Social World Midterm
"The Social Psychology of George Herbert Mead" - Meltzer
Talks about self hood, developing self, the development of the mind, behavior as Mead social psychology theory argues and its critique - theory of formation of self by Mead - the "me" (looking glass self - what Cooley calls the self) - the "I" - "the conversation of gestures"
the Pygmalion effect
embodied cultural capital is converted into objective cultural capital and into internalization of class position differential expectations are institutionalized in form of ability groupings, trackings, G&T
"reductionism"
when complex human social behavior to be fully explained, or "nothing but," or "the same as", a biological variable
What makes Socioeconomic status or social networks or race/ethnicity a "fundamental cause"
"Fundamental cause" -- Link and Phelan - factors that put people at risk of risks - an association between a fundamental cause and disease will reemerge - access to resources: "reason for such persistent associations, and the essential feature of fundemental social causes is that they involve access to resources that can be used to avoide risks ... money, knowledge, power, prestiege ... social support and social network" - rise of new risks: "reason why resources like knowledge, money, power, prestige, and social connectedness are transportable from one situation to another ... health situations change ... those who command the most resources are best able to avoid risks..." - multiple causal paths: "because a fundamental cause involves access to broadly serviceable resources, it influences (1) multiple risk factors and (2) multiple disease outcomes ... the assocition between a fundamental cause and disease can be preserved through changes either in , mechanisms or in the outcomes.
Paul Farmer on Tuberculosis and Poverty
"Poverty and other social inequalities come to alter disease distribution and sickness trajectories through innumerable and complicated mechanisms." (13) • The likelihood of initial infection is strongly related to housing density and quality, as well as to likelihood of residing in congregated settings. - progession to active disease is strongly related to other aspects of poverty - reinfection - more likely because of density - increases likelihood of progression to active disease - severe consequences are more likely due to the lack of access to effective treatmemts or inability to "comply" with medication regimen - social forces and processes come to be embodied as bio. events
"Condom Semiotics" by Tavory & Swindler
(how does this article connect to concepts of embeddedness?) The problem: why is there widspread resistance to condom use in sub-Saharan Africa? WHO/similar actors present problem as a matter of "rational choice" between risky behavior and responsibility - solution = education campaigns "paradox" -- even as awareness of hiv/aids increase, use of condom in "love" relationships remains miniscule - authors argue that this "ignores complex semiotic space that Malawians navigate." - people embedded in "semiotic space" that contrains and enables what they can say or do - "semiotic" -- meaning , what object/action signifies - not determined by what person intends to convey but by how people read it in light of cultural oppositions that make up semiotic space - one may want to use a condom to signify that one is trustworthy and not taking risks, but partner may read it as implying they are not trustworthy or that relationship is casual - absence of love - condom use signifies risky, less serious and less intimate partner -- statement condom use makes about relationship trumps other meanings - even if not ration in dis-embedded pov, rational within semiotic space
"universe of discourse"
- " universe of discourse" is "that system of common or social meanings which thinking presupposes as its context." - Evidence from "over generalization" and "category reduction" in early language development - "Abstract concepts are concepts stated in terms of the attitudes of the entire social group." (156, n.8)
"Unequal Childhoods" - Lareu
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tale of "meritocracy"
- Analyzing socialization as the reproduction of inequality goes directly against the prevailing ideology of meritocracy - "They believe that individuals carve out their life paths by drawing on their personal stores of hard work, effort and talent. All children are seen as having approximately equal life chances. Or, if children life chances appear to differ, this is seen as due to differences in raw talent, initiative, aspirations, and effort." (Lareau) this is not the case - reproduction of inequality
The "me"
- Capacity to take the point of view of significant others - develops through the conversation of gestures and corresponds to the emergence of early language and imaginary role-playing - Mead (175): "the 'me' is the organized set of attitudes others which one himself assumes - Evidence comes from the development of manipulation and deception The "me" → the "organized set of attitudes of others, which one himself assumes" - shaped by their position in social structure - This is how social structure becomes internalized as part of the "self"
"Sexuality and Gender in Children's Daily Worlds" - Thorne and Luria
