SOC 100: Exam #2

Ch 6 Labelling Theory

Definition: the belief that individuals subconsciously notice how others see or label them, and their reactions to those labels over time form the basis of their self-identity. The labeling theory of social deviance offers insight into how people become deviants. - According to this theory, individuals subconsciously notice how others see or label them, and their reactions to those labels over time form the basis of their self-identity. - It is only through the social process of labeling that we create deviance by assigning shared meanings to acts. We all know that stealing, trespassing, and vandalizing are wrong, abnormal, and criminal behavior, but these acts are considered deviant only because of our shared meanings about the sanctity of private property and our rules about respecting that property. In 1963, Howard S. Becker, a proponent of labeling theory, made precisely this point, arguing that individuals don't commit crimes in a vacuum. - Rather, social groups create deviance, first by setting the rules for what's right and wrong, and second by labeling wrongdoers as outsiders. - Offenders are not born; they are made. - They are a consequence of how other people apply rules and sanctions to them. Social groups create rules about the correct or standard mode of conduct for social actors. - When these rules are broken, society's reaction to the act determines if the offense counts as deviance. Becker also argues that not only are deviant acts created by a process of labeling but deviants are also created by a process of labeling. - If you break a rule—say, accidentally burn down an apartment—but your violation is not labeled a crime or otherwise recognized as deviant, then you are not recognized as a criminal or deviant. We become (or don't become) deviant only in interaction with other social actors. - It is this social reaction to an act, and the subsequent labeling of that act and offender, that create social deviance. Another example of a social process may help illustrate the power of labeling theory. - As part of a psychology experiment, a group of eight adults with steady employment and no history of mental illness presented themselves at different psychiatric inpatient hospitals and complained of hearing voices (Rosenhan, 1973). - Each of the pseudo-patients was admitted after describing the alleged voices, which spoke words like "thud," "empty," and "hollow." - In all cases, the pseudo-patients were admitted with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. - The researchers instructed the pseudo-patients, once they were hospitalized, to stop "simulating any symptoms of abnormality." Each pseudo-patient "behaved on the ward as he 'normally' behaved." - Still, the doctors and staff did not suspect that the pseudo-patients were imposters. - Instead, the treating psychiatrists changed their diagnosis of schizophrenia to "schizophrenia in remission." - Something even more troubling than the misdiagnosis occurred. - Once the pseudo-patients had been labeled insane, all their subsequent behavior was interpreted accordingly. Labeling Theory - For something to be "deviant," it has to be labeled as deviant - The same act may be considered deviant in some groups but not others - Ex: a solider taking someone's life (some may see it as an act of heroism while others violence and hate) Deviance is a process Labels influence a person's self-concept Focuses on the labels given and viewed based on society.

Ch 8 Glass Ceiling

Definition: an invisible limit on women's climb up the occupational ladder. When women do enter more prestigious corporate worlds, they often encounter gendered barriers to reaching the very top: the so-called glass ceiling, which effectively is an invisible limit on women's climb up the occupational ladder. Sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter argues in her classic study Men and Women of the Corporation (1977) that the dearth of women in top corporate positions results from a cultural conflation of authority with masculinity. - In Indesco, the fictitious name of the corporation Kanter studied, she found that most people believed that men and women come to occupy the kinds of jobs for which they are naturally best suited. - To the contrary, Kanter showed, the job often makes the person; the person doesn't make the job. Male peers tend to rely on gender stereotypes when interpreting a token's behavior, seeing female managers as "seductresses, mothers, pets," or tough "iron maidens." - When a token female manager botches the job, it just goes to show that women can't handle the corporate world and should be kept out of it. Similarly, Jennifer L. Pierce's (1995) study of law firms showed that sexual stereotypes, as much as organizational structure, are underlying causes of job segregation. - Paralegals—who are 86 percent female—are expected to be deferential (that is, they should not stick up for themselves), caring, and even motherly toward the trial lawyers for whom they work. - Given the adversarial model of the US legal system, trial lawyers, in contrast, perform what Pierce calls masculine emotional labor. - To excel in the job takes aggression, intimidation, and manipulation. - Even though almost half of law school graduates are female, women make up only 16 percent of partners at firms (Scharf & Flom, 2010). - When a woman joins the higher ranks of trial lawyering, she's likely to face exclusion from informal socializing with her colleagues (no drinks after work), deflation of her job status (frequently being mistaken for a secretary), and difficulty bringing clients into the firm. Thus female litigators find themselves in a double bind not experienced by their male counterparts. - When deploying courtroom tactics of aggression and intimidation—the very qualities that make a male lawyer successful and respected—women litigators find themselves being called "bitches," "obnoxious," and "shrill." - But when they fail to act like proper "Rambo litigators" in the courtroom, women are equally chided for being "too nice" and "too bashful." - The trade-off between being a good woman and being a successful lawyer adds yet another obstacle for women to make it to the top in male-dominated jobs—and that's not even taking into account the added burden of sexual harassment in the workplace.

Ch 8 Homosexual (Part 2)

Though based on questionable data, Alfred Kinsey's 1948 study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male suggested that at least 10 percent of men were homosexual. - He challenged the psychiatric model of homosexuals as perverse and abnormal and instead viewed sexuality as a continuum. - Most people, he claimed, experience both heterosexual and homosexual desires and behaviors. - Kinsey's figures have since been disputed—his sampling was not representative of the US population as a whole—but the basic idea holds. - Across the globe and throughout history, there has been more or less the same degree of homosexual behavior. What is different across time and place, however, is how sexuality is perceived. Gender often plays a large role. - For example, Yale historian George Chauncey makes the case in Gay New York (1994) that in early twentieth-century New York, an emerging working-class gay world was split between masculine men (tops) and the effeminate men who solicited them (bottoms). - As long as men stuck to their masculine gender scripts, no matter how often they engaged in gay sex, they were not considered abnormal like the more feminine men, who were derided for their effeminacy. The reverse is true among the travesti, transgender prostitutes in Brazil. - Anthropologist Don Kulick (1998) conducted an ethnography of the travesti, males who adopt female names, clothing styles, hairstyles, cosmetic practices, and linguistic pronouns; ingest female hormones; and inject industrial silicone directly into their bodies to give themselves breasts and round buttocks or bunda. - They display stereotypically feminine traits, yet they do not self-identify as women. In fact, they think it is both repugnant and impossible for men to try to become women. - Kulick argues that in Brazil, gender is determined by sexual practice: "What one does in bed has immediate and lasting consequences for the way one is perceived (and the way one can perceive oneself) as a gendered being. - If one penetrates, in this particular configuration of sexuality and gender, one is a 'man.' If one expresses interest in the penis of a male, and especially if one 'gives'—allows oneself to be penetrated by a male—then one is no longer a man." - However, the travesti do not think they are women; they think of themselves as travesti, men who emulate women but are not women. The primacy of penetration as a determinant of gender is common across cultures and challenges Americans to look beyond chromosomes and hormones to practices and cultural context. While same-sex relations have occurred in several different cultures throughout history, homosexual identity (i.e., "homosexual" as a term to describe a type of person) emerged in 1850. - During the Victorian era. Foucault: Discourses on sexuality emerged; the state then aimed to assert power. - Focuses on the historical timeline of the Victorian era. - Strict cultural attitudes and societal restrictions between sexuality and sexual behavior. Homosexuality began to be understood as a personality type since 1850. - Was listed as a mental disorder until 1973.

Ch 7 Social Mobility (Part 1)

(Part 1) Definition: the movement between different positions within a system of social stratification in any given society. Social mobility, the movement between different positions within a system of social stratification in any given society. Pitirim A. Sorokin (1959) emphasized the importance of not just looking at the mobility of individuals but also examining group mobility. Sorokin noted that social mobility can be either horizontal or vertical. - Horizontal social mobility means a group or individual transitioning from one social status to another situated more or less on the same rung of the ladder. - Examples of this might be a secretary who changes firms but retains her occupational status, a Methodist person who converts to Lutheranism, a family that migrates to one city from another, or an ethnic group that shifts its typical job category from one form of unskilled labor to another. - Vertical social mobility, in contrast, refers to the rise or fall of an individual (or group) from one social stratum to another. - We can further distinguish two types of vertical mobility: ascending and descending (more commonly termed upward and downward). - An individual who experiences ascending vertical mobility either rises from a lower stratum into a higher one or creates an entirely new group that exists at a higher stratum. - Ugo's promotion to regional manager at Sears is an example of rising from a lower stratum to a higher one. - By becoming a manager, he has changed his class position, a change that confers both a higher salary and more prestige. - Descending vertical mobility can similarly take either of two forms: individual or group. - One way to think of these forms is as the distinction between a particular person falling overboard from a ship and the whole ship sinking. - Sorokin (1959) asserted that "channels of vertical circulation necessarily exist in any stratified society and are as necessary as channels for blood circulation in the body." Most sociologists concerned with studying mobility focus on the process of individual mobility. - These studies generally fall into two types: mobility tables (or matrices) and status attainment models. - Constructing a mobility table is easy, although making sense of it is much more difficult (see Table 7.2 for an example). - Along the left-most column of a grid, list a number of occupations for people's fathers (it was traditionally done for males only). - Across the top, list the same occupational categories for the sons (the respondents). - There can be as many or as few categories as you see fit, so long as they are consistent for the parental and child generations. - The number of categories can be expanded, and it is not uncommon to see seven-, nine-, or even fourteen-category tables. - The key is filling in the boxes. - Probably not many people fall into the cell where the father is upper nonmanual and the son is a farmer. However, because of the decline in the agricultural workforce over the course of the twentieth century, you are likely to observe (at least in the United States) a fair bit of movement from farmwork in the parental generation to other occupations in the children's generation. - Changes in the distribution of jobs lead to what sociologists call structural mobility, mobility that is inevitable given changes in the economy. - With the decline of farmwork because of technology, the sons and daughters of farmers are by definition going to have to find other kinds of work. - This type of mobility stands in contrast to exchange mobility, in which, if we hold fixed the changing distribution of jobs, individuals trade jobs such that if one person is upwardly mobile it necessarily entails someone else being downwardly mobile.

Ch 9 Segregation

Definition: the legal or social practice of separating people on the basis of their race or ethnicity. A third paradigm for inter-group relations is segregation, the legal or social practice of separating people on the basis of their race or ethnicity. - An extreme case of segregation was the southern United States before the civil rights movement. - Under the Jim Crow system of segregation, reinforced by the Supreme Court's 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, a "separate but equal" doctrine ruled the South. - Strictly enforced separation existed between Blacks and Whites in most areas of public life—from residence to health facilities to bus seats, classroom seats, and even toilet seats. Although the Plessy decision ruled that separate facilities for Blacks and Whites were constitutional as long as they were equal, in real life the doctrine legalized unequal facilities for Blacks. - The NAACP has long recognized that segregation and discrimination are inescapably linked. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of education. - Social science data consistently show that an integrated educational experience for minority children produces advantages over a nonintegrated school experience. - School segregation almost always entails fewer educational resources and lower quality for minority students. Today most US schools are only marginally less segregated than they were in the mid-1960s. - It seems that 1988 was the least segregated year in US schools. - Namely, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found the number of "hyper-segregated schools, in which 90% or more of students are minorities, grew since 1988 from 5.7% to 18.4%" (Orfield et al., 2016). - School segregation is invariably linked to poverty, which is perpetuated by residential segregation, and perhaps this issue is the one we should be addressing if we are concerned about mitigating racial disparities. Residential segregation, scholars argue, maintains an urban underclass in perpetual poverty by limiting its ties to upwardly mobile social networks, which connect people to jobs and other opportunities. - When you live in the ghetto, your chances of landing a good job through your social network are indeed slim (Wilson, 1987). - It has also been suggested that residential segregation inflicts poverty through a "culture of segregation". As Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton (1993) have argued, the ghetto was deliberately and systematically constructed by Whites to keep Blacks locked into their (unequal) place. - Before 1900, Blacks faced job discrimination but relatively little residential segregation. Blacks and Whites lived side by side in urban centers, as the index of dissimilarity numbers in Figure 9.3 show. - The index of dissimilarity, the standard measure of segregation, captures the degree to which Blacks and Whites are evenly spread among neighborhoods in a given city. By the 1950s, urban slums were being razed in the name of "urban renewal," which essentially became a program of removal, as African Americans were relocated to concentrated public housing projects (Massey & Denton, 1993). - These deliberately discriminatory policies are perpetuated today by de facto segregation in the form of continued suburban White flight and the splintering of school districts along racial lines. - Some scholars argue that a new form of segregation has emerged in America: the criminal justice system.

Ch 7 Wealth

Definition: a family's or individual's net worth (i.e., total assets minus total debts). In 2015, half of the world's wealth was held by just 1% of the population Includes income, plus your assets, but minus your debt Bottom 40% of U.S. income earners own less than 1% of nation's wealth Recent trends in earnings in the United States suggest that there is an increasing divergence or inequality between the bulk of the people and the rich, but especially between the super-rich and the merely rich. - For instance, from 1950 to 1970, for every dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent of the American population, those in the top 0.01 percent earned an additional $162. Wealth is a family's or individual's net worth (total assets minus total debts). - For the majority of American families, assets include a home, cars, other real estate, and business assets, along with financial forms of wealth such as stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. - Put simply, wealth is everything you own minus debts such as mortgages on a home, credit card debt, and, as most of you will probably have, debt from student loans. Decisions by various companies become increasingly similar. - Many studies have suggested that these elite networks share practices, principles, and information that account for some of the surprising conformity in approaches to corporate governance and ethics. Historically, the upper class was often distinguished by not having to work. - (The economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen dubbed this group "the leisure class.") - Its members were able to maintain their lifestyle by collecting rent and/or other investment returns. - They were the aristocracy, the wealthy, the elite, the landowners. - The only way to join this sphere was by birth or (occasionally) marriage. The upper class was the basis for Marx's capitalist class. - In the United States, "upper class" is associated with income, wealth, power, and prestige. Parental wealth, meanwhile, is the most unequal by race—getting us the most racial bang for the buck, so to speak. - The typical African American family has about 10 percent of the net worth of the typical White family. Wealth also predicts college outcomes (though not as strongly as parental education). - So it would seem to be an ideal measure for balancing concerns about race and class diversity on campus. However, parental wealth faces an even greater problem of verification, potential gaming, and perverse incentives against savings. - For example, because Medicaid has strict asset limits, many families shift assets from one individual to another (or even get divorced) in anticipation of needing Medicaid's long-term care insurance component. - Similar shell games may emerge in response to offspring approaching their senior year of high school. - Unlike the case of education, however, where self-reporting is the only metric to go by for parental wealth, we can infer a lot based on a few factors that are less apt to be gamed. First, we can measure the median housing value of a community in which a student was raised. - This has been shown to be a very good proxy for individual wealth level. - If it were measured for all years from birth, the incentive to move to a poor-value neighborhood in the period just preceding college applications would be minimized. Second, other forms of wealth can be ascertained or imputed through property tax records, estate tax records, and schedules A through D of the federal income tax return. - While these individual-level measures could theoretically be gamed, the fact that they are measured over multiple years (as with the address of the applicant) minimizes such potential threats, and when combined with the neighborhood-level measures, such risk is further minimized.

Ch 7 Bourgeoise Society

Definition: a society of commerce (modern capitalist society, for example) in which the maximization of profit is the primary business incentive. The factory workers/own the means. They bring home more money but they rely on the proletariat.

Ch 8 Gender

Definition: a social position; behaviors and a set of attributes that are associated with sex identities. Gender ---> social Refers to the social meanings we apply to our sociology. Gender denotes a social position—namely, the set of social arrangements that are built around normative sex categories. - Sexuality, meanwhile, refers to desire, sexual preference, and sexual identity and behavior. Gender is one set of stories we tell each other to get by in the world. - It's a collectively defined guidebook that humans use to make distinctions among themselves, to comprehend an otherwise fuzzy mass of individuals. - But the gender story can change. And if gender is a human invention, we have to take it as seriously as we would any other institution, as Judith Lorber argues. Although gender is a social construction, it matters in the real world, organizing our day-to-day experiences and having profound and unequal consequences for the life chances of people—effects that themselves vary by the other social categories to which an individual belongs. - Gender is not just about people—institutions, occupations, and even nouns (in some languages) can all be gendered. - In this way gender ultimately embodies power struggles and how they organize daily life, from household economies and wage labor to birth control and babies' names. The study of gender boils down to seeing how the two spheres, nature and nurture, overlap, penetrate, and shape each other. - The biological world of sex and bodies does not exist outside of a social world, and the social world of human beings is always made up of human bodies. Studying the links between the two allows us to see the social construction of both gender and sex. Biological sex makes up the inside of the strip, whereas the social world—culture, experience, and gender—make up the outside. - But as happens in the contours of gender, the inside and outside surfaces are inseparable. - In thinking or talking about sex and gender, we often switch from one to the other without even noticing that we've changed our focus (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). People tend to think that gender difference is a natural cleavage between two static groups. - Men and women are naturally (that is, biologically) different, so they behave differently. The longer, sociological answer is that gender differences are much more fluid and ambiguous than we may care to admit. - Androgynous—that is, his gender presentation didn't seem obviously masculine or feminine. - There are plenty of people whose behaviors, occupations, and roles don't correspond neatly to essentialist expectations. But just because gender isn't tied to some fixed biological reality doesn't mean it doesn't have real consequences. - Gender establishes patterns of expectations for people, orders our daily lives, and is one of the fundamental building blocks of society—law, family, education, the economy, everything. The process of forming a gendered identity starts before a person is even born, as soon as the sex of a fetus is estimated or even earlier in the case of in vitro fertilization (IVF), where the sex chromosomes can be identified before implantation into the uterus. - Through socialization and personality development—such as being steered to certain games or ways of dressing, and even how they are named—many children acquire a gendered identity that, in most cases, reproduces the attitudes and values of their society. - We impose rigid boundaries to maintain a gender order, but if we look at how gender systems vary, we can expose those boundaries as social constructions. - Our challenge is to identify those systems and inequalities without unwittingly reproducing the binary thinking we wanted to investigate in the first place.

