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Crash Course Transcript: Social Groups

"If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?" It's the lament of many an exasperated parent, but it's also a kind of profound sociological question. Because, when you're talking to your parents, the answer's always no. But, with the right group of friends, you might be quite happy to take a dive in the water. The thing is, you're a different person when you're a part of a group, and you're a different person in different groups. A family, a group of friends out for a swim, a business meeting, and a choir are different kinds of groups. And the same person can be a member of all of them. So if we want to understand how these groups are different, and even how they're similar, we need to talk about what social groups are, and why they matter, both to the people who are a part of them, and to the people who aren't. [Theme Music] The choir, the meeting, the friends, and the family are all examples of social groups. A social group is simply a collection of people who have something in common and who believe that what they have in common is significant. In other words, a group is partly defined by the fact that its members feel like they're part of a group. This is obviously a pretty broad definition. But it does have its limits, and you can see these limits if you compare social groups to aggregates and categories. An aggregate is a set of individuals who happen to be in the same place at the same time. All the people passing through Grand Central Station at 1:00 on a Friday afternoon are an aggregate, but they aren't a group, because they don't share a sense of belonging. Categories, meanwhile, consist of one particular kind of person across time and space. They're sets of people who share similar characteristics. Racial categories are a simple example. So the sense of feeling like you belong to a group is a defining feature of a group. But it also helps you differentiate kinds of groups, specifically between primary and secondary groups. Primary groups are small and tightly knit, bound by a very strong sense of belonging. Family and friendship groups are primary groups. They're mutually supportive places where members can turn for emotional, social, and financial help. And as far as group members are concerned, the group is an end-in-itself. It exists to be a group, not for any other purpose. Secondary groups, however, are the reverse. These are large and impersonal groups, whose members are bound primarily by a shared goal or activity, rather than by strong emotional ties. A company is a good example of a secondary group: Employees are often loosely or formally connected to one another through their jobs, and they tend to know little about each other. So there's a sense of belonging there, but it's much more limited. That's not to say that coworkers never have emotional relationships. In fact, secondary groups can become primary groups over time, as a set of coworkers spends time together and becomes a primary group of friends. And while a gang of friends and a company clearly have a lot of differences, they also have at least one major similarity: They're both voluntary - if you belong to that group, it's because you choose to join. But there are also plenty of involuntary groups, in which membership is assigned. Prisoners in a prison are members of an involuntary group, as are conscripted soldiers. Now that we understand a little bit about what groups are, we can start to study how they work - beginning with group dynamics, or the way that individuals affect groups, and groups affect individuals. If we want to think about how individuals affect groups, a good place to start is with leadership. Not all groups have formally assigned leaders, but even groups that don't, often have de facto leaders, like parents in a family. A leader is just someone who influences other people in the group. And there are generally two types of leadership: an instrumental leader is focused on a group's goals, giving orders and making plans in order to achieve those goals. An expressive leader, by contrast, is looking to increase harmony and minimize conflict within the group. They aren't focused on any particular goal, they're just trying to promote the wellbeing of the group's members. And just as leaders may differ in what they're trying to do, so too can they go about doing it in different ways. I'm talking here about leadership styles, of which we have three. Authoritarian leaders lead by giving orders and setting down rules which they expect the group to follow. Such a leader earns respect, and can be effective in a crisis, but at the expense of affection from group members. Democratic leaders on the other hand, lead by trying to reach a consensus. Instead of issuing orders, they consider all viewpoints to try and reach a decision. Such leaders are less effective during a crisis, but, because of the variety of different viewpoints they consider, they often find more creative solutions to problems. And they're more likely to receive affection from their group's members. Finally, laissez-faire leaders do the least leading. They're extremely permissive, and mostly leave the group to function on its own. This means lots of freedom, but it's the least effective style at promoting group solidarity and least effective in times of crisis. So, leadership is one way that individuals affect groups, but groups also affect individuals. You can see this especially clearly in group conformity, where members of a group hew to the group's norms and standards. Basically, group conformity is the reason that you do jump off the bridge with your friends. And this has been demonstrated in some fascinating experimental results. Let's go to the Thought Bubble to learn about perhaps the most famous - or infamous - experiment on conformity. The Milgram Experiment was run by American psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1974, and it was presented as an experiment in punishment and learning, with two participants. One participant was the teacher, who read aloud a series of word pairs and then asked the other participant, the student, seated in another room, to recall them. The student was strapped to a chair and wired up with electrodes. For each wrong answer, the experimenter, who was standing beside the teacher, instructed the teacher to deliver a painful electric shock to the student. With each wrong answer, the intensity increased, from an unpleasant few volts up to 450 volts, a potentially deadly shock. But the experiment was not about punishment or learning. The student was actually an actor, a confederate of the experimenter, and the shocks were not real. The experiment was designed to test how far the teacher would go in conforming to authority. At some point in the experiment, the confederate would feign extreme pain and beg the teacher to stop. Then he fell silent. If at any point the teacher refused to issue the shock, the experimenter would insist that he continue. In the end, 65% of participants went all the way, administering the presumably deadly 450 volt shock. And this is usually given as proof that people tend to follow orders, but there's a lot more to it than that. If the experimenter gave direct orders to the teacher, like "You must continue, you have no other choice," that resulted in non-compliance. That's when the teacher was more likely to refuse. The prods that did produce compliance were the ones that appealed, instead, to the value of the experiment - the ones that said administering the shocks was necessary for the experiment to be successful and worthwhile. So in this instance, the value of the experiment, of science, was a strongly held group value, and it helped convince the subjects to continue, even though they might not have wanted to. Thanks, Thought Bubble. This idea of group values points us to another important concept in understanding conformity: the idea of groupthink. Groupthink is the narrowing of thought in a group, by which its members come to believe that there is only one possible correct answer. Moreover, in a groupthink mentality, to even suggest alternatives is a sign of disloyalty to the group. Another way of understanding group conformity is to think about reference groups. Reference groups are groups we use as standards to judge ourselves and others. What's "normal" for you is determined partly by your reference groups. In-groups are reference groups that you feel loyalty to, and that you identify with. But you can compare yourself to out-groups, too, which are groups that you feel antagonism toward, and which you don't identify with. And another aspect of a social group that can affect its impacts and dynamics is its size. And here, the general rule is: the larger the group, the more stable, but less intimate, it is. A group of two people is obviously the smallest and most intimate kind of group, but it's also the least stable. Because, if one person leaves, there's no group anymore. Larger groups are more stable, and if there are disagreements among members, other members are around who can mediate between them. But big groups also are prone to coalitions forming within them, which can result with one faction aligning against another. The size of a group matters in other ways, too, for instance in terms of social diversity. Larger homogenous groups tend to turn inward, concentrating relationships within the group instead of relying on intergroup contacts. By contrast, heterogenous groups, or groups that have more diversity within them, turn outward, with its members more likely to interact with outsiders. Finally, it's worth pointing out that social groups aren't just separate clumps of people. There's another way to understand groups, in terms of social networks. This perspective sees people as nodes that are all socially interconnected. You can imagine a "circle of friends" who are all connected to each other in different ways, some with strong connections in a clique or subgroup, while some are connected by much weaker ties. And you can follow the ties between all of the nodes outward, to friends-of-friends and acquaintances who exist on the periphery of the network. Networks are important, because even their weak ties can be useful. Think of the last time you were networking, following every connection you had to, say, land a job interview. Regardless of whether you think about groups as networks and ties, or as bounded sets, it's clear that they have important impacts on people, both inside and outside. If you just looked at society as a bunch of individuals, you'd miss all the ways that groups impact our lives - by acting as reference groups, by influencing our decisions through group conformity, and much more. And groups are important for how society itself is organized. So next time, we're gonna talk about one big part of that: formal organizations and bureaucracy. For now, we've learned about social groups. We talked about what social groups are and the different kinds of groups. Then we discussed group dynamics: how individuals affect groups and how groups affect individuals. We learned about leadership, group conformity, reference groups, and the impacts of group size. And finally, we talked about groups as networks and why networks matter.

Crash Course Transcript: Deviance

A person holding up a convenience store and a pacifist at a protest might seem like polar opposites. 0:05 But they actually have something in common. 0:07 So do an American vegan preparing a meal at home, and a white-collar criminal committing tax fraud, and a runaway slave. 0:14 They're all social deviants. 0:16 We've spent a lot of time so far talking about how society fits together, and how it functions. 0:21 But we can't cover that in any meaningful way without also talking about the people who don't fit. 0:25 We have to talk about who's normal and who's deviant...and how they get to be that way. 0:31 [Theme Music] 0:42 Now, you might think that calling pacifists and vegans and runaway slaves deviant is...rude, but in sociology, deviance isn't an insult. 0:50 Deviance simply means being non-normative. Different. 0:53 So while this does include some things that we might think of as bad or harmful, like, crime, it also includes things we might just think of as outside the mainstream. 1:02 So if eating a burger is a traditional "all-American" cultural activity, then being vegan in America is deviant. 1:08 But there's something important to notice here. 1:10 I didn't say being vegan in a society where most people eat meat is deviant, because deviance is not just a matter of numbers. 1:17 Deviance is anything that deviates from what people generally accept as normal. 1:21 For instance, red hair is statistically uncommon, but it's not considered deviant. 1:25 Dying your hair bright purple - that is deviant and might earn you some strange looks from some people. 1:30 And strange looks from strangers are a form of social control, 1:34 attempts by society to regulate people's thoughts and behaviors in ways that limit, or punish, deviance. 1:38 Specifically, the strange looks are what are known as negative sanctions, negative social reactions to deviance. 1:44 The opposite, naturally, are positive sanctions - affirmative reactions, usually in response to conformity. 1:49 Once you start looking, you begin to see forms of social control, both positive and negative, everywhere: 1:54 a friend making fun of your taste in food or a teacher congratulating you on a good paper. 1:58 Or someone commenting loudly on your bright purple hair. 2:01 Sanctions all. 2:03 These are all examples of informal norms, or what sociologists call folkways. 2:07 You won't be arrested for violating a folkway, but breaking them usually results in negative sanctions. 2:12 But not all norm violations are informally sanctioned. 2:14 Formal sanctioning of deviance occurs when norms are codified into law, and violation almost always results in negative sanctions from the criminal justice system - the police, the courts, and the prison system. 2:24 So given the power of formal sanctions, why does anyone do deviant things? 2:28 This is a big question. 2:29 Before we get to the sociological perspective, we need to mention some of the biological 2:32 and psychological views of deviance that have been influential in the past. 2:35 Spoiler alert: Historically, these explanations have been insufficient in helping us understand non-normative behavior. 2:41 For example, the earliest attempts at scientific explanations for deviance, and crime in particular, are biologically essentialist explanations. 2:48 They were based on the idea that something about a person's essential biology made them deviant. 2:53 In 1876, Cesare Lombroso, an Italian physician, theorized that criminals were basically subhuman, throwbacks to a more primitive version of humanity. 3:01 He went so far as to suggest that deviants could be singled out based on physical characteristics, 3:05 like a low forehead, stocky build, and prominent jaw and cheekbones, all of which he saw as reminiscent of our primate cousins. 3:12 Another scientist, U.S. psychologist William Sheldon, also found a relationship between general body type and criminality. 3:18 In the 1940s and '50s, he studied body types and behavior and concluded that men who were more muscular and athletic were more likely to be criminally deviant. 3:25 We know today that the idea that physical features somehow correspond to criminality is just no...it's wrong. 3:32 But later work by Eleanor and Sheldon Glueck appeared to confirm William Sheldon's basic findings on male muscularity and criminal aggression. 3:38 However, they refused to ascribe their results to a biological explanation. 3:42 They countered that a simple correlation between body type and criminality could not be taken as causal evidence. 3:47 Instead, they argued this was an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy: 3:51 People expect physically strong boys to be bullies, and so they encourage aggressive behavior in such boys. 3:56 Large boys who have their bullying behavior positively sanctioned are encouraged to continue being aggressive, 4:01 and some eventually grow up and engage in aggressive criminal behaviors. 4:04 Psychological approaches, by contrast, place almost all the explanatory power in a person's environment. 4:09 While some elements of personality may be inherited, psychologists generally see personality as a matter of socialization. 4:15 So they see deviance as a matter of improper or failed socialization. 4:18 A classic example of this strain of psychological explanation is found in the 1967 work of Walter Reckless and Simon Dinitz. 4:25 They studied boys who lived in an urban neighborhood known for its high rate of delinquency. 4:29 Using the assessment of the boys' teachers, they grouped the youths into "good boys" and 4:33 "bad boys," and then interviewed them to construct psychological profiles. 4:36 They found that the so-called "good boys" had a strong conscience, were good at coping with frustration, and identified with conventional cultural norms. 4:43 The "bad boys," on the other hand, were the opposite on all counts. 4:46 Following the boys over time, Reckless and Dinitz found that the "good boys" had fewer run-ins with the police. 4:50 And they attributed this to the boys' ability to control deviant impulses. 4:54 This idea that deviance is essentially a matter of impulse control is called containment theory, or having a personality that contains deviant actions. 5:01 And containment theory has received support in recent research, including a 2011 study on 500 male fraternal twins that assessed their self-control, resilience, and ability to delay gratification. 5:10 Researchers found that the brother who scored lower on these measures in childhood was more likely to be criminally deviant in adulthood. 5:16 Now, while we've seen that there's clearly value in both biological and psychological approaches, they're each also fundamentally limited. 5:22 For example, both kinds of explanations link criminal deviance to individual factors - either of body or of mind - 5:27 while leaving out other important factors, like peer influence or what opportunities for deviance different people might be exposed to. 5:33 Plus, biological and psychological explanations only understand deviance as a matter of abnormality. 5:38 Both approaches begin by looking for physical or mental irregularities, 5:41 whereas more recent research suggests that most people who do deviant things are both biologically and psychologically normal - 5:48 or, to use a better word, let's say: typical. 5:50 Finally, neither biology nor psychology can answer the question of why the things that are deviant are considered deviant in the first place. 5:57 Even if you could 100% prove that a certain abnormality caused people to be violent, not all violence is considered a form of deviance. 6:04 Think boxing. 6:05 And here's where we can turn to a sociological approach, which sees deviance and criminality as the result of how society is structured. 6:11 And here, the approach is based on three major ideas. 6:14 First is the idea that deviance varies according to cultural norms. 6:17 In other words, nothing is inherently deviant: Cultural norms vary from culture to culture, 6:22 and over time and place, so what's deviant now might have once been quite normal. 6:26 Slavery is an obvious example. 6:28 Not only was race-based slavery normal in 19th century America, rejecting it was considered deviant. 6:33 So deviant, in fact, that physician Samuel Cartwright wrote about a disorder he called drapetomania 6:37 to explain the supposed mental disorder that caused slaves to flee captivity. 6:41 The second major principle sociologists draw on is the idea that people are deviant because they're labeled as deviant. 6:46 What I mean here is that it's society's response that defines us, or our actions, as deviant. 6:51 The same action can be deviant or not, depending on the context: 6:55 Sleeping in a tent in a public place can be illegal, or it can be a fun weekend activity, depending on where you do it. 7:00 And, as the Gluecks argued, labeling people can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: 7:04 When society treats you as a deviant, it's very easy to become one. 7:07 Deviance doesn't even necessarily require action. 7:10 Simply being a member of a group can classify you as a deviant in the eyes of society. 7:14 The rich may view the poor with disdain for imagined moral failures, or we can return again to racism and slavery, which imagined African Americans as deviant by nature. 7:21 And the last major sociological principle for understanding deviance is the idea that defining social norms involves social power. 7:28 The law is many things, but Karl Marx argued that one of its roles is as a means for the powerful elite to protect their own interests. 7:34 This is obvious in the case of something like fugitive slave laws, which applied a formal negative sanction to deviating from the norms of slavery. 7:40 But we can also see it in things like the difference between a campaign rally and a spontaneous protest. 7:45 Both are public political speech, and both may block traffic, but they draw resoundingly different reactions from police. 7:50 So these are three foundational ideas about the sociological perspective on deviance. 7:54 But I want to stress that they only begin to define a perspective. 7:57 Sociology clearly understands deviance in a different way than biology and psychology do, 8:02 but if you really want to dive into more detailed sociological explanations, 8:05 you'll need to wait until next week, when we look at the major theoretical explanations for crime and deviance. 8:10 Today we learned about social deviance. 8:11 We discussed biological and psychological approaches to explaining deviance, 8:15 what they can bring to the table, and their inherent limitations. 8:18 Then we finished by turning to the sociological perspective and talking about the social foundations of deviance. 8:23 Crash Course Sociology is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney Studio in Missoula, MT, and it's made with the help of all of these nice people. 8:30 Our animation team is Thought Cafe and Crash Course is made with Adobe Creative Cloud. 8:34 If you'd like to keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can support the series at Patreon, 8:38 a crowdfunding platform that allows you to support the content you love. 8:42 Thank you to all of our patrons for making Crash Course possible with their continued support.

