Sociology Exam 3

wealth

The total value of money and other assets, minus outstanding debts

Individual Discrimination

person-to-person or face-to-face discrimination; the negative treatment of people by other individuals

impoverished

poor, in a state of poverty; depleted

white privilege

rights or immunities granted to people as a particular benefit or favor simply because they are white

Interactionist theory on gender

(1987) gender is not a fixed identity or role that we take with us into our interactions. Rather, it is the product of those interactions. In this framework, gender is a matter of active doing, not simply a matter of natural being. To be a man or a woman, they argue, is to perform masculinity or femininity constantly. In this social constructionist theory, gender is a process, not a static category.

Scapegoat

(n.) a person or thing carrying the blame for others

asset

(n.) something of value; a resource; an advantage

Globalization

Actions or processes that involve the entire world and result in making something worldwide in scope. (Main reason for growing inequality)

gender

a social position; behaviors and a set of attributes that are associated with sex identities.

bourgeois society

a society of commerce (modern capitalist society, for example) in which the maximization of profit is the primary business incentive

Meritocracy

a system in which promotion is based on individual ability or achievement

status hierarchy system

a system of stratification based on social prestige. For Weber, status groups are communities united by either a positive or negative social estimation of their honor. Put more simply, status is determined by what society as a whole thinks of the particular lifestyle of the community to which you belong.

elite-mass dichotomy system

a system of stratification that has a governing elite, a few leaders who broadly hold power in society.

Stereotyping

creating an oversimplified image of a particular group of people, usually by assuming that all members of the group are alike

Microaggressions

everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership

Freud's developmental psychology

girls and boys develop masculine and feminine personality structures through early interactions with their parents. Boys, so the story goes, have a tormented time achieving masculinity because they must resolve the Oedipal complex. In this stage of development, around age three, every normal boy experiences heterosexual love for his maternal figure. But he soon realizes that he will be castrated (psychologically, not literally) by his father if he continues to fancy his mother. To resolve this Oedipal conflict, the boy rejects his mother, in turn emulating his emotionally distant father and developing rigid ego boundaries.

Discrimination

in classical conditioning, the learned ability to distinguish between a conditioned stimulus and stimuli that do not signal an unconditioned stimulus

How did Scottish Enlightenment Thinkers view inequality?

inequality was a prerequisite for social progress, and social progress was a prerequisite for the development of civilization—the greatest goal toward which humankind could strive.

Matrix of Domination (Collins)

intersecting domains of oppression that create a social space of domination and, by extension, a unique position within that space based on someone's intersectional identity along the multiple dimensions of gender, age, race, class, sexuality, location, and so on. More fundamentally, Collins (1990) argues, black women face unique oppressions that white women don't.

income

money received, especially on a regular basis, for work or through investments.

The Myth of Race

race is a social construction, a set of stories that we tell ourselves to organize reality and make sense of the world, RATHER THAN a fixed biological or natural reality. It was believed that the Irish were a distinct category of people who carried innate differences in their blood, differences that made them permanently inferior to their white American neighbors.

Weber's Three Dimensions of Class

Power, Wealth, and Prestige

Redlining

A discriminatory real estate practice in North America in which members of minority groups are prevented from obtaining money to purchase homes or property in predominantly white neighborhoods. The practice derived its name from the red lines depicted on cadastral maps used by real estate agents and developers. Today, redlining is officially illegal.

Ethnicity

A social division based on national origin, religion, language, and often race.

paradox of inequality

inequality is the result of surplus

gender wage gap

The difference between the earnings of women who work full-time year-round as a group and those of men who work full-time year-round as a group.

Affirmative Action

A policy designed to give special attention to or compensatory treatment for members of some previously disadvantaged group.

Vertical Direction

this direction gives a feeling of balance, formality and alertness

Horizontal direction

this direction suggests calmness, stability, and tranquility

Nancy Chodorow's theories on gender development

-Emotional attachments -Boys break from mothers more than girls -Development of masculine and feminine character traits She reasoned that parents' unequal involvement in child rearing was a partial cause for the universal oppression of women. Her answer was that mothering by women is reproduced in a cycle of role socialization, in which little girls learn to identify as mothers and little boys as fathers (and workers outside the home). Chodorow concluded that egalitarian relations between the sexes would be possible if men shared the mothering.

India (gender inequality)

-status in general -concept of Sati: ex-when husband dies, wife is supposed to kill herself

social construct

A concept or practice that is construct of a group. Everybody in society agrees to treat a certain aspect a certain way regardless of its inherent value in nature.

