ideologies influence the feelings, thoughts, and actions of slaveholders in many ways, even to the point of compromising their sense of their own humanity.
Socialization and the self
Socialization is especially important in sociological terms because it is the process through which we become self-aware and develop a sense of who we are and how we are connected to other people and the larger social world. This sense of who we are is identified by sociologists as our self.
When we are born we have no self-awareness. We are little bundles of biological drives, physiological needs, psychological predispositions, and genetic possibilities. But we do not have any awareness of our existence as a being that is physically distinct from the physical world and socially distinct from other human beings. The awareness of our own bodies and of our selves is something that we must learn, and we learn it through a combination of physical experiences and socialization.
Developmental experts suggest that body awareness begins to develop at about 6 months old. It is then that an infant begins to realize that the knuckle that gives her satisfaction when it is in her mouth is actually a part of her own body and that she can put it there when she wants to experience this satisfaction. But it takes about six months of waving that hand around, watching it move, and having it coincidentally or reflexively placed in her mouth before she understands that it is part of her body and under her physical control.
If it takes 6 months just to develop the first forms of body awareness, you can imagine that it would take quite a while before a child might develop something as abstract as self-awareness and self-control. In fact, George Herbert Mead, a philosopher-sociologist at the University of Chicago during the 1930s suggested that until children begin to use language in a meaningful sense, they could not even begin to develop a sense of self awareness. The period between birth and learning to use words was described by Mead a time of pre-self-awareness.
During the time of pre-self-awareness the behavior of infants was based on a combination of responses to stimuli, conditioning, and eventually, imitation of the actions of people around them. His point was that before children could use words to refer to things and people it was impossible for them to conceptualize themselves as distinct and separate from other things and people. Only when children begin to learn a system of symbols such as a verbal language can they begin to develop a concept of self.
Once children begin to use words in a meaningful sense it becomes possible for them to make distinctions between themselves and others. As these distinctions become increasingly clear children develop the ability to actually pretend that they are someone else such as a mommy or daddy or a giant or a princess. Mead referred to this ability as taking the role of the other.
Mead made the case that full participation in social life required the ability to take not only the role of one person at a time but to take the roles of multiple people all at the same time. In other words, in order to participate in any form of group life individuals must be able to put themselves in the social positions of multiple others and form a general sense of how those others see the world.
It was in explaining this idea that Mead used children's participation in organized games to illustrate the process of self development. He said that children who play in a game must be ready to take the perspectives of all the other players in that game and see their connections to each other. Therefore, playing a game ultimately requires the ability to cognitively grasp the dual notion of multiple social relationships and social organization. Without being able to conceptualize an organized set of interrelated positions played by teammates and opponents, children could not fully participate in a game or in any other complex human activity.
The inability of young children to think in these terms can be illustrated by a mother's futile efforts to teach her four-year old son to fully grasp the notion that his grandmother is also her mother, and that his uncle is also her brother. The five-year old thinks only in terms that directly involve him. Within personal and ego-centric terms he understands his relationship to his mother, his relationship to his grandmother, and his relationship to his uncle. However, he cannot conceptually separate himself from these individual personal relationships to specific other people and grasp the notion of an interrelated set of family members in which people are related to one another apart from his relationships with any of them in particular. He knows enough to say that he is a nephew to his uncle, but the notion that his uncle is his mother's brother is too complex for him to understand. And the notion that his uncle is his grandmother's son is something he will not fully grasp until much later in his childhood.
According to Mead, the reason these conceptualizations are too complex for him to handle at this point is that he is still in what some of Mead's students described as the play stage of self development. The play stage is characterized by an ability to put oneself in the role of only one other person at a time. Thus, the boy in the example is able to use his mother's perspective to view and evaluate himself and to even view and evaluate things and people in the settings in which he sees his mother. He has an idea of what his mother thinks of him because he can put himself into her position and view himself as an object from her perspective. He may also be able to use his grandmother's perspective in the same manner, and his uncle's. But he is not yet able to use his grandmother's perspective to view and evaluate his mother or his uncle. Such a perspective would require him to take more than one role at a time and look at the relationships between his mother, grandmother, and uncle apart from his direct relationship with any of these people.