Ch 7 Class System

Definition: an economically based hierarchical system characterized by cohesive oppositional groups and somewhat loose social mobility. Modern form of stratification Based on economic position: one's occupation, income, or possessions - Ex: the US Social Class system This system is not fixed or permanent; there is room to move up or down The class system, an economically based hierarchical system characterized by cohesive oppositional groups and somewhat loose social mobility. Class means different things to different people, and there is no consensus among sociologists as to the term's precise definition. - For instance, some might define class primarily in terms of money, whereas others see it as a function of culture or taste. - Some people barely even notice it (consciously at least), whereas others feel its powerful effects in their daily lives. - Some controversy has existed about whether class is a real category or a category that exists in name only. As in the caste and estate systems, the lines that separate class categories in theory should be clearly demarcated, but there have been problems in drawing boundaries around class categories—for instance, upper class, middle class, and so on. - Some scholars have even argued that class should be abandoned as a sociological concept altogether. A class system implies an economic basis for the fundamental cleavages in society. - That is, class is related to position in the economic market. - Notions of class in sociological analysis are heavily influenced by two theorists, Karl Marx and Max Weber. In Marxist sociological analyses, every mode of production—from subsistence farming to small-scale cottage industries to modern factory production to the open-source information economy—has its own unique social relations of production, basically the rules of the game for various players in the process. - Thus, to talk about class in this Marxist language is to place an individual into a particular group that has a particular set of interests that often stand opposite to those of another group. Class is a relational concept. - That is, one can't gain information about a person's class by simply looking at his or her income. Class identity, in fact, does not correspond to an individual at all but rather corresponds to a role. - And an individual may, over the course of her career, change class positions as she changes jobs. Class positions of jobs themselves—that is, their roles with respect to the production process—do not change, however. For Marx, it all boils down to two antagonistic classes in a fully mature capitalist society: the employing class (the bourgeoisie or capitalist class) and the working class (the proletariat). - The proletariat sells its labor to the bourgeoisie in order to receive wages and thereby survive. But, according to Marx, the bourgeoisie extract surplus value from the proletariat, even when a few of the proletarians make high incomes. - As this is a fixed-pie or zero-sum view of economic production, an exploitative and hence inherently conflict-ridden relationship exists between the two classes. The central aspect of Marxist class analysis is this exploitation—capitalists taking more of the value of the work of laborers than they repay in wages. - Because the two-class model does not appear to adequately describe the social world as we find it in most modern capitalist economies, more recent Marxist theorists such as Erik Olin Wright have elaborated this basic model with the concept of contradictory class locations. Wright suggests that people can occupy locations in the class structure that fall between the two "pure" classes. - For instance, managers might be perceived as part of both working class and capitalist class: They are part of the working class insofar as they sell their labor to capitalists in order to live (and don't own the means of production), yet they are in the capitalist class insofar as they control (or dominate) workers within the production process. Conversely, the petit bourgeoisie, a group including professionals, craftsmen, and other self-employed individuals or small-business owners, according to Wright, occupy a capitalist position in that they own capital in the form of businesses, but they aren't fully capitalist because they don't control other people's labor. Marxists use these distinctions to analyze how various classes rise and fall under the capitalist system. Max Weber takes an alternative view of class. - He argues that a class is a group that has as its basis the common life chances or opportunities available to it in the marketplace. - In other words, what distinguishes members of a class is that they have similar value in the commercial marketplace in terms of selling their own property and labor. - Thus, for Weber, property and lack of property are the basic categories for all class situations. Weber's paradigm is distinct from the Marxist class framework, where the basic framework is antagonistic and exploitative; rather, for Weber, class is gradated, not relational. - Put another way, your class as a newly minted attorney does not affect or determine my class as an accountant, computer programmer, or day laborer.

Ch 7 Socioeconomic Status

Definition: an individual's position in a stratified social order. Socioeconomic status (SES): combines position, status, power, connections, tastes, etc. Sociologists often use the phrase socioeconomic status to describe an individual's position in a stratified social order. - When sociologists talk about socioeconomic status, they are referring to any measure that attempts to classify groups, individuals, families, or households in terms of indicators such as occupation, income, wealth, and education. - Although the boundaries between socioeconomic categories are not sharply defined, the lay public generally divides society into the upper class, the middle class, the working class, and the poor.

Ch 8 Essentialism

Definition: arguments explaining social phenomena in terms of natural, biological, or evolutionary inevitabilities. Any entity, such as an individual, group, object, or concept, has innate and universal qualities.

Ch 8 Black Feminism

Definition: centers the experiences of Black women, understanding their position in relation to racism, sexism, and classism, as well as other social and political identities. Our actions are influenced by structural forces that we might not even be aware of, such as class or race privilege. - As Patricia Hill Collins (1990) claims, we "do" a lot more than gender; gender intersects with race, class, nationality, religion, and so forth. - Black feminists have made the case that early liberal feminism was largely by, about, and for White middle-class women. In trying to answer the woman question and explain women's oppression, early feminists assumed that all women were in the same oppressed boat. - In so doing, they effaced multiple lines of fragmentation and difference into one simple category: woman. - For example, by championing women's rights to work outside the home in The Feminine Mystique (1997), leading second-wave feminist Betty Friedan ignored the experiences of thousands of working-class women and women of color who were already working, sometimes holding down two jobs to support their families. - Indeed, a third wave of feminism focuses on how the identities surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality intersect with other meaningful social categories like race or class in a process called intersectionality, as articulated by critical race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1989) and sociologist Beatrice Potter Webb back in 1913. As illustrated by the concept of intersectionality, "woman" is not a stable or obvious category of identity. Rather, women are differentially located in what Collins calls a matrix of domination. - A 40-year-old poor, Black, straight, single mother living in rural Georgia will not have the same conception of what it means to be a woman as a 25-year-old professional, White, single, lesbian in Chicago. - More fundamentally, Collins (1990) argues, Black women face unique oppressions that White women don't. - For instance, Black women experience motherhood in ways that differ from the White masculinist ideal of the family, as "bloodmothers," "othermothers," and "community othermothers," thus revealing that White masculine notions of the world do not capture the daily lived experiences of many Black women. Gender, sexual orientation, race, class, nationality, ability, and other factors all intersect. - Just as some women enjoy privilege by virtue of their wealth, class, education, and skin color, some men are disadvantaged by their lack of these same assets. As bell hooks (1984) noted, if women's liberation is aimed at making women the social equals of men, women should first stop and consider which men they would like to equal. - Certainly, not all men are privileged over all women. Making universal comparisons of men to women misses these nuances and implicitly excludes marginally positioned people from the discussion. - For example, men of color certainly experience oppression that intersects with their gender identities (for example, Black men bearing the brunt of police harassment). Even going beyond demographic groups, men who do not embody or perform the dominant form of masculine behavior often suffer for it, occupying a subordinate status (Connell, 1987). - Power comes from many different angles; it doesn't sit evenly on a plane for all women.

Ch 8 Cisgender

Definition: describes people whose gender corresponds to their birth sex. Anyone who identifies by the gender they were assigned at birth.

Ch 7 Income

Definition: money received by a person for work, from transfers (gifts, inheritances, or government assistance), or from returns on investments. Growing disparities in income Money or dollars coming into you Economic position in class system The U.S. has most extreme income inequality in developed world Bottom 40% of U.S. income earners own less than 1% of nation's wealth - 1 in 5 American children live below poverty line The median income is everyone's income regardless of occupation or position. The bourgeoisie extract surplus value from the proletariat, even when a few of the proletarians make high incomes. Namely, various individuals in a society who earn similar incomes may not have much in common in terms of lifestyles (and therefore status). Recent trends in earnings in the United States suggest that there is an increasing divergence or inequality between the bulk of the people and the rich, but especially between the super-rich and the merely rich. - For instance, from 1950 to 1970, for every dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent of the American population, those in the top 0.01 percent earned an additional $162. Wealth is a family's or individual's net worth (total assets minus total debts). - For the majority of American families, assets include a home, cars, other real estate, and business assets, along with financial forms of wealth such as stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. - Put simply, wealth is everything you own minus debts such as mortgages on a home, credit card debt, and, as most of you will probably have, debt from student loans. Decisions by various companies become increasingly similar. - Many studies have suggested that these elite networks share practices, principles, and information that account for some of the surprising conformity in approaches to corporate governance and ethics. How and why has this differential income growth happened? - One factor may be the changing nature of available employment. - As the technological sector expands, the majority of jobs are being created either at very high skill levels with correspondingly high salaries (engineers and hedge fund managers) or at very low levels with little room for upward mobility (baristas at Starbucks who serve lattes to those hedge fund managers). - And the fastest-growing job category for those with no more than a high-school education is food preparation and service. - Furthermore, this bifurcated job growth is reflected in the change in educational expectations of potential employers. Some argue that along with income inequality, income insecurity (or volatility) has also increased for the middle classes. - However, other researchers argue that income instability is not the result of fluctuating earnings or job insecurity but rather stems from two major changes in family dynamics. - First, there are more changes to household structure today because of divorce and remarriage; second, women now play a greater role in breadwinning (even exceeding men as a proportion of the workforce at one point during the recent recession), but they also enter and exit the workforce with greater frequency than men.

Ch 8 Homosexual (Part 1)

Definition: the social identity of a person who has sexual attraction to and/or relations with people of the same sex. Both the Siwans of North Africa and the Keraki, also in New Guinea, prefer homosexuality to heterosexuality, for fairly straightforward, practical reasons (Kimmel, 2000). - Because every male is homosexual during his adolescence and then bisexual after heterosexual marriage, limiting straight sex keeps down the birthrate. - In these cultures with scant resources, homosexuality makes practical sense to limit the chances of teen pregnancy and overpopulation. The connections between sex and power are best exemplified in the social construction of the homosexual in the current West, the social identity of a person who has sexual attraction to and/or relations with people of the same sex. - For most of the past century, the dominant view has been that individuals are born either homosexual or heterosexual, gay or straight, queer or normal. - Sexual orientation was thought of as a kind of personhood automatically acquired at birth or something carried in our genes (despite documented cases of identical twins in which one is straight and the other gay). Jane Ward (2015), for example, studied straight men who have sex with other men in the contemporary United States, including fraternity members, or military personnel who engage in sex acts with their compatriots as part of hazing, or men who answer ads to find other men to masturbate with. - Men in these examples engage in homosexual acts without adopting a homosexual identity (Silva, 2017). When do acts, behaviors, or desires crystallize into identities? French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) led the way to poststructuralist notions of the body and sexuality as historical productions. - In The History of Sexuality (1978), Foucault made the case that the body is "in the grip" of cultural practices. - That is, there is no pre-social or natural body; instead, culture is always already inscribed on our bodies. - Foucault further argued that the way in which we know our bodies is linked to power, and knowledge and power go hand in hand. As the population expanded in nineteenth-century Europe, newly formed states and their administrators developed a concern for population management. - The rise of scientific ways of thinking at the time led to the creation of what Foucault calls "bio-power," the control of populations by influencing patterns in births, deaths, and illnesses. Discourses on sexuality had by then surfaced. People talked about sex, scientists studied it, and government officials tried to regulate it, whereas a century before, all this sex talk did not exist. - With the development of the biological and human sciences in the nineteenth century, doctors wanted to know which kinds of sex were normal and which were deviant, and new attention was paid to policing those differences. By the late 1800s, "Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior [identity]" (Foucault, 1978). - In Foucault's account, the category of homosexuality arises from the efforts of government bureaucrats trying to assert their power (that of the state) over human populations. Meanwhile, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association listed homosexuality on their list of mental disorders until 1973. - Homosexuals were regarded as needing to be regulated, observed, studied, and most important, controlled. - Because everyone was capable of, or in danger of, sexual deviance, the urgency to confess one's sexuality grew, as did the scientific need for public surveillance. Who was gay? How could a homosexual be detected? Anyone could be a pervert—your professor, your roommate, even you! Even our language reflects the way sexual behavior becomes more than a single event among the many other behaviors that make up an individual's life—it often becomes a master status. - Today our society places a huge emphasis—our entire selfhood, according to Foucault—on sexuality. - Sexuality, in other words, is a prime factor that goes into the construction of gender—a dynamic that may not have been as important in days gone by. - Now, what you do (and with whom) defines who you are: not just how others see you, but how you experience yourself.

Ch 9 Assimilation

Definition: Robert Park's 1920s universal and linear model for how immigrants assimilate: they first arrive, then settle in, and achieve full assimilation in a newly homogenous country. Scholars have defined four broad forms that inter-group relations can take: assimilation, pluralism, segregation, and conflict. In the 1920s, sociologist Robert Park began to wonder what, on the one hand, held together the diverse populations in major American cities and, on the other hand, sustained their cultural differences. - He came up with a race relations cycle of stages: contact, competition, accommodation, and assimilation. - His model, called straight-line assimilation, was at first accepted as the universally progressive pattern in which immigrants arrive, settle in, mimic the practices and behaviors of the people who are already there, and achieve full assimilation in a newly homogenous country. Milton Gordon (1964) tweaked Park's model by suggesting multiple kinds of assimilation outcomes. - For Gordon, an immigrant population can pass through (or stall in) seven stages of assimilation: cultural, structural, marital, identification, attitude reception, behavior reception, and civic assimilation. Harold Isaacs (1975) noticed something that these theories of assimilation could not explain: People did not so easily shed their ethnic ties. - Ethnic identification, among White ethnics and everyone else, persisted even after a group attained certain levels of structural assimilation. Ernest Barth and Donald Noel (1972) noted that assimilation is not necessarily the end result for immigrants. - On the contrary, other outcomes such as exclusion, pluralism, and stratification are possibilities. A society with several distinct ethnic or racial groups is said to exhibit pluralism, meaning that a low degree of assimilation exists.

Ch 9 Symbolic Ethnicity

Definition: a nationality, not in the sense of carrying the rights and duties of citizenship but in the sense of identifying with a past or future nationality. For later generations of White ethnics, it is something not constraining but easily expressed, with no risks of stigma and all the pleasures of feeling like an individual. For Americans, Herbert Gans (1979b) called the voluntary, chosen form of ethnic identification "symbolic ethnicity." - While asserting symbolic ethnic identity was particularly difficult for my Italian friend, for most White middle-class Americans today symbolic ethnicity is largely a matter of choice. - It has no risk of stigma and confers the pleasures of feeling like an individual. In this way, the differences between race and ethnicity underscore the privileged position of Whites in America, who have the freedom to pick and choose their identities, to wave a flag in a parade, or to whip up Grandma's traditional recipe and freely show their ethnic backgrounds. - The surge of ethnic pride among White Americans today implies a false belief that all ethnic groups are the same, but in the very way that symbolic ethnicity is voluntary for White ethnics, it is not so for nonwhite Americans such as African Americans, Latinxs, and Asians (like my friend).

Ch 9 Subaltern

Definition: a subordinate, oppressed group of people. In Erving Goffman's (1959) terms, members of this group construct a front stage of acceptance, often using stereotypes to their own advantage to "play the part" in the presence of the dominant group (see Chapter 4). - Backstage, however, privately among their subaltern or oppressed group, they present a very different self.

Ch 9 Collective Resistance

Definition: an organized effort to change a power hierarchy on the part of a less powerful group in a society. A more overt form of resistance, the fourth paradigm of group responses to domination, would be collective resistance through a movement such as revolution or genocide or through nonviolent protest as in the US civil rights movement.

Ch 9 Genocide

Definition: the mass killing of a group of people based on racial, ethnic, or religious traits. The final paradigm of race relations is conflict relations, when antagonistic groups within a society live integrated in the same neighborhoods, hold the same jobs, and go to the same schools. - The result was genocide, the mass killing of a particular population based on racial, ethnic, or religious traits. - The Rwandan genocide was a stark reminder that when we speak of the myth or fiction of race, we cannot deny its reality in social life. A more overt form of resistance, the fourth paradigm of group responses to domination, would be collective resistance through a movement such as revolution or genocide or through nonviolent protest as in the US civil rights movement.

Ch 9 Discrimination

Definition: harmful or negative acts (not mere thoughts) against people deemed inferior on the basis of their racial category, without regard to their individual merit. On the individual level, racism can manifest itself as prejudice or discrimination. - Prejudice refers to thoughts and feelings about an ethnic or racial group, whereas discrimination is an act. Robert Merton (1949a) developed a diagram for thinking about the intersections of prejudice and discrimination (Figure 9.4). - One who holds prejudice and discriminates is an "active bigot." - This is the prototypical racist who puts his money (or burning cross) where his (or her) mouth is. - Those who are neither prejudiced nor discriminatory are "all-weather liberals," not only espousing ideologies of racial equality or talking the talk, but also walking the walk when faced with real choices. A "timid bigot" is one who is prejudiced but does not discriminate—a closet racist perhaps, who backs down when confronted with an opportunity for racist action. - Conversely, one who is not prejudiced but does discriminate is termed a "fair-weather liberal." - Despite the fair-weather liberal's inner ideological stance in favor of racial equality, he or she still discriminates, perhaps without knowing it. - In fact, the prime time for families to move out of integrated neighborhoods happens to be around the time when the eldest child of the family turns five and begins school.

Ch 9 Pluralism

Definition: the presence and engaged coexistence of numerous distinct groups in one society. Ernest Barth and Donald Noel (1972) noted that assimilation is not necessarily the end result for immigrants. - On the contrary, other outcomes such as exclusion, pluralism, and stratification are possibilities. And as others point out (Lieberson, 1961; Massey, 1995; Portes & Zhou, 1993), some immigrants assimilate more easily than others, depending on a variety of structural factors, like migration patterns; differences in contact with the dominant or majority groups; demographics including fertility, mortality rates, and age structure; and ultimately, power differentials among groups. - This is the case for the "new immigration," which, in comparison with the earlier era of European immigration (1901-30), is a large-scale influx of non-European immigration that began in the late 1960s and continues to the present. The new immigrants, largely from Hispanic and Asian countries, are racialized as nonwhites—even though Asians are widely considered a "model minority." - They therefore are subject to a different set of conditions for assimilating and face greater obstacles to their upward mobility. A society with several distinct ethnic or racial groups is said to exhibit pluralism, meaning that a low degree of assimilation exists. - A culturally pluralistic society has one large sociocultural framework with a diversity of cultures functioning within it. - This is the premise of multiculturalism in America. - Statistically speaking, in a pluralist country, no single group commands numerical majority status. - Switzerland, with its three linguistic groups—German, French, and Italian—is a striking example of ethnic autonomy and balance. Demographic projections suggest that Whites will make up about 46 percent of the US population by 2065 (Pew Research Center, 2015c). A broader definition of pluralism, however, is a society in which minority groups live separately but equally. Imagine America with no substantial stratification, no oppression, and no domination. - In Switzerland, despite slight income differences among ethnic groups (with the exception of recent immigrant groups like the Turkish), no one group dominates politically, but the same cannot be said for America.