Race

A group of human beings distinguished by physical traits, blood types, genetic code patterns or genetically inherited characteristics.

Racism

Belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.

Conflict Theory on gender

Conflict theorists mixed old-school Marxism with feminism to claim that gender, not class, was the driving force of history. Socialist feminists, also known as radical feminists, claimed that the root of all social relations, including relations of production, stemmed from unequal gender relations.

contradictory class locations

Erik Wright's idea that people can occupy locations in the class structure that fall between the two "pure" classes. (managers, small business owners, self employed, craftsmen, ect)

How gender structures life

Gender establishes patterns of expectations for people, orders our daily lives, and is one of the fundamental building blocks of society—law, family, education, the economy, everything. The process of forming a gendered identity starts before a person is even born, as soon as the sex of a fetus is estimated or even earlier in the case of in vitro fertilization (IVF), where the sex chromosomes can be identified even before implantation into the uterus.

Gender as a social construct

Gender is assigned to someone based on what they were born as; this is not always necessarily what a person identifies as

Paradoxes of Gender

Lorber claims that gender is a social structure that "establishes patterns of expectations for individuals, orders the social processes of everyday life, is built into the major social organizations of society, such as the economy, ideology, the family, and politics, and is also an entity in and of itself."

Marxist Feminism

Marxist feminists, for instance, argue that sexuality in America is an expression of the unequal power balance between men and women. Catharine MacKinnon (1983) argued that in male-dominated societies, sexuality is constructed as a gender binary, with men on top and women on the bottom (literally and figuratively).

Intersex Society of North America

Most doctors today still typically recommend secretive surgery during infancy to make nonbinary children conform to a preconceived notion of what "unambiguous" genitalia should look like. About 90 percent of these surgeries reassign an ambiguous male anatomy into a female one because, in the disquieting (and offensive) phrase of the surgical world, "It's easier to make a hole than build a pole"

social mobility

Movement of individuals or groups from one position in a society's stratification system to another

India gender

Nadles are not the only non-Western examples of nonbinary gender configurations. Serena Nanda (1990) and Gayatri Reddy (2005) studied hijras in India, a group that is often included in textbooks like this one to stand in as proof that a binary either/or gender system is not so natural after all. From Reddy we know that "hijras are phenotypic men who wear female clothing and ideally, renounce sexual desire and practice by undergoing a sacrificial emasculation—that is, an excision of the penis and testicles." To our Western ears, then, these men who renounce manhood but who are not women are actively staking a claim for a third gender. But Reddy goes on to develop the definition of what it means to be a hijra, which includes behaviors that may have little to do with gender

Population growth in Africa

No demographic transition--population predicted to grow, reaching 20% of the world's total population by 2050

descending vertical mobility

One way to think of these forms is as the distinction between a particular person falling overboard from a ship and the whole ship sinking. Sorokin (1959) asserted that "channels of vertical circulation necessarily exist in any stratified society and are as necessary as channels for blood circulation in the body."

straight-line assimilation

Robert Park's 1920s universal and linear model for how immigrants assimilate: they first arrive, then settle in, and achieve full assimilation in a newly homogenous country

Segregation

Separation of people based on racial, ethnic, or other differences

sex role theory

Talcott Parsons's theory that men and women perform their sex roles as breadwinners and wives/ mothers, respectively, because the nuclear family is the ideal arrangement in modern societies, fulfilling the function of reproducing workers. Women and men play distinctive roles that are functional for the whole of society; a healthy, harmonious society exists when actors stick to their normal roles. Generally speaking, according to Parsons, social structures such as gender and the division of labor are held in place because they work to ensure a stable society. The functionalist sex role story also does not explain how and why structures change throughout history.

What does Jean-Jacques Rousseau believe is as the primary source of social ills?

The emergence of private property. He claims that if private property were eliminated, we would live in a state of social equality

How do Enlightenment thinkers, such as Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and Thomas Malthus think of inequality?