Crash Course Transcript: Economic Systems & the Labor Market

A social institution that has one of the biggest impacts on society is the economy. 0:04 And you might think of the economy in terms of numbers - unemployment numbers, GDPs, or whatever the stock market is doing today. 0:10 But while we often talk about it in numerical terms, the economy is really made of people! 0:14 It's the social institution that organizes all production, consumption, and trade of goods in a society. 0:19 And there are lots of different ways in which stuff can be made, exchanged, and used. 0:23 Think capitalism, or socialism. 0:25 These economic systems - and the economic revolutions that created them - shape the way that people live their lives. 0:31 [Theme Music] 0:42 Economies can vary a lot from one society to the next, but in any given economy, you can typically see production split into three sectors. 0:50 The primary sector extracts raw materials from natural environments - so, workers like farmers or miners would fit well here. 0:56 The secondary sector takes raw materials and transforms them into manufactured goods. 1:01 So, someone in the primary sector may extract oil from the earth, but someone in the secondary sector refines the petroleum into gasoline. 1:08 And then the tertiary sector is the part of the economy that involves services rather than goods. 1:13 You know, doing things, rather than making things. 1:15 But, this system is actually pretty complicated. 1:18 Or at least, more sophisticated than the way things used to be for much of human history. 1:22 So, how did we get from a world where people worked to produce just what they needed for their families, to one with all these sectors that have to work together? 1:30 To understand that, we need to back up a little - about 12,000 years. 1:34 The first big economic change was the agrarian revolution. 1:37 When people first learned how to domesticate plants and animals, 1:40 it ushered in a new agricultural economy that was much more productive than hunter-gatherer societies were. 1:45 Farming helped societies build surpluses, which meant not everyone had to spend their time producing food. 1:51 This, in turn, led to major developments like permanent settlements, trade networks, and population growth. 1:56 Now, let's go to the Thought Bubble to discuss the second major economic revolution: the industrial revolution of the 1800s. 2:02 With the rise of industry came new economic tools, like steam engines, manufacturing, and mass production. 2:08 Factories popped up, changing how work functioned. 2:10 Now, instead of working at home, where people worked for their family by making things from start to finish, 2:15 they began working as wage laborers and becoming more specialized in their skills. 2:20 Overall productivity went up, standards of living rose, and people had access to a wider variety of goods thanks to mass production - all good things. 2:28 But every economic revolution comes with economic casualties. 2:32 The workers in the factories - who were mainly poor women and children - worked in dangerous conditions for low wages. 2:37 There's a reason that the industrialists of the 19th century were known as robber barons: 2:41 with more productivity came greater wealth, but also greater economic inequality. 2:46 So, in the late 19th century, labor unions began to form. 2:50 These organizations of workers sought to improve wages and working conditions through collective action, strikes, and negotiations. 2:56 Inspired by Marxist principles, labor unions are partly to thank for us now having things like minimum wage laws, 3:01 reasonable working hours, and regulations to protect the safety of workers. 3:05 Thanks Thought Bubble. 3:06 So, the industrial revolution was an incredibly big deal, when it came to the changes that it brought to both economies and societies. 3:13 And there's a third revolution we should talk about too - one that's happening right now. 3:17 But before we get to that, we should pause and explore two competing economic models that sprung up around the time of the industrial revolution, 3:23 as economic capital became more and more important to the production of goods. 3:26 Pretty sure you've heard of them! 3:27 And possibly have strong opinions about them! 3:30 They're capitalism and socialism. 3:31 Capitalism is a system in which all natural resources and means of production are privately owned. 3:36 And it emphasizes profit-seeking and competition as the main drivers of efficiency. 3:40 If you own a business, you need to out-perform your competitors if you're going to succeed. 3:44 So you're incentivized to be more efficient - by improving the quality of your product, and reducing your prices. 3:49 This is what economist Adam Smith in the 1770s called the "Invisible Hand" of the market. 3:54 The idea is that if you just leave a capitalist economy alone, consumers will regulate things themselves, by selecting goods and services that provide the best value. 4:01 But, in practice, an economy doesn't work very well if it's left completely on auto-pilot. 4:06 There are lots of sectors where a hands-off approach can lead to what economists call "market failures," 4:10 where an unregulated market ends up allocating goods and services inefficiently. 4:14 A monopoly, for example, is a kind of market failure. 4:17 When a company has no competition for customers, it can charge higher prices without worrying about losing customers. 4:22 That, as economic allocations go, is really inefficient, at least on the consumer end. 4:27 So, in situations like these, a government might step in and force the company to break up into smaller companies to increase competition. 4:33 Market failures like this are why most countries, the United States included, are not purely capitalist societies. 4:39 For example, the US federal and state governments own and operate a number of businesses, like schools, the Postal Service, and the military. 4:45 Governments also set minimum wages, create workplace safety laws, and provide social support programs like unemployment benefits and food stamps. 4:52 Government plays an even larger role, however, in socialism. 4:55 In a socialist system, the means of production are under collective ownership. 4:59 Socialism rejects capitalism's private-property and hands-off approaches. 5:03 Instead, here, property is owned by the government and allocated to all citizens, not just those with the money to afford it. 5:09 Socialism emphasizes collective goals, expecting everyone to work for the common good, and placing a higher value on meeting everyone's basic needs than on individual profit. 5:18 When Karl Marx first wrote about socialism, he viewed it as a stepping stone toward communism, 5:23 a political and economic system in which all members of a society are socially equal. 5:27 But of course, in practice, this hasn't played out in the countries that have modelled their economies on socialism, like Cuba, North Korea, China, and the former USSR. 5:35 Why? 5:36 Well, Marx hoped that, as economic differences vanished in communist society, the government would simply wither away and disappear. 5:43 But, that never happened. 5:45 If anything, the opposite did. 5:47 Rather than freeing the proletariat from inequality, the massive power of the government in these 5:52 states gave enormous wealth, power, and privilege to political elites, retrenching inequalities along political - rather than strictly economic - lines. 6:00 At the same time, capitalist countries economically out-performed their socialist counterparts, 6:05 contributing to the unrest that eventually led to the downfall of the USSR. 6:09 Before the fall of the Soviet Union, the average output in capitalist countries was about $13,500 per person, which was almost three times that in the Soviet countries. 6:18 But there are downsides to capitalism, too - namely greater income inequality. 6:22 A study of European capitalist countries and socialist countries in the 1970s 6:26 found that the income ratio between the top 5% and the bottom 5% in capitalist countries was about 10:1, whereas in socialist countries it was 5:1. 6:36 We could fill whole episodes about the merits of each economic model - and in fact, we did in Crash Course World History. 6:41 There are many more questions we could answer about how societies build their economic systems. 6:46 But in any case, those two models aren't the end of the story. 6:49 Because: we're living in the middle of the economic revolution that followed the industrial revolution. 6:55 Ours is the time of the information revolution. 6:58 Technology has reduced the role of human labor, and shifted it from a manufacturing-based economy 7:02 to one based on service work and the production of ideas rather than goods. 7:06 And this has had a lot of residual effects on our economy. 7:09 Computers and other technologies are beginning to replace many jobs, by making it easier to either automate them or send them offshore. 7:16 And we've also seen a decline in union membership. 7:18 Nowadays, most unions are for public sector jobs, like teachers. 7:21 So what do jobs in a post-industrial society look like? 7:24 Well, agricultural jobs, which once were a massive part of the American labor force, have fallen drastically over the last century. 7:31 While 40% of the labor force was involved in the agricultural sector in 1900, only about 2% of workers today work in farming. 7:39 Similarly, manufacturing jobs, which were the lifeblood of the US economy for much of the 20th century, have also declined in the last 30 years. 7:47 So, the US economy began with many workers serving in either the primary and secondary economic sectors, 7:52 but now, much of the US economy is centered on the tertiary sector, or the service industry. 7:57 The service industry makes up 85% of jobs in the US, 8:01 including everything from administrative assistants to nurses to teachers to lawyers to everyone who made this Crash Course video for you. 8:08 Now, that's a really big and diverse group. 8:10 That's because the tertiary sector - like all the economic sectors we've been discussing 8:14 - is defined mainly by what it produces, rather than what kinds of jobs it includes. 8:19 So, sociologists have a way of distinguishing between types of jobs, based more on the social status and compensation that come with them: 8:26 There's the primary labor market and the secondary labor market. 8:28 The primary labor market includes jobs that provide lots of benefits to workers, like high incomes, job security, health insurance and retirement packages. 8:36 These are white collar professions, like doctors or accountants or engineers. 8:40 Secondary labor market jobs provide fewer benefits and include lower-skilled jobs and lower-level service sector jobs. 8:45 They tend to pay less, have more unpredictable schedules, and typically don't offer benefits like health insurance. 8:50 They also tend to have less job security. 8:53 So what's next for capitalism, or socialism? 8:55 Well, no one knows what the next economic revolution is going to look like. 8:59 But I can tell you that, nowadays, a key part of both our economic and political landscape is corporations. 9:04 Corporations are defined as organizations that exist as legal entities and have liabilities that are separate from its members. 9:10 So, they're their own things. 9:11 And more and more these days, corporations are operating across national boundaries, 9:15 which means that the future of the US economy - and most countries' economies - will play out on a global scale. 9:22 Today we discussed how economies can be broken down into the primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors. 9:27 We discussed the three stages of economic revolution that brought us to the modern post-industrial era. 9:31 And in the middle there, we talked about two types of economic models: capitalism and socialism.

Crash Course Transcript: Formal Organizations

Every year we consume immense quantities of goods that make their way from one side of the planet to the other. But have you ever wondered how this enormous flow of goods is organized, so that stuff made in China is available in stores in rural Montana? It happens because formal organizations make it happen. Our world is structured by formal organizations, and life as we now know it can't exist without them. But it's not all rainbows and butterflies and incredibly extensive trade networks, because within these organizations lurk some pretty substantial dangers. [Theme Music] OK so when I talk about formal organizations, what does that mean? Like, I gotta wear a cocktail dress or a black tie? And is there, I dunno, a casual organization that I can be part of instead? Where people just wear flip flops and maybe go floating? Well, sociologists think of formal organizations as groups that are organized to achieve goals efficiently. Now, that's obviously incredibly broad. That's why formal organizations are so diverse - they include everything from the IRS to Google to your local PTA. But you can understand these kinds of groups a bit better, by thinking about the three main types of formal organizations: Utilitarian organizations, for example, serve some function for their members. Businesses pay their employees, and schools teach their students - and also pay their teachers. Normative organizations, sometimes called voluntary associations, are organizations that people join as volunteers. They're called "normative" because people join them to pursue some goal that they think is morally worthwhile. This includes charities like the Red Cross, but also political parties and religious organizations. Finally, coercive organizations are ones where you don't have a say in whether you're a member or not. People are coerced into joining these organizations, often as punishment - as in prisons - or treatment - say, through involuntary commitment into a psychiatric hospital. Now, these are all modern-day examples, but formal organizations have been around basically forever: They built the pyramids, they collected taxes across the Roman Empire, and they helped organize monasteries and convents. But, there is a major difference between those formal organizations and modern ones. And that difference is between traditional and rational worldviews. This goes back to our friend Max Weber, who you (hopefully) remember from episode 9. A traditional world view takes the basic set-up of the world as given: The way previous generations did things - their values and techniques - is thought to be basically the right way. A rational world view, on the other hand, sees everything as up for grabs, and tries to find the most efficient way to accomplish a given task through critical thinking and calculation. It's the transition from traditional to rational worldviews, or the rationalization of society, that ushered in modernity for Weber, and we can see this rationality at work in an especially pervasive kind of formal organization: the bureaucracy. A bureaucracy is an organization that's been rationally constructed to do things efficiently. And according to Weber, every bureaucracy has six main things in common, which we introduced in episode 9, but to recap: Its members each have specialized roles that fit together in a hierarchy - that is, a clear chain of command linked by formal, written communications. Members of a bureaucracy also complete their work with technical competence, treating colleagues and customers without regard for their individual, personal traits: That is, everyone's treated impersonally. And all of this functions according to detailed rules and regulations, literally "by the book." These six traits make bureaucracies extremely efficient at what they do. But the very things that make bureaucracies effective also cause their share of problems. One problem is just that, sometimes, bureaucracies are not actually that efficient. Since bureaucracies are strictly hierarchical and rule-based, those rules can sometimes get in the way. This is what people mean when they talk about bureaucratic "red tape." And that focus on rules leads to another kind of inefficiency: bureaucratic ritualism. In this case, the rules become a kind of end in themselves, ultimately interfering with the organization's goals. Faith in the rules can become just as damaging as faith in tradition ever was. And a group's goals can even shift so much that it comes down with what's known as bureaucratic inertia. This is where an organization's ultimate goal becomes just to perpetuate itself, to keep existing. This can be an intentional choice, made by those who have the most to lose if the organization were to disappear. But it can also happen just because its members believe that the organization does good work. And it's not just that bureaucracies aren't always efficient, or that their goals change: Their hierarchies create another problem, the problem of oligarchy, or the rule of the many by the few. Now, of course a hierarchical organization is going to be an oligarchy. After all, in a hierarchy, the people at the top make decisions for everyone else to carry out. This is partly what Weber thought helped make bureaucracies so efficient. But in a lot of bureaucracies, like democratic governments, the people at the top of the hierarchy are elected, or are appointed by people who are elected. So even if they're giving orders, it should still be considered a democratic organization, right? Well, here's where another sociologist, Robert Michels, saw a problem. He called it the iron law of oligarchy. He argued that regardless of how democratic a bureaucracy is in theory, in practice, it always tends toward pure oligarchy. The people at the top may be elected, but because of their position of power, they're actually insulated from the people who elected them. And even if the people in power are voted out, those who replace them just become like the ones they replaced, because of the way the system is structured. Finally, what Weber saw as the worst danger of bureaucracy was something called bureaucratic alienation. Bureaucracies are supposed to run with machine-like efficiency, consistency, and calculability. But people aren't machines. So, bureaucracies can be dehumanizing to those who work in them and those they serve. When a clerk at the DMV can't help you because you didn't follow some obscure rule, they're doing their job right. And if they exercise their personal, reasoned judgement and ignore the rule, they're doing their job wrong. To be a good bureaucrat is not to think for yourself, but to be a good cog in the machine. Despite all these problems, we still see rationalization all over the place, including in the workplace, through what's known as scientific management. Scientific management is a system devised by American engineer Frederik Taylor, who, in the early 1900s, sought to make industry work more efficiently. He came up with a process in which management closely observes and systematizes how workers do their jobs, so that those jobs could be refined over time, making them more efficient. Taylor's ideas were incredibly influential, and in time, companies across the US adopted them. So, from governments to corporations, the bureaucratic model of formal organizations has taken hold to be a regular part of modern life. But in addition to the problems that bureaucracy can cause, American formal organizations in particular have faced many challenges over the last century, due to changes in what's called the organizational environment. Simply put, that's just the environment in which organizations exist and operate. The organizational environment includes things like technology, political and economic trends, and population patterns. And in the US, one the main challenges that formal organizations have faced is the growing recognition that many of them were either racist or sexist or both. Following the civil rights and feminist movements in the 1960s and 70s, hiring practices that excluded people who weren't white men came under increasing fire. While excluding job candidates on the basis of race or gender might seem to go against Weber's idea of technical competence, it's important to understand that that's not how those doing the hiring saw it. Often, they believed that those who were excluded were simply incapable of doing the work. Until they were forced to do otherwise by changes in the organizational environment, many were quite happy to go on excluding large swaths of their talent pools. More recently, another challenge has come in the form of big economic shifts, and the changing nature of work itself. As the US transitions from an industrial to postindustrial economy, there are fewer manufacturing jobs, and more jobs based around creating and processing information. Frederik Taylor's vision of work - as a series of discrete, rote tasks - might have been a good way to improve assembly lines. But applying it to things like programming, design, or marketing just hasn't worked. As a result, we've seen a lot of important changes in the organizations that house these of newer kinds jobs: Workers have more creative freedom, and more flexibility around when and where they work, and organizational hierarchies have flattened. Compared to old style bureaucracies, average employees in the information industry have a much more direct connection to their leadership. But not everything has changed in the American workplace. While big changes have taken place in high-skill jobs that require creative work, lower-skilled jobs, which are now mostly in the service sector, are just as amenable to Taylor's scientific management as ever. And rationalization is alive and well in many other aspects of society, too. If anything, it continues to spread. Sociologist George Ritzer has called this the McDonaldization of Society: the process by which the principles of the fast food restaurant have come to dominate the whole of society. Few things, after all, are more hyper-rational than fast food. The whole industry is based on the principles of efficiency, predictability, uniformity, and control. The point of fast food is that you get your food quickly, and just as you expect it. And that's because the way the food is made is precisely controlled. And Ritzer argues that these principles are having an growing impact in our society at large. In education, for instance, we see more emphasis on standardized tests and tightly controlled curricula that run students through the system in 4 years flat. All of this brings us to what Ritzer calls the irrationality of rationality. As we saw with bureaucratic ritualism and alienation, rational systems are often unreasonable, impersonal. The reliance on rules and procedures can leave no room for independent judgment, basically denying people their status as independent thinking beings. So, rational formal organizations are a necessary part of our world. They're how goods from all over the world end up on shelves here in Montana. But they're also a part of modern life that deserves our close attention. Today we learned about formal organizations. We talked about the historical process of rationalization and its impact on organizations in the form of bureaucracy. We discussed how organizations change in response to their organizational environment. Finally, we talked about the negative consequences of rationalization in organizations.