Ch 6 Social Regulation

Definition: the number of rules guiding your daily life and, more specifically, what you can reasonably expect from the world on a day-to-day basis. At the heart of learned helplessness is the sense that we are unable to stave off the sources of our pain, that we have no control over our own well-being. - Durkheim studied a similar condition, which he termed anomie. Literally meaning "without norms," anomie is a sense of aimlessness or despair that arises when we can no longer reasonably expect life to be more or less meaningful. - Our sense of connection between our actions and values is eroded, because too little social regulation exists. Durkheim labeled suicide that resulted from insufficient social regulation anomic suicide. - For example, after the stock market crashed in 1929, many businessmen jumped out of skyscraper windows to their deaths. - These stockbrokers and investors may have felt that they did everything right and still ended up destitute. - For them, the connection between what they thought was the right thing to do—work hard on Wall Street—and just rewards was severed. - They had no idea how to cope with the changes. Durkheim's argument about anomic suicide seems intuitive when it refers to negative events rupturing our everyday lives, but the same principle also holds for positive life events. - For example, many lottery winners report spells of severe depression after winning millions of dollars, displaying another case of anomie. The final coordinate is fatalistic suicide, which occurs when a person experiences too much social regulation. Anomic Suicide --> Not enough regulation - Very prominent in industrial environments. - Ex: when an individual suffers extreme financial loss, the disappointment and stress drives the individual to take their own life. Fatalistic Suicide --> Too much regulation - Ex: when a slave completes suicide as a method of escape from the control of his or her owner.

Ch 9 Color-Blind Racism

Definition: the view that racial inequality is perpetuated by a supposedly color-blind stance that ends up reinforcing historical and contemporary inequities, disparate impact, and institutional bias by "ignoring" them in favor of a technically neutral approach. As this old kind of racism declines, race scholars are beginning to find traces of a new kind of racism gaining ground. - Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls this "color-blind racism." According to Howard Winant (2001), such new racial hegemony comes with "race-neutral" rhetoric and relies more on culture and nationality to explain differences between nonwhites and Whites than immutable physical traits. - The new line of thinking replaces biology with culture and presumes that there is something fixed, innate, and inferior about nonwhite cultural values. - In America, this kinder, gentler anti-Black ideology is characterized by the persistence of negative stereotyping, the tendency to blame nonwhites for their own problems, and resistance to affirmative action policy. - The irony is that since the civil rights triumphs of the 1960s, the official stance of formal equality has brought about subtler forms of prejudice and discrimination, making it harder to tackle racism and inequality. When a state proclaims racial equality, White privilege is let off the hook and goes unnoticed. In the new color-blind Europe, argues Neil MacMaster (2001), a "differentialist" or "cultural" racism has taken hold. - Characteristic of cultural racism is the call to protect national (White) identity from "criminal" and polluting cultural outsiders, constructing an image of "fortress Europe." Antirefugee commentary is one example of the new racist ideology. Although this dynamic is not completely color-blind, it is different from overt racism in that the motivation is not about race per se but about underlying characteristics that tend to be associated with race. - Finally, institutional racism can even be encoded into the educational system through test construction. - There has been much debate about cultural bias in testing. - Beyond this issue, however, is the effect of stereotypes on performance.

Ch 9 Ethnic Groups in the US - Latinxs

Latinx (the gender-neutral construction of Latino) means individuals who trace their ancestry back to Latin America. - So in theory, this group includes Brazilians who speak Portuguese and Belizeans who speak English. Hispanic means descended from (or identifying with) Spanish-speaking populations (including from Spain itself). - So, while they are not technically the same groups, the terms are often used interchangeably in practice. In 2018, the majority of Latinxs in the United States were from Mexico (about 61.9 percent), Puerto Rico (about 9.7 percent), Cuba (4 percent), and the Dominican Republic (3.5 percent) (US Census Bureau, 2020f). (Figure 9.1 provides a breakdown of the US Hispanic population by region of origin.) - They are a huge and rapidly expanding segment of the American population; in 2018 they made up approximately 18 percent of the population, surpassing African Americans (US Census Bureau 2020f). Latinxs also live in a wide array of locations, although they have clustered in the West Coast and Southwest regions (US Census Bureau, 2020g). Hispanics are often called an "in between" racial group because of their intermediate status, sandwiched between Whites and African Americans. - Unlike African Americans, the majority of Latinxs in America today have come by way of voluntary immigration, particularly during the last four decades of heavy, second-wave immigration. Puerto Ricans are the exception, because they have been able to travel freely to the United States since 1917, when Puerto Rico became an American territory and its inhabitants US citizens. - The chief motivation for Latinx immigration is economic because of America's high demand for labor in the service, agriculture, and construction industries. Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans all have diverse phenotypical traits that make racial distinctions of a unified Latinx type nearly impossible. - Mexicans are generally classified as "mestizos," a term referring to a racially mixed heritage that combines Native American and European traits. - And for instance, Puerto Ricans are often a mixture of African, European, and Indian backgrounds. At the moment, being Hispanic or Latinx is considered by the US government to be an ethnic identity, not a racial identity, although, as I mentioned above, many researchers consider Latinxs a racialized group. Take Cubans. - Most Cubans consider themselves Hispanic Whites, although their immigration status has changed drastically in recent years. The US federal government terminated its 35-year open-door policy toward Cuban refugees, and the heavy media coverage of Cubans arriving since then in small boats has led to stereotypes of a desperate "wetback" invasion. - Arrivals since the 1970s—who generally are from lower socioeconomic backgrounds in Cuban society—have met more resistance from their host society, consequently experiencing higher rates of unemployment, low-wage work, and dependence on welfare and charity than native Whites and previous Cuban émigrés.

Ch 9 Ethnic Groups in the US - Asian Americans

The term Asian American is very broad, encompassing diverse and sometimes clashing peoples from China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia. - The first wave of Asians to arrive in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century were predominantly laborers of Chinese, then Japanese, then Korean and Filipino origin. A second large wave of immigration is currently under way, mostly made up of well-educated and highly skilled people from all over Asia. Early Asian immigrants were perceived as a labor threat and therefore met with extreme hostility. - The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which led to a ban against the Chinese in 1902, marked the first time in American history in which a group was singled out and barred entry. Urban "Chinatowns" developed out of ghettos in which marginalized Chinese workers, mostly men, were forced to live. - Japanese immigrants faced similar hostilities and were formally barred entry by the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924. By 2018, Asian and mixed-Asian US residents amounted to 6.7 percent of the population. - This was a 28 percent increase since 2010, making Asian Americans the fastest-growing racial group (US Census Bureau, 2020n). They are most heavily concentrated in California, Hawaii, New York, Illinois, and Washington. Asian Americans overall find it a bit more difficult to be reemployed once they lose a job

Ch 9 Ethnic Groups in the US - Native Americans

According to archaeological findings, the original settlers of the North American continent arrived anywhere between 12,000 and 50,000 years ago from northeast Asia, traveling by foot on glaciers. - This is disputed by some tribes, such as the Ojibwe, who believe that their ancestors came from the east, not the west. Before European explorers arrived in significant numbers for extended periods in the fifteenth century (there is evidence that the Vikings had reached North America before then), the Indigenous population was anywhere between 10 and 100 million. - The tribes living here when Europeans showed up were geographically, culturally, and physically diverse, but they were categorically viewed as a single uncivilized group by arriving Spanish, French, and British explorers. - Even today, "Indians" in America are part of 280 distinct cultural groups (Gray & Nye, 2001). Foreshadowing the lack of respect to come, Columbus called all of the people he met Indians, despite their clear cultural differences, because he thought he was in India. - Confronted with foreign diseases and unfamiliar military technology, the Indians were quickly dominated by White invaders. - In Central and South America, the Spanish brutally enslaved them as labor for the mining industry. - In the northern parts of North America, French colonialists nurtured their relationships with the Indians in order to cultivate a profitable fur trade. - The British, chiefly concerned with acquiring land, settled colonies with the long-term goal of expanding the British state, dispossessing and "civilizing" America's Indigenous population in the process. American Indians' way of life was completely obliterated by the European settlements, as vital land was taken from them and their communal infrastructure was disrupted. - Most devastating were the newly imported diseases, such as smallpox and cholera, against which the Indians, having no native immunity, were virtually defenseless. - There were also grueling forced marches from native lands to dedicated reservations. By the end of the 1800s, the Native American population had dwindled to approximately 250,000 (US Census Bureau, 1993). - The Indian Bureau (later called the Bureau of Indian Affairs) was established as part of the War Department in 1824 to deal with the remaining "Indian problem," and its chief means was "forced assimilation." - This involved removing Indian children from their families and putting them in government-run boarding schools that taught the superiority of Anglo culture over "primitive" Native culture and religion. - Children who refused to adopt Western dress, language, and religion met with harsh physical and emotional punishment (Cornell, 1988). (A similar project was undertaken in British-ruled Australia with the native Aboriginal tribes.) - Despite this poor treatment, Navajo men served the United States in World War II, in which 29 "code talkers" used the Navajo language in lieu of cryptography to protect the secrecy of American communications. - The work of the code talkers was critically instrumental in the American victory at Iwo Jima and many other battles throughout the war. The largest reservation, Navajoland or Diné Bikéyah, covers approximately 16 million acres of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. - Reservations are generally impoverished and rife with health problems, domestic abuse, substance abuse, poor infrastructure, and crime. In fact, Native Americans as a whole are plagued by the lowest average socioeconomic status in the United States. - They rank among the worst in terms of high-school dropout rates and unemployment, which go hand in hand with poor health outcomes such as alcoholism, suicide, and premature death. Suicide rates are more than double that of the general population and are the second-leading cause of death for Native Americans from ages 15 to 34 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012a). - Around 33 percent of Native Americans die before age 45, compared with 11 percent of the US population as a whole (Garrett, 1994). Though facing many social problems, Native Americans are becoming more politically organized and active as a bloc. - For example, sustained protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline crossing sacred ground—and the reservation's water source—in North Dakota led to a delay and rerouting of the oil conduit (McKenna, 2016). - And recent lawsuits brought by Native Americans in Colorado have successfully challenged the gerrymandering that had concentrated their numbers into a single state district, thereby diluting their power.

Ch 7 The Missing Middle

Definition: "[A] forgotten [part] of the [United States'] labor force—too prosperous to be the 'working poor,' too insecure to be 'middle income'" The "Missing Middle" —-> the gradual disappearance of middle class as U.S. - Widening gap between rich and poor - Middle class standard of living becoming more difficult to achieve

Ch 6 Secondary Deviance

Definition: subsequent acts of rule breaking that occur after primary deviance and as a result of your new deviant label and people's expectations of you. Secondary deviance refers to deviant acts that occur after primary deviance and as a result of your new deviant label. - These labels themselves are socially structured by group stereotypes that can often serve as default cognitive categories Secondary deviance can quickly become social stigma. Doing an act of deviance again where labels are now given. - Ex: you smoke weed again, and now people see you as a stoner. Impacts on self image Consequences

Ch 9 Institutional Racism

Definition: institutions and social dynamics that may seem race-neutral but actually disadvantage minority groups. The case of race and property values is an example of institutional racism—institutions and social dynamics that may seem race-neutral but actually end up disadvantaging minority groups. Yet another example of institutional racism can be found in the case of hiring patterns by employers. - With limited information about job applicants, employers may be rational to use social networks to recruit employees since informal ties (i.e., references) can provide more reliable information about individuals than can be gleaned from paper job applications. - And because Whites tend to hold more managerial positions, and social networks tend to be segregated by race, this need for additional information on the part of employers also perpetuates racial disparities with no racially explicit motivation. A related dynamic is called statistical discrimination, where firms use race as a shorthand proxy for having attended poorer schools and having experienced other disadvantages that would lead to less productive performance. Although this dynamic is not completely color-blind, it is different from overt racism in that the motivation is not about race per se but about underlying characteristics that tend to be associated with race. - Finally, institutional racism can even be encoded into the educational system through test construction. - There has been much debate about cultural bias in testing. - Beyond this issue, however, is the effect of stereotypes on performance.

Ch 9 Ethnicity

Definition: one's ethnic quality or affiliation. It is voluntary, self-defined, nonhierarchical, fluid and multiple, and based on cultural differences, not physical ones per se. Racial groupings are about domination and struggles for power. - They are organizing principles for social inequality and a means of legitimating exclusion and harassment. Ethnicity can be thought of as a nationality, not in the sense of carrying the rights and duties of citizenship but in the sense of identifying with a past or future nationality. For Americans, Herbert Gans (1979b) called the voluntary, chosen form of ethnic identification "symbolic ethnicity." - While asserting symbolic ethnic identity was particularly difficult for my Italian friend, for most White middle-class Americans today symbolic ethnicity is largely a matter of choice. - It has no risk of stigma and confers the pleasures of feeling like an individual. In this way, the differences between race and ethnicity underscore the privileged position of Whites in America, who have the freedom to pick and choose their identities, to wave a flag in a parade, or to whip up Grandma's traditional recipe and freely show their ethnic backgrounds. - The surge of ethnic pride among White Americans today implies a false belief that all ethnic groups are the same, but in the very way that symbolic ethnicity is voluntary for White ethnics, it is not so for nonwhite Americans such as African Americans, Latinxs, and Asians (like my friend). As soon as someone classifies you as racially different on the basis of your physical features, you lose the ability to choose your ethnic identity. - It becomes racialized—subsumed under a forced identifier, label, or racial marker of "otherness" that you cannot escape. - Thus, although it is common to use the term ethnicity across the board to refer to Latinx, Black, Asian, or Irish backgrounds, being Irish in America is something that a person can turn on or off at will. - You can never not be Asian or Black: Your body gives away your otherness, no matter how much you want to blend in.

Ch 9 Prejudice

Definition: thoughts and feelings about an ethnic or racial group, which lead to preconceived notions and judgments (often negative) about the group. On the individual level, racism can manifest itself as prejudice or discrimination. - Prejudice refers to thoughts and feelings about an ethnic or racial group, whereas discrimination is an act. Robert Merton (1949a) developed a diagram for thinking about the intersections of prejudice and discrimination (Figure 9.4). - One who holds prejudice and discriminates is an "active bigot." - This is the prototypical racist who puts his money (or burning cross) where his (or her) mouth is. - Those who are neither prejudiced nor discriminatory are "all-weather liberals," not only espousing ideologies of racial equality or talking the talk, but also walking the walk when faced with real choices. A "timid bigot" is one who is prejudiced but does not discriminate—a closet racist perhaps, who backs down when confronted with an opportunity for racist action. - Conversely, one who is not prejudiced but does discriminate is termed a "fair-weather liberal." - Despite the fair-weather liberal's inner ideological stance in favor of racial equality, he or she still discriminates, perhaps without knowing it. - In fact, the prime time for families to move out of integrated neighborhoods happens to be around the time when the eldest child of the family turns five and begins school.

Ch 9 Ethnic Groups in the US - Middle Eastern Americans

Middle Easterners are a group that are in the middle of a process of becoming racialized in the US context. - They come from places as diverse as the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Iran, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories. Middle Easterners established communities in the United States as far back as the late 1800s, but their numbers have swelled since the 1970s as part of the rising tide of non-European immigration. - Middle Easterners in this second wave of immigration often arrive from politically tumultuous areas to seek refuge in the United States—such as the many refugees who have recently fled from war-torn Syria. In fact, the largest Middle Eastern population in the United States today is from Iran, and they are Persians, not ethnic Arabs, and do not generally speak Arabic. - Similarly, although the majority of new Middle Eastern Americans are Muslim, many of them are Christian, and a small number are Jewish (Bozorgmehr et al., 1996). Widespread misunderstandings about Middle Easterners derive, in part, from their negative stereotyping in the mainstream media. - In one study of television portrayals of Arabs, researchers found four basic myths that continue to surround this group. - First, they are often depicted as fabulously wealthy—as sultans and oil tycoons. - Second, they are shown as uncivilized and barbaric. - Third, they are portrayed as sex-crazed, especially for underage White sex slaves. - Fourth, they are said to revel in acts of terrorism, desiring to destroy all things American (Shaheen, 1984). - Little has changed since this study came out over 30 years ago, although after 9/11, the emphasis shifted away from stereotypes of Arabs as extremely rich and toward one of Middle Easterners as terrorists.

Ch 9 Racial Conflict

The final paradigm of race relations is conflict relations, when antagonistic groups within a society live integrated in the same neighborhoods, hold the same jobs, and go to the same schools. The result was genocide, the mass killing of a particular population based on racial, ethnic, or religious traits. The Rwandan genocide was a stark reminder that when we speak of the myth or fiction of race, we cannot deny its reality in social life.

Ch 9 Ethnic Groups in the US - African Americans

The first Black people in North America arrived not as slaves but as indentured servants contracted by White colonialists for set periods. - They were in the same circumstances as poor, unfree Whites such as those from Ireland or Scotland (Franklin, 1980). The system of slavery, however, evolved to meet colonial labor needs, and the slave trade was a fixed institution by the end of the seventeenth century. - African Americans have been, all in all, on the bottom of the racial hierarchy ever since. - Just before the American Revolution, slaves made up more than 20 percent of the colonial population (Dinnerstein et al., 1996). As of 2018, about 12.7 percent of the American population is Black (US Census Bureau, 2020c). - Like the Japanese Burakumin, this minority group has high rates of poverty, health problems, unemployment, and crime. According to the US Census Bureau, the median income of African Americans as a group is roughly 62.8 percent that of Whites (US Census Bureau, 2017c, 2017d). - In 2015, more than 6.7 million people in the United States were on probation or parole, in jail, or in prison—that's 2.7 percent of all US adult residents, or 1 in every 37 adults (Kaeble & Glaze, 2016). - Among men ages 25 to 39, Blacks are imprisoned 2.5 times and 6 times as often as Hispanics and Whites, respectively; overall, just 0.5 percent of White men are imprisoned. Afro-Caribbeans such as Cubans, Haitians, and Jamaicans resent being unilaterally categorized as African American, because each of these immigrant groups enjoys a unique history, culture, and language that do not correspond to the American stereotypes of people with Black skin. - For this reason, new Black immigrant groups would rather not assimilate, but instead retain their distinctive immigrant status, setting themselves apart from the lowest status group in America, Blacks (Greer, 2006).