- Children gender arrangements help lay the foundation for the more overtly sexual scripts of adolescence and adulthood - Segregation of boy and girls leads to gender differentiated contexts of learning - Gender divided social worlds Sexual scripts early adolescence In our culture, gender and sexuality deeply intertwined - Boys - shared excitement and bonding focused on public rule transgression - Girls - organized in friendship pairs , bond more through mutual self-disclosure , teach and learn strategies for maintaining and ending intimacy - Heterosexual teasing like "chase and kiss" heighten gender boundaries - Girls and boys who spend lots of time in gender seperate groups, learn different patterns of interaction which article argues lays the groundwork for social scripts - Chasing has a gendered structure - difference in the way boys chase eachother and girls chase eachother When boys and girls chase each other they become a separate team
describe - working class: restricted linguitic code
- Few alternatives - Assumption that everybody share the same understanding - Much is left non-verbalized Directives, one-word sentences - Appeal to personal authority ("because I told you so...") - Relatively little challenging of authority by child As a result: working class kids self-exclude from adult conversations; do not experience language as a tool fit for their needs; emerging sense of constraint
"Embodying Race" - Roberts
- Hospitals in majority black neighborhood of Chicago does not recieve as much money as other hospitals which serve in areas with more whites in the population - Black neighborhood have fewer facilities that provide breast cancer screening - Black women historicallty being treated badly in the healthcare system = a lack of trust for it - Quality of mammography not good - White women more likely to be treated with surgery which increases survival - Black women more likely to be treated without surgery or to recieve no treatment at all - Unequal access to health care = racial disparities in health - Best predictor of health is an individual's position in the social hierarchy - Race as a Social grouping affects health - because of different life experiences based on race
Upper-middle class: Elaborated code
- Many alternatives - Concern to consider different points of view - Everything is verbalized - Use of conditionals - Appeals to explicit and generalizable justifications ("what do you think?...) - Child contestation of adult statements - Extended negotiations between parents and child As a result: middle class kids acquire familiarity and ease around adult conversations; the capacity to use language to customize certain situations to fit their needs and obtain benefits; emerging sense of entitlement
metaphors
- Metaphors make us attend to certain things and dis-attend to others (time is not really money, duh!), they are like "perceptual filters" - Metaphors permit the cognitive infrastructure of social life to remain in the background, yet shape our conduct in intimate ways• Example: "clean is morally correct" - inescapable & tools for thinking basic level metaphors: - orientational ("sad is down") - ontological ("his hatred made him do that") - substance ("Im going to pieces") - container ("the ship is coming into view") grounded in bodily experiences (Lakoff & Johnson - Metaphors We Live By"
socialization as political process of struggle over boundaries of the collectivity
- Power and politics are an essential part of socialization - Socialization is moral politics or politics by other means - Especially in American society there is an intimate connection between models of parenting and political position on the conservative-liberal spectrum - Socialization is a source of political metaphors: "nanny state", "tough love", "it takes a village" - Conflict over socialization is a struggle over the power to tell us who we are, to name identities and prescribe ways of being
"Preschool in Three Cultures" - Tobin, Wu, Davidson
- Preschools are sites not just of cultural continuity but also of change. - Preschools must deal with such changes as declining birth rates, urbanization, women's work patterns, and the development of new technologies. - Preschools are asked to prepare children who will both be familiar and appropriate members of their culture and at the same time who grow up to be successful in the new forms of society that await them. - preschools are sites for the socialization and enculturation of young children learn to be appropriate members of their culture Gender Norms What are "cooties"? Why are little girls' kisses "cooties"? 1) Gender separation 2) Boys' group defines it boundaries through sexual meanings ("dirty talk" and transgression) 3) Girls marked as more sexually-defined 4) In cross-gender interaction girls are endowed with the power to pollute ("cooties") 5) Girls who exercise this power are stigmatized as "kissers" Case of Hiroki - If culture a system of contradictions, socialization is hardly ever a spontaneous process that "just happens," but skilled navigation of these contradictions and the opportunities they offer - In eyes teachers in America, Hiroki is a problem - Japanese teachers say he is not a problem, he is an asset. He has a lot of problems but he is not a problem - A year later, Hiroki is sitting in front of class by himself, leader of the class - Kids take discipline and turn it into their badge of honor Two types of explanation: personalized : "This is a bad teacher. She is