They view inequality as good and necessary. Inequality emerges when resources can be preserved. (Private Property)

Plessy vs. Ferguson

a case that was brought to supreme court by black lawsuits to challenge the legality of segregation. The court ruled that segregation was legal as long as it was "equal". Established separate but equal

Social equality

a condition in which no differences in wealth, power, prestige, or status based on nonnatural conventions exist

race

a group of people who share a set of characteristics—typically, but not always, physical ones—and are said to share a common bloodline.

horizontal social mobility

a group or individual transitioning from one social status to another situated more or less on the same rung of the ladder. Examples of this might be a secretary who changes firms but retains her occupational status, a Methodist person who converts to Lutheranism, a family that migrates to one city from another, or an ethnic group that shifts its typical job category from one form of unskilled labor to another.

symbolic ethnicity

a nationality, not in the sense of carrying the rights and duties of citizenship but of identifying with a past or future nationality. For later generations of white ethnics, something not constraining but easily expressed, with no risks of stigma and all the pleasures of feeling like an individual.

Patriarchy

a nearly universal system involving the subordination of femininity to masculinity.

bisexual

a person who is sexually attracted to both sexes

estate system

a politically based system of stratification characterized by limited social mobility

Caste System

a religion-based system of stratification characterized by no social mobility (India)

gender role

a set of expected behaviors for males or for females

middle class

a term commonly used to describe those individuals with nonmanual jobs that pay significantly more than the poverty line—though this is a highly debated and expansive category, particularly in the United States, where broad swathes of the population consider themselves middle class.

upper class

a term for the economic elite. Associated with income & wealth, power, and prestige.

class system

an economically based hierarchical system characterized by cohesive, oppositional groups and somewhat loose social mobility (Marx views any roles in the production process as a class system and the US (capitalism) as a class system)

sexual harassment

an illegal form of discrimination revolving around sexuality that can involve everything from inappropriate jokes to sexual "barter" (where victims feel the need to comply with sexual requests for fear of losing their job) to outright sexual assault.

glass ceiling

an invisible limit on women's climb up the occupational ladder. Betty Dukes (right) was a longtime greeter for Wal-Mart and became the lead plaintiff in a class-action gender discrimination lawsuit against the discount retailer. She and her counterparts claimed that they were passed over for promotions and paid less than men for the same work. In 2011 the Supreme Court dismissed the case in a controversial 5-4 decision.

Prejudice

an unjustifiable (and usually negative) attitude toward a group and its members. Prejudice generally involves stereotyped beliefs, negative feelings, and a predisposition to discriminatory action.

status-attainment model

approach that ranks individuals by socioeconomic status, including income and educational attainment, and seeks to specify the attributes characteristic of people who end up in more desirable occupations.The status-attainment model is an elastic one that allows researchers to throw in new factors as they arise and see how they affect the relationships between existing ones, generally ordered chronologically over a typical life course. Generally, it is thought that education is the primary mediating variable between parents' and children's occupational prestige. That said, research shows that parental education and net worth, not occupation or income, best predict children's educational and other outcomes

essentialist

arguments explaining social phenomena in terms of natural, biological, or evolutionary inevitabilities. Sex and gender are biological

bourgeoisie

capitalist class; owns the means of production

Max Weber on class

class is a group that has as its basis the common life chances or opportunities available to it in the marketplace. In other words, what distinguishes members of a class is that they have similar value in the commercial marketplace in terms of selling their own property and labor.

Marx and his view of class

classes are defined and structured by the relations concerning (i) work and labour and (ii) ownership or possession of property and the means of production. These economic factors more fully govern social relationships in capitalism than they did in earlier societies.

Transgender

describes people whose gender does not correspond to their birth sex.

sexuality

desire, sexual preference, and sexual identity and behavior.

Types of Discrimination

discriminatory policies or practices, sexual harassment, intimidation, mockery and insults, exclusion, incivility

Ferguson and Millar saw social developments resulting from the establishment of private property as representing a huge improvement in society because private property leads to higher degrees of social organization and:

efficiency

exchange mobility

mobility resulting from the swapping of jobs. we hold fixed the changing distribution of jobs, individuals trade jobs such that if one person is upwardly mobile it necessarily entails someone else being downwardly mobile.

structural mobility

mobility that is inevitable from changes in the economy. With the decline of farmwork because of technology, the sons and daughters of farmers are by definition going to have to find other kinds of work.

intragenerational mobility

movement up or down a social stratification hierarchy within the course of a personal career

differential income growth factors

nature of available employment, increase in education requirements, and income insecurity

Malthus believed inequality was

necessary, for avoiding the problem of massive overpopulation and hence starvation.

Scientific racism

nineteenth-century theories of race that characterize a period of feverish investigation into the origins, explanations, and classifications of race.

sexism

occurs when a person's sex or gender is the basis for judgment, discrimination, or other differential treatment against that person.