Ch 7 Social Mobility (Part 2)

(Part 2) Rates of occupational (and income) mobility in the United States have long been thought to have dwarfed those of European societies with their royalty, aristocracies, and long histories. - However, a consensus seems to be slowly emerging that mobility rates should be broken down into the two components discussed above, structural and exchange mobility. - When we do this, it turns out that rates of "trading places" are fairly fixed across developed societies. - By contrast, historically, the United States has enjoyed an advantage in growth-induced upward mobility; as the farm and blue-collar sectors withered and white-collar jobs expanded, sons and daughters of manual workers experienced, by necessity, a degree of upward occupational mobility. - However, sociologists and economists debate whether economic growth still drives upward mobility, or whether bifurcated job growth means intergenerational stagnation. Another common methodology for studying social mobility is the status-attainment model. - This approach ranks individuals by socioeconomic status, including income and educational attainment, and seeks to specify the attributes characteristic of people who end up in more desirable occupations. The occupational status research of Peter M. Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan (1967), who ranked occupations into a status hierarchy to study social attainment processes, is generally seen as the paradigmatic work in this tradition. - Unlike mobility tables, the status-attainment model allows sociologists to study some of the intervening processes. The status-attainment model is an elastic one that allows researchers to throw in new factors as they arise and see how they affect the relationships between existing ones, generally ordered chronologically over a typical life course. - For the most part, it is thought that education is the primary mediating variable between parents' and children's occupational prestige. - That said, research shows that parental education and net worth, not occupation or income, best predict children's educational and other outcomes (Conley, 1999). Blau and Duncan didn't measure net worth, but by now it has become a fairly standard factor in many socioeconomic surveys. - Although there is increasing consensus on what aspects of class background matter (and how much they do), there is relatively little understanding of the multiple mechanisms by which class is reproduced (or how mobility happens) Moving between different positions (ex. social classes) Happens, but actually very difficult and rare Your parents' social class remains a strong predictor of your own social class In the US Relatively less mobility than other industrialized nations Most mobility occurs in the middle classes

Ch 7 Structural Barriers to Social Mobility

- Economic change - Discrimination - Government policies - Poor nutrition - Inadequate education - Higher rates of chronic disease - Poor or no healthcare - Inferior housing - Greater likelihood of being victimized by crime - Greater likelihood of being labeled criminal

Ch 8 Doing Gender

A social theory is useful only if it helps you understand the social world in which you live. - For example, Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman argue in their influential article "Doing Gender" (1987) that gender is not a fixed identity or role that we take with us into our interactions. - Rather, it is the product of those interactions. In this framework, gender is a matter of active doing, not simply a matter of natural being. - To be a man or a woman, they argue, is to perform masculinity or femininity constantly. In this social constructionist theory, gender is a process, not a static category. The "doing gender" perspective is rooted in Erving Goffman's dramaturgical theory, symbolic interactionism, and ethnomethodology. (See discussion of these terms in Chapter 4.) - That is, West and Zimmerman argue that people create their social realities and identities through interactions with one another. Unlike the structural functionalists, psychoanalysts, and conflict theorists, however, social constructionists view gender roles as having open-ended scripts. - Perhaps individuals come to the stage situated differently according to their place in power hierarchies or personality development, but their lines and gestures are far from being predetermined. Regardless of social location, individuals are always free to act, sometimes in unexpected ways that change the course of the play. - For example, the presence of openly transgender people has been said to "undo" or "redo" gender by subverting the binary norms (Connell, 2010; Sawyer et al., 2016). - But by and large, as a result of doing gender, people contribute to, reaffirm, and reproduce masculine dominance and feminine submissiveness in the bedroom, kitchen, workplace, and so on.

Ch 9 Racism

Definition: the belief that members of separate races possess different and unequal traits. Modern racial thinking developed in the mid-seventeenth century in parallel with global changes such as the Protestant Reformation in Europe, the Age of Exploration, and the rise of capitalism. - Scientific racism, what today we call the nineteenth-century theories of race, brought a period of feverish investigation into the origins, explanations, and classifications of race. On the individual level, racism can manifest itself as prejudice or discrimination. - Prejudice refers to thoughts and feelings about an ethnic or racial group, whereas discrimination is an act.

Ch 9 Ethnocentrism

Definition: the belief that one's own culture or group is superior to others and the tendency to view all other cultures from the perspective of one's own. Scientific racism sought to make sense of people who were different from White Europeans—who constituted the norm, according to the French scientist Comte de Buffon (1707-1788). - This way of thinking, called ethnocentrism, the judgment of other groups by one's own standards and values, has plagued scientific studies of "otherness."

Ch 8 Conflict Theories

By the 1980s, another wave of thinkers began to tackle an issue missing from earlier discussions of the woman question: power. - Conflict theorists mixed old-school Marxism with feminism to claim that gender, not class, was the driving force of history. Socialist feminists, also known as radical feminists, claimed that the root of all social relations, including relations of production, stemmed from unequal gender relations. Economist Heidi Hartmann (1981) and legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon (1983), for example, both analyzed how capitalism combines with patriarchy to make women economically dependent on a man's income. - This means that in a capitalist society, women have a disadvantaged position in the job market and within the family. - Capitalists (predominantly men), in turn, reap all the benefits of women's subordination. - When women are subordinate, men benefit. - To radical feminists, gender inequality is first and foremost about power inequalities, and gender differences (as in personality development) emerge from there. A useful metaphor for the pervasiveness of gender oppression has been offered by Marilyn Frye: the birdcage. - Women, she argued in 1983, find themselves like birds trapped in a cage. One can focus on one of the wires of sexism up close, but then we cannot see the other wires that complete the cage. - It is the combination of the many strands (bars of the cage) of sexism that oppress women—not any single one in isolation. - A bar can be workplace discrimination, unequal housework burdens, and so on.

Ch 7 Proletariat

Definition: the working class. The working class/laborers Are exploited - don't get paid well for their work For Marx, it all boils down to two antagonistic classes in a fully mature capitalist society: the employing class (the bourgeoisie or capitalist class) and the working class (the proletariat). - The proletariat sells its labor to the bourgeoisie in order to receive wages and thereby survive. But, according to Marx, the bourgeoisie extract surplus value from the proletariat, even when a few of the proletarians make high incomes. - As this is a fixed-pie or zero-sum view of economic production, an exploitative and hence inherently conflict-ridden relationship exists between the two classes.

Ch 8 History of Sexuality

Conflict theorists mixed old-school Marxism with feminism to claim that gender, not class, was the driving force of history. Socialist feminists, also known as radical feminists, claimed that the root of all social relations, including relations of production, stemmed from unequal gender relations. Connections may be found between the sheets and history, desire and science, how we do it and how it in turn organizes what we do, as well as with whom and with what meanings. - As expected, an excavation into the social construction of sexuality divulges a surprising amount of variation in what is considered normal bedroom behavior. - By exposing different social patterns of sexuality, throughout history and across cultures, the sociologist can trace unequal gender relations and show how sexuality expresses, represses, and elucidates those relations. If an essentially right way existed, we wouldn't be able to find such wild and woolly variation throughout history and across cultures. Starting from the view that sex itself is a social creation, sociologists tend to argue that humans have sexual plumbing but no sexuality until they are located in a social environment. - The range of normal and abnormal is itself a construction, a production of society. In The History of Sexuality (1978), Foucault made the case that the body is "in the grip" of cultural practices. - That is, there is no pre-social or natural body; instead, culture is always already inscribed on our bodies. Foucault further argued that the way in which we know our bodies is linked to power, and knowledge and power go hand in hand. Across the globe and throughout history, there has been more or less the same degree of homosexual behavior.

Ch 8 Hooking Up

Definition: (of two people) meet or form a relationship; engage in casual sexual activity. Figuring out the right way to approach someone online is not the only challenge that teens and adults have in the evolving world of Tinder, Grindr, and OkCupid. - A new phenomenon of the "define-the-relationship" (DTR) conversation is emerging. In a world where a new potential partner is only a swipe away, and where people are inventing new ways of being romantic or sexual, and where one cannot assume a single narrative arc of how such relationships are meant to progress, the DTR talk is a way that people can clarify expectations, hopes, fears, and so on after getting to know each other. - As to when to have (or avoid) that conversation, just as there are myriad relationship types nowadays, there is no clear norm on what's too soon (or too late) to discuss or define one's relationship. Hookup Culture: - "Hooking Up" - 72% college students report at least one hook-up - Orgasm gap? (See Reading 3 in Blackboard) - How do college students engage in romantic relationships today? - Do you see evidence of hook-up culture on campus?

Ch 6 Strain Theory

Definition: Robert Merton's theory that deviance occurs when a society does not give all of its members equal ability to achieve socially acceptable goals. Merton's strain theory, advanced in 1938, explains how society gives us certain templates for acting correctly or appropriately. - More specifically, we learn what society considers appropriate goals and appropriate means of achieving them. - The strain in strain theory arises when the means don't match up to those ends; hence, Merton's theory is also called the "means-ends theory of deviance." - When someone fails to recognize and accept either socially appropriate goals or socially appropriate means (or both), he or she becomes a social deviant. Strain Theory ---> Deviance is by-product of inequality - When a society promotes certain goals, but provides unequal means of acquiring them, there will be deviance. Conformity - Accept a goal and Accept institutionalised means - Ex: graduate from High School and going to college to pursue a degree. Ritualism - Reject a goal but Accept institutionalised means - Ex: when people do not embrace the goal of getting ahead in society by doing well in one's career and earning as much money as possible. Innovators - Accept goals but Reject institutionalised means - Ex: stealing cards to make money and reach goals. - Where deviance starts to come through Retreatism - Rejects goals and Rejects innovation - Ex: a homeless person (the person lacks institutional means to achieve the goal of living in a home and getting a job to support him or herself and doesn't feel inclined to try and reach this goal via other means such as stealing. Rebellion - New goals and New means - Ex: social movements and leaders

Ch 7 Social Reproduction

Definition: Social reproduction refers to the processes that ensure the self-perpetuation of a social structure over time, in rough analogy to biological reproduction for a population. We are all collectively playing the game of life. - We all assume we start at the same place. Reality is not everyone starts at the same place. Disadvantages - Childhood environment - Parent's income - Level of education

Ch 8 Biological Determinism

Definition: We're pushing back against essentialist arguments, which explain social phenomena in terms of natural ones. Essentialist thought often relies on biological determinism—which assumes that what you do in the social world is a direct result of who you are in the natural world. If you are born with male parts, essentialists believe, you are essentially and absolutely a man, and you will be sexually attracted to women only, as preordained by nature. Although biological determinism plays a major role in Freudian theory, so does the idea that gender develops through family socialization.

Ch 6 Panopticon

Definition: a circular building composed of an inner ring and an outer ring designed to serve as a prison in which the guards, housed in the inner ring, can observe the prisoners without the detainees knowing whether they are being watched. Foucault used the imagined architectural design of the panopticon as a metaphor for this march toward total surveillance and control. Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher, devised the panopticon as a prison design. - The panopticon is a circular building composed of an inner ring and an outer ring. - Prisoners' cells are located in the outer ring, and large windows compose the front and back of each cell, allowing ample natural light to flood the rooms. - The inner ring is a guards' tower, which also has large windows, that open onto the windows of prisoners' cells. - The guards can always see the prisoners, regardless of where they are in their cells, but the prisoners do not know when they are being watched. Foucault (1977) asserts that the "power" of the guards is both "visible and unverifiable." - Foucault uses the panopticon as a metaphor for the general functioning of disciplinary techniques in society.

Ch 7 Lower Class

Definition: a class of people below the middle class, having the lowest social rank or standing due to low income, lack of skills or education, and the like; (broadly) working class. The Poor - Poverty line for a family of four is $26,000. Vertical social mobility, in contrast, refers to the rise or fall of an individual (or group) from one social stratum to another. - We can further distinguish two types of vertical mobility: ascending and descending (more commonly termed upward and downward). - An individual who experiences ascending vertical mobility either rises from a lower stratum into a higher one or creates an entirely new group that exists at a higher stratum. - Ugo's promotion to regional manager at Sears is an example of rising from a lower stratum to a higher one. - By becoming a manager, he has changed his class position, a change that confers both a higher salary and more prestige

Ch 7 Social Equality

Definition: a condition in which no differences in wealth, power, prestige, or status based on nonnatural conventions exist. Argues that the rise in ownership of property causes or leads to inequality and negative impacts. - There is always someone who runs faster than another. Social inequality based on social class. If we were to strip away the elements of society that result from the institution of private property—the competition, isolation, aggression, and hierarchical organization—only social equality, a condition in which no differences in wealth, power, prestige, or status based on nonnatural bases exist, would remain. According to Rousseau (2004), there are two forms of inequality: physical (or natural), which "consists in a difference of age, health, bodily strength, and the qualities of the mind or of the soul," and social (or political), which depends on a kind of conventional inequality and is established or at least authorized by the consent of men. This latter consists of the different privileges which some men enjoy to the prejudice of others, such as that of being more rich, more honored, more powerful, or even in a position to exact obedience. Rousseau acknowledges that a certain amount of natural inequality will always exist among people: Someone is always going to be better than someone else. - In contrast, social inequality is a result of privileges and uneven access to resources (i.e., private property) and will eventually lead to social ills. Rousseau sees such inequality as ultimately detrimental and as a catalyst for social conflict. Thinkers of the later Enlightenment, including Adam Ferguson and John Millar of Scotland and Thomas Malthus of England, saw inequality as good—or at least necessary. - These three agreed that inequality arises when private property emerges and that private property emerges when resources can be preserved, because it is only through surpluses that some people are able to conserve and increase their bounty. - This leads to the paradox of this chapter: Inequality is a result of surplus.

Ch 9 Race

Definition: a group of people who share a set of characteristics—typically, but not always, physical ones—and are said to share a common bloodline. Race refers to a group of people who share a set of characteristics—typically, but not always, physical ones—and are said to share a common bloodline. - People obviously have different physical appearances, including eye color, hair texture, and skin color, so it's perhaps puzzling to hear that (biological) racial differences somehow do not exist. To speak of the myth of race is to say that it is largely a social construction, a set of stories we tell ourselves to organize reality and make sense of the world, rather than a fixed biological or natural reality. - In this sense, it resembles the socially constructed notions of childhood and adolescence. When the term race comes up in America today, we usually think in two colors: Black and White. - But, at the turn of the twentieth century, Americans categorized themselves into anywhere from 36 to 75 different races that they organized into hierarchies, with Anglo-Saxon at the top followed by Slav, Mediterranean, Hebrew, and so on down the list (Jacobson, 1998). - Even though the United States was a nation of immigrants, many Americans doubted whether "ethnic stock," such as the Irish, were fit for self-governance in the new democracy. Racism is the belief that members of separate races possess different and unequal traits coupled with the power to restrict freedoms based on those differences. - Racist thinking is characterized by three key beliefs: that humans are divided into distinct bloodlines and/or physical types; that these bloodlines or physical traits are linked to distinct cultures, behaviors, personalities, and intellectual abilities; and that certain groups are superior to others. Whiteness today is something we take for granted, a natural part of the landscape. - But dig back just a hundred years into the unnatural history of race, and you might not even recognize it. - Not only have groups of people been categorized differently over time, showing that there is nothing natural about how we classify groups into races today, but the very concept of what a race is has changed over time.

Ch 8 Patriarchy

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

Ch 6 Stigma

Definition: a negative social label that not only changes others' behavior toward a person but also alters that person's own self-concept and social identity. Secondary deviance can quickly become social stigma. A stigma is a negative social label that not only changes others' behavior toward a person but also alters that person's self-concept and social identity. We frequently say that certain behaviors, groups, identities, and even objects are stigmatized. - Mental illness still carries a stigma in our society. - Pedophilia carries a bigger one. Pager's research reveals how stigmas have real consequences, shaping the map of opportunities for men with criminal records, and illuminates the challenges faced by Black men, whose skin carries a stigma of deviance into the labor market whether they've been in prison or not. - Of course, in this case, because the testers were trained with a script, the issue of internalized self-stigma doesn't come up to influence their interactions. - But such internalized stigma is itself an important source of disadvantage and stress for marginalized groups. Sometimes, though, we label groups differently, or stigmatize them Stigma ---> a negative social label that influences others' reactions to a person - (e.g., sexuality, mental health, physical traits) Stigma has serious consequences in terms of the opportunities made available—or, not made available—to people in a stigmatized group Example: Race and Job Application Experiments - Differing rates of call-backs based on race - Employers found to be slightly more willing to consider a white applicant with a felony record than a black applicant with a clean history.

