Sociology Chapter 15 Communities, the Environment, and Health

1. Environmental Threats

Among the environmental challenges we face are the following: Climate change: The use of fossil fuels generates carbon dioxide pollution, which helps to produce global warming.Air pollution: Gases emitted by automobiles and industrial processes can be reintroduced into the soil and water as acid rain, and they can also reduce the effectiveness of the ozone layer.Water pollution: Water quality is threatened by numerous pollutants that can create health problems and destroy habitats.Solid waste: Leaks and seepage of toxic wastes into the groundwater and the release of polluting gases into the air pollute areas near landfills.Resource depletion: Human activity destroys, depletes, and pollutes a variety of natural resources. Clean water, for example, is becoming a scarce commodity.Energy consumption: It depletes natural resources, produces toxic pollutants, and contributes to climate change.

c. The Weakening of Doctors' Authority

Changes in health care in the United States have undermined the power, status, and authority of doctors. Factors include decline in government support for doctors in private practice, bureaucratization of medical practice (corporations), competition from lower-cost health care workers, globalization and the information revolution, changes in the public conception of the body, erosion of patient trust,growth in the number of doctors, weakening and fragmentation of the AMA.

1. Community: Place, People, and Relationships

Community is a set of social relationships, typically arising from living in a particular place, that give people a sense of identity and belonging. There are three kinds of environments:Social environment refers broadly to the cultural context and patterns of relationships within which humans live and includes groups, institutions, social networks, and social positions.The natural environment is the land, water, air, vegetation, and organisms that make up the physical world.The built environment is the physical surroundings that humans create and includes buildings, roads, dams, homes, and consumer products.

3. Rural Life: Settlements, Surpluses, and Inequality

Crop cultivation and domestication of animals tied people to a particular place, where they produced a built environment and generated and stored produce surpluses. The ability to produce material surpluses led to the specialization of labor. Social inequality also increased.

b. Monopolizing Medical Practice

Doctors established an institutional monopoly on medical practice that drove out rival practitioners. They secured legislation that permitted only officially licensed doctors to practice medicine. AMA-certified medical schools limited enrollment, thereby controlling the supply of doctors.

6. Sunbelt Cities and Global Growth

During the second half of the twentieth century, growth in cities of the U.S. South and Southwest created decentralized environments dependent on the automobile. Today, industrialization and urbanization are increasingly global phenomena.

G. A Changing World: Community and Environmental Influences on Health

Environmental health refers to the aspects of health, illness, and disease that result from environmental factors. Improving and expanding access to safe water and sanitation systems can make a major contribution to global health.

E. Environmental Sociology

Environmental sociology refers to the study of the interactions among social life, the built environment, and the natural environment. Environmental sociologists focus on three key issues: Why societies are producing such daunting environmental problems, How people come to recognize and understand them, How changes in social structure and behavior can help address them.

2. Durkheim: Organic Solidarity in the City

For Durkheim, homogenous rural communities exhibited mechanical solidarity, social cohesion based on shared experience, personal ties, and a limited sense of individuality. With the growth of cities, mechanical solidarity was replaced with organic solidarity, a new form of social cohesion based on interdependence.

5. Culture and the Social Construction of Environmental Problems

For people to recognize objective conditions—the physical reality of environmental problems—as social problems, they must frame them accordingly; this is done by sponsors, who work to bring these problems to the attention of the media, public officials, and the public. Seriously addressing environmental threats requires a change of culture. Recent research shows that the environmental movement has stalled.

B. Understanding the Culture of Urban Life 1. Tönnies: Cities as a New Form of Social Organization

German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936)Gemeinschaft refers to social organization in which most relationships are based upon the long-term personal ties of collective kinship, common tradition, and shared values.Gesellschaft refers to social organization in which most social relationships are impersonal, temporary, and based primarily on the pursuit of individual rational self-interest.If people change where they live, they will likely change how they live.