not doing her job right" Culturalization: "Its Japanese culture." - Hiroki doesn't know how to be dependant on others - Agents of socialization (parents, teachers) are conscious and reflective about what they are doing Chinese pre-school drop-off policy - If socialization is ethical work, then it continually changes throughout history - Drop-off policy is about the interface between the family and the larger society - Kid cries, doesnt want her dad to leave, teacher makes him leave the room - Jap. Teachers say this is harsh and that they should let the parents stay for longer - What chinese teachers say is that kids are spoiled (princesses/princes) - has to be nipped in the bud - not shaped by chinese culture but by historical events Children play an active role in socialization - Socialization is not just adults initiating kids into culture. Children's society is a powerful socializing agent - Example: Thorne and Luria on segregated same-gender groups as socializing agents - Differences in teacher-student ratio between American and Japanese preschools and what they show about assumptions about children's agency and "proper" socialization - Jap has larger student:teacher ration because they trust that the kids will help to socialize one another and as a group help one another learn - Allowing children to socialize themselve in large groups - All of this is political - debates about education are the most bitter and map onto political polarization - Language americans use to talk about politics draws from language used to talk about raising children
Connecting Social Structure to Luker
- Pro-choice and pro-life activists differ in their position in social structure - pro-choicers are "up" and pro-lifers are "down"; or, pro-choicers are at the "center" and pro-lifers are on the "periphery" - Great distance between them explains why they cannot agree - Worldviews of pro-lifers and pro-choicers align with their respective social positions: "Her life is arranged so that for her this belief [that an unanticipated pregnancy usually becomes a beloved child] is true."
cultural capital
- culture as a means of investment - comprises the social assets of a person (education, intellect, style of speech, style of dress, etc.) that promote social mobility in a stratified society
Science as a Vocation - Weber summarize/connect to lecture
- Proposes that a scientist must have a certain personality that allows him to be wholly devoted to his work - This devotion, for Weber, is part of what makes science more than just a profession; it is also a calling in the sense that only select personalities are drawn to and are fit for a career in science - Weber weighed the benefits and detriments of choosing a career as an academic at a university who studies science or humanities
Value Relevance:
- Recognition that sociologist studies are value-related - studies have to do with the activities of people who are acting in light of certain meaning, beliefs and habits, deeply embedded in who they are, their upbringing, where they are located in society - cannot just deal with facts and quantities How does this Luker attend to value-relevance of subject matter?
structural causation - the embodiment of race
- Roberts: "Race is not a biological category that naturally produces health disparities because of genetic differences. Race is a political category that has staggering biological consequences because of the impact of social inequality on people's health...How does racial inequality get under the skin? How is racism embodied? If racial discrimination causes health disparities, how does it get into the body?" - Segregation in unhealthy neighborhoods• - Chronic exposure to stress• - Transmission through the fetal environment
"The Conversation of Gestures"
- Socialization begins as imitation but imitation is not as simple as it seems - children imitate and also acquire capacity to step outside selves into external viewpoint - The "conversation of gestures" is habitual, prelinguistic interaction with "significant others" that leads to the formation of habits and expectations
alternative view of socialization (vs seeing it as production of culture)
- Socialization not the acquisition of a role prescribed by culture but learning to skillfully navigate the contradiction of culture - The contradictions are never resolved, and can be reactivated in new situations - With respect to these contradictions, not all individuals are equal The "marked" part of the binary opposition, the marginal, always have a harder time
Definition of the Situation
- Sociologists study not only fact but how facts interpreted = the definition of the situation - "When people define situations as real, they are real in their consequence" - Dont act in reaction to what situation "really" is but on interpretation of it - case of "the definition of the situation": self-fulfilling prophecy Expectations communicated to the self by an authoritative other have a tendency to come true
Social Structure
- Sum total of conditions that limit and enable individual action and individual thought - Space of positions, distances and trajectories - Composed of resources - money, education, occupation, connections - provide energy to travel in this space - How much energy one has probabilistically determines how long is one's trajectory, whether one ends at top or center or not How does this connect to Luker?