It is not until children develop an ability to take more than one role at a time that they enter what Mead's students called the game stage. It is in the game stage that children first develop the ability to understand relationships that do not directly involve themselves. As this ability gradually is developed children begin viewing themselves in a manner that is not directly linked to specific other people in their lives. In other words, as they move into the game stage they begin to develop the ability to conceptualize relationships between other people apart from how those other people are related to them.
This is the ability that is needed for a mature form of self development. It enables us to view ourselves as objects through the eyes of a number of other people at once. This, in turn, makes it possible for us to construct self evaluations from a generalized perspective that is actually made up of a collection of the various perspectives of all the people with whom we have interacted and come to know in our experience. According to Mead, this new perspective is described as a "generalized other." It is through this generalized other that detailed form of self-reflection occurs. This process of self-reflection is also the means through which our selves constantly emerge and change.
Assignment due on 3/1
Read the online material on Social Interaction and use at least 4 of the concepts from the material (social interaction, socialization, significant other, self, pre-self-awareness, taking the role of the other, play stage, game stage, and generalized other) in a 400-500 word essay that describes and explains some aspect of social life.
The aspect of social life that you write about can be from your experience, it can be fictional, it can be related to media content, or related to a social issue or problem that you find interesting. It could even be related to an application or critique of some of Giroux's ideas.
The goal of the essay is to use the concepts in a way that indicates to me that you understand what they mean, how they are related to each other, and how they can be used to describe or make sense of some aspect of social life.
You should define in your own words each concept you use, or use them in a way that makes the definition obvious. You could also include comments about your understanding of the significance of the concepts in sociology. Finally, sociologists usually use combinations of concepts to describe social processes or situations, and that is why I am asking you to use at least 4 of the concepts listed above. I want you to understand how they "fit together."
Please read this material on identity for class on 3/7
IDENTITY
Identity refers to our sense of who we are and how we are connected with and identified by others. We form, maintain, and change our identities in connection with our experiences and relationships. This means that when our experiences, relationships, and connections to the social world are stable, our identities remain relatively stable. However, in social environments where experiences, relationships, and connections to the social world change rapidly, identities are fluid, sometimes fragmented, and often fused or overlapped with other identities in unique combinations.
Identities are related to culture and ideology in the sense that they are formed in connection with the meanings that we and others give to our experiences and our personal and social characteristics. For example, your identity as a student is important to the extent that you and the people around you value education and educational achievement, and to the extent that educational credentials are defined as socially relevant or evidence of competence by other people in the larger social world.
Identities are related to social interaction in the sense that we cannot maintain a particular identity unless others acknowledge and reaffirm our claim to be who we say we are or who we present ourselves to be. For example, you can claim to be a basketball player, but unless others, especially other basketball players, acknowledge your claim and identify you as a basketball player, your identity as a basketball player will fade in importance, become socially irrelevant and less personally meaningful in your life. In fact, unless your identity claim is acknowledged, you may even be denied access to opportunities to play basketball − sometimes, you've got to be a "player" to even get on the court and in the game! In other words, maintaining an identity requires more than simply learning how to talk the talk and walk the walk; it also requires acceptance and reaffirmation from others, especially those who have successfully claimed the identity in question. (This when issues of "social sponsorship" and "who you know" can be very important).
Identities are related to social structure because our sense of who we are emerges in connection with the established social arrangements and routine relationships that make up our everyday lives. For example, if you are a member of a particular religious congregation and you participate in the congregation's youth group, sing in the choir, and teach children in your congregation's religious education program, your religious identity receives regular acknowledgment and support through an organized and predictable set of everyday relationships and routines. In other words, your identity has "institutionalized" support − that is, ready-made support built right into the structures of your everyday social activities.