3. Urbanization in a Global Economy

Globalization has centralized much of business in the form of chain stores. The massive growth of chains has brought lower prices for consumers but has concentrated economic power in the hands of a few corporate players. An influx of investment dollars can bring jobs and prosperity, while a withdrawal of investment can lead to economic decline and urban blight.

3. Inequality and Health Disparities

Health disparities are persistent patterns of inequality in health. In general, social inequality works in predictable ways: People with less income and education are likely to experience more illness and to die younger. Components of socioeconomic status contribute directly to health disparities: Education shapes future job opportunities and helps determine adult income.Income is necessary to purchase health care services or health insurance. Occupation relates to health disparities in that people with jobs and job security have fewer health problems. Race and ethnicity intersect with class to create distinct disparities.

4. The Impact of Place on Social Life: Human Ecology

Human ecology is the study of the links between the physical environment—natural and built—and social life. Sociologists also point out that function, not political boundary, defines urban areas and shapes our experience of them. Various physical spaces make up urban communities:the inner city, typically the most densely developed portion;the city property, a city's legal boundary;the suburbs, less densely developed and populated areas that surround a city's official boundaries;edge cities, mini-cities that developed outside the city proper and include major business, commercial, and industrial districts; exurbs, residential areas beyond the suburbs that have a quasi-rural atmosphere;metropolitan area, the region that encompasses a city plus the surrounding suburbs, exurbs, and edge cities; megalopolis, a continuous urban region that incorporates multiple cities.

3. Jane Addams and the "Chicago School": Community in City Life

In 1889, Hull House was a settlement house that provided community services for ethnically diverse poor and working-class residents. Addams invented a new form of urban sociology relying on detailed data and demographic characteristics of different neighborhoods. Community studies typically look at groups of people who share some common tie and engage in social interaction within a particular geographic area: "Chicago School" studies. The studies found that some of the social cohesion that marked traditional rural life survived in the new urban ethnic enclaves.

2. The Social Determinants of Health

In the United States, our understanding of how to improve health outcomes has varied over time: 1930-1950: sanitation and environmental health, 1950-1970: health care, 1970-1990: health behaviors, 1990-present: social and economic factors.

2. Nomadic Life: Hunting and Gathering

Individuals lived in small, nomadic groups. There was no ownership of land, little private ownership, and little economic inequality. Men and women did different types of work but were generally social equals.

5. Modern Urbanization: Opportunity, Diversity, and Problems

Industrialization and urbanization transformed the way human beings lived. Emerging cities offered economic opportunities and created a vital and diverse intellectual environment, but they also contributed to social problems.Cities created enormous wealth for some, abject squalor for others.Work environments were hazardous.Pollution and sanitation problems arose.

b. Higher Taxes

Local governments lose money on suburban residential growth, making growth expensive for taxpayers. To pay the costs of infrastructure and the ongoing salaries of public servants, suburban governments usually increase residential property taxes.

C. Power and Inequality in City Life

New urban sociology refers to an approach to studying cities that focuses on the interactions of politics and economics and locates them in the larger context of the global economy.

F. The Sociology of Health 1. Culture, Structure, Power, and the Medical Profession

One example of the sociological approach to health issues concerns the rise of the medical profession. The occupation of doctor is among the most prestigious and highly paid in the United States. But this was not always the case. Prior to 1900, doctors did not enjoy any financial success. They lacked uniform training and universal standards of practice and were not successful at diagnosis and treatment. Doctors Organize American Medical Association (AMA). By the early twentieth century, U.S. doctors had established professional authority, legitimate power to define the terms of discussion within a specific field.

1. Class Inequality and the Urban "Growth Machine"

Pervasive inequality seen in the gap between luxurious homes and the homeless and between rates of street crime and community services from one neighborhood to the next; attention paid to the needs of commuters while public transportation for city residents is neglected. "Growth machines" is a label that highlights how powerful businesses and politicians work together to promote urban development, often while ignoring the interests of ordinary citizens. Gentrification is the process of rehabilitating older housing stock and investing in neighborhood development in a way that typically attracts new higher-income residents and displaces current middle- and low-income residents.