Ch 6 Corporate Crime

Definition: a particular type of white-collar crime committed by the officers (CEOs and other executives) of a corporation. A particular type of white-collar crime is corporate crime, offenses committed by the officers (CEOs and other executives) of a corporation. In the late spring of 2012, JPMorgan Chase trader Bruno Iksil (also known as the London Whale) placed a giant risky trade and ended up losing $6.2 billion for the bank. - Losing billions on a trade is deviant but not illegal. Iksil was fired, but he avoided arrest. US federal prosecutors have indicted his boss and his assistant for conspiring to cover up the losses by filing false reports. - Penalties for their crimes include a $920 million fine for JPMorgan, but no individuals did time. Corporate crime: a type of white-collar crime committed by the officers or executives of a company - Ex. Bernie Madoff

Ch 7 Estate System

Definition: a politically based system of stratification characterized by limited social mobility. The first ideal type of social stratification is the estate system. Primarily found in feudal Europe from the medieval era through the eighteenth century, and in the American South before the Civil War, social stratification in estate systems has a political basis. - That is, laws are written in a language in which rights and duties separate individuals and distribute power unequally. Social reproduction—you are what your parents were and what your children will be—generally prevailed. Sometimes called a feudal system Fixed and permanent system One is born into their position (i.e., limited mobility) - Ex: you are either a serf or Lord (in feudal Europe) - Ex: the south during slavery Political basis

Ch 7 Caste System

Definition: a religion-based system of stratification characterized by no social mobility. Fixed and permanent Religious basis Incarnation --> your role and function today will lead you to be reborn in the afterlife Assigned position at birth A second type of stratification is a caste system. As opposed to having a political basis, the caste system is religious in nature. - That is, caste societies are stratified on the basis of hereditary notions of religious purity. Today the caste system is primarily found in South Asia, particularly in India. The historical legacy of the caste system still dominates rural India despite its constitutional abolition almost 70 years ago and despite affirmative action policies to help those of lower caste origins. - Although contradictory opinions exist, origins of the caste system are rooted in Hinduism and a division of labor predetermined by birth. Social hierarchy was further entrenched by preferential treatment of upper caste members during British colonialism. - The result was rigid social stratification of four main castes or varnas: Brahman (priests and scholars), Kshatriya (soldiers), Vaishya (merchants and farmers), and Shudra (servants class). Excluded completely from the caste system are both Adivasi (India's indigenous people) and Dalit or "Untouchables," who are considered the least pure of all class distinctions. Over time, the caste system in India has evolved into a complex matrix of thousands of subcastes. - Each of the major castes is allowed to engage in certain ritual practices from which the others are excluded. - For instance, the Shudra caste is not permitted to study ancient Hindu texts, while Dalits are prohibited from entering temples or performing any rituals that confer purity. - This places them at the bottom of the social hierarchy and typically leaves them with occupations seen as impure, such as the cremation of corpses or disposal of sewage, reinforcing their "untouchable" social status. Castes are largely endogamous—communities in which members generally marry within the group. - Because of the resulting problems with classifying children born from intercaste marriages, the caste system would simply fall apart if high levels of exogamy (marriage between castes) occurred. The strict divisions would begin to look more like a spectrum and would eventually fade away. - Practicing endogamy is an example of social closure, a powerful method of maintaining the caste hierarchy within Indian society. Although there is little to no individual mobility in caste systems, one unique fact of the system is that an entire caste could obtain a higher position in the hierarchy by adopting practices and behaviors of the upper castes. - This process is called sanskritization. Typically practices that are adopted are those that pertain to a higher degree of religious purity (vegetarianism or fasting, for example). - At the same time, a caste will eschew aspects of its own traditions that are considered impure (animal sacrifice or the consumption of alcohol). - In this way, an entire group of people can rise in social status in one to two generations.

Ch 6 Anomie

Definition: a sense of aimlessness or despair that arises when we can no longer reasonably expect life to be predictable; too little social regulation; normlessness. At the heart of learned helplessness is the sense that we are unable to stave off the sources of our pain, that we have no control over our own well-being. - Durkheim studied a similar condition, which he termed anomie. Literally meaning "without norms," anomie is a sense of aimlessness or despair that arises when we can no longer reasonably expect life to be more or less meaningful. - Our sense of connection between our actions and values is eroded, because too little social regulation exists. Durkheim's argument about anomic suicide seems intuitive when it refers to negative events rupturing our everyday lives, but the same principle also holds for positive life events. - For example, many lottery winners report spells of severe depression after winning millions of dollars, displaying another case of anomie. The final coordinate is fatalistic suicide, which occurs when a person experiences too much social regulation. - Instead of floundering in a state of anomie with no guiding rules, you find yourself doing the same thing day after day, with no variation and no surprises. Sociologist Robert Merton pioneered a complementary theory of social deviance. - Instead of stressing the way sudden social changes lead to feelings of helplessness, Merton argued that the real problem behind anomie occurs when a society holds out the same goals to all its members but does not give them equal ability to achieve these goals.

Ch 8 Feminism

Definition: a social movement to get people to understand that gender is an organizing principle in society and to address gender-based inequalities that intersect with other forms of social identity. Feminism was at first embraced as a social movement to advocate for women's right to vote; it later became a consciousness-raising movement to get people to understand that gender is an organizing principle of life. - One of the central ideas of this "second-wave" feminism is that gender is important because it structures relations between people. Further, as gender shapes social relations, it does this on unequal ground, meaning gender is not just an identifying characteristic (I'm a guy, you're a girl), but embodies real powers and privileges. - Regardless of which "wave" we are talking about, the basic idea behind feminism is that women and men (and other-gendered people) should be accorded equal opportunities and respect. At the start of the second wave of the feminist movement in the 1960s, theorists scrambled to find an answer to the "woman question": What explains the nearly universal dominance of men over women? What is the root of patriarchy, a system involving the subordination of femininity to masculinity? By the 1980s, another wave of thinkers began to tackle an issue missing from earlier discussions of the woman question: power. - Conflict theorists mixed old-school Marxism with feminism to claim that gender, not class, was the driving force of history.

Ch 7 Status Hierarchy System

Definition: a system of stratification based on social prestige. A status hierarchy system, has its basis in social prestige, not in political, religious, or economic factors. In classical sociology, Weber contributed most heavily to the modern-day sociologist's understanding of status. - For Weber, status groups are communities united by either a positive or negative social estimation of their honor. Put more simply, status is determined by what society as a whole thinks of the particular lifestyle of the community to which you belong. - In this sense, those with and without property can belong to the same status group if they are seen to live the same lifestyle. Namely, various individuals in a society who earn similar incomes may not have much in common in terms of lifestyles (and therefore status). Although a status group can be defined by something other than occupation, such as a claim to a specific lifestyle of leisure (skate punks) or membership in an exclusive organization that defines one's identity (the Daughters of the American Revolution), much work by sociologists has been related to occupational status. - In the 1960s, for example, Peter M. Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan (1967) created the Index of Occupational Status by polling the general public about the prestige of certain occupations. What is particularly interesting is that the hierarchy is largely stable over time and across place. - Occasionally, new jobs need to be slotted in (there were no web designers in the 1960s), but they generally are slotted in fairly predictable ways based on the status of similar occupations and do not create much upheaval within the overall rank ordering. The scores on the Duncan scale (as it is known) range from 0 to 96, with 0 being the least prestigious and 96 the most prestigious. Blau and Duncan observed that five-sixths (just over 83 percent) of the explanation for people's status ratings of occupations was attributed to the education necessary for the position and not the income corresponding to that position. Although we have emphasized that status may have its basis in occupation, it can also be formed through consumption and lifestyle, though these factors are often closely linked with occupation. - This means that there should be a tendency for status differences between groups to be finely gradated and not relational: Fundamentally antagonistic status groups such as capitalists and laborers or owners and renters do not exist. - Rather, people exist along a status ladder, so to speak, on which there is a lot of social mobility. - Often, individuals seek to assert their status or increase their status not just through their occupation but also through their consumption, memberships, and other aspects of how they live. They might try to generate social prestige by driving a fancy car, living in a gated community, wearing stylish clothes, or using a certain kind of language. A system of stratification based on social prestige. Blue Collar = manual and physical types of work White Collar = office types of work

Ch 7 Elite-Mass Dichotomy System

Definition: a system of stratification that has a governing elite, a few leaders who broadly hold power in society. Has a governing elite—a few leaders who broadly hold the power of society. - Has elite members that make decisions for everybody. C Wright Mills: The Power Elite - Government - Corporations - Military-Industrial Complex Elite-mass dichotomy system, with a governing elite, a few leaders who broadly hold the power in society. Vilfredo Pareto, in The Mind and Society (1983), took a positive view of elite-mass dichotomies, whereas C. Wright Mills saw much to dislike in such systems. - For Pareto, when a select few elite leaders hold power—as long as the elites are the most able individuals and know what they are doing—the masses are all the better for it. - This imbalance, where a small number of people (say 20 percent) cause a disproportionately large effect (more like 80 percent), has come to be known as the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule. The basis for Pareto's argument is that individuals are unequal physically, intellectually, and morally. - He suggests that those who are the most capable in particular groups and societies should lead. In this way, Pareto believes in a meritocracy, a society where status and mobility are based on individual attributes, ability, and achievement. Pareto opposed caste systems of stratification that create systematic inequality on the basis of birth into a specific group. - He criticized societies based on strict military, religious, and aristocratic stratification, arguing that these systems naturally tend to collapse. - Concerning such systems, he argued that aristocracies do not last, and that, in fact, history is a "graveyard of aristocracies". The ideal governing elite for Pareto is a combination of foxes and lions—that is, individuals who are cunning, unscrupulous, and innovative along with individuals who are purposeful and decisive, using action and force. - This applies not only to the political realm but also to the economic realm, and the masses will be better off for it. The whole system works over time, in Pareto's view, when there is enough opportunity and social mobility to ensure that the most talented individuals end up in the elite and that it does not become a rusty aristocracy. Mills takes a much more negative view of the elite-mass dichotomy, arguing that it is neither natural nor beneficial for society. In Mills's view, the elite do not govern the way Pareto claims they do. - Mills argues in The Power Elite (2000) that there are three major institutional forces in modern American society where the power of decision making has become centralized: economic institutions (with a few hundred giant corporations holding the keys to economic decisions), the political order (the increasing concentration of power in the federal government and away from the states and localities, leading to a centralized executive establishment that affects every cranny of society), and the military order (the largest and most expensive feature of government). According to Mills, "families and churches and schools adapt to modern life; governments and armies and corporations shape it; and, as they do so, they turn these lesser institutions into means for their ends." - The elite for Mills are simply those who have most of what there is to possess: money, power, and prestige. - But they would not have the most were it not for their positions within society's great institutions. Whereas Pareto views elite status as the reward for the talent that helped certain individuals rise through the ranks of society, Mills sees the unequal power and rewards as determining the positions. - And whereas Pareto sees a benefit in having power centralized in a large, otherwise ungovernable society, Mills warns of the dangers. - For Mills, such a system hurts democracy by consolidating the power to make major decisions into the hands (and interests) of the few. The power elite is further stratified for Mills; at the inner core of the power elite are those individuals who interchange commanding roles at the top of one dominant institutional order with those in another. - In Mills's view, as the interactions among the big three power elites increase, so does the interchange of personnel among them. - Such exchange across domains is of central importance to Mills, because as the elite increasingly assume positions in one another's domains, the coordination among the elite becomes more and more entrenched. The inner core also includes the professional go-betweens of economic, political, and military affairs. - These include individuals at powerful legal firms and financial institutions, such as corporate lawyers and investment bankers. The outer fringes of the power elite, which change more readily than the core, are individuals who count in the decisions that affect all of us but who don't actually make those decisions.

Ch 7 Middle Class (working class)

Definition: a term commonly used to describe those individuals with nonmanual jobs that pay significantly more than the poverty line—though this is a highly debated and expansive category, particularly in the United States, where broad swaths of the population consider themselves middle-class. Although those in the upper class have very real influence and control, the effects of this are sometimes limited in the public perception. The United States is often thought of as a middle-class nation—so much so that depending on how the question is phrased, almost 90 percent of Americans have self-identified with this stratum. - That said, there is no consensus on what the term middle class really means. Sociologists, economists, policy makers, think tank analysts, and even the public at large all work with different operating assumptions about the term. - The categories become particularly blurry when we attempt to separate the middle class from the working class (or "working families," to use the political campaign euphemism). So what is the middle class? - Some refer explicitly to position (i.e., below upper class, above lower class); others speak to shared vocational characteristics and values. - Still others mention principles. - One of the most interesting comes from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, which indicates that the middle class is "characterized by a high material standard of living, sexual morality, and respect for property." In the United States, the middle class has historically been composed of white-collar workers (office workers), and the working class composed of those individuals who work manually (using their hands or bodies). How and why has this differential income growth happened? - One factor may be the changing nature of available employment. - As the technological sector expands, the majority of jobs are being created either at very high skill levels with correspondingly high salaries (engineers and hedge fund managers) or at very low levels with little room for upward mobility (baristas at Starbucks who serve lattes to those hedge fund managers). - And the fastest-growing job category for those with no more than a high-school education is food preparation and service. - Furthermore, this bifurcated job growth is reflected in the change in educational expectations of potential employers. Sociologist Michael Hout helped explain that even though there has been stagnation in the number of people receiving bachelor's degrees, the value of those degrees is increasing. - Hout pointed out that part of what is holding students back from getting their degree is that the cost of college is increasing and a larger proportion of the cost is borne by individuals and families rather than states. Some argue that along with income inequality, income insecurity (or volatility) has also increased for the middle classes. - However, other researchers argue that income instability is not the result of fluctuating earnings or job insecurity but rather stems from two major changes in family dynamics. - First, there are more changes to household structure today because of divorce and remarriage; second, women now play a greater role in breadwinning (even exceeding men as a proportion of the workforce at one point during the recent recession), but they also enter and exit the workforce with greater frequency than men. Middle Class and Working Class - Once separated by "white collar" and "blue collar" positions, this division is now blurred - Trends: Increase in service work sector —> technically white collar jobs but make working class wages - During the 20th century, middle class grew - Trends have since shifted, and the middle class is declining - Most mobility occurs in the middle classes

Ch 7 Upper Class

Definition: a term for the economic elite. Generally, the upper class refers to the group of individuals at the top of the socioeconomic food chain. - In practice, however, the term is used to describe diverse and complex concepts. Historically, the upper class was often distinguished by not having to work. - (The economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen dubbed this group "the leisure class.") - Its members were able to maintain their lifestyle by collecting rent and/or other investment returns. - They were the aristocracy, the wealthy, the elite, the landowners. - The only way to join this sphere was by birth or (occasionally) marriage. The upper class was the basis for Marx's capitalist class. - In the United States, "upper class" is associated with income, wealth, power, and prestige. According to some sources, the primary distinguishing characteristic of upper-class individuals is their source of income—generally more from returns on investments rather than wages. - Although estimates vary, approximately 1 percent of the US population is considered to fall into this stratum. Over and above income levels, the upper class is also distinguished by prestige and power, which can be used to promote personal agendas and influence everything from political decisions to consumer trends. - This is of particular importance because, as noted earlier, members of the upper class often wear many hats. The members of the tiny capitalist class at the top of the hierarchy have an influence on economy and society far beyond their numbers. - They make investment decisions that open or close employment opportunities for millions of others. - They contribute money to political parties, and they often own media enterprises that allow them influence over the thinking of other classes. Approximately 1% of the population falls into this stratum Prestige & Power

Ch 8 Sexual Harassment

Definition: an illegal form of discrimination revolving around sexuality that can involve everything from inappropriate jokes to sexual "barter" (where victims feel the need to comply with sexual requests for fear of losing their job) to outright sexual assault. Making universal comparisons of men to women misses these nuances and implicitly excludes marginally positioned people from the discussion. - For example, men of color certainly experience oppression that intersects with their gender identities (for example, Black men bearing the brunt of police harassment).

Ch 6 Total Institution

Definition: an institution in which one is totally immersed and that controls all the basics of day-to-day life; no barriers exist between the usual spheres of daily life, and all activity occurs in the same place and under the same single authority. The high rates of recidivism in the United States bring us back to labeling theory, which suggests that the process of becoming a deviant often involves contact with, even absorption into, a special institution such as a prison or mental health institution. - Total institutions are distinguished by "a breakdown of the barriers separating" these "three spheres of life" (sleep, work, play). In total institutions, "all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under the same single authority" (Goffman, 1961). - In total institutions such as prisons and mental hospitals, life is highly regimented, and the inmates take part in all scheduled activities together. - The inmates have no control over the form or flow of activities, which are chosen by the institutional authorities to "fulfill the official aims of the institution." - Thus, if the official aim of prisons is rehabilitation, prisoners might be required to attend at least one self-improvement class a day or engage in some sort of productive labor. - All of these activities occur in the same place with the same group of people every day. Once you enter a total institution such as a prison, a process that strips away your sense of self begins. - Once people enter a prison or a mental institution, they are closed off from their normal routines and cease to fulfill their usual social roles. - Because the roles people play are important to the way they perceive themselves, this separation from the world erodes that sense of identity. In the Stanford Prison Experiment: - They were issued uniforms and given numbers in place of names. - The mandated homogeneity of prisoners (and patients) results in an erasure of self. - The total institution simultaneously strips away clothes, personal belongings, nicknames, hairstyles, cosmetics, and toiletries—all the tools that people use to identify themselves. - The inmates no longer have control over their environment, peer group, daily activities, or personal possessions. - It's not hard to see how this process leads to a sense of helplessness. - The total institution rapidly destroys a prisoner's sense of self-determination, self-control, and freedom. The authorities in these total institutions are given the unenviable duty of "showing the prisoners who's boss" and expediting the process of prisoner degradation to ensure "co-operativeness" (Goffman, 1961). - Wardens must "socialize" inmates into compliance through informal "obedience test[s]" or "will-breaking contest[s]" until the inmate "who shows defiance receives immediate visible punishment, which increases until he openly 'cries uncle' and humbles himself." When Zimbardo locked a group of seemingly normal college kids into the basement of a Stanford building (discussed in the box on pages 224-25), he found that not only were the inmates affected but the guards also felt impelled to use increasingly violent and inhumane means to solidify their authority and keep the prisoners in check. - We can see these patterns in everyday life, too. - Because the roles we play are important to how we think about ourselves, it is hardly possible for the self-images of both guards and prisoners to remain unaffected by the prison environment.

Ch 6 Deviance

Definition: any transgression of socially established norms. Violating a social rule or norm (or refusing to follow one). May or may not be illegal. Social deviance, loosely understood, can be taken to mean any transgression of socially established norms. - Minor violations are acts of informal deviance, such as picking your nose. Because social norms and rules are fluid and subject to change, the definitions of what counts as deviance are likely to vary across contexts. - When a soldier kills an enemy combatant, that act is considered heroic. - But if the same soldier kills his or her spouse, the act is considered heinous and punishable by a long prison sentence. Persons and behaviors have been variously called deviant, depending on what culture and historical period they happen to fall in. In the popular conception, deviance typically takes the form of blatant rule-breaking or lawlessness. - But deviance does not necessarily require outlandish activity on the part of social misfits. Deviance is a broad concept covering everything from answering your cell phone during a lecture to murder. - Both formal deviance and informal deviance are collectively defined and often subject to a range of punishments. Yet deviance is sticky; it cannot be turned off and on so easily. - Deviance can be a powerful label, capable of reproducing the entrenched social inequalities that punishment is often supposed to correct.