Finally, our identities are related to social inequalities in the sense that each of us has different resources for successfully claiming identities in various social situations. For example, when a person with a great amount of wealth wishes to claim an identity as a legitimate candidate for mayor in your town or city, he or she can become visible by donating money to respected causes or civic projects in the area, becoming aligned with other people who are respected as honest and influential, hiring people to organize a campaign, and then using visibility and connections to call press conferences and receive favorable media coverage. For a person with no wealth, successfully claiming an identity as a legitimate candidate for mayor would be very difficult. It could happen if the person was able to mobilize other "human" resources, but it would take an amazing amount of ingenuity, persistence, grass-roots political support, organization, and good luck. Of course, money is not the only resource that can be useful in claiming identities. Power, position, reputation, cultural knowledge, and social skills can also be used effectively, depending on the identity you are trying to claim or maintain.
Identity as a Key Concept in Sociology
Many sociologists who are concerned with the social aspects of individuals' lives in today's social world tend to focus more on identity and identity issues than on the social self. The self remains a useful concept in sociology but research on the self has traditionally focused on how the development of selves occurs through established relationships in institutionalized social settings such as the family, education, and work where norms and authority structures are relatively clear, stable, and predictable. Those who focus on identity are concerned with a broader set of issues. These include the following:
Identity and Social Interaction
Identities and social interaction are interdependent. Not only do we construct identities in and through social interaction, but social interaction depends on continuous processes of claiming and acknowledging identities. Just imagine what social life would be like if we could not communicate to others information about who we are and how we are connected to the world, or if others refused to acknowledge our identity claims as a basis for relating to us.
For example, what would happen to the social organization of a high school if the students refused to acknowledge the teachers' identity claims as instructors, and if teachers refused to acknowledge the students' identity claims as able learners? Teachers would "blow off" the students and students would "blow off" the teachers. Student-teacher interaction would be subverted right along with the organization of individual classes and the school as a whole. The point here is that unless we take each other's identity claims seriously and are open to reaffirming them, interaction becomes difficult, if not impossible.
In most situations, unless the stakes are very high, we acknowledge and accept the identity claims of others. However, if we have questions about those claims, we are likely to look for evidence that would support or contradict them. We are less likely to give people the benefit of the doubt when the stakes are high. For example, when an orthopedic surgeon tells me that I need a disk fused in my spine to eliminate back pain, I will seriously check his identity claims as an experienced and competent surgeon. If there are any doubts, I will obtain other medical opinions.
This means that even though we participate in the construction of our identities, our identities are not so much things that we possess as they are things that others loan to us in particular situations and from one situation to another. Unless others acknowledge who we claim to be in a relatively consistent manner it is difficult for us to maintain our sense of who we are.
With this said, it is important to note that some people are willing to honor their "identity loans" to us despite temporary indications that we might be a bad interactional risk. Others, however, may call in "identity loans" as soon as they sense that our identity claim may be bogus or inauthentic.
Who can we count on to give us a break before they refuse to acknowledge our identity claim and call in an "identity loan"? Usually, they include family members, close friends, and others who have long term consistent experiences with us. These people have concluded over time our identity claims are legitimate, even if something we say or do in a particular situation is inconsistent with a particular claim. For example, our parents may continue to reaffirm our claim to be an honest and trustworthy son or daughter even though we missed our curfew last Friday and even thought they discovered that we were not where we said we would be. But if we consistently lied to them and ignored curfews, our identity as honest and trustworthy would be "spoiled" in their eyes and they would withdraw their support for that identity claim in the family. Of course, our friends might continue to acknowledge our claims to be honest and trustworthy, even if our parents do not. But that assumes that we act in ways that do not lead our friends to raise those identity questions about us. Once others withdraw their support for a particular identity claim, it takes some dedicated interactional work to regain reaffirmation.