Standards of equality

ontological equality, equality of opportunity, equality of condition, equality of outcome

Major Systems of Stratification

slavery, caste, estate, class

socioeconomic status

status in society based on level of education, income, and occupational prestige

natural inequality

stems from differences in age, health or other physical characteristics

cisgender

term used when gender identity and/or expression aligns with the sex assigned at birth

glass elevator

the accelerated promotion of men to the top of a work organization, especially in feminized jobs.

Social Darwinism

the application of Darwinian ideas to society—namely, the evolutionary "survival of the fittest."

one-drop rule

the belief that "one drop" of black blood makes a person black, a concept that evolved from U.S. laws forbidding miscegenation

Ethnocentrism

the belief that one's own culture or group is superior to others and the tendency to view all other cultures from the perspective of one's own.

feminism

the belief that women should possess the same political and economic rights as men

intergenerational mobility

the change that family members make in social class from one generation to the next

hegemonic masculinity

the condition in which men are dominant and privileged, and this dominance and privilege is invisible.

institutional discrimination

the denial of opportunities and equal rights to individuals and groups that results from the normal operations of a society

Racialization

the formation of a new racial identity by drawing ideological boundaries of difference around a formerly unnoticed group of people

Stratification

the hierarchical organization of a society into groups with differing levels of power, social prestige, or status and economic resources.

equality of outcome

the idea that each player must end up with the same amount regardless of the fairness of the "game" (free rider problem)

equality of opportunity

the idea that everyone has an equal chance to achieve wealth, social prestige, and power because the rules of the game, so to speak, are the same for everyone.

equality of condition

the idea that everyone should have an equal starting point

Heteronormativity

the idea that heterosexuality is the default or normal sexual orientation from which other sexualities deviate.

Intersectionality

the idea that it is critical to understand the interplay between social identities such as race, class, gender, ability status, and sexual orientation, even though many social systems and institutions (such as the law) try to treat each category on its own.

nativism

the movement to protect and preserve indigenous land or culture from the allegedly dangerous and polluting effects of new immigrants.

free rider problem

the notion that when more than one person is responsible for getting something done, the incentive is for each individual to shirk responsibility and hope others will pull the extra weight.

sex

the perceived biological differences that society typically uses to distinguish males from females.

ontological equality

the philosophical and religious notion that all people are created equal

social construction of reality

the process by which people creatively shape reality through social interaction

ascending vertical social mobility

the rise or fall of an individual (or group) from one social stratum to another. We can further distinguish two types of vertical mobility: ascending and descending (more commonly termed upward and downward). An individual who experiences ascending vertical mobility either rises from a lower stratum into a higher one or creates an entirely new group that exists at a higher stratum. Ugo's promotion to regional manager at Sears is an example of rising from a lower stratum to a higher one.

Eugenics

the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's master-slave dialectic

the slave is dependent on the master because the master provides food, shelter, and protection. the master is also dependent on the slave, who performs the basic duties of survival until the master can no longer function on his own. He doesn't remember how to grow his own food, prepare meals, or even get dressed without help. Basically, the master would not be able to function if left to fend for himself. Thus the master-slave nexus becomes a relationship of mutual dependency. Hegel views history as marching steadily forward from a situation of few masters and many servants or slaves—such as monarchies and empires, not to mention the entire feudal system—to a society with more and more free men and women, a situation of democracy and equality.

homosexual

the social identity of a person who has sexual attraction to and/or relations with other persons of the same sex

Assimilation

the social process of absorbing one cultural group into harmony with another

social construction of sexuality

the sociologist would argue that the notion of normal, especially pertaining to what happens behind closed bedroom (or bathroom or car) doors, is always contested. In other words, there is no natural way of doing it. If an essentially right way existed, we wouldn't be able to find such wild and woolly variation throughout history and across cultures. Starting from the view that sex itself is a social creation, sociologists tend to argue that humans have sexual plumbing but no sexuality until they are located in a social environment.

Miscegenation

the technical term for interracial marriage, literally meaning "a mixing of kinds"; it is politically and historically charged—sociologists generally prefer exogamy or outmarriage.

Income Inequality

the unequal distribution of household or individual income across the various participants in an economy

social inequality

the unequal distribution of wealth, power, or prestige among members of a society

Structural Functionalism

theoretical tradition claiming that every society has certain structures (the family, the division of labor, or gender) that exist to fulfill some set of necessary functions (reproduction of the species, production of goods, etc.). (Parsons)

biological differences between men and women

women enter puberty earlier, live longer, and have more fat and less muscle

Proletariat

working class