self as product of interaction with a "generalized other" **
- The "generalized other" - one learns to regard to oneself from point of view bound to set of interactions - not just individual - More general and abstract - Group engaged in cooperative organized social activity that is continuous in time Example Play vs. game In role play - limited number of roles, defined buy their relationship to one another In Team sport one's role is defined in relationship to a group as specified by the rules of the game
"The Fire Next Time"
- The black child is raised with the awareness that they live in a world completely different from the white world - a world not as privileged and full of discrimination and violence - Though the child may not completely understands or perceives this, they react to it and are controlled by it - Outlets are used to deal with being in this world and with the fear that comes with it: drugs, alcohol, church, migrating and more - Unable to say what it was that had oppressed them (his friends) expect that they knew it was the white man White people living by different standards, in a different world - Fear in child of challenging the white world's assumption puts him in path of destruction - But the avenue can be tempting because of the power that marginality promises: "One needed, in order to be free, something more than a banking account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means more than a banking account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear." Needless to say, this was stigmatized power. connecting to: the "me" "organized set of attitudes of others, which one himself assumes." But the attitudes of these others are shaped by their position in social structure. This is how social structure becomes internalized as part of the "self." alternative view of socialization - skillfully navigating the contradition of culture, not just acquisition of role precribed by culture - marked individual
Socialization
- To become a competent human being requires social interaction and a process of socialization - Genes and instincts are necessary but not sufficient causes of what it means to be human WE ARE SOCIAL BEINGS
Sociology and its connection to history
- To explain by placing in context, also means placing in historical context, showing the connection between biography and history Meaning of utterances, concepts, actions and internal states is dependent on historical period Connecting to Luker: - There is historical conditions for why abortion is so controversial now: Medical knowledge, technology (especially imaging technology), industrialization, all led to a situation in which abortion is viable and the moral status of the embryo or of abortion - Medical doctors have lost their monopoly over reproductive decision-making and thus over defining the meaning of the embryo or of abortion - Womens entry into the labor force has led to increase struggles over birth control and reproduction
vaccines are hybrid
- between natural and artificial - between organic and chemical - between alive and dead - between medication and illness 'I am Legend' - zombie vampires - now part of vaccine conversation hence vaccines cana be a potent symbol of pollutions -- "toxins"
the grid of experience
- cosmology or a system of classification organizes individual experience and everyday life as in a grid -- what belongs together and what does'nt - where and when is the proper place for everything - what/who is protective and what/who poses a danger another ex. - time is duration divided, sorted, and named - space literally a grid divided into what is familiar and safe and what is different and dangerous
embeddedness in social structure: "risk" of position
- different positions in social structure entail different probabilities or "risks" for what the individuals so located are likely to do, what is likely to happen to them, or how far can they move ex. the correlation between low SES & mortality and morbidity position in social structure determines quality of healthcare/morbidity rates - connect to "Embodying Race" by Roberts
"The Ease of Privlege" - Khan
- elite thinking of themselves as very talented individuals - class doesnt matter for how they think about themselves; dont think they got somewhere because of entitlement - agressively challenge idea that they inherited anything - share culture, social ties and association w institutions: St. Pauls - ease of privledge - individualization of this - belief that what explains their position is that they are smart, hardworking, set of skills other people dont have = arrogance - rather than position yourself in a class, position yourslef as person who can move freely across situations/context - do not see hierarchal world of class division - students of st. paul rarely highlighted distinctions between "them" and rest of the world - facade of even playing field - adapting to that social world is what made the student "smart" -- learning same thing but in another language - language accepted by institution - students' refusal to think of st. paul as the way that things work - distance from school - opposational conciousness - "hidden curriculum" - ease comes when you buy into belief that the st.pauls way of acting is the right way - yet school talks about merit, work and