Ch 7 The Poor

Definition: characterized by or showing poverty; deficient or lacking in something specified. The poor are, ironically, often said to resemble the rich in being more oriented toward the present and therefore less worried about the future than their middle-class and working-class counterparts (although this is highly debated). - Day-to-day survival keeps the poor clearly planted in the present. - Of course, like any class, the poor are not a unified group. In fact, one distinction often made in political speeches is that between the "working poor" (those who deserve our assistance) and the "nonworking poor" (those who can work but don't and therefore have a weaker moral claim on assistance). - This latter group is sometimes called the "underclass." Of course, even these two categories obscure huge distinctions within either group; in fact, poverty is a state that families usually shift in and out of throughout their history, and often a clear distinction does not exist between the working class and the poor. The Poor - Poverty line for a family of four is $26,000.

Ch 6 Street Crime

Definition: crime committed in public and often associated with violence, gangs, and poverty. Street crime generally refers to crime committed in public. - The term invokes specific images, however, of violent crime, typically perpetrated in an urban landscape. - Both historically and today, street crime is often associated with gangs, and currently it is also associated with both disadvantaged minority groups and poverty. Just why people are drawn to a career of street crime has long been a favorite question of social scientists and is still a matter of heated debate. - Explanations for the fluctuations and trends in violent crime rates also vary widely. One theory, for example, posits that street crime rises and falls in relation to the availability of opportunity within the legitimate economy. - When this is lacking, people turn elsewhere. - A wrinkle on this theory is provided by "differential opportunity theory" (Cloward & Ohlin, 1960). Differential opportunity theory states that in addition to the legitimate economic structure, an illegitimate opportunity structure also exists that is unequally distributed across social classes. - That is, some groups have more opportunities than others in the illicit economy, and it is really the ratio of risks and rewards in the formal and black market economies that influences participation in crime One way, then, to reduce crime would be to raise the costs of working in the illegitimate economy, thereby lowering the net returns. - Such a strategy lies behind tougher sentencing policies, such as "three strikes" laws (if you are convicted of three felony crimes, you are imprisoned for life), which aim simultaneously to deter criminals and to incarcerate habitual offenders. The focus of such policies tends to be violent crime; lately, however, such laws have been extended to nonviolent crimes, such as drug dealing. - Another strategy would be to increase the returns to entry-level opportunities in the legitimate economy; raising the minimum wage is one way to do this. - Either strategy—decreasing the returns to the illegitimate economy or increasing the returns to the legitimate economy—shortens the distance, or differential, between the two economies. Many people attribute the decrease in crime rates over the past few decades to the adoption of a community policing ideology, in which police officers are viewed (and view themselves) as members of the community they serve, and not to the punitive nature of prison life. - Rather than enforce laws from the outside in, as community members walking the streets, police can work to develop reliable relationships and bonds of trust with community residents. - On a practical level, this means that greater police presence is felt in areas where community policing is in effect. (However, convincing evidence on this causal claim is still lacking; that said, community policing probably doesn't make crime rates any worse.) Street crime—refers to crime committed in public - Often associated with violence, gangs, and poverty - Most prevalent category of crime

Ch 8 Transgender

Definition: describes people whose gender does not correspond to their birth sex. Anyone who has a gender identity that doesn't correlate with the sex they were born with. The growing prominence and social awareness of transgender people in our own society helps us break out of binary thinking about gender, since we tend to assume everyone is cisgender. - The search or space for a third gender may be limited by our assumption that gender should be a fixed category. - Rather, gender is a spectrum that is constantly changing, along which individuals may change positions over their lifetimes. The travesti, transgender prostitutes in Brazil. - Anthropologist Don Kulick (1998) conducted an ethnography of the travesti, males who adopt female names, clothing styles, hairstyles, cosmetic practices, and linguistic pronouns; ingest female hormones; and inject industrial silicone directly into their bodies to give themselves breasts and round buttocks or bunda. - They display stereotypically feminine traits, yet they do not self-identify as women. - In fact, they think it is both repugnant and impossible for men to try to become women. - Kulick argues that in Brazil, gender is determined by sexual practice: "What one does in bed has immediate and lasting consequences for the way one is perceived (and the way one can perceive oneself) as a gendered being. - If one penetrates, in this particular configuration of sexuality and gender, one is a 'man.' If one expresses interest in the penis of a male, and especially if one 'gives'—allows oneself to be penetrated by a male—then one is no longer a man." - However, the travesti do not think they are women; they think of themselves as travesti, men who emulate women but are not women. - The primacy of penetration as a determinant of gender is common across cultures and challenges Americans to look beyond chromosomes and hormones to practices and cultural context.

Ch 8 Sexuality

Definition: desire, sexual preference, and sexual identity and behavior. Sexuality, meanwhile, refers to desire, sexual preference, and sexual identity and behavior. Sexual desire, behaviors, and attraction. The Social Construction of Sexuality By treating sexuality as a social construction—that is, as always shaped by social factors—the sociologist would argue that the notion of normal, especially pertaining to what happens behind closed bedroom (or bathroom or car) doors, is always contested. - In other words, there is no natural way of doing it. If an essentially right way existed, we wouldn't be able to find such wild and woolly variation throughout history and across cultures. - Starting from the view that sex itself is a social creation, sociologists tend to argue that humans have sexual plumbing but no sexuality until they are located in a social environment. - The range of normal and abnormal is itself a construction, a production of society. - The study of this range can lead the willing sociologist into an exploration of the social relations on which sex is built.

Ch 8 Matrix of Domination

Definition: intersecting domains of oppression that create a social space of domination and, by extension, a unique position within that space based on someone's intersectional identity along the multiple dimensions of gender, age, race, class, sexuality, location, and so on. As illustrated by the concept of intersectionality, "woman" is not a stable or obvious category of identity. Rather, women are differentially located in what Collins calls a matrix of domination. - A 40-year-old poor, Black, straight, single mother living in rural Georgia will not have the same conception of what it means to be a woman as a 25-year-old professional, White, single, lesbian in Chicago. - More fundamentally, Collins (1990) argues, Black women face unique oppressions that White women don't. - For instance, Black women experience motherhood in ways that differ from the White masculinist ideal of the family, as "bloodmothers," "othermothers," and "community othermothers," thus revealing that White masculine notions of the world do not capture the daily lived experiences of many Black women.

Ch 9 Eugenics

Definition: literally meaning "well born"; a pseudoscience that postulates that controlling the fertility of populations could influence inheritable traits passed on from generation to generation. Under the model of natural selection, human difference must have evolved over tens or hundreds of thousands of years (if not millions), not just over a few generations in relative sun or shade. A new movement, eugenics, took the idea of very distant origins and ran with it. Eugenicists, led by Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), claimed that each race had a separate package of social and psychological traits transmitted through bloodlines. Everything from criminality and feeblemindedness to disease and intelligence, Galton asserted, could be traced through bloodlines and selectively bred out of or into populations. One of his followers, the American psychologist H. H. Goddard (1866-1957), applied eugenic thinking to generalize findings from his intelligence tests in America. - He tested a handful of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in the early twentieth century and generalized their test scores to whole populations, claiming—and garnering many believers too—that around 70 percent of the immigrants sailing from eastern and southern Europe were, in his phraseology, "morons" who posed a serious threat to the good of the nation.

Ch 6 Formal Social Sanctions

Definition: mechanisms of social control by which rules or laws prohibit deviant criminal behavior. The first are called formal social sanctions. - In most modern societies, these formal sanctions would be rules or laws prohibiting deviant criminal behavior such as murder, rape, and theft. - These sanctions are formal, overt "expressions of official group sentiment" (Meier, 1982).

Ch 6 Social Control

Definition: mechanisms that create normative compliance in individuals. Social control is the set of mechanisms that create normative compliance in individuals. - Informal social sanctions - Formal social sanctions Deviance is learned. - Social control shapes individuals' decision making In Durkheim's The Division of Labor in Society—the idea that deviance, and specifically the act of collective punishment, holds us together. Social control is what sociologists refer to as the set of mechanisms that create normative compliance, the act of abiding by society's norms or simply following the rules of group life. The urban theorist Jane Jacobs (1961) coined the term the eyes and ears of the street to describe the fact that, ideally, in mixed-use (i.e., commercial and residential) neighborhoods, the thread of social control is implicitly woven into daily life. - Through their windows, grandmothers watch children playing baseball on the street below, on the alert for any trouble. - During the course of a busy weekday, a shopkeeper might notice a group of teenagers, who should be at school, loitering outside his store and report this to their parents or the school. In any society, many agents of both formal and informal social control exist. - Our local neighbors act as the primary agents of informal social control, whereas the state, or the government, often has a hand in the construction of formal social sanctions by making laws. - The police are an obvious example of an agent of state social control formed for the protection of the public. - The police patrol public parks and neighborhoods after nightfall and contain public protests to ensure social order. Informal social control is the bedrock on which formal social control must rest. - Likewise, without strong informal social norms, the police are relatively helpless. If an entire community relaxes its informal social control, formal social control inevitably fails. - Lately, the boundary between informal and formal social control is perhaps blurring a bit with the proliferation of surveillance cameras installed by private and public entities.

Ch 7 Structural Mobility

Definition: mobility that is inevitable from changes in the economy. Changes in the distribution of jobs lead to what sociologists call structural mobility, mobility that is inevitable given changes in the economy. - With the decline of farmwork because of technology, the sons and daughters of farmers are by definition going to have to find other kinds of work. - This type of mobility stands in contrast to exchange mobility, in which, if we hold fixed the changing distribution of jobs, individuals trade jobs such that if one person is upwardly mobile it necessarily entails someone else being downwardly mobile.

Ch 8 Androgynous

Definition: neither masculine nor feminine. Gender differences are much more fluid and ambiguous than we may care to admit. - Androgynous—that is, his gender presentation didn't seem obviously masculine or feminine. - There are plenty of people whose behaviors, occupations, and roles don't correspond neatly to essentialist expectations.

Ch 9 Scientific Racism

Definition: nineteenth-century theories of race that characterize a period of feverish investigation into the origins, explanations, and classifications of race. Modern racial thinking developed in the mid-seventeenth century in parallel with global changes such as the Protestant Reformation in Europe, the Age of Exploration, and the rise of capitalism. - Scientific racism, what today we call the nineteenth-century theories of race, brought a period of feverish investigation into the origins, explanations, and classifications of race. Scientific racism sought to make sense of people who were different from White Europeans—who constituted the norm, according to the French scientist Comte de Buffon (1707-1788). - This way of thinking, called ethnocentrism, the judgment of other groups by one's own standards and values, has plagued scientific studies of "otherness." In Buffon's classification schemes, anyone different from Europeans was a deviation from the norm. - His pseudoscientific research, like all racial thinking of the time, justified imperial exploits by automatically classifying nonwhites as abnormal, improper, and inferior. Anthropologist Franz Boas dismissed the claims of the biological basis of discrete races, and sociologists such as Robert Park advanced new ideas about culture's importance in determining human behavior. - Race, these thinkers argued, was less about fixed inherited traits than about particular social circumstances. - Furthermore, when World War II exposed the kind of atrocities to which scientific racism could lead, it became socially and scientifically inappropriate to discuss race in biological terms, and eugenics came to be considered a dangerous way of thinking. With the decline of scientific racism and the shift toward cultural theories of race and ethnicity, the Immigration Act of 1924 was gradually chipped away at starting in 1959 and then completely repealed in 1965. - Don't let the formal denunciation of racial thinking fool you, however.

Ch 8 Sexism

Definition: occurs when a person's sex or gender is the basis for judgment, discrimination, or other differential treatment against that person. One can focus on one of the wires of sexism up close, but then we cannot see the other wires that complete the cage. - It is the combination of the many strands (bars of the cage) of sexism that oppress women—not any single one in isolation. - A bar can be workplace discrimination, unequal housework burdens, and so on.

Ch 8 Queer

Definition: of, relating to, or characterized by sexual or romantic attraction that is not limited to people of a particular gender identity or sexual orientation. Someone who doesn't identify by one space on the binary. What about the Q-word? - Queer is a derogatory term, reclaimed by those it was originally intended to wound, to become a broader, encompassing term for nonheteronormative sexual behaviors/identities. - That is, when someone self-identifies as queer, they may be a lesbian looking for a broader, more inclusive umbrella that is not already overly associated with, say, White middle-class people. - Or they may be someone who participates in what might be called "kinky" sexual practices, such as BDSM (a term meant to capture bondage/discipline/submission/sadomasochism and related practices). - Or they may simply be someone who does not feel comfortable with and wishes to reject other aspects of heteronormativity. - For instance, some queer people reject the notion of same-sex marriage. - They reject what they see as assimilation into heteronormative culture, and instead prefer to organize their lives differently in terms of kinship, sexuality, and so on.

Ch 8 Bisexual

Definition: of, relating to, or characterized by sexual or romantic attraction to people of one's same sex and of the opposite sex. Mimi Schippers (2016) finds that some forms of polyamory subvert gender/sexuality norms more than others. - For example, a relationship including a woman and two men challenges heterosexual norms and gender power relations more than a relationship among one man and two women, since the latter more easily allows for male dominance and because female bisexuality is more socially acceptable than male bisexuality. The vast majority of Generation Z adults who identify as LGBT -- 72% -- say they are bisexual. Thus, 11.5% of all Gen Z adults in the U.S. say they are bisexual, with about 2% each identifying as gay, lesbian or transgender. Contrary to common perception, the percentage of high school students who have had sex has declined over the past couple of decades.

Ch 6 White Collar Crime

Definition: offense committed by a professional (or professionals) against a corporation, agency, or other institution. Infractions such as fraud are called white-collar crime, a term coined by sociologist Edwin Sutherland in 1939. - It is typically committed by a professional (or professionals) in his or her (or their) capacity in the professional world against a corporation, agency, or other professional entity. Although street crime is the most prevalent type of crime, looking strictly at the numbers, white-collar crime has greater financial impact. A particular type of white-collar crime is corporate crime, offenses committed by the officers (CEOs and other executives) of a corporation. In the late spring of 2012, JPMorgan Chase trader Bruno Iksil (also known as the London Whale) placed a giant risky trade and ended up losing $6.2 billion for the bank. - Losing billions on a trade is deviant but not illegal. Iksil was fired, but he avoided arrest. US federal prosecutors have indicted his boss and his assistant for conspiring to cover up the losses by filing false reports. - Penalties for their crimes include a $920 million fine for JPMorgan, but no individuals did time. White-collar crime—Illegal actions of a corporation or people acting on its behalf - Examples: fraud, bribery, insider trading, embezzlement, money laundering, tax evasion - Most financially costly category of crime - Costs the U.S. government between $300-660 billion a year (compared to $15 billion for "regular" street crime) - Most cases of white-collar crime go unpunished or are settled outside of court

Ch 6 Deterrence Theory

Definition: philosophy of criminal justice arising from the notion that crime results from a rational calculation of its costs and benefits. Linking drug use to violent crimes and the decay of social order, the federal and state governments instituted an array of harsher penalties for the possession or sale of illegal substances. - The philosophy of deterrence, or deterrence theory, suggests that "crime results from a rational calculation of the costs and benefits of criminal activity." There are two types of deterrence. - Specific deterrence is what the system attempts when it monitors and tries to prevent known criminals from committing more crimes. - An example would be the prison parole system, because the criminal remains under supervision and is being specifically deterred from committing another crime. - An example of general deterrence would be if, from word on the street, you learn that dealing cocaine carries a prison sentence of 15 years and decide not to risk it. - Deterrence theory suggests that crime in general can be reduced through general deterrence, and recidivism in particular can be reduced through specific deterrence. Recidivism is the "reversion of an individual to criminal behavior" after involvement with the criminal justice system (Maltz, 2001). - However, deterrence theory—in practice—has other, unintended consequences that may lead to more crime. Some advocates for deterrence theory claim that the tough-on-crime policies that led to the era of mass incarceration are responsible for the dramatic drop in violent crime the United States has experienced since the early 1990s.

Ch 8 Pink Collar

Definition: relating to work traditionally associated with women. Louise Howe (1977) calls "pink-collar" jobs, are low-paid service industry jobs. - Cleaning buildings, filing papers, and making coffee are hardly what women imagine when they dream of independence. - Caring work tends to be feminized as well—think home health aides, nurses, or child-care workers. - Meanwhile, "purple-collar" labor—a name given to occupational niches typically filled by transgender individuals—often involves trans women performing emotional work to reduce tensions in high-stress environments, such as one Philippine call center that was studied by Emmanuel David. Men and women often work in different jobs, and men's jobs tend to be paid higher. - For example, truck drivers and nurses' aids: although job training, demands, and physical strength required are similar, truck drivers make about 60% more than nurses' aids. Women are still underrepresented in managerial, hiring, and other authority positions. Equal pay for equal work laws are difficult to enforce. Sexism in undervaluing women's work still persists in some cases. - For example, orchestra auditions

Ch 6 Social Cohesion

Definition: social bonds; how well people relate to each other and get along on a day-to-day basis. Émile Durkheim, author of The Division of Labor in Society (1893/1997), used such a functionalist approach to explain social cohesion—the way people form social bonds, relate to each other, and get along on a day-to-day basis. - Durkheim's thesis is that there are two basic ways society can hold together, or cohere, which he called mechanical and organic solidarity. Cohesion stems from the reliable similarity of the parts.

Ch 6 Organic Solidarity

Definition: social cohesion based on difference and interdependence of the parts. In a state of organic solidarity—which characterizes modern society—social cohesion is based on interdependence, because the members in this type of social body perform different, specialized functions, and this increased mutual dependence among the parts is what allows for the smooth functioning of the whole. - The physical analogy here is a machine in which each part is different and none would be so meaningful outside the context of the machine.

Ch 6 Mechanical Solidarity

Definition: social cohesion based on sameness. Mechanical or segmental solidarity—which characterized premodern society—was based on the sameness of the individual parts. In this model, the functional units are like cargo containers; each container is like all the others and can perform the same function as the next.

Ch 6 Anomic Suicide

Definition: suicide that occurs as a result of insufficient social regulation. Durkheim labeled suicide that resulted from insufficient social regulation anomic suicide. - For example, after the stock market crashed in 1929, many businessmen jumped out of skyscraper windows to their deaths. Durkheim's argument about anomic suicide seems intuitive when it refers to negative events rupturing our everyday lives, but the same principle also holds for positive life events. - For example, many lottery winners report spells of severe depression after winning millions of dollars, displaying another case of anomie. Anomic Suicide --> Not enough regulation - Very prominent in industrial environments. - Ex: when an individual suffers extreme financial loss, the disappointment and stress drives the individual to take their own life.