Crash Course Transcript: Social Development

Have you ever met a friend's parents and realized that your friend was basically a mini-me of their mom? Not just because they both have brown hair or a pointy nose. It's how they talk, the way they both like making silly puns, their attitudes and beliefs. Now the question is: How much of that similarity is genetic, and how much is just a function of that fact that your friend grew up with their mom, and pretty much learned how to be a human being by watching her? This is the age old question: nature or nurture? Nature is the part of human behavior that's biologically determined and instinctive. When a baby latches onto your finger and won't let go, and it's basically the cutest thing in the whole world, it's not because they learned to do that - it's natural. A lot of human behavior, however, isn't instinctive - it comes instead from how you're nurtured. The nurture part of behavior is based on the people and environment you're raised in. And it's this second part - the social environment that determines human behavior - that sociologists tend to investigate and have many different theories about. [Theme Music] To a big extent, we develop our personalities and learn about our society and culture through a social process - one known as socialization. Sounds legit, right? But what happens if you don't have people around you? Social isolation affects our emotional and cognitive development, a lot. To get a glimpse into how and why this is, let's go to the Thought Bubble to look at sociologist Kingsley Davis's case studies on Anna. In the winter of 1938, a social worker investigated a report of child neglect on a small Pennsylvania farm and found, hidden in a storage shed, a five-year-old girl. That five-year girl was Anna. She was unwanted by the family she was born into and was passed from house to house among neighbors and strangers for the first six months of her life. Eventually, she ended up being kept in a shed with no human contact other than to receive food. Kingsley Davis observed Anna for years after her rescue and wrote about the effects of this upbringing on her development. When Anna was first rescued, she was unable to speak or smile, and was completely unresponsive to human interaction. Even after years of education and medical attention, her mental development at age eight was less than that of a typical two-year old. This is a story with both a sad beginning and a sad ending. Anna died of a blood disorder at the age of 10. And Davis' study of how isolation affects young children was only one of many that have shown how a lack of socialization affects children's ability to develop language skills, social skills, and emotional stability. Thanks Thought Bubble. There are lots of different theories about how we develop personalities, cognitive skills, and moral behavior, many of which come from our siblings in social science: psychologists. Take Sigmund Freud. You've heard of him: Austrian guy? Liked cigars? Invented the field of psychoanalysis? One of his main theories was about how personalities develop. He thought we were born with something called an id. You can think of the id as your most basic, unconscious drive - a desire for food, comfort, attention. All a baby knows is it wants THAT and it will scream until it gets it. But then we develop the ego and superego to balance the id. Ego is the voice of reason, your conscious efforts to rein in the pleasure-seeking id. And your superego is made up of the cultural values and norms that you internalize and use to guide your decisions. So if the id is the devil on your shoulder, the superego is the angel on the other shoulder, and the ego is the mediator who intervenes when the angel and devil start fighting. Now, a lot of Freud's work hasn't stood the test of time, but his theories about how society affects our development has influenced pretty much everyone who has researched the human personality. This includes Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who spent much of his career in the early 1900s studying cognitive development. While researching ways to measure children's intelligence, Piaget noticed that kids of similar ages tended to make similar mistakes. And this, to Piaget, suggested that there were four different stages of cognitive development. First Stage: TOUCH EVERYTHING! Babies learn about the world by grabbing things and sticking them in their mouths. This curious, slobbery interaction with the world is what Piaget called the sensorimotor stage - the level of development where all knowledge is based on what you can perceive with your senses. Around age 2, a child enters the next stage, known as the preoperational stage. At this point, kids have learned to use language and begin to ask questions to learn about the world, rather than just grabbing stuff. Now they can think about the world and use their imaginations - which leads to playing pretend and an understanding of symbols. But thinking about the world is pretty much limited to how THEY think about the world. Kids in the preoperational stage are pretty ego-centric; if they love playing with trains and you ask them what their dad's favorite thing to do is, they'll probably say that he loves playing with trains too. It's not until they reach the concrete operational stage, around 6 or 7, that they develop the ability to take in other people's perspectives, and begin to make cause-and-effect connections between events in their surroundings. And in the formal operational stage, at about age 12, Piaget said, kids begin to think in the abstract and use logic and critical thinking. Now, American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg later expanded on Piaget's model of cognitive development to incorporate stages of moral development. Essentially, kids' sense of what is "right" begins in what Kohlberg called the pre-conventional stage, where right is just what feels good to them personally. Next, they move to the conventional stage, where what's right is what society and the people around them tells them is right. And then finally, children end up in the post-conventional stage, where they begin to consider more abstract ethical concepts than just right or wrong. So at a young age, a child doesn't realize that grabbing the candy bar they want at the store is wrong - they just want it. But then, a combination of societal norms and being scolded by their parents convinces them that stealing is wrong, no matter how much they want the candy bar. And over time, they learn that morals have gray areas; stealing is wrong if it's just for fun, but might be considered less wrong if you're stealing to feed your family. Eventually, children reach a point where they're able to think about things like freedom and justice, and realize that societal norms about what's right may not always line up with these principles. Sure, laws against stealing candy may be just, but what about laws that say only certain people can get married? Just because something is a law, is it right? How you feel about that question may depend on your socialization. And on your gender. Carol Gilligan, an American psychologist who started out as a research assistant and collaborator of Kohlberg's, explored how girls and boys experience these stages differently. She realized that Kohlberg's original studies only had male subjects - which may have biased his findings. When she expanded the research to look at both male and female children, she found that boys tended to emphasize formal rules to define right and wrong - what she called a justice perspective. Whereas girls tended to emphasize the role of interpersonal reasoning in moral decisions - what she called a care and responsibility perspective. Gilligan argued that these differences stem from cultural conditioning that girls receive to fulfill ideals of femininity. She thought that we socialize girls to be more nurturing and empathetic, and that influences their moral interpretation of behavior. The next theory of social development I want to focus on is from American sociologist George Herbert Mead, who was one of the founders of the sociological paradigm we talked about a few episodes ago, known as symbolic interactionism. His work focused on how we develop a "self." What makes up the you that is inherently you? Are you born with some inherent spark of you-ness? According to Mead no! Instead, he believed that we figure out who we are through other people. All social interactions require you to see yourself as someone else might see you - something Mead described as "taking on the role of others." In the first stage of development, according to Mead's model, we learn through imitation - we watch how others behave and try to behave like them. You see your mom smile at your neighbor, so you smile too. And Mead observed that as kids got older, they moved on to a new stage - play. Rather than just imitating your mom, you might play at being a mom, taking care of a doll. Assuming the role of "mommy" or "daddy" is a kid imagining the world from their parent's perspective. The next stage of development is the game stage, where children learn to take on multiple roles in a single situation. What does that have to do with games? Well, games use rules and norms, and require kids to take on a role themselves, and develop that role in reaction to the roles that others take on. Team sports are a great example of this. When you're playing soccer, you need to not only know what you're going to do, but also what your teammates and your opponents will do. If you were ever the kid who ended up running the wrong way on the soccer field because you didn't realize the ball had switched possession, you know how important it is to anticipate what other people do. The last stage, in Mead's model, occurs when we learn how to take on multiple roles in multiple situations. In this phase, we weigh our self and our actions not against one specific role, but against a 'generalized other' - basically, a manifestation of all of our culture's norms and expectations. Now, you might have noticed that all these theories focus on childhood. So, does that mean that your personality is set once you hit 18? No, definitely no. As anyone over 18 will tell you, you keep growing well past high school. And that's why yet another theorist, German-born psychologist Erik Erikson, came up with his own eight-stage theory of development, that goes all the way from infancy to old age. He based these stages on the key challenge of each period of life. When you're a toddler, for example, your biggest challenge is getting what you want - or as Erikson puts it, gaining autonomy, which helps you build skills and confidence in your abilities. But once you're a young adult, you've got plenty of autonomy. Now a bigger challenge is developing intimate relationships. Falling in love, finding friends - there's a reason that's the focus of every 20-something sitcom. And his list goes on. Every life stage from when you're born to when you die features different expectations that inform what we see as markers of social development. Moving out, getting married, having kids - they're all societal markers of social development as an adult. But whether you feel like one or not, adulthood will come for us all - and it's your socialization that will determine how exactly you perform the role of "adult." Next week, we'll talk about the different agents of socialization that shape who we really end up being. Today we learned about social development, starting with the role of nature and nurture in influencing a person's development. We talked about social isolation and the importance of care and human interaction in early years for proper emotional and mental development. Then, we talked about five theories of development: Freud's Id, Ego, and Superego; Piaget's Four Stages of Cognitive Development, Kohlberg and Gilligan's theories of moral development; Mead's theory of self; And Erik Erikson's life stage theory.

Crash Course Transcript: Race & Ethnicity

How do you define race? 0:01 If you had to describe why you think you're a member of one race and someone else was a member of a different one, you'd probably focus on appearances - 0:09 your skin, your hair, maybe even the structures of your bodies and faces. 0:13 But most of the time, those physical criteria mean different things, depending on the culture you're a part of. 0:18 An obvious example is skin color. 0:20 We use the words White and Black to describe two races, but the distinction in skin color between those races isn't as clear cut. 0:26 A White person who's spent the summer at the beach might come home with brown skin, but getting a tan doesn't change their race. 0:33 And light-skinned Black people may have skin that's not all that darker than that tan. 0:37 Clearly, race is about more than just the literal color of someone's skin. 0:41 So let's talk about race, and why it's a topic that goes more than skin deep. 0:45 [Theme Music] 0:56 Much like gender, race is a socially constructed category. 1:00 In this case, it's used to categorize people who share biological traits that a society thinks are important. 1:05 So, you might be wondering: how can race be both a social construct and something based on biology? 1:10 Well, the key part of that definition of race is the last part: what a society thinks is important. 1:15 Sure, skin color varies widely across regions of the world. 1:19 But so does eye color, and we don't consider people with blue eyes a different race than people with brown eyes. 1:24 And while physical traits are often used to describe or identify a race, they're not always applied consistently. 1:30 Take for example, the so-called 'one-drop' rule in the United States, 1:33 where even the smallest amount of African American ancestry is enough to classify someone as Black rather than White. 1:39 The opposite, however, isn't true - someone with one Black parent and one White parent is almost never considered white. 1:45 Plus people from different places or different time periods have defined racial groups differently. 1:49 Nowadays, light skinned people of European descent are typically considered `White' in the United States. 1:54 It doesn't matter whether your heritage is British or Irish or Italian or Polish or German - you're just 'White.' 2:00 But that wasn't the case a century ago. 2:02 In the early 1900s, anyone who wasn't a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant was considered 'ethnic' - 2:07 so for example, if you were Italian or Irish, you weren't considered white. 2:11 Likewise, today, being Jewish is often seen as an ethnicity in the United States. 2:15 But Europeans are more likely to think of being Jewish as a race. 2:18 So, that raises the question: What's the difference between ethnicity and race? 2:22 Well, ethnicities are socially constructed categories based on cultural traits that a society finds important, rather than strictly biological traits. 2:29 Essentially, an ethnic group is a group that has a shared cultural heritage. 2:33 Language, traditions, religion - these are all types of culture that can determine your ethnic background. 2:39 Two people of different races might share an ethnicity - and conversely, two people of the same race might be of totally different ethnicities. 2:46 Japanese and Vietnamese people are both considered Asian, but they come from different cultural backgrounds. 2:50 In fact, a term that many people think refers to race - `Hispanic' - actually refers to ethnicity. 2:55 To explore this a little more, let's go to the Thought Bubble to talk about the differences between the terms Hispanic, Latino, and Latin American. 3:01 The term "Hispanic" first appeared as a racial category in the US Census in 1970, 3:06 as a way of describing those whose heritage originated in a Spanish-speaking country. 3:10 Before then, the Census referred to those people as Spanish-Americans - 3:13 even though tracing back their origins to Spain would mean going way, way back for many of them. 3:19 And for others, it'd be totally inaccurate. 3:20 But in day-to-day conversation, most people from Spanish-speaking backgrounds were usually referred to by the country of their heritage, 3:26 like Mexican American or Cuban American, or sometimes more broadly as 'Latin American.' 3:31 This last term is also where we get the word `Latino' - and the de-gendered latinx. 3:35 It's a shorter version of the Spanish word 'latinoamericano,' 3:38 and it refers to someone whose heritage originates from nations in the Americas that are south of the United States, 3:43 including Mexico, all of South America, and the Caribbean. 3:46 Now, not all Hispanics are Latino. 3:48 Being from Spain for example, makes you Hispanic but not Latino - and not all Latinos are Hispanic. 3:54 Brazilians speak Portuguese, meaning that they are not considered Hispanic. 3:57 But regardless of which term you're using, Hispanic or Latino, neither of these distinctions are based on physical appearance. 4:03 Unlike race, which is based on observable, physical traits, ethnicities aren't. 4:07 And in fact, two people of the same ethnicity can be entirely different races. 4:11 For example, both Cameron Diaz and Rosario Dawson are Cuban Americans, which means they are both Hispanic, but Cameron Diaz is white and Rosario Dawson is Black. 4:20 Thanks Thought Bubble! 4:21 Though race is more commonly used by society as a way to organize people and distribute power, 4:26 both race and ethnicity play a role in how people are perceived and, therefore, the opportunities that are available to them. 4:31 A person's race influences a whole host of social outcomes, from their education to their income to their experiences with the criminal justice system. 4:39 But which races or ethnicities are advantaged or disadvantaged depends on when and where we're talking about. 4:44 For example, in the United Kingdom, there's been a lot of unrest about immigration from Eastern Europe, especially Poland. 4:49 Incidents of hostility and violence against Polish immigrants have increased in the wake of the UK's exit from the European Union. 4:55 But while Eastern Europeans are considered an ethnic minority in the UK, 4:58 people in the US are much more likely to think of Eastern European immigrants as just White - they're not thought of as a minority. 5:04 And that's because what constitutes a minority is more complex than you might think. 5:08 Sociologists define a minority as any category of people, who are distinguished by physical or cultural difference, that a society sets apart and subordinates. 5:16 Now, notice that there are two important parts of that definition: 5:19 First, minorities share a distinctive identity based on physical or cultural traits. 5:23 Second, minorities occupy a lower status in society and have less access to the levers of societal power. 5:30 Notice how that definition doesn't say anything about the size of the group. 5:33 In sociology, a minority group's relative size isn't important. 5:37 For example, women are considered a minority, even though they make up about 51% of the United States. 5:41 And a group that's a minority in terms of size can still be a majority in terms of power. 5:46 South African apartheid is an example of this. 5:48 From 1948 to 1994, a white minority maintained a system of racial segregation and discrimination against Black South Africans. 5:55 Right now, non-Hispanic Whites are the majority group in the United States in terms of sheer size, making up 61% of the US population. 6:02 But that's rapidly changing. 6:04 As of 2015, babies of color being born now outnumber non-Hispanic white babies. 6:09 And five states are already minority-majority states: California, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, and Hawaii. 6:15 How can a state or country be minority-majority? Isn't that, like, an oxymoron? 6:19 Well, for one thing, even if non-Hispanic white Americans no longer make up more than half the country, 6:24 they'll likely remain a larger group than any other single race. 6:27 But also, to be a minority in the sociological sense of the word, a group must be in a position of disadvantage. 6:33 And as we've discussed many times before, non-Hispanic White Americans tend to have higher incomes, 6:38 live in better neighborhoods, and are more likely to have more prestigious jobs and better educations than racial and ethnic minorities. 6:44 But before we can make comparisons between different racial groups in the US, we should talk about the races that make up the United States. 6:51 The US Census uses six different categories of race when collecting data about the demographics of the country. 6:56 White refers to anyone who reports their origins as being from Europe, the Middle East, or Northern Africa. 7:00 So, Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese, Iranian, Moroccan - they're all ethnicities that go under the heading of white. 7:07 Yes, you heard me right. 7:09 People of Middle Eastern descent are categorized as White by the Census, even if they often aren't treated as if they're white. 7:14 Why? Well, what's now become known as 'White' originates from a term to refer to people of Indo-European descent: the 'Caucasian' race. 7:22 The term Caucasian started as a reference to the Caucus Mountains, which run through the modern day countries of Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. 7:29 Back when race was understood as a purely biological phenomenon, everyone from Europe all the way down to India was lumped into one 'Caucasian' group. 7:36 So yesterday's 'Caucasian' contained most of the people who count as today's 'white', 7:40 but also captured groups that nowadays get labelled as Asian, such as Indians or Pakistanis. 7:45 Now, many Hispanic Americans are also counted as White in the Census. 7:48 'Hispanic' is considered an ethnicity, not a race, for Census purposes, so in the 2010 Census, 7:53 52% of Hispanic Americans identified themselves as white, 7:56 while 36.7% identified themselves as 'some other race,' and smaller percentages identified themselves as one of the other racial groups. 8:03 Black or African Americans are the second largest racial group in the United States and are defined as individuals with African heritage, including those who are Afro-Caribbean. 8:11 Since many African Americans' ancestors were forcibly brought to the United States as slaves, 8:16 the countries that their ancestors originated from are often unknown. 8:19 To this day, the remnants of slavery and the Southern plantation systems can be seen in the geographic distribution of Black Americans around the country. 8:26 Though many Black Americans moved to Northern cities during the Great Migration of the early 20th century, 8:31 most remained in the South, in a region that has come to be known as the Black Belt of the United States. 8:35 The third racial category used in the Census is 'American Indian or Alaska Native,' 8:39 which refers to anyone whose origins are indigenous to the contiguous United States and Alaska. 8:43 Though Native Americans numbered in the millions when Europeans first arrived in the 15th century, 8:47 today, they control only 2% of the country's land area, make up just 0.2% of the US population, 8:53 and remain severely disadvantaged in terms of access to education and income. 8:57 The fourth Census category for race, Asian, refers to origins in Eastern Asia, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent, including China, India, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Vietnam. 9:07 The largest subgroup of Asian Americans are those of Chinese ancestry, who make up a little less than ¼ of the total Asian American population. 9:13 The fifth Census category is Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, 9:17 which refers to people whose origins are from Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands. 9:22 As I mentioned before, Hawaii is one of the states where a minority race is the majority race for the state - 9:26 and in fact, it's the only state that has always been minority-majority. 9:30 The last Census category is just a catch-all 'Some Other Race.' 9:33 You might remember that about a third of Hispanic Americans fall into this group; 9:36 if a person lists a country of origin that doesn't fit one of the other categories, they get stuck in this group. 9:41 You might be thinking that these categories don't seem like the racial groups you typically think of. 9:45 And that's ok! 9:46 In all likelihood, the way that the government defines races will continue to change, 9:50 to incorporate our society's changing notions of race and ethnicity. 9:54 And something that should be clear from everything we talked about today is that races aren't fixed immutable categories - they are defined by societies. 10:02 Today we learned the difference between races and ethnicities. 10:05 We discussed how definitions of races and ethnicities have changed over time and across places. 10:10 We also discussed the terms minority and minority-majority. 10:13 And we finished up by discussing how races are defined in the United States.