A. The Structure and Evolution of Communities

Place matters: Social life can be vastly different in the dissimilar structures of different locations, that is, small-town versus big-city life.

6. The Search for Solutions of the United States continues to embrace a culture of consumption.

Seriously addressing environmental threats requires a change in attitudes, values, and understanding—a change of culture. Four basic mechanisms of environmental reform are environmental activism and social movements,environmental regulation by governments,international environmental governance,ecological modernization.

4. The Enduring Significance of Rural Life

Some rural counties with major population growth have been reclassified as nonrural. Rural rebound has occurred mostly in areas that cater to tourists looking for outdoor activities, such as skiing, boating, and hiking. Rural communities are much less isolated and homogeneous, but residents continue to be linked to the natural environment, in contrast with city dwellers.

2. Suburban Problems a. Sprawl

Sprawl refers to low-density development that disperses people over a wide area, separates homes from workplaces and stores, and depends heavily on cars for transportation. Its associated problems include commuting time, health problems related to reliance on driving, environmental issues of driving and congestion, and a higher cost of living.

3. Today's Changing Suburbs

Suburbs overall are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse; modern technology is helping to overcome social isolation. Older inner suburbs have developed many social problems formerly associated with cities, such as significant crime, gang violence, poverty, pollution, and neighborhood blight.

2. Analyzing Environmental Problems

Sustainability refers to a balance between resource protection and consumption that can be maintained indefinitely. Humans are engaged in a number of unsustainable practices. The three basic functions of our environmental assets are to provide a place in which to live, to provide resources needed for survival, and to provide a place to dispose of wastes. Unsustainable practices put excess demands on the environment creating three corresponding problems: Dramatic growth in population is leading to overcrowding. We are consuming resources at a pace that outstrips long-term supply. Pollution is overwhelming the ecosystem's ability to absorb waste products.

c. Social Isolation

The built environment of suburbs often makes social life more isolated and private. The need to drive almost everywhere reduces face-to-face social interaction. The orientation to privacy can carry over to a broader decline in civic engagement.

4. Preindustrial Cities: Protection and Prosperity

The built environment was of primary importance. Early cities offered benefits over rural villages:They helped produce a higher standard of living through more specialized occupations and more commerce.They helped protect their inhabitants against marauders and other enemies.

D. The Structure and Culture of the Suburbs 1. Suburban Growth and Urban Decline

The rise of the suburbs dates to the post-World War II period when the newfound affluence among the working class allowed many to pursue home ownership. Structural conditions encouraged migration from cities to suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s. Cities, on the other hand, became increasingly unattractive due to a number of developments. Many were led to believe that they were dangerous and crime-ridden.

4. Structure: The "Treadmill of Production"

The treadmill of production is the idea that capital-intensive industries and the modern state, in pursuit of continual growth as a central good, have created a "treadmill of production" that results in increasing resource depletion and worsening pollution. It is part of a structural analysis that focuses on the effect of structural forces in creating environmental problems.

3. Power, Inequality, and Environmental Justice

Those with more power and privilege generally reap the benefits of environmental degradation through affluent lifestyles and the ability to protect themselves from pollution. Activists have organized campaigns for environmental justice, the prevention of harmful practices that unfairly burden low-income people and racial minorities with disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards.

2. Race and Urban Inequality

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro Du Bois used innovative methods to document employment, family composition, religion, street activity, community institutions, crime, and so on. Urban communities are still divided by race, due to the legacy of segregation. Institutional discrimination in the housing industry played a role in the form of redlining, which is the use of discriminatory practices in the sale or rental of housing to minorities. The segregation picture today is mixed.Segregation between blacks and whites peaked in the 1960s and has been declining slowly.Hispanics and Asians are less segregated than African Americans, and there has been little change in segregation levels for these groups.