excellence - author challenges Bourdieu's view that elite kids can be found in elite schools because there was correspondence between their dispostions & logic of institution - Khan found initial discomfort for all - experience suggests to them that it is who you are that matters - not where you from - this is what students (elite, white) learn in the school - for some, non-white, not high class, contradiction between their understanding of the world and school organizational method - students from disadvantaged backgroud ask: What about other kids from home who could be here but are'nt? Why are so many of the students here so rich? Why do so few of the people here look like me? - student from advantaged backgrounds -- not plagued by these questions -- most likely not aware of them at all -- to these students school looks like meritocracy - disadvantaged students navigate much more bumpy terrain connect to the myth of meritocracy + ease of privlege sociology vs common sense "anwers seem so obvious that we tend to dismiss questions lilke these"
3 forms of embeddedness
- embeddedness in social structure - embeddedness in "culture" -- "the cognitive infracture of everyday life" - embeddedness in material structure -- technology, machines, animals and the "natural" environemtn
gate-keeping aspect of socialization typical image of socialization into a culture vs alternative view
- gate-keeping process of obtaining membership in a collectivity Typical image of socialization into a "culture" - Culture as a unitary whole - Socialization as a spontaneous process - Culture as a deep and longlasting, almost unchanging - Socialization as top-down process - Culture as distinct from politics Alternative View - Culture as a system of contradictions - Socialization as ethical work - Socialization and childhood as historically changing - Children's agency - Culture and socialization as moral politics
"The Sociological Imagination" - Mills Summarize and relate to lecture
- given to us to get a sense of what thinking sociologically means - "The promise": "the sociological imagination is . . .a quality of mind that seems most dramatically to promise an understanding of intimate realities of ourselves with connection to larger social realities . . . human reason will come to play a greater role in human affairs." - By seeing that things could have been otherwise, we gain an understanding of how they came to be shaped the way they are - we gain the capacity to bring the process that shape both our private lives and the larger socia realities under conscious control What is the difference between sociology and common sense?
The over-scheduled child
- minute division of non-school time into a schedule of activities - abhorrence of "dead time" - making oneself scarce through over-scheduling/over-working - activities are with "appropiate" age peers - sociability is either an adul-child relation, or age group activites
Value Neutrality
- necessary for soci. research - identifying and acknowledging own values and personal biases when conducting research - which can manifest in language use (words as weapons - politicized) How does Luker practice value neutrality?
relationship between networks and social structure??
- networks are nested within social structure and shaped by it ex. - jews in france in the late 19th century were cohesive community because the larger French society discriminated against them
What is structural causation, or "fundamental causes"? (Link and Phelan)
- over-determination or multiple causation - causal paths that involve various intermediate cause/effect relations - many causal paths lead to the same effect ("final common pathway") - mutually reinforcing effects - feedback loop from the variety of causal effects back to location in social structure, vicious and virtuous circles of capital accumulation or dis-accumulation - perpetuated over generations - trajectory effects, or "self-fulfilling prophecy"
What is "egoistic suicide"? (Durkheim)
- protestants > catholics > jews - singles > married > married w children explanation: - number, intensity, frequency of interactions and network ties More notes on Egoistic Sucide by Durkheim - Suicide increases with knowledge, more common amongst educated communities - "Man seeks to learn and man kills himself because of the loss of cohesion in his religious society; he does not kill himself because of his learnin" - Loss of social cohesion → the strength of relationships and the sense of solidarity among members of a community - Suicide due to a loss of cohesion to man's religious society - Easy to think when you see correlation to learning and suicide that knowledge is the cause but thats not the case - Correlation is not causation - Both learning and suicide products of loss of cohesion - not suicide product of learning
structure of background knowledge
- semantic chains organized by metaphors - metaphors give everyday world its structure as inter-subjectively shared and taken for granted - not just flowery language, they organize experience and social interactions - background knowledge = toll used to repair situations - unconcious condition of successful practice - embeddedness in language through metaphors ex. "time is money"
embeddedness in social structure: what is social structure? how does it work?