Crash Course Transcript: Sexuality

Let's talk about sex. 0:01 It's totally OK if that makes you wanna cringe. 0:03 After all, most people will tell you that sex is private, not something that people generally talk about at least, not in class. 0:10 Besides, sex is usually thought of as a deep, primeval part of ourselves. 0:14 It's a matter of drives and instincts, of biology and psychology. 0:18 And if sex and sexuality are both primeval and private, can a social science tell us anything about them? 0:23 Of course it can. 0:24 Because no matter how natural and private you think they are, sex and sexuality are still a part of every society. 0:30 And like I've seen saying since this course started: society gets in everywhere. 0:35 [Theme Music] 0:47 In order to talk about sex, we need to get a handle on some terms, starting with sex. 0:51 Not sex the act, but sex the category. 0:53 Sex is a biological category, and it distinguishes between females and males. 0:57 And biologically speaking, the root cause of sex is a pair of chromosomes: XX for females and XY for males. 1:04 These chromosomes result in two kinds of visible differences: 1:06 There are primary sex characteristics, which show up as the sex organs involved with the reproductive processes and which develop in utero. 1:13 And then there are secondary sex characteristics, which develop at puberty and are not directly involved in reproduction, things like pubic hair, enlarged breasts or facial hair. 1:23 Now, we tend to think of sex as a simple fixed binary: You're either male or female. 1:27 But that's not the case. 1:29 A significant portion of the population is intersex, that is 1:32 "people [who] are born with sex characteristics that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies." 1:37 This can mean a lot of different things. 1:39 Like, it can mean having different combinations of sex chromosomes - 1:42 as in Klinefelter Syndrome, which creates chromosomes XX and Y, or in Triple-X Syndrome, which results in XXX. 1:49 An intersex condition can also mean that the body responds differently to hormones, or that the genitals aren't fully developed. 1:55 This wide variety of intersex conditions makes population figures hard to pin down. 2:00 If intersex is defined strictly in terms of having atypical genitalia at birth, then 1 in every 1500-2000 births fits that description. 2:08 If defined more broadly, however - to include all of the conditions I just mentioned - intersex conditions appear in as much as 2% of the population. 2:15 And of course, different societies respond to intersex people differently. 2:18 In some societies, they're accepted as just a natural variation. 2:21 But Western society and medicine have long understood sex as an immutable binary, 2:26 so intersex people were not seen as an acceptable variation, but rather as a deviation in need of correction. 2:32 Some intersex conditions do require medical intervention for the sake of the patient's health, but many don't. 2:37 And for years doctors performed unnecessary operations on intersex children, in order to make them acceptable according to cultural ideas about sex. 2:45 So, society plays a role in the biological category of sex. 2:48 But when it comes to gender, those distinctions are all about society. 2:52 Gender is the set of social and psychological characteristics that a society considers proper for its males and females. 2:58 The sets of characteristics assigned to men are masculinities, and those assigned to women are femininities. 3:04 A lot of people have a hard time understanding the difference between sex and gender, but hopefully this definition makes it clear. 3:10 Gender is its own thing, separate from sex. 3:13 Some people don't even want to accept that gender is anything but biological, but sociology is here to tell you that it really isn't. 3:20 Instead, it's a matter of social construction. 3:22 To explore this idea some more, let's go to the Thought Bubble: 3:25 Let's start with how we dress. 3:26 A business suit is considered masculine. A skirt is feminine. 3:29 And it should be obvious and uncontroversial that this is a purely social convention: Because, 3:34 for example, you'd be pretty hard pressed to explain the objective difference between a skirt and a kilt, 3:40 except to say that wearing one is feminine, and wearing the other is masculine. 3:44 And this is also true of things that might seem to be more biologically determined. 3:48 For example, physical labor like construction has typically been understood as masculine. 3:52 And there might seem to be an underlying biological explanation for that, 3:56 because on average men do tend to be bigger and have more muscle mass than women. 4:00 But even with an average difference between the sexes, there's a great deal of overlap too. 4:05 Plenty of women are bigger and stronger than plenty of men. 4:08 And minor differences in average size and strength can't explain why some occupations have been stratified by gender. 4:15 The reality is that minor, average, biological differences are used as the justification for widespread gender stratification, 4:21 funnelling males and females into different jobs, hobbies, and identity constructions. 4:26 And society then points to this resulting stratification as "proof" of an underlying difference in biological reality, even though that reality doesn't actually exist. 4:34 Thanks Thought Bubble. 4:36 So, one way of thinking about gender is that it's a matter of a self-presentation, a performance that must be worked at constantly. 4:42 What we wear, how we walk and talk, even our personal characteristics - like aggression or empathy - are all ways of "doing" gender. 4:49 They're ways of making claims to masculinity or femininity that people will see and, hopefully, respect. 4:55 And we can be sanctioned if we don't do gender right, or well enough. 4:58 This is precisely what's happening when a man is called a "sissy" or a woman is told she "really ought to smile more." 5:03 This idea of gender as a performance is known as gender expression. 5:07 But gender is more than that; it's also a matter of identity. 5:10 Gender identity refers to a person's internal, deeply held sense of their gender. 5:15 Nobody really, perfectly fits the cultural ideal of masculinity or femininity. 5:20 And lots of people construct their gender differently from these conventional ideas. 5:24 In particular, transgender people are those whose gender identity doesn't match the biological sex they were assigned at birth. 5:29 By contrast, cisgender people's gender identity matches their biological sex. 5:33 Still, both trans and cis people can express their identity in a variety of ways, conventional or otherwise. 5:39 And this should make it clear that gender, like sex, is not binary. 5:43 There are many ways of doing femininities and many ways in which a person can be masculine. 5:47 Now that we've got a basic understanding of sex and gender, we can finally get to sexuality. 5:52 Sexuality is basically a shorthand for everything related to sexual behavior: sexual acts, desire, arousal - the entire experience that is deemed sexual. 6:01 One part of sexuality is sexual orientation, or who you're sexually attracted to, or not. 6:06 Most people identify as heterosexual, meaning they're attracted to people of the other gender. 6:10 While this is the most common orientation, significant numbers of people are homosexual - attracted to people of their own sex or gender. 6:15 But these are really only poles on a continuum, with plenty of people being attracted to both their own and other genders, as in bisexual or pansexual. 6:22 And some people are asexual, and don't experience sexual attraction at all. 6:26 Now, these definitions can vary from person to person, just as they vary from society to society. 6:31 This, and the fact that social norms may make people wish to keep their orientation private, 6:36 makes estimates of the number of homosexual and bisexual people necessarily imprecise. 6:40 That said, based on the surveys we do have, around 4% of the American population identifies as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. 6:47 However, this increases to around 10% if we ask instead whether a person has ever experienced same-sex attraction or engaged in homosexual activity. 6:54 So, what can each of the three sociological paradigms tell us about sexuality? 6:58 We'll start with symbolic-interactionism, because its insight is the most fundamental: 7:02 And that is that sexuality, this intensely private and supposedly primeval thing, is socially constructed. 7:08 You might think that this is a claim too far, because sexuality is a matter of inbuilt urges. 7:12 Some things just are sexual. 7:14 But if we actually start asking "what is sexual?" then the constructed nature of sexuality gets pretty obvious pretty fast. 7:20 We might think, for instance, that oral sex is just sexual. 7:23 But that's not necessarily true in all societies. 7:26 For example, among the Sambia of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, young boys perform oral sex on, and ingest the semen of, older men, as part of a rite of passage to adulthood. 7:35 Oral sex is definitely happening, but it's not clear that this should be thought of as sexual in the way we understand it. 7:41 And we might also be inclined to label this ritual as "homosexual behavior", but it's still not quite the same thing as homosexuality as we understand it in the US. 7:49 So physically identical acts can have radically different social and subjective meanings. 7:53 We can explain this, in part, with the concept of sexual scripts. 7:57 These are cultural prescriptions that dictate the when, where, how, and with-whom of sex, and what that sex means when it happens. 8:03 The idea that sex happens at home between two willing partners, for example, is part of a generic sexual script in our society. 8:09 Likewise, sex that happens between two people who met at a bar might come with a different script - 8:14 and therefore different shared expectations - than sex between two people who've known each other for a long time. 8:19 This brings us to the structural functionalist perspective. 8:22 Since sexual reproduction is necessary for the reproduction of society, this view says that sex has to be organized in some way, in order for society to function. 8:31 And society organizes sexuality by using sexual scripts. 8:34 Before contraception was widespread, it was these norms that controlled how many people were born, by determining when and how often people had sex. 8:41 And by controlling who had sex with whom, they also, generally, made sure that those kids were born into families that could support them. 8:47 This is one function of the universal incest taboo, the prohibition of sex between close relatives. 8:53 Reproduction between family members would ultimately break down kinship relations. 8:57 It would be impossible to maintain a clear set of familial obligations if, for instance, your brother could also be your father. 9:03 But, as seen from the perspective of social conflict theory, regulating sexuality is also a matter of creating, and reinforcing, inequalities. 9:10 In particular, our society is traditionally built around heteronormativity. 9:13 This is the idea that there are only two genders, that gender corresponds to biological sex, 9:18 and that the only natural and acceptable sexual attraction is between these two genders. 9:22 Heteronormativity makes heterosexuality seem like it's directly linked to biological sex, 9:27 but heterosexuality is just as much a social construction as any other sexuality. 9:31 It's defined by dominant sexual scripts, privileged by law, and normalized by social practices, like religious teachings, 9:37 so it comes to be understood as natural in a way that other sexualities are not. 9:42 Queer theory challenges this naturalness and especially shows how gender and heterosexuality are tied together. 9:47 Heteronormativity is based on the idea of two opposite sexes that naturally fit together, like poles of a magnet: 9:53 So by this logic, men pursue, women are pursued, men are dominant, women are submissive. 9:58 But all this is socially constructed; 10:00 the sexes aren't opposites, there are just two of them at both ends of a spectrum, along with the whole array of variations between them. 10:07 But the idea of opposite sexes helps make heterosexuality seem natural to us. 10:12 And so you can see how sex, gender, and sexuality are all linked, and all socially constructed. 10:17 And you can see how society gets in everywhere, even among these apparently private and primeval things. 10:23 And in turn, these things help structure society, creating and sustaining inequalities and giving them the veneer of the natural. 10:30 But sociology can help us pick them apart. 10:33 Today we learned about what sociology can tell us about sex and sexuality. 10:36 We talked about the biological classification of sex, and how it's more complicated than we tend to think. 10:41 And we discussed the social construct of gender and a little bit about how it works. 10:46 Finally, we talked about sexuality and sexual orientations, and what the three paradigms of sociology can tell us about them. 10:52 Crash Course Sociology is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney Studio in Missoula, MT, and it's made with the help of all of these nice people. 10:59 Our animation team is Thought Cafe and Crash Course is made with Adobe Creative Cloud. 11:03 If you'd like to keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can support the series at Patreon, a crowdfunding platform that allows you to support the content you love. 11:10 Thank you to all of our patrons for making Crash Course possible with their continued support.