The point that social interaction involves a dual process of making and acknowledging identity claims also can be illustrated when you take your next test. During the test you want your instructor to acknowledge and accept your identity claim as an honest student. You ARE an honest student, so this should be easy unless your instructor sees you gaze off in the direction of another student's test paper. Your gaze was unintentional; you never meant to see anything and your gaze never even focused on anything in particular. But if you want your instructor to reaffirm your identity claim as an honest student you must learn to "act honest" during tests. This means that you must take care to focus your gaze on your own paper even if you are daydreaming or deep in thought rather than writing or recording an answer; or you must take care to cast your gaze clearly toward the ceiling as you stretch or "look thoughtful". In other words, success in making identity claims depends on "performing" the identity you are claiming as well as being committed to that identity personally.
Of course, image is not everything, but identities do depend on the dynamics of social interaction and, sometimes, image is a key part of those dynamics. Remember this the next time you go to a funeral of the parent of a friend. Your task as you greet your friend is to sincerely communicate that you are concerned and sorry about his or her loss. Usually, this is not done while smiling or laughing or while making a joke or a comment about your own troubles. Sometimes learning how to perform the identity of "a sincere friend" takes very thoughtful actions.
These interactional issues around identity are so important that the social well being of any society or group depends on the extent to which people can develop, claim, and receive acknowledgment for the identities to which they are committed and with which they are personally comfortable. After all, to be unknown as you know yourself or as you would like to be known is to be lonely or alienated − and neither of these individual conditions facilitate viable forms of social organization.
Forming identity impressions and managing impressions
The dynamics of claiming and acknowledging
identities revolve around two processes:
1. forming identity impressions of others
2. managing the identity impressions that others have of us
Think about the ways that you form impressions of others − what do you use for "evidence" about the identities of others? Do you ever use an acknowledgment of age, gender, race or ethnicity, national background, citizenship, religion, or specific physical characteristics, individual attributes, or clothing and other aspects of appearance as "identity markers"? If so, how can you avoid the use of stereotypes? Can we develop identity hypotheses without using stereotypes? (Think about these questions for next class − but you do not have to write anything unless you would like to make up points for a class missed)
As you think about these questions, remember that using "identity hypotheses" involves using many cues, gathering as much information as possible, keeping our interpretive framework fluid, establishing the connections that will lead to valid identity performances by others, putting information in context, and reaching "tentative" conclusions. Using "stereotypes", on the other hand, involves using one or two cues, gathering superficial information, having a fixed interpretive framework, subverting connections and encouraging invalid of disguised identity performances by others, ignoring context, and reaching final conclusions.
When it comes to the challenge of managing the identity impressions that others have of us, how do we claim identities without "performing" them? What are the many ways that we go about claiming identities? I say that we do it by presenting images of who we claim to be − not phony images, but images nevertheless. This means that we must be sensitive to both stereotypes and how people develop identity hypotheses if we are to successfully manage the impressions that others have of us. Because of this, some sociologists view interaction and social life in terms of a "theater' metaphor − all the social world is a stage and we are but actors. This is called dramaturgical sociology.
Spoiled identities and "stigma"
What happens when we fail when trying to make an identity claim? What happens when we have characteristics that interfere with successfully claiming certain identities?
When people have a trait or characteristic that is seen as a stigma by others, they must live with a permanently "spoiled identity" − an identity that often interferes with claiming positive identities of various types. Stigma is a characteristic or attribute that is socially defined in a way that leads to the discrediting of identity claims; stigma interferes with a person's ability to make positive identity claims.
What are the strategies that people use to claim positive identities when they have been stigmatized in the social world in which they live? Imagine that you have been in an accident and you have had your face permanently disfigured in a way that cannot be transformed through surgery. How might this affect your interaction with others, and what strategies would you use to try to keep it from interfering? Please write down at least two strategies and be ready to talk about them on 3/7 during class. I will ask you to hand them in as well.
For material on Social Structure and the assignment for March 15, go back to the top of this page