- structure is the sum total of conditions that limit and enable individual action and interaction - those who have similar accounts of resources are "close" to one another in terms of social properties (residential concentration + frequency of interaction) - different amounts = less likely to meet, date, live next to one another (economic capital, cultural capital, social capital)
The "I"
- the response of the organism to the attitude of others - comes after the "me" NOT VICEVERSA sense of "I" develops out of the difference between the significant other and taking the pov of the significant other Ex. "Perhaps he will make a brilliant play or an error. The response to that situation as it appears in his immediate experience is uncertain and it is that which constitutes the "I" (175) This is "role-taking" as an active process of "arousing in oneself the attitudes of others." It is the most evident in development of role-playing
male/female as symbol
- this is a "natural symbol": we use natural differences and especially bodies, to express social meanings - then we string a whole set of increasingly arbitrary oppositions from the natural symbol - male/female are like boxes in the grid into which are sorted multiple other difference, thereby naturalizing a certain organization of social relations
"Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood" by Luker Summarize and Relate to topics in lecture
- value neutrality - value relevance - social world/social position - social structure - definition of the situation: battle over the power to define
"The Forms of Capital" - Bourdieu
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"The Habitus and the Space of Life-Styles" - Bourdieu
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socialization = transmission of cultural capital describe the process
1) "investment" -- not only money, also time, effort, and most importantly cultural resources - language used, "exposure", mode of child-rearing 2) accumulation happens through formal educational system, measured by increase social distance 3) conversion
Cultural capital as arbitrary
Bourdieu: Things like "concerted cultivation," soccer practice, piano practice, etc. are "cultural arbitraries," their value is purely relational, namely in how they create social distance
objective cultural capital --> institutionalized cultural capital (the credential
Bourdieu: institutionalization creates "a form of cultural capital which has a relative autonomy vis-a-vis its bearer and even vis-a-vis the cultural capital he effectively possesses at a given moment in time. "
Concerted Cultivation vs. Accomplishment of Natural Growth common with what class?
Concerted Cultivation: (middle class) • investment in enhancing and realizing the child's "potential" • The over-scheduled child • Similarity to the culture of educational institutions • Parents intervene in school on behalf of child • Parents train child to do the same Natural Growth: (low class) • Parents care for child and allow child to grow • Hanging out in mixed-age groups • Distance from and conflict with the culture of educational institutions • Self-exclusion from intervening in school
Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital
Cultural capital exists in at least three "states":• - Embodied (Class Habitus) -A set of dispositions which generate practices and perceptions - Objective (essays, grades, class rank) - Institutionalized (Credential) Accumulation happens as cultural capital is converted from one state to another. The workplace: - embodied cultural capital and institutionalized cultural capital converted to job offers The family: position in social structure and objective cultural capital are converted to class habitus/embodied cultural capital The School: symbolic violence converts class habitus/embodied cultural capital into objective achievements (grades) and status Self-fulfilling prophecy: school status and teacher judgments become embodied and internalized as sense of ease or unease in cultural settings The Credential: embodied cultural capital is converted to institutionalized cultural capital
3 aspect of socialization
Development of self Process of gaining member Process of reproduction of inequality Note: only one process of socialization, does all these three things at same time
What is dirt?
Douglass - Purity and Danger Dirt is matter "out of place" - "dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt, it exists in the eye of the beholder... Dirt offends against order... There is nothing fearful or unreasoning about our dirt-avoidance... it is a creative movement ... an attempt .. to make unity of experience." (2-3) Bateson - "Why do things get in a muddle?" - there are many arrangements we could consider a muddle, but only a few we would consider orderly, so order requires work - problem that genesis 1 contends with is not the origin of matter, but the origin of form, the origin of order Purity and Pollution - "Rituals of purity and impurity create unity in experience." Pollution is an idea and a set of rituals that express a general view of things that should be kept apart. It can be understood, therefore, as a way of symbolizing and working through perceived threats to social order. "Reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death. Wherever ideas of dirt are highly structured their analysis discloses a play upon such profound themes." (6) in polution - always a threat to boundaries - implies danger and power
Lauren Rivera: Hiring as cultural matching
ED (embodied) -> OCC (objective) -> INC -> ED -> OCC -> INC... - When converting ED to OCC, not just institutionalized cultural capital counts, but also embodied and objective cultural capital. The hiring process to elite jobs de-emphasizes technical skills and objective tests. Instead, it is a form of "cultural matching", namely similarity to the existing pool of employees on cultural characteristics such as pastime pursuits, sports, hobbies, personality characteristics and styles, in short the "intangibles" that are the habitus of a class. "Evaluators tended to favor extracurricular activities associated with the white upper-middle class and that were acquired through intense, prolonged investment of material and temporal resources not only by job applicants but also by their parents." "For example, "white-shoe" investment bank HR manager Kelly (white, female), dressed in a buttoned, pastel cardigan and pearls, asserted, "I'd have to pick Blake and Sarah. With his lacrosse and her squash, they'd really get along . . . on the trading floor."