Political Theory - Karl Marx Transcript

Most people agree that we need to improve our economic system somehow. Yet we're also 0:13 often keen to dismiss the ideas of capitalism's most famous and ambitious critic, Karl Marx. 0:19 This isn't very surprising. In practice, 0:21 his political and economic ideas have been used to design disastrously planned economies 0:26 and nasty dictatorships. 0:28 Nevertheless, we shouldn't reject Marx too quickly. We ought to see him as a guide whose 0:33 diagnosis of Capitalism's ills helps us navigate towards a more promising future. 0:39 Capitalism is going to have be reformed - and Marx's analyse are going to be part of any 0:45 answer. Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Germany. 0:49 Soon he became involved with the Communist 0:51 party, a tiny group of intellectuals advocating for the overthrow of the class system and 0:56 the abolition of private property. He worked as a journalist and had to flee Germany, eventually 1:01 settling in London. 1:03 Marx wrote an enormous number of books and articles, sometimes with his friend Friedrich Engels 1:08 Mostly, Marx wrote about Capitalism, the type of economy that dominates the western world. 1:13 It was, in his day, still getting going, and Marx was one of its most intelligent and perceptive critics. 1:19 These were some of the problems he identified with it: 1:22 Modern work is "alienated" One of Marx's greatest insights is that 1:27 work can be one of the sources of our greatest joys. 1:30 But in order to be fulfilled at work, Marx wrote that workers need 'to see themselves 1:35 in the objects they have created'. Think of the person who built this chair: 1:39 it is straightforward, strong, honest and elegant 1:43 It's an example of how, at its best, labour offers us a chance to externalise 1:47 what's good inside us. But this is increasingly rare in the modern world. 1:52 Part of the problem is that modern work is incredibly specialised. Specialised jobs make 1:57 the modern economy highly efficient, but they also mean that it is seldom possible for any 2:02 one worker to derive a sense of the genuine contribution they might be making to the real 2:07 needs of humanity. Marx argued that modern work leads to 2:11 alienation = Entfremdung 2:14 in other words, a feeling of disconnection between what you do all day and who you feel 2:18 you really are and what you think you ideally be able to contribute to existence. 2:24 Modern work is insecure Capitalism makes the human being utterly expendable; 2:30 just one factor among others in the forces of production that can ruthlessly be let go 2:35 the minute that costs rise or savings can be made through technology. And yet, as Marx 2:40 knew, deep inside of us, we don't want to be arbitrarily let go, we are terrified of 2:45 being abandoned. Communism isn't just an economic theory. 2:50 Understood emotionally, it expresses a deep-seated longing that we always have a place in the 2:54 world's heart, that we will not be cast out. 2:57 Workers get paid little while capitalists get rich 3:02 This is perhaps the most obvious qualm Marx had with Capitalism. In particular, he believed 3:07 that capitalists shrunk the wages of the labourers as much as possible in order to skim off a 3:12 wide profit margin. 3:14 He called this primitive accumulation = ursprüngliche Akkumulation 3:19 Whereas capitalists see profit as a reward for ingenuity and technological talent, Marx 3:24 was far more damning. Profit is simply theft, and what you are stealing is the talent and 3:30 hard work of your work force. 3:32 However much one dresses up the fundamentals, Marx insists that at its crudest, capitalism 3:37 means paying a worker one price for doing something that can be sold for another, much 3:42 higher one. Profit is a fancy term for exploitation. 3:46 Capitalism is very unstable 3:49 Marx proposed that capitalist systems are characterised by series of crises. Every crisis 3:54 is dressed up by capitalists as being somehow freakish and rare and soon to be the last one. Far from it, argued Marx, 4:02 crises are endemic to capitalism - and they're caused by something very odd. The fact that 4:08 we're able to produce too much - far more than anyone needs to consume. 4:14 Capitalist crises are crises of abundance, rather than - as in the past - crises of shortage. 4:20 Our factories and systems are so efficient, we could give everyone on this planet a car, 4:25 a house, access to a decent school and hospital. 4:29 That's what so enraged Marx and made him hopeful too. Few of us need to work, because 4:35 the modern economy is so productive. 4:38 But rather than seeing this need not to work as the freedom it is, we complain about it 4:43 masochistically and describe it by a pejorative word "unemployment." We should call it freedom. 4:50 There's so much unemployment for a good and deeply admirable reason: because we're 4:54 so good at making things efficiently. We're not all needed at the coal face. 4:59 But in that case, we should - thought Marx - make leisure admirable. We should redistribute 5:04 the wealth of the massive corporations that make so much surplus money and give it to 5:08 everyone. 5:09 This is, in its own way, as beautiful a dream as Jesus's promise of heaven; but a good 5:15 deal more realistic sounding. 5:17 Capitalism is bad for capitalists 5:21 Marx did not think capitalists were evil. For example, he was acutely aware of the sorrows 5:25 and secret agonies that lay behind bourgeois marriage. 5:29 Marx argued that marriage was actually an extension of business, and that the bourgeois 5:33 family was fraught with tension, oppression, and resentment, with people staying together 5:38 not for love but for financial reasons. 5:41 Marx believed that the capitalist system forces everyone to put economic interests at the 5:45 heart of their lives, so that they can no longer know deep, honest relationships. He 5:50 called this psychological tendency 5:52 commodity fetishism = Warenfetischismus 5:56 because it makes us value things that have no objective value. 5:59 He wanted people to be freed from financial constraint so that they could - at last - start 6:04 to make sensible, healthy choices in their relationships. 6:08 The 20th century feminist answer to the oppression of women has been to argue that women should 6:13 be able to go out to work. Marx's answer was more subtle. This feminist insistence 6:18 merely perpetuates human slavery. The point isn't that women should imitate the sufferings 6:23 of their male colleagues,it's that men and women should have the permanent option to 6:27 enjoy leisure. 6:29 Why don't we all think a bit more like marx? 6:32 An important aspect of Marx's work is that he proposes that there is an insidious, subtle 6:37 way in which the economic system colours the sort of ideas that we ending up having. 6:42 The economy generates what Marx termed an "ideology". 6:45 A capitalist society is one where most people, rich and poor, believe all sorts of things 6:50 that are really just value judgements that relate back to the economic system: that a 6:55 person who doesn't work is worthless, that leisure (beyond a few weeks a year) is sinful, 7:00 that more belongings will make us happier and that worthwhile things (and people) will 7:04 invariably make money. 7:06 In short, one of the biggest evils of Capitalism is not that there are corrupt people at the 7:11 top—this is true in any human hierarchy—but that capitalist ideas teach all of us to be 7:16 anxious, competitive, conformist, and politically complacent. 7:21 Marx didn't only outline what was wrong capitalism: we also get glimpses of what Marx 7:26 wanted the ideal utopian future to be like. 7:29 In his Communist Manifesto he describes a world without private property or inherited wealth, 7:34 with a steeply graduated income tax, centralised control of the banking, communication, and 7:39 transport industries, and free public education. Marx also expected that communist society 7:45 would allow people to develop lots of different sides of their natures: 7:49 "in communist society...it is possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, 7:54 to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after 7:58 dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." 8:05 After Marx moved to London he was supported by his friend and intellectual partner Friedrich 8:10 Engels, a wealthy man whose father owned a cotton plant in Manchester. Engels covered 8:15 Marx's debts and made sure his works were published. Capitalism paid for Communism. 8:20 The two men even wrote each other adoring poetry. 8:23 Marx was not a well-regarded or popular intellectual in his day. 8:27 Respectable, conventional people of Marx's 8:29 day would have laughed at the idea that his ideas could remake the world. Yet just a few 8:34 decades later they did: his writings became the keystone for some of the most important 8:38 ideological movements of the 20th century. 8:41 But Marx was like a brilliant doctor in the early days of medicine. He could recognise 8:45 the nature of the disease, although he had no idea how to go about curing it. 8:50 At this point in history, we should all be Marxists in the sense of agreeing with his 8:54 diagnosis of our troubles. But we need to go out and find the cures that will really 8:58 work. As Marx himself declared, and we deeply agree: 9:03 Philosophers until now have only interpreted 9:06 the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. English AllEconomicsHistoryListenableRelatedFrom The School of LifeWatched

Crash Course Transcript: Crime

Over the last few weeks, you've heard me say many times that deviance isn't necessarily criminal. 0:04 But of course, sometimes it is. 0:06 Understanding crime sociologically means we need to answer some basic questions: 0:11 Like, what is the nature of crime? 0:13 Who commits crimes and why? 0:15 And how does society respond to it? 0:17 You'll see pretty quickly that these questions are actually all tangled together. 0:20 And you can't untangle them. 0:22 [Theme Music] 0:33 It might not surprise you to learn that the literal definition of crime is the violation of criminal laws. 0:38 And the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, a major source of data on crime in the U.S., tracks many different kinds of crime. 0:44 There are crimes against the person, which include murder, aggravated assault, rape, and robbery, 0:48 and crimes against property, which include burglary, larceny-theft, auto-theft, and arson. 0:54 But there's also a third kind of crime, not generally tracked in major crime indices, often called victimless crimes. 0:59 They include things like illegal drug use, prostitution, and gambling. 1:03 But the name is misleading, because many of these cases have serious negative consequences for the people involved. 1:08 Data from the FBI show that in the US in 2015, there were about 1.2 million violent crimes and about 8 million property crimes. 1:15 Raw numbers aren't terribly helpful, though, so we can turn these into crime rates - 1:19 in the case of 2015, that would be 372.6 violent crimes per 100,000 people and 2,487 property crimes per 100,000 people. 1:29 Those numbers are about half what they were in 1991, when crime rates peaked after a steady upward trend from about 1960. 1:35 These numbers allow for some useful comparisons, but it's important to realize that they can't capture the whole picture. 1:40 Because, crime statistics are based on police reports, so they only include crimes that are reported to the police. 1:46 And not all crimes are reported. 1:48 So researchers sometimes conduct victimization surveys, 1:50 which ask representative samples of the population if they have had any experiences with crime. 1:54 And one such survey from 2015 suggests that fewer than half, about 47%, of violent crimes were reported to police, and just 35% of property crimes were. 2:04 So what can we say about who's committing these crimes? 2:06 Well, based on government data, sociologists have put together a kind of demographic picture, 2:10 but it only shows us who's being arrested for crime, not necessarily who's committing it. 2:15 To begin with, the average arrestee is young and male: 2:18 people between the ages of 15 and 24 make up about 14% of the population, but accounted for 31.8% of all arrests in 2015. 2:26 And while men are about half the population, they made up about 62% of arrests for property crimes and 80% of arrests for violent crimes. 2:32 And, while FBI data don't assess social class, we know from other sources that those of lower social class are more likely to be arrested. 2:40 But again, that's not the whole picture, because, as we talked about last time, wealthy Americans aren't likely to be seen as criminally deviant in the same way that the poor are. 2:48 This brings us to race and ethnicity, where disparities in arrests are clear: 2:52 despite making up only 13.3% of the population, African Americans make up 26.6% of arrests. 2:58 There are a number of reasons for this. 3:00 First, race and ethnicity are closely linked to wealth and social standing, and as we just saw, people of lower social class are more likely to be arrested. 3:07 Second, the data don't include many crimes that are more commonly committed by whites, like drunk driving, embezzlement, and tax fraud. 3:14 Finally, African Americans, and people of color generally, are overcriminalized: 3:18 They're more easily assumed to be criminal and treated as such by both the police and the public at large. 3:22 For example: A study of pedestrian stops in New York City found that African Americans and Hispanics are disproportionately likely to be stopped, 3:29 even when controlling for race-specific arrest rates - that is, the rate at which those racial and ethnic groups are arrested. 3:35 And this rate itself isn't entirely fair: 3:37 despite the fact that black people and white people use drugs at similar rates, black people are far more likely to be arrested for it. 3:43 A 2009 Human Rights Watch report found that in 2007, black people were 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for drugs than white people. 3:51 And studies have shown that the racial composition of a neighborhood has an influence on perceptions of crime in that neighborhood. 3:57 Larger African American populations, for example, have been found to be associated with increased perception of crime, 4:02 even when controlling for the actual crime rate. 4:05 And this brings us to our third question: how society responds to crime. 4:09 Overcriminalization, after all, isn't a matter of who commits crimes, but of how society imagines who criminals are. 4:15 Society's main institutional response to crime comes from the criminal justice system, which is composed of three parts in the US: 4:21 the police, the courts, and the system of punishment and corrections. 4:24 The police are the main point of contact between the criminal justice system and the rest of society. 4:29 There are about 750,000 police officers in the United States, and it's their personal judgement that makes for the actual application of the law. 4:36 And, in exercising this judgement, police officers size up a situation according to a number of factors. 4:41 The severity of the situation, the suspect's level of uncooperativeness, and whether the suspect has previously been arrested all make an arrest more likely. 4:48 Officers also take the wishes of the victim into account. 4:50 Likewise, the presence of observers makes an arrest more likely, 4:53 because making an arrest moves the encounter to the police station, where the officer is in control. 4:57 Finally, the suspect's race plays a role, as officers are more likely to arrest non-white suspects because of a long-standing association of non-whiteness with criminality - which is the cultural basis for overcriminalization. 5:09 And the effects of this can be clearly seen not only in the data on overcriminalization that I mentioned before, but in studies of race and perceptions of threat. 5:17 And race shouldn't be understood as an independent factor here; the other factors are also all seen through race. 5:22 So when a police officer assesses how threatening or uncooperative a suspect is, non-white suspects are viewed as more threatening and more uncooperative, even given the same behavior. 5:31 The point here is that policing has a lot of aspects to it that are surprisingly subjective. 5:36 Given this problem, we might expect the courts to help correct them by accurately adjudicating guilt and innocence. 5:41 And sometimes they do. 5:42 But in practice, how well they do their job is often a matter of who the defendant is and the economic resources that they have access to. 5:48 Let's go to the Thought Bubble to see how people with less money are affected differently by the criminal justice system: 5:53 The first problem is bail. 5:55 Bail allows people to be released from jail after an arrest by guaranteeing, usually with a deposited sum of money, that they'll show up for their day in court. 6:03 But in practice, it just keeps defendants without money behind bars until their court date. 6:08 A date which may be a long time in coming. 6:10 The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to a speedy trial, but many jurisdictions in the US are heavily overburdened. 6:15 There are just too many cases. 6:18 So those who can't afford bail may wait months, even years, before their case is heard. 6:22 And defendants who can't afford to hire lawyers are represented by public defenders, 6:25 who are, to varying degrees, underpaid and overworked. 6:28 They often simply can't give their clients adequate representation, frequently leading to harsher sentences for the poor. 6:34 Together these make the last issue, plea bargaining, much worse. 6:37 Plea bargaining is basically a negotiation in which the prosecution offers concessions on the legal punishment in exchange for the defendant's guilty plea. 6:44 In theory, this is a useful tool for quickly resolving simple cases and easing the burden on the courts. 6:49 But while plea bargaining may be a negotiation, the parties aren't on even footing. 6:53 A poor defendant, stuck in jail because they can't make bail, 6:56 represented by a public defender without the resources to adequately defend them, and facing the threat of a long jail sentence, 7:02 is strongly incentivized to take a plea bargain, regardless of their actual guilt or innocence. 7:07 Thanks Thought Bubble. 7:08 Those convicted of criminal deviance are then moved through the last part of the criminal justice system, the system of punishment and corrections. 7:14 And this brings us, unavoidably, to mass incarceration. 7:16 Mass incarceration refers to the growth of the incarcerated population over the past several decades, and the social, political, and economic conditions that caused it. 7:23 Here's what that looks like in terms of the numbers: 7:25 Today there are over 2.3 million people imprisoned in the United States. 7:29 For some context, while the US has about four and a half percent of the world's population, 7:33 it has nearly a quarter of the world's incarcerated population. 7:36 And the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 693 people out of every 100,000 behind bars. 7:42 This is more than 5 times higher than the rate in most other countries. 7:45 But it hasn't always been like this: the incarcerated population has increased by 500% over the past 40 years. 7:52 And this increase has only a limited relationship to actual crime rates. 7:55 Like I mentioned, crime rates dropped dramatically in the 90s, but prison populations continued to rise. 8:00 Mass incarceration is a consequence of political choices, namely "tough-on-crime" policies, like mandatory minimum sentences. 8:06 And mass incarceration falls hardest on the poor, and on people of color: 8:09 Despite making up only 37% of the US population, non-whites make up 67% of the prison population. 8:16 In 2015, the incarceration rate for white men was 457 per 100,000. 8:21 The rate for hispanic men was more than twice as high - 1,043 per 100,000 - 8:25 and the rate for black men was nearly six times higher (2,613 per 100,000). 8:30 So, are these "tough-on-crime" policies effective? 8:33 Well, there are a couple ways to think about the purpose of punishment. 8:36 One approach to punishment is retribution, which is about making the offender suffer as the victim suffered, as a kind of moral vengeance. 8:43 In the U.S., a more favored approach is deterrence, which tries to reduce crime by making the prospect of getting caught sufficiently awful. 8:49 Yet another approach is societal protection, designed to render an offender incapable of further criminal offense, usually through long prison sentences or capital punishment. 8:57 And finally, rehabilitation views punishment as an opportunity to reform offenders and return them to society as productive citizens. 9:04 In practice, rehabilitation is hard to accomplish, because the prison system has limited resources and because severe limitations are placed on convicted felons that go beyond the criminal justice system. 9:13 Felons are often barred from social welfare programs, for example, and face extensive legal discrimination in hiring and housing. 9:19 The fact that reintegration into society is so difficult leads to high rates of recidivism, or re-offense that leads to incarceration. 9:26 A study by the National Institute on Justice of prisoners from 30 states estimated that within three years of release, two-thirds (67.8%) of them were re-arrested. 9:35 Five years after release, three-fourths (76.6%) had been re-arrested. 9:40 So these approaches to punishment don't appear to work as deterrence. 9:43 Now, long sentences succeed in removing offenders from society, 9:46 but that removal itself can have damaging effects, with communities of color being particularly impacted. 9:52 Incarceration puts stress on families, destabilizes neighborhoods as residents cycle in and out of prison, 9:58 and leads to increasing numbers of people with limited employment prospects, 10:02 partly because employers can legally refuse to hire those with criminal records. 10:06 So when we talk about crime, we can't look at any of these questions in isolation: 10:10 Defining crime based on FBI data misses how these definitions are applied in the real world. 10:15 And only paying attention to the demographics of offenders overlooks the conditions that create those statistics. 10:20 Likewise, looking at society's response alone misses how that response answers the other two questions. 10:26 It's all tangled. 10:28 Today we learned about crime in the US. 10:29 We looked at the legal definitions of crime and used FBI data to get an idea of the amount and kinds of crime. 10:35 We put together a demographic picture of who gets arrested, and we talked about why that's not necessarily who commits crime. 10:41 And we talked about society's response to crime in the criminal justice system, and how that response ends with mass incarceration.