Ch 6 Fatalistic Suicide

Definition: suicide that occurs as a result of too much social regulation. The final coordinate is fatalistic suicide, which occurs when a person experiences too much social regulation. - Instead of floundering in a state of anomie with no guiding rules, you find yourself doing the same thing day after day, with no variation and no surprises. - In 10 years, what will you be doing? The same thing. In 20 years? The same thing. You have nothing to look forward to because you reasonably expect that nothing better than this will ever happen for you. - This type of suicide usually occurs among slaves and prisoners. - You might imagine that slaves and prisoners would commit suicide because of their physical hardships, but Durkheim's research suggested that it is more accurate to understand their suicidal deaths as resulting from the suffocating tyranny of monotony. Women's roles in society were tightly controlled, and thus they were at higher risk for fatalistic suicide. Fatalistic Suicide --> Too much regulation - Ex: when a slave completes suicide as a method of escape from the control of his or her owner.

Ch 6 Altruistic Suicide

Definition: suicide that occurs when one experiences too much social integration. Altruistic suicide can be a more personal, less ritualistic, choice, as well. - Enlisted soldiers might be the obvious choice because they experience a lower standard of living and less social prestige, but statistics show that the suicide rate is, in fact, higher among officers. - Why? Too much social integration. - The identity of officers—their sense of honor and self-worth—is more completely linked to their role in the military. - Enlisted soldiers, in contrast, are not as responsible for group performance. - More likely, these soldiers perceive their military service as a job and still identify strongly with their other, civilian roles, so they have a lower risk of altruistic suicide. Too little social integration increases the risk of suicide, but too much social integration can also be dangerous. - A person who strays too far up the y-axis might commit altruistic suicide, because a group dominates the life of that individual to such a degree that he or she feels meaningless aside from this social recognition. Altruistic Suicide --> Too much integration - Ex: a solider jumping on a grenade in order to save others, yet kills him.

Ch 6 Egoistic Suicide

Definition: suicide that occurs when one is not well integrated into a social group. Durkheim found that throughout Europe, Protestants killed themselves most often, followed by Catholics and then Jews. - Protestantism is premised on individualism. In most Protestant denominations, there isn't an elaborate church hierarchy as there is in the Catholic Church, and Protestants are encouraged to maintain a direct personal relationship with God. - By changing the individual's relationship to God (and therefore the individual's relationship to the church), Protestantism also stripped away many of the integrative structures of Catholicism, putting its members at greater risk for egoistic suicide. Egoistic Suicide --> Not enough integration - Ex: a woman who has few friends, no husband, and no child takes her own life.

Ch 8 Glass Escalator

Definition: the accelerated promotion of men to the top of a work organization, especially in feminized jobs. Just as the odds are stacked against female tokens, they tilt in favor of men in female-dominated jobs. In Still a Man's World (1995), Christine Williams found that male nurses, elementary school teachers, librarians, and social workers inadvertently maintain masculine power and privilege. - Specifically, when token men enter feminized jobs, they enjoy a quicker rise to leadership positions on the aptly named glass escalator. - These escalators also operate in law firms, where male paralegals, themselves tokens in the overwhelmingly female semi-profession, reap benefits from their heightened visibility (Pierce, 1995). Williams's (2013) new research suggests that women are holding a more equitable share of the top spots in nursing, elementary schools, and libraries, but that a larger problem is emerging that hits both men and women, and their families' overall well-being: Wages in these careers have not kept pace with the cost of living. - Careers that have traditionally been associated with women are not the only ones that have seen declining wages. - Manufacturing, trucking, and warehouse jobs—traditionally dominated by male workers—are also paying less (Mishel & Shierholz, 2013). In the fashion industry, the escalator reverses the gender filter Williams originally found for women-dominated fields. - Aspiring male models are forced off at the second floor while a small number of women models can continue to top model status. I talked with sociologists (and former model) Ashley Mears about the wage structure in the modeling industry. - She confirmed that "you see a complete inverse" where "women outearn men by two to one, sometimes much more" and that "there are just more jobs and opportunities for women models." - She explained that there are two reasons for this, one cultural and one structural. From a structural perspective there simply are no stepping-stones to managerial positions or other promotions for models. - According to Mears, on the models' job escalator, "there's no place to go" because career positions in the fashion industry go to experienced businesspeople and designers who, surprise, tend to be men (Conley, 2013c; Reimer, 2016). - So even though male models don't enjoy a glass escalator, the wider industry ends up dominated by men all the same.

Ch 9 Social Darwinism

Definition: the application of Darwinian ideas to society—namely, the evolutionary "survival of the fittest." Darwin's theory had an enormous impact on how people thought of race. - In effect, it called into question the popular belief that climate influenced racial difference and instead offered an account in which racial lineages were much more deeply rooted and long-standing. - What's more, humankind was now seen as being on a trajectory in which some groups have advanced (or evolved) more than others. - The popular nineteenth-century notion of social Darwinism was the application of Darwinian ideas to society—namely, the evolutionary "survival of the fittest."

Ch 9 One-Drop Rule

Definition: the belief that "one drop" of Black blood makes a person Black, a concept that evolved from US laws forbidding miscegenation. One means (but still not foolproof) of drawing sharp racial boundaries in America was the one-drop rule, asserting that just "one drop" of Black blood makes a person Black. - The rule developed out of the laws passed in many US states forbidding miscegenation, or interracial marriage. By 1910, most Whites in the United States had accepted this doctrine. - The one-drop rule was integral in maintaining the Jim Crow system of segregation upheld in the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. In the American South, it was clear that anyone of Black lineage fell on the unfortunate side of the racial divide, and the rule essentially cleaved America into two societies: one Black, one White. - This meant again clumping together all "White ethnics" into one united category. As F. James Davis notes (1991), the one-drop rule was highly efficient, not least because it completely erased stratification within the Black community that had previously been based on skin tone.

Ch 7 Bourgeoisie

Definition: the capitalist class. The factory workers/own the means They bring home more money but they rely on the proletariat For Marx, it all boils down to two antagonistic classes in a fully mature capitalist society: the employing class (the bourgeoisie or capitalist class) and the working class (the proletariat). - The proletariat sells its labor to the bourgeoisie in order to receive wages and thereby survive. But, according to Marx, the bourgeoisie extract surplus value from the proletariat, even when a few of the proletarians make high incomes. - As this is a fixed-pie or zero-sum view of economic production, an exploitative and hence inherently conflict-ridden relationship exists between the two classes. The central aspect of Marxist class analysis is this exploitation—capitalists taking more of the value of the work of laborers than they repay in wages. - Because the two-class model does not appear to adequately describe the social world as we find it in most modern capitalist economies, more recent Marxist theorists such as Erik Olin Wright have elaborated this basic model with the concept of contradictory class locations. Wright suggests that people can occupy locations in the class structure that fall between the two "pure" classes. - For instance, managers might be perceived as part of both working class and capitalist class: They are part of the working class insofar as they sell their labor to capitalists in order to live (and don't own the means of production), yet they are in the capitalist class insofar as they control (or dominate) workers within the production process. Conversely, the petit bourgeoisie, a group including professionals, craftsmen, and other self-employed individuals or small-business owners, according to Wright, occupy a capitalist position in that they own capital in the form of businesses, but they aren't fully capitalist because they don't control other people's labor.

Ch 8 Hegemonic Masculinity

Definition: the condition in which men are dominant and privileged, and this dominance and privilege is invisible. Among social categories, those who go unquestioned tend to be most privileged. - In Manhood in America (1996), Michael Kimmel traces the development of hegemonic masculinity in the West and finds that in the eighteenth century, the ideal man was not associated with physical fitness, money-making endeavors, or sports. - Business endeavors were the boorish concerns of the rude trade classes, and physical strength undermined one's gentlemanly dispositions. - Ideal masculinity in the 1700s went hand in hand with kindness and intellect, and preferably a little poetry, a very different image from the modern-day ideal of the "man's man." Erving Goffman (1963) describes the masculine ideal of mid-twentieth-century America as a young man who is "married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant, father, of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height, and [with] a decent record in sports." - Today that definition has blossomed to include more forms of dominant masculine identity, including, for example, the metrosexual male, who, as described by sociologist Kristen Barber (2016), is typically White and wealthy and spends a large amount on grooming activities, such as manicures, that would have been considered feminine in the days Goffman was writing. Likewise, many men take on what Tristan Bridges and C. J. Pascoe (2014) call "hybrid masculinities," in which, for example, young White men may try to distance themselves from hegemonic masculinity and instead adopt aspects of, say, African American masculinity.

Ch 9 Phrenology

Definition: the detailed study of the shape and size of the cranium as a supposed indication of character and mental abilities. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), widely considered the founder of anthropology, cataloged variation by race, including differences in head formation, a pseudoscience called phrenology. - Blumenbach's aim was to classify the world based on the different types of bumps he could measure on people's skulls. Based on these skull measurements, he came up with five principal varieties of humans: Caucasian, Mongoloid, Ethiopian, American, and Malay. - Caucasians (named after the people who live on the southern slopes of the Georgian region of eastern Europe), he decided, were the superlatives of the races based on their excellent skull qualities.

Ch 6 Social Integration

Definition: the extent to which you are integrated into your social group or community. By observing patterns in suicide rates across Europe (just as he had previously discerned patterns in penal codes), Durkheim developed a normative theory of suicide. - Durkheim proposed that by plotting "social integration" on the y-axis and "social regulation" on the x-axis of a Cartesian coordinate system, we can better see how social forces influence suicide rates (Figure 6.1). Social integration refers to the degree to which you are one with your social group or community. - A tightly knit community in which members interact with each other in a number of different capacities—say the coach of your child's Little League team is also your dentist and you are the dentist's mechanic—is more socially integrated than one in which people do not interact at all or interact in only one role. - Social regulation refers to how many rules guide your daily life and what you can reasonably expect from the world on a day-to-day basis—the degree to which tomorrow will look like today, which looks like yesterday.

Ch 6 Primary Deviance

Definition: the first act of rule breaking that may be given a label of "deviant" and thus influence how people think about and act toward you. Labeling theorists call the first act of rule breaking (which can include experiences or actions such as hearing voices, breaking windows, or dyeing one's hair neon orange) primary deviance. - After you are labeled a deviant (a criminal, a drug addict, a shoplifter, even a prostitute), you might begin behaving differently as a result of the way people think about and act toward you. Others' expectations about how you will act affect how you do act. - Secondary deviance refers to deviant acts that occur after primary deviance and as a result of your new deviant label. - These labels themselves are socially structured by group stereotypes that can often serve as default cognitive categories. Primary Deviance - Doing an act of deviance one time. - Ex: if you smoke weed one time, people aren't going to label you a stoner. - No influence on self image - No consequences

Ch 9 Racialization

Definition: the formation of a new racial identity by drawing ideological boundaries of difference around a formerly unnoticed group of people. Muslims in America have undergone what scholars call racialization, the formation of a new racial identity by drawing ideological boundaries of difference around a formerly unnoticed group of people. - These days, any brown-skinned man with a beard or woman with a headscarf is subject to threats, violence, and harassment. - And men with turbans bear some of the worst discrimination, although nearly all men who wear turbans in the United States are Sikh, members of one of the world's largest religious groups, which originated in India. The racialization of Muslims operates on several flawed assumptions. - First, people make stereotyped assumptions based on appearance (turban = Osama bin Laden), even if in their own personal experience they know better (most people wearing turbans in the United States are Sikhs, not Muslim extremists). - Second, making snap judgments about Muslims requires a gross caricaturization of Islam's followers. - Remember, two-thirds of Arabs in the United States are not Muslim but Christian (Pew Research Center, 2011a).

Ch 7 Stratification

Definition: the hierarchical organization of a society into groups with differing levels of power, social prestige, or status and economic resources. There are many dimensions and forms by which this equality or inequality can emerge in a given society. - For example, a society can be stratified based on age. In many tribes, for instance, age determines the social prestige and honor that the group accords an individual. - Those younger than you would place great weight on your words and in some cases treat them as commands. Furthermore, birth order can be the basis of inequality. - Such a system was prevalent as late as the nineteenth century in European society, where the firstborn male typically inherited the family estate; however, in certain parts of the world, birth order still plays a role in resource distribution. Gender or race and ethnicity also can be the predominant forms social stratification takes. - Ultimately, many dimensions exist within which inequality can emerge, and often these dimensions overlap significantly. Stratified societies are those where human groups within them are ranked hierarchically into strata, along one or more social dimensions. Many sociologists and philosophers believe that there are four ideal types of social stratification—estate system, caste system, class system, and status hierarchy system—although all societies have some combinations of these forms and no type ever occurs in its pure form. - In addition to these, some sociologists propose a fifth ideal type, an elite-mass dichotomy. - Each system has its own ideology that attempts to legitimate the inequality within it. Systematic inequalities between groups of people that arise as intended or unintended consequences of social processes and relationships - Entails ranking of social status, power, and social standing Five Class Model - Categorization is socially constructed, but consequences are very real - Different layers/stratum US Social Class Ladder - Upper Class = top 1%

Ch 7 Equality of Outcome

Definition: the idea that each player must end up with the same amount regardless of the fairness of the "game." The final and most radical (or rather most antibourgeois and anticapitalist) form of equality is equality of outcome, the position that each Monopoly player should end up with the same amount regardless of the fairness of the "game." - This standard is concerned less with the rules of the game than with the distribution of resources; it is essentially a Marxist (or Communist) ideology. Like Rousseau's idea that there will always be physical inequalities—some will be better at math, others will be better at physical work, and so on—equality of outcome is the idea that everyone contributes to society and to the economy according to what they do best. A centrally organized society calls on its citizens to contribute to the best of their ability, yet everyone receives the same rewards. The median income is everyone's income regardless of occupation or position. Under equality of outcome, or equality of result, the individual incentives touted by the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers are eliminated. Nobody earns more power, prestige, and wealth by working harder. - In this system, the only incentive is altruistic; you are giving to society for the sake of its progress and not merely for your own betterment. Critics worry that without the selfish incentives of capitalism, all progress would halt, and sloth might take over. Unless an oppressive rule emanated from some central agency, collective endeavors would be doomed to failure on account of the free rider problem, the notion that when more than one person is responsible for getting something done, the incentive is for each individual to shirk responsibility and hope others will pull the extra weight. - (You might have encountered this sort of situation while collaborating on group projects for school.) - Critics of this system argue that even when there is a relatively strong central planning agency to assign each worker a task and enforce productivity, such an administrative mechanism cannot make decisions and allocate resources as efficiently as a more free-market approach does.

Ch 7 Equality of Opportunity

Definition: the idea that everyone has an equal chance to achieve wealth, social prestige, and power because the rules of the game, so to speak, are the same for everyone. One standard of equality is termed equality of opportunity. Monopoly follows the rules of equality of opportunity. - Everyone had an equal chance at the start. - Assuming nobody cheated, any differences were a result of luck (the dice) and skill (the players' choices). - The same goes for society. - The mere existence of inequality is not at issue here. - Some people have more wealth and income than others, and some people enjoy greater social prestige or power than others, but the rules of the game are still fair. We all go into the game of society, as we do into a game of Monopoly, knowing the rules, and therefore any existing inequality is fair as long as everyone plays by the rules. This is the standard model for what equality means in a bourgeois society, such as modern capitalist society. - Although the word bourgeois is often used pejoratively, here I mean it as a neutral description—a society of commerce in which the maximization of profit is the primary business incentive. Almost all modern capitalist societies purport to follow an ideology of equal opportunity. - The equal opportunity ideology was adopted by civil rights activists in the 1960s, who argued that the rules were unfair. - For instance, the segregation of public spaces and other Jim Crow laws (a rigid set of anti-Black statutes that relegated African Americans to the status of second-class citizens through educational, economic, and political exclusion) were seen as incompatible with the bourgeois notion of fairness or equality of opportunity. Unequal opportunity clearly stifles meritocracy, a system in which advancement is based on individual achievement or ability.

Ch 7 Equality of Condition

Definition: the idea that everyone should have an equal starting point. A second standard of equality is a bit more progressive and is termed equality of condition. An example of this ideology is affirmative action, which involves preferential selection to increase the representation of women, racial and ethnic minorities, and/or people from less privileged social classes in areas of employment, education, and business from which they have historically been excluded (see the policy discussion at the end of this chapter). Affirmative action occurs when a person or group in a gatekeeper position, such as a college admissions office or the human resources department in charge of hiring new workers, actively selects some applicants who have faced the steep slope of an uneven playing field, often due to racism or sexism in society. - Sometimes these policies can enhance efficiency if they result in fairer competition; other times they may result in a trade-off between efficiency and equality in favor of the latter. - We may accept that certain groups with slightly lower SAT scores are admitted to colleges because they faced much greater obstacles to attain those SAT scores than other groups of test takers who enjoyed more advantages. Such "social engineering" may be based on race, class, gender, or any other social sorting category, as long as the proponents can make a justifiable claim that the existing playing field is tilted against them.

Ch 8 Heteronormativity

Definition: the idea that heterosexuality is the default or normal sexual orientation from which other sexualities deviate. One form of nonheteronormativity that has garnered a lot of attention of late is non-monogamy. - Non-monogamy is not just having sex with multiple people (because, for example, people can be in monogamous relationships and cheat on their partners). - Rather, it is the practice of having multiple sexual (or intimate) relationships (or merely the desire to) with the full knowledge and consent of all the people involved. Polyamory is a particular form of non-monogamy (Sheff, 2014). - While there is no agreed on, universal definition of polyamory, it usually involves intimate relationships with more than one partner (again, with the knowledge and consent of all involved). - So a couple who agree that they can have one-night stands with other people are non-monogamous but not polyamorous. - Mimi Schippers (2016) finds that some forms of polyamory subvert gender/sexuality norms more than others. - For example, a relationship including a woman and two men challenges heterosexual norms and gender power relations more than a relationship among one man and two women, since the latter more easily allows for male dominance and because female bisexuality is more socially acceptable than male bisexuality.