class habitus
Habitus -- set of predispositions acquired early on, which include - bodily habits - habits of perception and cognition - ineffeable things such as how one carries self, taste, style, manners, manner of speech - "class habitus" because these predispositions are shaped by position of the family in class structure position in class structure determines degree of distance from material necessity, & consequently mode in which one approaches culture
"Hellhole" - Gwande summarize/connect to lecture
Humans are social being that need companionship to operate. Prisoners are put into solitary confinement as punishment and to prevent violence but the results only worsens the situation. It leaves the prisoner to become more violent and is shown to be related to irrational anger or unresponsive. Violence is a result of the conditions of the social enviornment. Providing prisoners with work and education opportunities decreases violence. - Humans need to be in the company of other humans to be able to function - Brain function is related to human social interactions - solitary confinement = mind that does not function - Humans go crazy with no social interaction - "The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learn, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There's nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind's gone dead." - Human crave companionship: solitary confinement leaves them unfit for social interactions despite this craving - Identity is socially created
What is the main problem with theories regarding socialization and the development of the self?
Main problem: (theory of socialization as development of the self needs) - how to provide casual explanation of the development of autonomy w/o casual account - fallacy of "free will" - humans as authors of their own lives, the self as something unique and ineffable → unrealistic/under-socialized Only theory that has satisfactory solution to this conundrum is the pragmatic theory of Cooley and Mead ("me", "I") in which the capacity for autonomy is built out of the acquisition of habits, and internalization of POV of significant others
binary oppositions constituting culture
Masculine, Feminine Western, Oriental White, Black Heterosexual, Homosexual Public, Private Spirit, Body One side of the opposition is always "unmarked" assumed as the norm and the other thereby "marked" as a deviation
Theory of formation of self
Mead - By "self" Mead means the humans capacity to act autonomously rather than to simply follow norms blindly - We are not born with this competence but it also cannot be explained by imitation - The capacity to act autonomously, to be subject ("I") is dependent on our capacity to stand outside ourselves and make ourselves into objects ("me")
theory of socialization as internalization of norms
Old and popular but limited theory Ex. gender socializarion into normative heterosexuality Ultimately theory is inadequate - its image of social actor is as "over-socialized" conformist and lacking autonomy
The looking-glass self
Others with whom one interacts with like a mirror because they allow us to see ourselves as we really are but because through interaction, they provide us with an external point of view The pov enables "role taking." Obeying the norms is just one option When this pov internalized, it is what Cooley calls "self" and what Mead calls "me" Ex. pronoun reversal → when a child refers to themselves as you, they, she, he, or by their own name instead of using I, me, or my
"Seeing like a state."
POV of social planners is biased and therefore often leads to unanticipated consequences, despite their authority ex. creation of capital, end up being ghost town
Speeding up and "precocity"
Speedup - not just the frenetic schedule of activities - also immense calue places on precocity on doing things early precocity: exceptionally early or premature development (as of mental powers or sexual characteristics) ex. arms' race of prepping G&T, "reading readiness" - Judgment and differential value formulated in terms of "quick" and "slow" opposite assumption (natural growth) - assumption that growth will be accomplished naturally - in own pace - without too much adult involvement - sociability is in mixed-ages groups
reproduction of inequality - problem faced by sociologists
The problem for sociologists is not whether there is "equality of opportunity" or not. It's a fact that there isn't. problem is to explain exactly how reproduction happens - What are the mechanisms that transmit inequality w/o knowing, would not know when or where to intervene
The Strenth of Weak Ties - Granovetter
What's argument? What's good about weak ties? - weak ties = bridges between denser netqorks of strong ties -- diversify one's sources of info - embeddedness in social networks, therefore, determines who gets the good jobs (correction to economic theories that assume information diffuses widely and equally) - the more social structure is de-compartmentalized, the more weak ties - Benefit from social network - Building communities that you may not be close with, but participate in will get you opportunities - Weak ties - close enough that its plausible to get a favor but not at the level of close friends and family - Loneliness more abundant by lack of strong ties
implications for research and intervention (Link & Phelan)
according to Link and Phelan - factors that put people at risk of risks may dominate, resulting in the intervention's ultimate failure - evidence involving experiemental. manipulation of risk factor -- the researchers have removed from consideration the social factors that determine exposure to the risk factor in the natural environments
how does embeddedness in the grid of experience impact and influence individual actionn?