Crash Course Transcript; DuBois & Race Conflict

Two bachelor degrees. PhD from Harvard University. Two-year fellowship to study in Berlin. Professor of sociology and history at two different universities. Author of countless books. Activist and co-founder of a key civil rights organization. Editor and co-founder of a magazine. And a poet to boot. Pretty good resume, yeah? What if I make it a bit more impressive? That PhD from Harvard? First Harvard PhD granted to an African American. The civil rights organization? The NAACP. That magazine? The Crisis, the longest running black publication in the United States, in print since 1910. This resume belongs to William Edward Burghardt DuBois, whom you might know better as W.E.B. Dubois. He was one of the earliest American sociologists, as well as one of the first proponents of race-conflict theory. And his studies of the lives of African Americans during the Jim Crow era of American history - and the oppression they faced - are the cornerstones of how sociologists study race. [Theme Music] W.E.B. Dubois was born in a small town in Massachusetts in 1868. 1868 - that's five years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Three years after the end of the American Civil War. And the same year that the 14th amendment was passed. At this time, race was considered a biological construct. Slavery, and later the Jim Crow laws - laws in the South that enforced racial segregation - were framed as natural consequences of the supposed, natural inferiority of Blacks to Whites. We, of course, now know that this was not just wrong, but deeply harmful. And more than that - the idea that race itself is a purely biological, immutable quality is also understood today as being simply untrue. Instead, race is thought of as a socially constructed category of people, who share biological traits that society has deemed important. Yes, human beings vary a lot in how we look - our skin color, our facial features, our body shapes, our hair texture. But those visual markers only become a "race" when members of society decide that specific markers constitute a specific racial group. This is why the concept of race often changes, across cultures and times. For example, when Dubois was alive, Irish and Italian Americans weren't considered 'white,' either. But today, try telling some Boston Southie guy or an Italian grandma from Pittsburgh that they're not white. See what they say. Did something change about Irish and Italian Americans biologically? Of course not. It's how society saw them that changed. And it's that last bit - what race a person is seen as, and how they're treated as a result - that ends up being a huge determinant of a person's social outcomes. Dubois began to consider his race as a part of his identity, when he moved to the South to go to college, and then spent several years in Europe. He saw how differently black people were treated in different places, and was disillusioned about how Americans treated him based on his skin color. He can describe this disillusionment much better than I can: "One ever feels his twoness," he wrote, "an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring id." This quote reveals a really critical underlying thread in much of Dubois' work - the idea of double-consciousness. Dubois argued that there are two competing identities as a Black American - seeing one's self as an American and seeing one's self as a Black person while living in white-centric America. Living as a member of a non-dominant race, he said, creates a fracture in your sense of identity within that society. These feelings are what fueled Dubois' work, which focused on the disparities and conflicts between people of different races - what we now call race-conflict theory. Today, questions of race and identity are studied by sociologists who work on racial identity theory, which looks at how individuals come to identify as a certain race. Dubois didn't only research racial identity, though - he also looked at the everyday lives of black and white Americans and wrote extensively about how and why their lives differed so drastically in post-slavery America. Let's go to the Thought Bubble to look at one of Dubois' early studies of these disparities. In 1896, the University of Pennsylvania hired Dubois to do a survey on Black communities in Philadelphia. His work eventually became 'The Philadelphia Negro,' the first published study of the living conditions of African Americans. Dubois went knocking on doors, asking people questions about themselves and their families. And there were an awful lot of doors. All told, Dubois collected data on 9,675 African Americans. He focused on one specific ward of Philly - the 7th ward, a historically Black neighborhood that attracted families of all classes, from doctors and teachers, to the poor and destitute. He sat in thousands of parlors, asking questions about age, gender, education, literacy, occupations, earnings, crime, and documented the ways in which African-Americans differed from Philly's white residents. For example, the Black population turned out to be much younger than the White population and had a higher proportion of women. It also had lower literacy rates, higher rates of poverty and crime, and a higher concentration of workers in the service industry than in manufacturing or trade. Mortality rates were higher, as was the frequency of illness. But here's what made Dubois' report especially unique: He concluded that much of the dysfunction within Black communities came from their inferior access to things like education and more lucrative jobs. The reason that the black population had higher rates of death and illness, he said, was because of occupational hazards, and poverty, and less access to health care. It's hard to express just how radical Dubois' conclusions were at the time. The problems in black communities were not due to racial inferiority, Dubois argued, but to racial prejudice. And that was completely different from how many Americans thought at the time. Thanks Thought Bubble. So, race doesn't exist in a vacuum. It doesn't just imbue you with certain essential qualities. Instead, race matters because of the power that society gives it. For another example, let's stick with Philly and use the labor unions there in the 1890s. Because of prejudice against Black workers, and beliefs about their abilities and morals, trade labor unions didn't allow Black workers to join. And because they couldn't join unions, many Black workers couldn't get manufacturing or trade work - which paid much better than service work. And because they couldn't get these jobs, Black communities had more men out of work, higher rates of poverty, and more criminal behavior. Which then allowed the white workers and unions to justify their decision to not allow black workers into their union. The prevailing beliefs about race and racism ultimately reinforced themselves. This is what's now known as racial formation theory, a theory formalized by modern sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant. Racial formation refers to the process through which social, political, and economic forces influence how a society defines racial categories - and how those racial categories in turn end up shaping those forces. Omi and Winant argue that the concept of race came about as a tool to justify and maintain the economic and political power held by those of European descent. Another modern look at these issues can be seen in the work of sociologist William Julius Wilson. He explores why Black and White Americans tend to have such different outcomes in terms of income, education, and more. And he argues that class, not race, is the determining factor for many Black Americans. But the reasons that these class gaps exist to begin with, come from the structural disadvantages that date back to Dubois' time. Dubois continued to research the ways in which prejudice, segregation, and lack of access to education and jobs were holding back African Americans. A strong advocate of education and of challenging Jim Crow laws, he clashed with another leading black intellectual of the time, Booker T. Washington, who advocated compromise with the predominantly white political system. Over time, DuBois grew frustrated with the limits of scholarship in affecting change, so he turned to direct activism and political writing. In 1909, he co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or the NAACP, and was the editor and intellectual driving force behind its magazine, The Crisis. The NAACP fought against lynching, segregation of schools, voting disenfranchisement, and much more. It used journalism as one of its most powerful tools, publishing the records of thousands of lynchings over a thirty year period. And it used lawsuits, targeting voter disenfranchisement and school segregation in decade-long court battles. And, after DuBois' time, it went on to become part of many of the landmark moments in the fight for civil rights, including the Brown vs. Board of Education case, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the March on Washington. Modern sociologists continue Dubois' work on racial politics, asking the question: How is race intertwined with political power, and the institutional structures within a society? Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, for example, argues that we now have what he calls "racism without racists." What he means is: Explicitly racist views have become less socially acceptable, so fewer people are willing to say that they don't think Black and White Americans should have equal rights. But, as Bonilla-Silva points out, that doesn't mean racism is a thing of the past. Instead, he says, structural racism - the kind that's entrenched in political and legal structures - still holds back the progress of racial minorities. Take, for example, the fact that the median wealth of white Americans is 13 times higher than the median wealth of black Americans. Now, you could look at that and say, well, black people just aren't as good at saving as white people. After all, it's not like there's anything legally preventing them from making or saving more money. But that completely ignores the ways in which wealth builds up over generations. Past generations of Black Americans were unable to build wealth, because they had far less access to higher incomes, banking services, and housing. These ideas about how the structures of power interact with race may have their origins in Dubois' work, but they continue today. And so do his studies of racial resistance. Researchers of racial resistance ask: How do different racial groups challenge and change the structures of power? Sometimes racial resistance is easy to see in society. Think the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, or Black Lives Matter today. But sociologists can also look at more subtle forms of resistance, too, like resistance against racial ideas and stereotypes. For example, sociologist Patricia Hill Collins has written about the different relationships that black and white women have had with marriage and staying home to raise a family. In the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s, one of its key issues was the exclusion of women from the workforce. Entering the workforce was seen as a form of resistance. But Black women have, for most of American history, been forced to work, or needed to work to help support their families. For them, Collins argues, joining the workforce is not resistance. Instead, staying at home to care for their families can be an act of resistance against society's expectations for Black women. All of these modern fields of study within race-conflict theory - racial identity, racial formation, racial politics, and racial resistance - they all have their origins in the work of one sociologist: W.E.B. Dubois. Today we talked about W.E.B. Dubois, one of the founders of sociological thought and the founder of race-conflict theory. We talked about race and how our understanding of how we define race has changed over time. We talked about Dubois' idea of 'double-consciousness' and how it relates to the modern day field of racial identity. We introduced the idea of racial formation and used Dubois' survey of African Americans in Philadelphia to look at how economic, political, and social structures affect how we perceive different races - and vice versa. And finally, we looked at the activist side of Dubois' life as co-founder of the NAACP and editor of the Crisis, and discussed how modern day sociologists study racial politics and racial resistance.

Crash Course Transcript: Socialization

What do you, as you're watching me right now, have in common with a toddler who's being read a bedtime story? I'll give you a clue. It's also something you have in common with the kids in The Breakfast Club. As well as with a soldier going through boot camp. Give up? You're all being socialized. It's also the title of the episode. You probably saw that. Each of us is surrounded by people, and those people become a part of how we act and what we value. This is known as socialization: the social process through which we develop our personalities and human potential and learn about our society and culture. Last time, we talked about the HOW of socialization, how we learn about the social world. And no matter which of the many theories out there that you like best, the answer seems to be that we're socialized by interacting with other people. But which people? What we didn't talk about last week was the WHO of socialization: Who do we learn about the social world from? What people, and what institutions, have made you who you are today? [Theme Music] Socialization is a life-long process, and it begins in our families. Mom, Dad, grandparents, siblings - whoever you're living with is pretty much your entire social world when you're very young. And that's important, because your family is the source of what's known as primary socialization - your first experiences with language, values, beliefs, behaviors, and norms of your society. Parents and guardians are your first teachers of everything - from the small stuff like how to brush your teeth to the big stuff like sex, religion, the law, and politics. The games they play with you, the books they read, the toys they buy for you, all provide you with what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called cultural capital - the non-financial assets that help people succeed in the world. Some of this cultural capital may seem fairly innocuous - I mean, is reading Goodnight Moon really making that big of an impact on a toddler? Yes, actually. It teaches the "value" of reading as much as it helps the child begin to recognize written language. The presence of books in the home is associated with children doing well in school. Another important form of socialization that starts in the home is gender socialization, learning the psychological and social traits associated with a person's sex. Gender socialization starts from the moment that parents decide on a gendered name and when nurses put a pink or a blue hat on the baby. Other group memberships, like race and class, are important parts of initial socialization. Race socialization is the process through which children learn the behaviors, values, and attitudes associated with racial groups. Racial discrimination is partly the result of what parents teach their children about members of other races. And class socialization teaches the norms, values, traits, and behaviors you develop based on the social class you're in. This may help explain why more middle- and upper-class children go to college. Not only can the families afford to send them, but these children are expected to attend. They grow up in a home that normalizes college attendance. Now, gender, race, and class socialization are all examples of anticipatory socialization - that's the social process where people learn to take on the values and standards of groups that they plan to join . Small children anticipate becoming adults, for example, and they learn to play the part by watching their parents. Gender socialization teaches boys to "be a man" and girls to "be a woman". But children also learn through secondary socialization - that's the process through which children become socialized outside the home, within society at large. This often starts with school. Schools are often kids' first introduction to things like bureaucracies, as well as systems of rules that require them to be in certain places at certain times, or act in ways that may be different from what they learned at home. Not only do schools teach us the three r's - reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic - but they come with what sociologists call a hidden curriculum - that is, an education in norms, values, and beliefs that are passed along through schooling. Take, for example, a spelling bee. Its main goal is to teach literacy and encourage kids to learn how to spell. But something as seemingly benign as a spelling bee can have many hidden lessons that stick with kids, too. For example, it teaches them that doing better than their peers is rewarding - and it enforces the idea that the world has winners and losers. Another hidden curriculum of school in general is to expose kids to a variety of people. When your only socialization is your family, you just get one perspective on race, class, religion, politics, et cetera. But once you go out into the world, you meet many people from many backgrounds, teaching you about race and ethnicity, social class, disability, gender and sexuality, and more. School becomes not just a classroom for academic subjects, but also for learning about different kinds of people. And, of course, schools are also where kids are exposed to one of the most defining aspects of school-age life: peer groups. Peer groups are social groups whose members have interests, social position, and usually age in common. As you get older, your peer group has a massive impact on the socialization process. Let's go to the Thought Bubble to to see just how big that impact can be. In the late 1950s, American sociologist James Coleman began studying teenagers - how they interacted and how their social lives affected their education. He interviewed teens in 11 high schools in the Midwest, asking them questions about what social group they identified with and who else they considered members of their group. Based on these interviews, Coleman identified four main social categories. And, uh, the names of these categories will probably sound familiar to you: They were nerds, jocks, leading crowd, and burnouts. Basically, he discovered the 1950s version of The Breakfast Club. And with these social categories came social prescriptions - behaviors that were expected of people in those groups. Coleman found that certain things were important to the members of certain groups, like being a good dancer or smoking or having money or getting good grades. He also tested the students' IQs and assessed their grades. And surprise! It turned out that who you hung out with affected how well you did in school. In some of the schools, getting good grades was considered an important criterion for the "leading group" - aka the popular kids- but in other schools, it wasn't. And in the schools where good grades were not a sign of popularity, students who scored high on IQ tests actually did worse on their exams than similarly smart students at schools where good grades made you popular. Thanks Thought Bubble! Now, Coleman's study might seem like common sense - of course you and your friends are gonna be pretty similar. Don't we choose to be friends with people who are like us? Well, not entirely. Coleman's study showed that we don't just pick peer groups that fit into our existing traits - instead, peer groups help mold what traits we end up with. OK, so far, we have family, schools, and peers as the main forces that influence someone's socialization. But what about me? Yes, me, Nicole Sweeney. Am I part of your socialization? Or more precisely, are youtube videos considered a form of socialization? Short answer: yes! Long answer: The media you consume are absolutely a part of your socialization. TV and the internet are huge parts of Americans' lives. And how we consume our media is affected by social traits, like class, race, and age. A teenager or twenty-something in 2017 is much more likely to watch online media, like Netflix or youtube, than television. And low-income Americans watch much more TV than their higher-income counterparts. The media we consume also impact us dramatically. The American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, has said there are connections between excessive television viewing in early childhood and cognitive, language and social emotional delays. But TV can also influence the attitudes of viewers, especially young ones. For example, studies have found that kids exposed to Sesame Street in randomized-controlled trial settings, reported more positive attitudes toward people of different races - most likely a result of the program's wide variety of characters from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. TV also affects us well beyond childhood. One recent study found that MTV's "16 and Pregnant" may have acted as a cautionary tale, helping to change teen girls' attitudes toward birth control and contributing to declining rates of teen pregnancy. So far, the types of socialization we've talked about have been fairly subtle — but there are also more intense types of socialization. Total institutions are places where people are completely cut off from the outside world, and face strict rules for how they must behave. First coined by sociologist Erving Goffman, the term "total institution" refers to places like the military, prisons, boarding schools, or psychiatric institutions that control all aspects of their residents' lives - how they dress, how they speak, where they eat, where they sleep. And in a total institution, residents undergo resocialization, where their environment is carefully controlled to encourage them to develop a new set of norms, values, or beliefs. They do this by, basically, breaking down your existing identity and then using rewards and punishment to build up a whole new you. Think about every boot camp movie you've ever seen. All soldiers are given the same haircut and uniform, expected to reply to questions in the same way, put through the same grueling exercises, and humiliated by the same officer. This process re-socializes the soldiers to put extreme value on their identity within the group, making them more willing to value self-sacrifice if their unit is in danger. So whether you're GI Jane training for a reconnaissance team or Molly Ringwald trying to maintain her queen-bee status in the leading crowd, the you that you are has been powerfully shaped by people and institutions. Now, think back on your own life - who has been the biggest influence on YOUR socialization? Who do you think that you yourself have influenced? Hard questions to answer, maybe, but definitely worthwhile - and hopefully a little easier now that you've learned how sociologists think about it. Today, we learned about five different types of socialization. We talked about anticipatory socialization from your family, like gender norms, that prepare children for entering society. We discussed the "hidden curriculum" in schools. We learned about peer groups through a look at James Coleman's study of teenage social groups. We explored the role of media in socialization. And finally, we talked about total institutions and how they can act as a form of re-socialization.