Ch 8 Intersectionality

Definition: the idea that it is critical to understand the interplay between social identities such as race, class, gender, ability status, and sexual orientation, even though many social systems and institutions (such as the law) try to treat each category on its own. Indeed, a third wave of feminism focuses on how the identities surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality intersect with other meaningful social categories like race or class in a process called intersectionality, as articulated by critical race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1989) and sociologist Beatrice Potter Webb back in 1913. As illustrated by the concept of intersectionality, "woman" is not a stable or obvious category of identity. Rather, women are differentially located in what Collins calls a matrix of domination. - A 40-year-old poor, Black, straight, single mother living in rural Georgia will not have the same conception of what it means to be a woman as a 25-year-old professional, White, single, lesbian in Chicago. - More fundamentally, Collins (1990) argues, Black women face unique oppressions that White women don't. - For instance, Black women experience motherhood in ways that differ from the White masculinist ideal of the family, as "bloodmothers," "othermothers," and "community othermothers," thus revealing that White masculine notions of the world do not capture the daily lived experiences of many Black women.

Ch 9 Nativism

Definition: the movement to protect and preserve indigenous land or culture from the allegedly dangerous and polluting effects of new immigrants. Goddard supported the immigration exclusion acts that in 1924 largely blocked non-Anglos from immigrating and were intended to improve the "stock" of the nation. - This concern about the new and objectionable stock of immigrants, as opposed to "native," more desirable immigrants of an earlier epoch, was the crux of nativism, the movement to protect and preserve indigenous land or culture from the allegedly dangerous and polluting effects of new immigrants. Madison Grant (1865-1937), an influential writer, epitomized the spirit of nativism when he argued that not restricting the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans meant "race suicide" for the White race (1916/1936).

Ch 7 Free Rider Problem

Definition: the notion that when more than one person is responsible for getting something done, the incentive is for each individual to shirk responsibility and hope others will pull the extra weight. Critics worry that without the selfish incentives of capitalism, all progress would halt, and sloth might take over. Unless an oppressive rule emanated from some central agency, collective endeavors would be doomed to failure on account of the free rider problem, the notion that when more than one person is responsible for getting something done, the incentive is for each individual to shirk responsibility and hope others will pull the extra weight. - (You might have encountered this sort of situation while collaborating on group projects for school.) - Critics of this system argue that even when there is a relatively strong central planning agency to assign each worker a task and enforce productivity, such an administrative mechanism cannot make decisions and allocate resources as efficiently as a more free-market approach does.

Ch 8 Sex

Definition: the perceived biological differences that society typically uses to distinguish males from females. Sex ---> biological - Terms used in conversational contexts. - Sex is a measure of our anatomy, hormones, biological self, genitalia, etc. Sex is typically used to describe socially accepted, perceived biological differences that distinguish males from females. - There are many biological differences between humans; society gives some of those biological differences gendered labels that, in turn, come to define sex categories such as "male" and "female." There are some exceptions and blurred lines that have led sociologists to view this model of "natural" sex as more of an approximation than an absolute. The medical industry used to refer to such children as "intersex"; these days, they refer to a "disorder of sex development." - Most doctors today still typically recommend secretive surgery during infancy to make nonbinary children conform to a preconceived notion of what "unambiguous" genitalia should look like. - About 90 percent of these surgeries reassign an ambiguous male anatomy into a female one because, in the disquieting (and offensive) phrase of the surgical world, "It's easier to make a hole than build a pole" (Hendricks, 1993).

Ch 7 Cultural Capital

Definition: the skills, education, norms, and behaviors acquired by members of a social group that can give them economic and other advantages. Cultural capital —> cultural articles that function as resources (based on class) - Knowledge and skills

Ch 9 Miscegenation

Definition: the technical term for interracial marriage, literally meaning "a mixing of kinds"; it is politically and historically charged, and sociologists generally prefer the term exogamy or outmarriage. One means (but still not foolproof) of drawing sharp racial boundaries in America was the one-drop rule, asserting that just "one drop" of Black blood makes a person Black. - The rule developed out of the laws passed in many US states forbidding miscegenation, or interracial marriage.

Ch 6 Informal Social Sanctions

Definition: the usually unexpressed but widely known rules of group membership; the unspoken rules of social life. Informal social sanctions are based on the usually unexpressed but widely known rules of group membership. - Informal social sanctions are the unwritten rules of social life. - So, hypothetically, if you loudly belch in public, you will probably be the object of scowls of disgust. - These gestures of contempt at your socially unacceptable behavior are examples of informal social sanctions, the ways we keep each other in check by watching and judging those around us. The idea behind informal social sanctions is that we are all simultaneously enforcing the rules of society and having them enforced on us. - At the same time we are watching or observing others, others are watching us, too. - All of us are both spectators and objects of spectacle.

Ch 6 Crime

Definition: the violation of laws enacted by society. At the other end of the continuum, we have formal deviance, or crime, which is the violation of laws enacted by society. When deviant persons are caught in deviant acts, depending on the seriousness of the offense, they are subject to punishment. Formal deviance Examples of Crimes - Murder Robbery - Belching loudly in church - Jaywalking - Underage drinking - Cheating on spouse/partner - Talking to yourself in public - Premarital sex - Dyeing your hair purple - Being in goth subculture - Downloading music illegally - "Upskirting"

Ch 6 Broken Window Theory of Deviance

Definition: theory explaining how social cues impact whether individuals act deviantly—specifically, whether local, informal social norms allow deviant acts. As labeling theory predicts, the ways other people see you affect your behavior and overall life chances. - So, too, does the way you see your social surroundings, according to the broken windows theory. In 1969 Zimbardo conducted another experiment in which he and his graduate students abandoned two cars, leaving them without license plates and with their hoods propped up, in two different neighborhoods (Wilson & Kelling, 1982). - The first car was abandoned in a seemingly safe neighborhood in Palo Alto, California, where Stanford University is located. - The second car was left in the South Bronx in New York City, then one of the most dangerous urban ghettos in the country. - Unsurprisingly, the abandoned car in Palo Alto remained untouched, whereas the car deposited in the South Bronx lost its hubcaps, battery, and any other usable parts almost immediately. - However, it was the next stage in the experiment that offers valuable insight into how social context affects social deviance. Zimbardo went back to the untouched car in Palo Alto and smashed it with a sledgehammer. - He and his graduate students shattered the windshield, put some dents in the car's sides, and again fled the scene. - What do you think happened to the smashed and dented car in the "safe," rich neighborhood? Passersby began stopping their cars and getting out to further smash the wreck or tag it with graffiti. - The social cues, or social context, influenced the way people, even in a rich neighborhood, treated the car. - In the South Bronx, the overall social context—involving many broken windows, graffiti, and dilapidated buildings—encouraged deviant acts at the outset because the neighborhood setting of decay and disorder signaled to residents that an abandoned car was fair game for abuse. - In Palo Alto, where neighborhood conditions were clean and orderly, people were unlikely to vandalize an abandoned car. - However, when the vehicle was already mangled, that cue of turmoil signaled to people that it was okay to engage in the otherwise deviant act of vandalism. - The broken windows theory of deviance explains how social context and social cues impact the way individuals act—specifically, whether local, informal social norms allow such acts. - When signals seem to tell us that it's okay to do the otherwise unthinkable, sometimes we do. Explains how social context and social cues affect the individuals act. Physical surroundings give off different cues for deviant behaviors. Took 2 cars: 1 abandoned in a poor/low income neighborhood and another in a wealthier neighborhood - Found that the car in the low income area was destroyed first. Then took the cars in each area and had kids purposefully destroy it to see how bystanders would interact. - Wealthy by standers: caught their attention, called the police - Poor by standers: caught their attention, let it be

Ch 6 Recidivism

Definition: when an individual who has been involved with the criminal justice system reverts to criminal behavior. Deterrence theory suggests that crime in general can be reduced through general deterrence, and recidivism in particular can be reduced through specific deterrence. Recidivism is the "reversion of an individual to criminal behavior" after involvement with the criminal justice system (Maltz, 2001). - However, deterrence theory—in practice—has other, unintended consequences that may lead to more crime. The high rates of recidivism in the United States bring us back to labeling theory, which suggests that the process of becoming a deviant often involves contact with, even absorption into, a special institution such as a prison or mental health institution. - Total institutions are distinguished by "a breakdown of the barriers separating" these "three spheres of life" (sleep, work, play). Research has shown that prison has very little effect on whether adults commit future crimes. - Recidivism rate very high Prison ends up being like "college for criminals"—a chance to network with other convicts, learn new illicit skills, and harden oneself to mainstream social norms, all while missing out on work experience and educational opportunities and acquiring the stigma of having done time. - In other words, perhaps prison actually creates crime by increasing recidivism

Ch 7 Global Inequality

Definition: when resources are limited to a few core nations and a wealthy minority of corporations or individuals. One of the main reasons cited for rising income and wealth inequality in the United States is globalization—the rise in the trade of goods and services across national boundaries, as well as the increased mobility of multinational businesses and migrant labor. In the long view, there is no question that global income inequality has been steadily rising over the last few centuries. - At the start of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, almost the entire population of the world lived in poverty and misery (see the discussion of Malthus earlier in the chapter). - Birthrates were high, but so was mortality. - Most people barely survived, no matter where they lived. Scholars have long been trying to figure out why Europe developed first. - Early explanations, dating back to the French essayist Montesquieu (1748/1750), focused on geographic differences between the peoples of Europe and the global South (as the less developed regions of the world are sometimes called). - Perhaps because of the South's heat or humidity, Montesquieu associated virtue and rationality with the North; the South he associated with vice and passion. Montesquieu's views are now discarded as a racist account of uneven development, but more recent versions of the geographical explanation focus on differences in the length of growing seasons, the higher variability of water supply (because of more frequent droughts), the types of cereal crops that can grow in temperate zones compared with tropical and subtropical regions, the lack of coal deposits (the first fuel that drove industrialization, long before oil), and perhaps most important, the disease burden in warmer climates (Sachs, 2001). Economist Jeffrey Sachs explains that Africa's geography made it much more difficult for an agricultural revolution to occur. - So Africa was not fortunate when it came to physical geography, and it missed out on the Green Revolution because it could not easily implement irrigation agriculture. - But that's not all. - If you recall from our discussion of Malthus, Africa also carried a higher disease burden because of the way malaria is transmitted through animal hosts—more deadly in Africa than in Asia. - Even with that, Sachs is not through explaining just how Africa came to be so disadvantaged compared with other regions of the world. Important impacts of colonialism would be easy to overlook if we focused only on geography and infectious disease transmission, he says. Others argue that geography doesn't matter as much as social institutions do. In one version of this line of reasoning, it is a strong foundation of property rights, incorruptible judiciaries, and the rule of law in general that predicts economic development (Easterly & Levine, 2002). Other scholars argue that the types of relationships different colonized regions had with the European powers largely determined their fate today: For example, under the rule of the British Raj, India was endowed with a huge network of railways to move cotton, tea, and other products to market. - This network, in turn, helped spur economic growth once India got over the rocky transition to self-government after gaining its independence. Today that legacy of unequal starting places and economic potentials means that the latest spurt of globalization has engendered an even greater level of income inequality across the North-South divide while creating huge differences within developing countries. - Indeed, some regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa and eastern Europe, have become poorer over the last 25 years, whereas in some previously poor regions, such as South and East Asia, income levels have risen. Considering the net change, economist Xavier Salai-i-Martin estimates that there were around half a billion fewer poor people in the world by the turn of the twenty-first century than there were in the 1970s (Salai-i-Martin, 2002). - Likewise, he claims, "all indexes show a reduction in global income inequality between 1980 and 1998." There have indeed been global reductions in population-weighted between-country differences, which can largely be attributed to the rapid growth of the Chinese and Indian economies over this period. - Within individual countries, however, inequality has generally risen over the same time frame. - The story of globalization and inequality is thus a complex and constantly changing one.

Ch 8 Intersex

Definition:a person is born with a combination of male and female biological traits. The medical industry used to refer to such children as "intersex"; these days, they refer to a "disorder of sex development." - Most doctors today still typically recommend secretive surgery during infancy to make nonbinary children conform to a preconceived notion of what "unambiguous" genitalia should look like. - About 90 percent of these surgeries reassign an ambiguous male anatomy into a female one because, in the disquieting (and offensive) phrase of the surgical world, "It's easier to make a hole than build a pole" (Hendricks, 1993). Founded in 1993, the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) was succeeded in 2008 by the Accord Alliance, which has the same mission: to reduce embarrassment and secrecy over intersex conditions. - Sociologist Georgiann Davis (2015), who herself learned only as an adolescent that she had male sex chromosomes, has documented rifts within the intersex community. - Some members find comfort in the scientific, medicalizing label of "disorder of sex development," while many resist the assertion that their identity is a pathology rather than just part of natural human variation. Intersex individuals show us that this biological binary is actually much blurrier than we think. Umbrella term for anyone that doesn't fall neatly into the male or female categories. - Ex: chromosomal abnormalities - XXY, ambiguous genitalia, etc. Estimates range from .05 - 2% population 1-2 babies in every 1000 births receive "corrective" genital surgery. - (in other words, Intersex is about as common as Down's Syndrome, and slightly more common than cystic fibrosis).

Ch 8 Sexuality and Power

Marxist feminists, for instance, argue that sexuality in America is an expression of the unequal power balance between men and women. Catharine MacKinnon (1983) argued that in male-dominated societies, sexuality is constructed as a gender binary, with men on top and women on the bottom (literally and figuratively). - To MacKinnon, sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality, an expression of male control. Some feminists also argue that our experiences of what is titillating are shaped by the fetishization of male power. - So being "taken" is exciting and pleasurable to women, revealing that even those things we think of as the most personal of experiences are shaped by social power arrangements. Adrienne Rich (1980) called sexuality in America a "compulsory heterosexuality." - This "political institution," at least for some, is not a preference but something that has been imposed, managed, organized, and enforced to serve a male-dominated capitalist system in which women's unpaid domestic work is required to support men's paid work outside of the home. - Because her work is unpaid, the woman in this situation is unable to leave a bad husband. According to Rich, people come to see heterosexuality as the norm, when it is, in fact, a mechanism integral to sustaining women's social subordination.

Ch 6 Social Integration - Suicide

Too little social integrationincreases the risk of suicide, but too much social integration can also be dangerous. - A person who strays too far up the y-axis might commit altruistic suicide, because a group dominates the life of that individual to such a degree that he or she feels meaningless aside from this social recognition. - Think about Japanese ritual suicide, sometimes called seppuku (and sometimes colloquially known as hara-kiri). - In this scenario, samurai warriors who had failed their group in battle would disembowel themselves with a sword rather than continue to live with disgrace in the community. - Durkheim uses the example of Hindu widows in some castes and regions of India, who were expected to throw themselves on their husbands' funeral pyre to prove their devotion. - This practice, called suttee or sati, symbolized that a woman properly recognized that her life was meaningless outside her social role as a wife. - Official efforts to ban suttee commenced as early as the sixteenth century, and it is now illegal and extremely rare in India. Altruistic suicide can be a more personal, less ritualistic, choice, as well. - Enlisted soldiers might be the obvious choice because they experience a lower standard of living and less social prestige, but statistics show that the suicide rate is, in fact, higher among officers. - Why? Too much social integration. - The identity of officers—their sense of honor and self-worth—is more completely linked to their role in the military. - Enlisted soldiers, in contrast, are not as responsible for group performance. - More likely, these soldiers perceive their military service as a job and still identify strongly with their other, civilian roles, so they have a lower risk of altruistic suicide. Durkheim and Suicide - Suicide is a social phenomenon that can be attributed to a lack of social integration and regulation. (Religion, Age, Marital Status, Gender, Employment ) - Altruistic Suicide --> Too much integration (Ex: a solider jumping on a grenade in order to save others, yet kills him.) - Egoistic Suicide --> Not enough integration (Ex: a woman who has few friends, no husband, and no child takes her own life.)

Ch 8 Same-Sex Sexuality

While same-sex relations have occurred in several different cultures throughout history, homosexual identity (i.e., "homosexual" as a term to describe a type of person) emerged in 1850. - During the Victorian era. Foucault: Discourses on sexuality emerged; the state then aimed to assert power. - Focuses on the historical timeline of the Victorian era. - Strict cultural attitudes and societal restrictions between sexuality and sexual behavior. Homosexuality began to be understood as a personality type since 1850. - Was listed as a mental disorder until 1973. French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) led the way to poststructuralist notions of the body and sexuality as historical productions. - In The History of Sexuality (1978), Foucault made the case that the body is "in the grip" of cultural practices. - That is, there is no pre-social or natural body; instead, culture is always already inscribed on our bodies. - Foucault further argued that the way in which we know our bodies is linked to power, and knowledge and power go hand in hand. As the population expanded in nineteenth-century Europe, newly formed states and their administrators developed a concern for population management. - The rise of scientific ways of thinking at the time led to the creation of what Foucault calls "bio-power," the control of populations by influencing patterns in births, deaths, and illnesses. Discourses on sexuality had by then surfaced. People talked about sex, scientists studied it, and government officials tried to regulate it, whereas a century before, all this sex talk did not exist. - With the development of the biological and human sciences in the nineteenth century, doctors wanted to know which kinds of sex were normal and which were deviant, and new attention was paid to policing those differences. By the late 1800s, "Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior [identity]" (Foucault, 1978). - In Foucault's account, the category of homosexuality arises from the efforts of government bureaucrats trying to assert their power (that of the state) over human populations. Meanwhile, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association listed homosexuality on their list of mental disorders until 1973. - Homosexuals were regarded as needing to be regulated, observed, studied, and most important, controlled. - Because everyone was capable of, or in danger of, sexual deviance, the urgency to confess one's sexuality grew, as did the scientific need for public surveillance. Who was gay? How could a homosexual be detected? Anyone could be a pervert—your professor, your roommate, even you! Even our language reflects the way sexual behavior becomes more than a single event among the many other behaviors that make up an individual's life—it often becomes a master status. - Today our society places a huge emphasis—our entire selfhood, according to Foucault—on sexuality. - Sexuality, in other words, is a prime factor that goes into the construction of gender—a dynamic that may not have been as important in days gone by. - Now, what you do (and with whom) defines who you are: not just how others see you, but how you experience yourself. Though based on questionable data, Alfred Kinsey's 1948 study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male suggested that at least 10 percent of men were homosexual. - He challenged the psychiatric model of homosexuals as perverse and abnormal and instead viewed sexuality as a continuum. - Most people, he claimed, experience both heterosexual and homosexual desires and behaviors.