background knowledge! - everyday affairs taken for granted - not blind trust or ignorance but based on enormous amount of background knowledge that is composed of assumptions, rules, heuristics, scripts, recipes, .... - typically organized in semantic chains by means of metaphors - why its in the "background" how do we know about background knowledge? by breaching experiments
symbolic violence in schools
schools valorize culture of upper/middle class and devalues culture of the lower class school transmits at the level of the elaborate code learned in Middle Class homes, and simply assumed that everybody are possessed with the tools to decode the transmission "reading readiness": cultural arbitrary (the habitus of class) is turned into something which is universally necessary (intelligence, merit) another example: symbolic violence in museums - excludes certain groups/classes not physically but by level of transmission, form of encoding that assumes that everybody has the key to decode it (completely different language -- connecting to Khan's exampel of St. Paul)
Exhibits of Socialization
social isolation of child - unsocialized creature, physically malnourished and apathetic/mentally blank Natural Pedagogy - babies attend atuned to a face where there is eye contact - humans being genetically predisposed to be socialized Language Humans do not merely behave impelled by genes and instincts - their action is oriented to linguistic meaning - to description Language enables it user to provide descriptions of selves, and thus become objective with respect to themselves I.e to have something like a "self" To become a human being is to possess a self that is linguistically mediated and which mediates our dealings with the environment Habits Automatic unconscious behaviors Not "instinctual equipment, but great deal of plasticity Capacity to learn Less likely to be innate, more likely to be developed & our reading: Hellhole by Gwande
socialization vs embeddedness
socialization: humans being social beings - identity created by social contexts/social worlds opposing view: human action as "hardwired" (nature vs. nurture) - time - collective's power over individual - processes by which culture, order, inequality instilled in us from childhood to when we die - learning internalizing and accumulating capital. embeddedness: perception, thought and action are constrained and enabled by social, cultural, and material structures in which individuals are embedded - action - relationships between people, networks, language shared - social structure and the way in which our relationships "enable anf constrain" us -- making decisions, communicating, acting confined by position in social structure taking on qualities of the context wherein they act contrasting view: individualist explanations of human action (e.g "choice", "decision", or reflecting unconcious motivation)
(mis)recognition
the characteristic reaction of people from the working class is to expose the charade ("my 3 year old could've done this!") - but also feel unease, being "out of place" -- they do not have the ease of privlege Khan talks about -hence they dont go (mis)recognition = subjective non-recognition (ridicule, resistance) + objective recognition (self-exclusion)
Chains of Affection - Bearman, Moody, and Stovel
the social structure of romantic ties in "Jefferson High" - network structure is useful for understanding diffusion processes, whether diffusion of information or disease transmission What generates the social network observed in "Jefferson High"? • Proscription • Homogamy rule: "Adolescents at Jefferson tend to select partners with similar socioeconomic status, grade point average, college plans, attachment to school, and trouble in school, drinking behavior, IQ, and grade. With respect to categorical attributes, partners tend to be similar in terms of sexual experience, suspension from school, and smoking." • Compartmentalization: The fact that it is the only high school in a relatively small and somewhat poorer town
class and distance from material necessity
upper class - distance from necessity working class - "taste for the necessary" middle class - "cultural goodwill" - strive for upper class but never getting there
class and its relationship to language
working class: restricted linguistic code upper middle class: elaboratie code