Crash Course Transcript: Politics

You're a good citizen, right? 0:01 You voted in the last election, or you're looking forward to voting in the future. 0:05 You pay your taxes. 0:06 You're happy to exercise the full range of your civic responsibilities. 0:09 The point is, you might already know all about how your government works. 0:13 If you don't, and you're American, well, there's a Crash Course for that. 0:16 But even if you're an informed citizen who knows every line of your constitution by heart, that doesn't mean you know why your government works. 0:22 For that, we need a different kind of political knowledge. 0:25 Civics can tell you how your system works, but sociology can help you understand why. 0:30 [Theme Music] 0:41 So, what do we mean when we talk about politics? 0:44 A civics class can define politics in terms of the particular systems of government, but sociologists have a broader definition: 0:50 Politics is the major social institution by which society organizes decision-making and distributes power and resources. 0:58 By this definition, politics obviously includes things like the government itself, 1:02 but it also includes things outside of it, like political party organizations and lobbying groups, and even social movements. 1:08 Voting is a political action, but so is going to a demonstration or calling your representative. 1:13 Or boycotting a company whose CEO has ideas that you find disagreeable. 1:16 Because, these are all ways of trying to influence societal decision-making and the distribution of power. 1:21 That being said, the government does have special importance here, because it's the major formal organization that organizes and regulates politics, 1:29 so it's responsible for making decisions for the whole of society. 1:32 And it can carry out these decisions, because it has a lot of power, 1:36 which our old friend Max Weber defined as the ability to achieve desired ends over the objections of others. 1:42 Now, Weber considered a government's power to be coercive power, or power that's backed by the threat of force. 1:47 You might not think of your government as a threat, but Weber actually defined a state as the organization that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. 1:54 Of course - and thankfully - not every action that a government takes requires an overt use of force. 2:00 Under normal circumstances, people respect the political systems at work in their government, 2:04 and they tend to view state power as an expression of authority, where state leaders have the right to use legitimate power. 2:11 And so, while violence for Weber is always the ultimate last resort of the state, most of the time, it isn't necessary. 2:17 Weber also recognized that the power of a political system comes in a variety of forms. 2:21 Traditional authority is power that's legitimized by respect for long-standing cultural patterns and beliefs. 2:27 It's based on the same idea as the traditional mindset we talked about in episodes 9 & 17, 2:32 namely that the world has a basic order to it, and that order must be respected. 2:36 Another style of power is known as rational-legal authority, or power legitimized by legally enacted rules and regulations. 2:44 This is the power behind the US Constitution, whose written rules determine the entire American political and legal system. 2:50 When the Constitution is changed or reinterpreted, the rules change, as with when the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage was legal in 2015, for example. 2:58 Finally, we have a kind of wildcard power: charismatic authority, which is power legitimized by the extraordinary personal qualities of a leader. 3:05 Jesus of Nazareth leading a new religious movement, or Martin Luther King Jr. leading thousands of people in the civil rights movement 3:11 are examples of personalities that mobilized precisely this kind of authority. 3:15 But authority that rests entirely on the qualities of one person can be unstable. 3:19 So sometimes that power becomes transferred to something outside - separate from - that one charismatic person. 3:25 This is called the routinization of charisma, and it's where charismatic authority is transformed into some combination of traditional and/or rational-legal authority. 3:34 The founding of the Church after Jesus' death is a good example of this. 3:38 Now, just as there are different kinds of authority, so too are there different forms of government. 3:42 For instance, democracy - a political system that gives power to the people as a whole - tends to be backed by rational-legal authority. 3:48 This isn't terribly surprising, since, in Weber's model, democracy as a form of government and a rational-legal approach to authority both emerged with rationalization and the rise of bureaucracy. 3:58 And we can see a certain affinity between democracy and rational-legal authority in the fact that leadership in democracies is linked to office-holding. 4:05 So, the power is attached to a legally defined office, not to a particular person. 4:10 By contrast, monarchy is a political system in which power is legitimized by traditional authority and held by a single family. 4:16 This is maybe most obvious in the feudal European idea of the Divine Right of Kings, in which the monarchs were held to be ordained by God from time immemorial. 4:24 And just as democracies are much more common in modern bureaucratic states, monarchies are more common in traditional agrarian societies. 4:30 But a certain type of authority doesn't always reside in a specific form of government. 4:34 Monarchy, for example, is just one type of authoritarianism, which is any system that denies people participation in their own governance and leaves ruling to the elites. 4:42 And while monarchy relies on traditional authority, another variety of authoritarianism, totalitarianism, does not. 4:49 Totalitarianism is a centralized political system that extensively regulates people's lives. 4:54 And it has some of the same affinities for legal-rational authority that democracy does. 4:57 Both are modern systems, for one thing, but it's also much easier to closely control a people through a system of bureaucratic rules. 5:04 For example, a totalitarian government might enact a law that, say, every household has to display a picture of the ruler. 5:10 It's a small bureaucratic rule with major political implications. 5:13 And democracy isn't always associated with legal-rational authority, either. 5:17 Take the United States! 5:18 The President has power because of the rules set out in the Constitution - which is a form of legal-rational authority - 5:23 but the President attains that power by winning an election, which can often rely on charismatic authority. 5:29 We can even see traditional authority of a kind at work in the reverence with which the Constitution and the "Founding Fathers" are invoked in political discourse. 5:36 Now, the US as an example can move us from what has so far been a pretty theoretical discussion of authority and politics, to seeing how sociology can help us understand what they look like in practice. 5:45 To understand power, authority, and politics, we need to understand the political attitudes of a population. 5:51 And to do this, we need to talk about the political spectrum, the broad array of beliefs and ideas that make up the politics of a society. 5:58 In the US, this ranges from liberal on the left of the spectrum to conservative on the right. 6:03 And again, this isn't just a theoretical difference of ideas; 6:06 these beliefs shape the distribution of power and resources in the US in some very fundamental ways. 6:11 On economic issues, for instance, left-leaning or liberal perspectives often favor government intervention in the economy to help guarantee an equality of outcomes. 6:19 Equal pay for women, equitable distribution of wealth among races, and regulations that promote workplace and product safety 6:25 are all examples of economic issues that the left is frequently concerned with. 6:29 By contrast, conservative or right-leaning perspectives may tend to take a more laissez-faire or "hands off" approach, 6:34 in which government regulation is seen as hampering the natural flow of economic activity. 6:38 So, that's how the political spectrum can look when it comes to economic matters. 6:41 On social issues, one way of understanding the gap between left and right is in terms of the different kinds of authority that each faction tends to support, or endorse. 6:49 Here, the right tends to build its arguments on traditional authority, while the left tends to look to legal-rational frameworks. 6:55 We can see this in the issue of marriage equality, for example: 6:58 The right has often described its opposition as a defense of "traditional marriage," 7:02 while the left has argued that marriage equality was an extension of legal, civil rights. 7:06 Now, no matter where your political leanings fall on the spectrum, 7:09 in the end they'd be pretty meaningless without some way to give them form in the struggle for things like power and wealth. 7:15 That's where political parties come in, as well as interest groups, like political action committees, which organize around particular issues rather than around a whole party platform. 7:23 And beyond the formal, institutional politics, there are also social movements that try to mobilize masses of people to further particular political goals. 7:30 Black Lives Matter and the Tea Party are both good examples of this. 7:33 But lobbying, special interest groups, and social movements all raise difficult questions about how truly democratic the American system is. 7:40 Why would you need to demonstrate in the streets if you're supposed to be able to express your political beliefs by voting? 7:46 The answer lies in sociological theories of power - that is, the different understandings of how power is distributed in a society. 7:53 One common view is known as the pluralist model, which sees power as being very widely distributed. 7:58 In this view, politics is a matter of negotiation, but everyone has at least some voice in the process. 8:04 This model was closely linked with structural functionalist theory and dominated much of American sociology in the 1950s and early 60s. 8:10 In this line of thinking, demonstrations are seen as irrational outbursts, pointless gestures in a political system that already distributes political power fairly. 8:19 However, in the power-elite model, political protests make perfect sense. 8:22 This view sees political power as being concentrated in the hands of small groups, especially among the very rich. 8:28 If this is the case, protests may be the only way for many people to advance their interests and have their voices heard. 8:33 Finally, there's the Marxist political economy model, which holds that both of the other two models really miss the point: 8:39 Here, power isn't evenly distributed, but it's also not held by a strictly political elite. 8:45 Instead, the cause of the imbalance of power is seen as being systemic, and the powerful few are seen as the products of a particular economic system. 8:53 So meaningful political change, in this understanding, is only possible through a change in the underlying economic system. 9:00 So to understand politics - in the United States or anywhere else - we need to look at all the aspects we've talked about - 9:06 the types of authority, the kinds of government, political beliefs, models of power, and how they all relate to each other. 9:12 Today we learned about the sociological approach to politics. 9:15 We defined politics and power. 9:17 We discussed the different types of authority and how they relate to different political systems. 9:21 And we looked at American politics in some detail, talking about demographics and political organizations. 9:27 Finally, we discussed different sociological theories of power.

Crash Course Transcript: Social Interactions & Performance

You're daydreaming in class when the teacher calls on you and asks you a question. You don't know the answer, so you look desperately around the room for help. Finally, one of your classmates whispers it to you. So you say the answer, and the moment of terror is over. You go back to daydreaming, the teacher goes back to teaching, and everyone's happy. A lot of stuff just happened there. Stuff that raises many questions. Like, why are you worried about giving the right answer? Why are you worried about answering the question at all? And why does your classmate help you out, when it could get them in trouble? If you want the right answers to these questions, we need to talk about social interaction. And we also need to talk about reality. Because, according to some sociological theories, the reality of your social world - in your classroom and beyond - is basically a huge, life-long stage play. [Theme Music] Social interaction is simply the process by which people act and react in relation to others. Whenever people converse, or yell, or fight, or play sports, that's social interaction. And any place you find social interaction, you're going to find social structure. Social structure consists of the relationships among people and groups. And this structure gives direction to, and sets limits on, our behavior. Because our relationships establish certain expectations of everyone involved, depending on the social setting. This is really obvious in a classroom: The teacher teaches and the students learn, because that's the expectation for that relationship, in that setting. But if you run into a teacher, say, at the mall, you both behave differently - and probably awkwardly - because the expectations for your interaction in that social setting have changed. Now, this still doesn't tell us why these relationships work the way they do. But it does tell us where to look. If our interactions are a matter of expectations, then we need to understand how those expectations are set, and for that we need to talk about social status. Status is a position that a person occupies in a society or social group. It's part of their identity, and it defines their relationships with other people. So, the status of "teacher" defines how a teacher should relate to their students. But statuses aren't just professions: gender, race, and sexual orientation are all social statuses, as are being a father, or a child, or a citizen. And all the statuses held by a single person make up that person's status set. That status set can tell us a lot about a person, because statuses exist in a hierarchy, with some statuses being more valued than others. So if I tell you that someone is a white middle aged male CEO, then you can make some pretty reasonable guesses about his education, wealth, and the power he holds in society. And you've probably noticed that there are different kinds of statuses; for example "white," "middle-aged," and "male" are pretty different from the status of "CEO." The first three are all ascribed statuses. Ascribed statuses are those in which a person has no choice; they're either assigned at birth or assigned involuntarily later in life. Race, for instance, is an ascribed status assigned at birth, while the ascribed status of "middle-aged" happens at a point later in life. CEO, on the other hand, is an achieved status - it's earned, accomplished, or obtained with at least some effort on the person's part. Professions, then, are achieved statuses. So is being a student, or a parent. Beyond this difference, there's also the fact that some statuses are more important than others. A master status is the status others are most likely to use to identify you. This can be achieved, like "professor," or ascribed, like "cancer patient." And as that example shows you, a master status doesn't need to be positive or desirable. In fact, it doesn't even need to be important to the person who holds it. It just needs to be important to other people, who use the status as their primary way of locating that person in the social hierarchy. Also, statuses tend to clump together in certain ways. Most CEOs are college educated, for example, but they aren't always. And a mismatch or contradiction between statuses is called a status inconsistency. When we talk about PhD students working as baristas, we're really bringing it up in that way, because there's a status inconsistency between PhD and barista. At least in the industrialized world, service workers aren't "supposed" to be highly educated. Now that's all very interesting, you might say, but we still haven't said that much about social interaction. And you're right: status gets us started, but if we want to get into how people behave, then we need to talk about roles. If status is a social position, then roles are the sets of behaviors, obligations, and privileges that go with that status. So a person holds a status, but they perform a role. Keep that word in mind: Perform. Now, since a person can have multiple statuses, they can have multiple roles too. But a single status often has multiple roles that go with it. For example, a teacher's role in the classroom is to teach and lead students. But in the faculty lounge, the status of teacher has another role; acting as a colleague to other teachers, or as an employee to the principal - roles that require a whole different bunch of behaviors than those found in the classroom. But all of the roles attached to the single status of "teacher" make up that status' role set. All statuses have role sets. And various role sets can sometimes demand contradictory behaviors of the person who holds that set. When the roles attached to different statuses create clashing demands, that's known as role conflict. Parents who work, for instance, often need to decide between the demands of their jobs and the demands of their families, which can lead to role conflict. And even the roles within a single status can create contradiction, in what we call role strain. A student who has responsibilities for class, but also for basketball, and orchestra, and the yearbook committee, experiences role strain as they try to balance the competing obligations of these roles, all within the context of their status as a student. Now sometimes, whether it's because of conflict, strain, or other reasons, people just disengage from a certain role, in a process called role exit. This can be voluntary, like quitting your job, or involuntary, like getting dumped. In either case, it's rarely as simple as just walking out the door, because roles are a part of who we are. So exiting a role can be traumatic, especially without preparation, or if the exit isn't by choice. Now, we've been talking about roles as though they're prescriptive, or that they totally determine our behavior. But they don't! Roles are guidelines, expectations that we have for ourselves and that others place on us. We may or may not internalize those expectations, but even if we do, our behavior still isn't completely controlled. But why do statuses come bundled with roles in the first place? Why can't I just not perform my role? The answer is complicated, but part of it is that, well, reality itself is socially constructed. I mean, there's nothing in the laws of physics that says that some people are teachers, and that those people get to ask questions, and students have to answer them. But that doesn't mean these statuses aren't real and don't have real roles attached to them. One good way of thinking about this is known as the Thomas Theorem, developed by early 20th century American sociologists William Thomas and Dorothy Thomas. It states, "If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences." In other words, statuses and roles matter, because we say they do. The perception creates the reality. So the reason you can't just not perform your role is that, even if you don't think it matters, everyone else does think it matters! So the student who refuses to answer a question gets in trouble, while the teacher who refuses to teach and just hangs out drinking wine with their feet up on their desk gets fired. If you have the status of a teacher, people expect, even demand, that you do the things teachers are expected to do. How you feel about your status doesn't really enter into it. And we know who's a teacher and who's a student based on our background assumptions, our experiences, and the socialization that teaches us about norms in various situations. So, this is how your reality becomes socially constructed - you, and everyone around you, uses assumptions and experiences to define what's real. By interacting with the people around you, and expecting certain behaviors in the context of roles, you actually create the social reality that shapes those interactions that you're having. The fact that this happens in interaction is really important, because your social reality is not just about you. It's about everyone you're interacting with, and their expectations, too. It's about maintaining a performance. And this idea of performance is really central to a sociological understanding of how people interact. It's the key to what's known as the dramaturgical analysis of social interaction. This approach, pioneered by Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman, understands social interaction as if it were a play performed on stage for an audience. By Goffman's thinking, people literally perform roles for each other, and the point of social interaction is always - at least partly - to maintain a successful interaction that's in line with expectations. That is, to satisfy the audience. In order to do this, people need to carefully control the information others receive about them, in a process called impression management. Like, if you're out on a first date, you're not gonna talk about how your last relationship ended, because you don't want to create a bad impression. But impression management isn't merely a matter of what you say and don't say. It's also a matter of what you wear and what you do. That is to say, it's a matter of what Goffman referred to as props and nonverbal communication. Props, as you know, are just objects that performers use to help them make a certain impression: So if you want to look professional, you wear a suit. If you want to look studious, make sure you're reading a book. And the setting can be a prop too: Being the one standing at the front of the classroom is like 50% of what it takes to look like a teacher. And nonverbal communication includes body language - like standing up straight in order to look respectable, and maintaining or averting eye contact - as well as gestures, like waving hello to your friend. Together, props and nonverbal communication are both examples of what Goffman called sign vehicles: things we use to help convey impressions to people we interact with. Those vehicles are important aspects of the performance, but really the most fundamental distinction is the one between what's part of the performance and what isn't - in other words, what the audience sees, and what they don't. Goffman called this frontstage and backstage. Frontstage is where the audience is and where the performance happens, while backstage is where the performer can drop the performance and prepare. Often the things we do backstage would totally ruin the performance we're trying to maintain frontstage. A teacher cursing floridly while grading papers would be considered backstage: important preparation for teaching is happening, but if any of her students - that is, the audience - saw her, it would totally ruin the performance, because it defies expectations of how teachers are supposed to act. And not all performances are one-person shows. The students, for instance, are all on what Goffman calls a team; they're all working together to give a performance collectively for the teacher. This doesn't mean they're all friends, or that they even like each other. It just means that they all need to work together to pull it off the show of being a good, attentive class. This is why your classmate whispers the answer to you: They're helping you maintain the class's performance of attentiveness by acting as a teammate. And the teacher goes on teaching. It's important to understand that, in Goffman's analysis, the performances that everyone does all the time aren't necessarily adversarial: The students perform for the teacher, and the teacher performs for the students, but everyone involved wants the performance to go smoothly. You may not ever win an Oscar. But according to dramaturgical analysis, your social interactions are where your statuses, roles, and all of the expectations that they entail, come together for you to give, literally, the performance of your life. And that performance is the stuff of social reality. Today we learned about social interaction. We talked about statuses, how you come to have them, and how they can conflict. Then we talked about how statuses impact your behavior by determining what roles you have. We explored why those roles matter by talking about the socially constructed nature of reality. Finally, we learned about the theory of dramaturgical analysis and how we can understand social interaction as in terms of theatrical performance.

Erving Goffman and the Performed Self video

all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players they have their exits and their entrances and one man in his time plays many parts the sociologist Erving Goffman took these lines from as you like it very seriously in his dramaturgical account of human interaction he argued that we display a series of masks to others in acting roles controlling and staging how we appear ever concerned with how we are coming across constantly trying to set ourselves in the best light according to Goffman we play a range of different parts determined by the situations we take ourselves to be in and how we think we are coming across we adapt what we are depending on who we are interacting with this is most apparent in awkward situations where we suddenly find ourselves trying to play two inconsistent roles as for example when we accidentally encounter friends from very different social groups and have to juggle masks the analogy with acting only goes so far for Goffman though because in his view there is no true self no identifiable performer behind the roles the roles just are the performer he challenged the idea that each of us has a more or less fixed character a psychological identity at least in the role of author of the presentation of self in everyday life he did

Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism Explained in One Minute Transcript

capitalism revolves around private 0:01 property products and services are 0:03 supposed to be provided by individuals 0:04 who sell on the open market based on 0:06 supplying them in however people like 0:08 Karl Marx considered capitalism unfair 0:10 towards the average worker and wanted to 0:12 create a system in which everyone is 0:13 equal 0:14 Marx said capitalism needs to initially 0:16 be replaced by socialism under socialism 0:18 the state would gain control over the 0:20 means of production such as land and 0:21 natural resources in his view socialism 0:24 itself would eventually be replaced by 0:25 communism under which absolutely 0:27 everyone is equal and the state doesn't 0:29 even have to exist so far contrary to 0:31 what most people think communism as 0:33 defined by Marx never materialized 0:35 anywhere even in the USSR you still in a 0:38 state and therefore it was not something 0:39 Marx would consider communism it was 0:41 still socialism as of 1848 socialism 0:44 spread to a lot of countries this 0:46 economic model however wasn't very 0:47 efficient as illustrated by the poor 0:49 economic performance of the USSR and the 0:51 countries under its sphere of influence 0:52 today that form of socialism only exists 0:55 in isolated countries such as North 0:56 Korea and Venezuela instead socialism is 0:59 more and we now have three main trends 1:01 one Chinese socialism with the high dose 1:03 of capitalism but no democracy two 1:05 democratic socialism such as in northern 1:07 Europe with democracy and private 1:09 property but heavy redistribution 1:10 through high levels of taxation three 1:12 socialism as a component of capitalism 1:14 president countries such as the US or 1:16 the UK which lean more towards 1:18 capitalism but still have state-funded 1:19 social programs as can be seen pure 1:21 communism and capitalism don't exist at 1:23 this point and instead we have various 1:25 combinations between the two

Crash Course Transcript: Social Stratification

magine two people. Two extremely wealthy people. 0:04 One of them inherited their money, acquiring it through the luck that comes with being born to owners of immense amounts of property and wealth. 0:10 And the other person worked for what they have. 0:12 They started at the bottom, and through years of hard work and clever dealing, they built a business empire. 0:17 Now: which one would you say deserves their wealth? 0:21 Sociologically, the interesting thing here isn't your answer, not really. 0:24 It's the fact that different societies in different times and places have different answers to this question. 0:30 Because the question of what it means to deserve wealth, or success, or power, is a matter of social stratification. 0:37 [Theme Music] 0:48 Social stratification is what we're talking about, when we talk about inequality. 0:51 It's a system by which society categorizes people, and ranks them in a hierarchy. 0:55 Everything from social status and prestige, to the kind of job you can hold, to your chances of living in poverty, are affected by social stratification. 1:02 That's because, one of the first principles of social stratification is that it's universal, but variable. 1:07 It shows up in every society on the planet, but what exactly it looks like - 1:11 how it divides and categorizes people, and the advantages or disadvantages that come with that division - vary from society to society. 1:18 Realizing that social stratification exists in every society brings us to another principle: 1:22 that stratification is a characteristic of society, and not a matter of individual differences. 1:27 People are obviously all different from each other, so we might assume that stratification is just a kind of natural outcome of those differences, but it's not. 1:34 We know this because we can see the effects of social stratification on people, independent of their personal choices or traits: 1:40 For example, children of wealthy families are more likely to live longer and be healthier, to attend college, and to excel in school than children born into poverty. 1:49 And they're also more likely to be wealthy themselves when they grow up. 1:52 And this highlights another key principle of social stratification: 1:55 It persists across generations. 1:57 So, stratification serves to categorize and rank members of society, resulting in different life chances. 2:02 But generally, society allows some degree of social mobility, or changes in position within the social hierarchy. 2:07 People sometimes move upward or downward in social class, and this is what we usually think of when we talk about social mobility. 2:13 But more common in the United States is horizontal mobility, changing positions without changing your standing in the social hierarchy. 2:19 This generally happens when a person moves between jobs that pay about the same and have about the same occupational prestige. 2:25 Like stratification itself, social mobility isn't just a matter of individual achievement; there are structural factors at play, too. 2:31 In fact, we can talk specifically about structural social mobility: 2:35 when a large number of people move around the hierarchy because of larger societal changes. 2:39 When a recession hits, and thousands of people lose their jobs and are suddenly downwardly mobile, that's structural mobility. 2:45 But stratification isn't just a matter of economic forces and job changes. 2:49 Which brings us to another aspect of social stratification: 2:51 It isn't just about economic and social inequalities; it's also about beliefs. 2:56 A society's cultural beliefs tell us how to categorize people, and they also define the inequalities of a stratification system as being normal, even fair. 3:04 Put simply: if people didn't believe that the system was right, it wouldn't last. 3:09 Beliefs are what make systems of social stratification work. 3:12 And it's these beliefs about social stratification that inform what it means to deserve wealth, or success, or power. 3:18 These four principles give us a better understanding of what social stratification is, but they still haven't told us much about what it looks like in the real world. 3:26 So, sociologists classify stratification systems as being either closed or open. 3:30 Closed systems tend to be extremely rigid and allow for little social mobility. 3:35 In these systems, social position is based on ascribed status, or the social position you inherit at birth. 3:40 On the other hand, open systems of stratification allow for much more social mobility, both upward and downward. 3:46 Social position tends to be achieved, not ascribed. 3:48 Now, these terms are pretty theoretical, so let's look at some examples of more closed or open systems, as well as societies that fall in the middle. 3:55 The archetypal closed system is a caste system. 3:57 Of these, India's caste system is probably one of the best known. 4:01 And while it's a social system of decreasing importance, it still holds sway in parts of rural India, and it has a strong legacy across the country. 4:07 Let's go to the Thought Bubble: 4:08 The traditional caste system contains four large divisions, called varnas: Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Sudra. 4:15 Together these varnas encompass hundreds of smaller groups called jatis at the local level. 4:19 The caste system in its traditional form is a clear example of an extremely rigid, closed, and unequal system. 4:25 Caste position not only determined what jobs were acceptable, but it also strongly controlled its members' everyday lives and life outcomes. 4:31 The system required endogamy, or marriage within your own caste category. 4:35 And in everyday life, the caste system determined who you could interact with and how, 4:40 with systems of social control restricting contact between lower and higher castes. 4:44 And this whole system was based on a set of strong cultural and religious beliefs, 4:48 establishing caste as a right of birth and living within the strictures of your caste as a moral and spiritual duty. 4:54 Thanks Thought Bubble. 4:55 We see a variation of the caste system in feudal Europe with the division of society into three orders or estates: 5:00 the nobility, the clergy, and the commoners. 5:02 Again, a person's birth determined his social standing; 5:05 commoners, for instance, paid the most taxes and owed labor to their local lord. 5:09 So they had little expectation that they'd rise above their station. 5:12 The whole social order was justified on the belief that it was ordained by god, with the nobility ruling by so-called divine right. 5:19 Both caste systems use ancestry and lineage as a main principle of social stratification, 5:23 but race has also been used as the main distinction in closed social systems. 5:27 The South African system of apartheid, for instance, maintained a legally enforced separation between black people and white people for decades. 5:34 Apartheid denied black people citizenship, the ability to own land, and any say whatsoever in the national government. 5:40 The Jim Crow laws of the American South were another example, as was slavery before that. 5:44 In contrast with caste systems, class systems are the archetypal open systems. 5:49 They aren't based solely on ascribed status at birth. 5:52 Instead they combine ascribed status and personal achievement in a way that allows for some social mobility. 5:57 Class is the system of stratification we have in American society. 6:00 The main difference between caste and class systems is that class systems are open, 6:05 and social mobility is not legally restricted to certain people. 6:08 There aren't formally defined categories in the same way there are in the Traditional Indian Caste system. 6:13 Being in the "under-class" in the U.S. is not equivalent to being an "untouchable" from India. 6:18 In class systems, the boundaries between class categories are often blurred, 6:21 and there's greater opportunity for social mobility into and out of class positions. 6:26 The American system of stratification is founded on this very idea, in fact: 6:30 that it's possible, through hard work and perseverance, to move up the social hierarchy, to achieve a higher class standing. 6:36 And this points to another difference in systems of stratification: 6:39 Instead of ancestry, lineage, or race being the key to social division, 6:43 the American system has elements of a meritocracy, a system in which social mobility is based on personal merit and individual talents. 6:50 The American dream is that anyone, no matter how poor, can "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" 6:55 and become upwardly class mobile, through nothing but hard work and gumption. 6:59 The American system is certainly more meritocratic than feudal Europe or traditional India; 7:03 but the idea of meritocracy is as much a justification for inequality as it is an actual principle of stratification. 7:09 In an open, class-based system of stratification, it's easy to believe that anyone who's not upwardly mobile deserves their poverty. 7:16 Because a meritocratic class system is supposed to be open, it's easy to ignore the structural factors that influence class standing. 7:23 But just as the Indian caste system and feudal estate system placed their limits on certain groups, 7:27 the American class system limits just how far hard work can take some people. 7:32 The US class system tends to reproduce existing class inequalities, 7:35 because the advantages that you start with have an incredibly powerful impact on where you can end up. 7:40 This is part of the reason that the US is still stratified along race and gender lines. 7:44 That said, these inequalities are no longer explicitly enshrined in the law, which is an example of the greater openness of class systems. 7:51 Because of this openness, class systems also have a greater likelihood of opportunity for individuals to experience status inconsistency: 7:57 a situation where a person's social position has both positive and negative influences on their social status 8:03 Stratification isn't just a matter of one thing after all. 8:06 When we talk about socioeconomic status, for instance, we're including three things: 8:09 income, education, and occupational prestige. 8:12 An example of status inconsistency is an adjunct professor who's very well educated, but earns a low income. 8:18 There's an inconsistency among these different aspects of their social status; 8:22 low income tends to decrease social status while at the same time, a high level of education 8:28 and the societal respect for the occupation of college professor improves social status. 8:32 All these comparisons between closed and open systems might make it sound like they're totally different: 8:37 a system is either one or the other. 8:40 But really they're two poles on a spectrum. 8:42 Not every society is strictly a caste system or a class system. 8:46 Modern Britain, for instance, is a good illustration of a mixed system of stratification. 8:50 It still maintains a limited caste system of nobility as a legacy of the feudal system of estates, 8:55 which survives alongside, and helps reinforce, a class system similar to what we have in the U.S. 9:00 And some systems of stratification even claim that its citizens are entirely equal, as the Soviet Union did. 9:06 Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the USSR was established as a theoretically classless society. 9:12 But inequality is more than just economic. 9:14 And Soviet society was stratified into four groups, each of which held various amounts of political power and prestige: 9:20 apparatchiks or government officials, intelligentsia, industrial workers, and the rural peasantry. 9:25 So, like I mentioned before, stratification is universal, but variable. 9:29 If you want to study a society, one of the things that you need to look at is that way that it's stratified, and whether, and how, social mobility occurs. 9:36 Today we learned about social stratification. 9:39 We talked about four basic principles of a sociological understanding of stratification. 9:43 We discussed open and closed systems of stratification, 9:46 and finally we talked about examples of different kinds of stratification systems, including caste systems and class systems.

Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality with Jelly Beans Transcript

race ethnicity and nationality are three terms that gets thrown around a lot, and 0:08 all too often they're used interchangeably, ignored, or just used incorrectly. But 0:12 each of these words actually has a very distinct meaning and I'm gonna talk 0:16 about them today using my favorite candy. Jellybeans. Let's start with Race. Now, you 0:21 may have heard someone say "race is a human construct" and that's true 0:26 race is a mode of categorization that's based on physical appearance, so in the case 0:29 of jellybeans race is color. Because race is based on appearance, to some 0:34 degree it's ascribed - meaning that people are assigned and racial categories based 0:38 on what other people see. Even if somebody could be mistaken for a certain 0:42 racial category can still apply to them. 0:45 These categories of fluid and our ideas of regional groupings change all the 0:48 time. It's also important to remember that a person can have parents with two 0:52 different racial backgrounds, the population of the world is becoming 0:55 increasingly mixed, but even a person with multiple races will still 0:59 ultimately belong to a racial category themselves whether or not it's the same 1:03 as their parents. Race is a huge factor in daily life, but it isn't the 1:08 whole picture. The term race does not capture the complexities of ethnicity 1:12 ethnicity refers to the ethnic group or groups that a person belongs to. It's a 1:18 part of a person's heritage and ancestry, and the case of Jellybeans ethnicity is 1:23 like the flavor. Two people who were in the same racial group can still have 1:27 very different ethnicities. For example all of these are red but this one is 1:31 cinnamon and this one is cherry. Two people in the same racial group can and 1:35 often do have very different backgrounds. It's also important to note that there are 1:39 some groups who are unable to trace their specific ethnic heritage because of 1:43 things like slavery assimilation and genocide. Ethnicity is a huge part of 1:47 identity formation and development but it's still not the same as nationality. 1:52 The word nationality refers to someone's national origin, the country where they 1:56 hold citizenship. For jellybeans, nationality is like the bag that a bean comes from. People 2:01 of the same race or ethnicity can come from all different nations, like the 2:05 watermelon bean that's in camo mix and kids mix or the lemon-lime bean that's in 2:09 all three. And nationality is flexible: if a person immigrates, their nationality 2:14 can change. People can have dual citizenship or sometimes no citizenship 2:18 at all. So now you know! As a quick recap race is a mode of categorization based on 2:25 physical appearance - like the color of a jelly bean. Ethnicity as a person's 2:29 actual ethnic background based on their ancestry - like the flavor of a jelly bean. 2:32 And nationality is the place where person holds citizenship, which is like 2:36 the jellybean's bag. Now that you know the difference you can having much more 2:40 comprehensive conversation about identity issues. Thanks for watching! I hope 2:44 you enjoyed this video because I totally enjoyed eating these jelly beans afterward! AllScienceListenableWatched