Sociology Exam 1 Review
George Ritzer: McDonaldizaiton (characteristics) Bureaucratization plus mass production ("Fordism", "Taylorism") dehumanization, routinization/standardization instrumental rationality, rationalization, irrationality of rationality, iron cage (Velvet cage? Rubber cage?) profitability, commodification/thingness workers, consumers, production and consumption McTasks/McWork Inequality in the system Limit choices? Ultimately, does Ritzer only allow for individual responses rather than collective responses /action?
According to George Ritzer, rationalization is growing out of control. He calls the rationalization of the economic sphere "McDonaldization" - a play on the overwhelming success and popularity of the McDonald's restaurant franchise. McDonaldization is "the process by which the principles of the fast food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world" (1993: 1). Ritzer takes his critique largely from the work of Max Weber regarding formal rationality and applies it to economic developments that are leading us into the twenty-first century. He describes formal rationality as "the search by people for optimum means to a given end [that] is shaped by rules, regulations, and larger social structures" (1993: 19). The social mechanism by which such formal rationality is to be carried out is the bureaucracy. "Weber viewed bureaucracy as the paradigm case of formal rationality" (1993: 20). Ritzer also describes the precedents set in the economy that led up to McDonaldization. First, he mentions the proclivity toward scientific management. Scientific management was created [at the turn of the century] by Frederick W. Taylor, and his ideas played a key role in shaping the work world throughout the twentieth century. Taylor developed a series of principles designed to rationalize work and was hired by a number of large organizations (for example, Bethlehem Steel) to implement those ideas. Employers found that when workers followed Taylor's methods, they worked much more efficiently, everyone performed the same steps (that is, their work exhibited predictability), and they produced a great deal more while their pay had to be increased only slightly (calculability) (1993:24). These elements of efficiency, predictability and calculability are key concepts in the discussion of rationalization. Second, Ritzer describes the assembly line and the part that the automobile industry played in manipulating technology to increase the elements of rationalization described above. From here, the examples become more and more numerous, ranging from the mass-produced houses of Levittown to fully enclosed shopping malls that reinforce the kind of 'franchisism' that the McDonald's chain made famous. Ritzer is intent to point out that "McDonaldization did not occur in a historical vacuum; it had important precursors...[that] contributed some of the structural bases needed for chains of fast-food restaurants to thrive. Although the fast-food restaurant adopts elements of its predecessors, it also represents a quantum leap in the process of rationalization". As we shall see, it also seems to represent a quantum leap in the process of irrationalization (1993: 34). Rationalization can be seen as essentially paradoxical. The 'rationale' for rationalization, its a priori assumption, is that increased efficiency, predictability, and calculability is akin to an increase in the ability of man to manipulate his environment, to adapt, to conquer the chaotic elements of life so as to obtain a quality of life that can be considered 'better' than previous times. It is the empirical economic realization of the notion that "social change is 'normal' " (cf. p. 6). It is an effort to increase the 'standard of living' of those citizens of the social order who agree to capitulate to institutionalized rational systems. However, 'standard of living' has come to be defined not in a qualitative manner, but rather as a quantity: of income, of 'gross national product', of the rise and fall of interest rates. The 'standard of living' is measured as a numerical gesture rather than experienced as a real circumstance. The way we gauge our 'progress' into the future is based on a notion of quantitative growth rather than qualitative happiness. It is merely assumed that a growth in production will allow us to shrug off the dangers and inconsistencies of the unpredictable natural environment; there is, in fact, a need to reevaluate this assumption. This is the paradox of rationality: it inevitably leads to irrationality. "The bureaucracy," writes Ritzer, "is a dehumanizing place in which to work and by which to be serviced. The main reason we think of McDonaldization as irrational, and ultimately unreasonable, is that it tends to become a dehumanizing system that may become antihuman or even destructive to human beings". The ultimate proof of the irrationality of rationality lies at the end of World War II: rational systems undertaken to construct an ideal utopia for humankind have led, ironically, to our ability to develop the technology of the atomic bomb that makes the ultimate extinction of homo sapiens possible. William Shirer (1959) writes in the foreword to his history of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon. In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet (xii). Destructive indeed! Our pursuit of the benefits that arrive with newfound technologies based on scientific principles seems irrevocably linked to the depths of the evils that plague modern socieites, including the threat of their own demise. However, bringing the irrationality of rationality to a less apocalyptic level, it should be understood that the growth of rationalized systems has a pronounced impact on our everyday lives, both as producers and consumers. Ritzer (1993) identifies the dehumanizing aspect of fast-food restaurants in customer/employee relations ("The nature of the fast-food restaurant turns customer's and employee's contact into fleeting relationships"), in the simple and repetitive nature of the jobs ("Said Burger King workers, 'Any trained monkey could do this job'") and in the dining experience of the consumer ("The diner is reduced to a kind of overwound automaton who is made to rush through the meal"). Given the rate at which the model of McDonaldization is being adopted by the business world, such a trend in the degradation of relationships between people and other people, and between people and their work, is disturbing. The individuation that accompanies rationalization is a process of isolation by which persons in our society are found to be separated from each other by invisible barriers of custom and culture that guide our relationships in directions that are not conducive to an honest and meaningful human exchange. The omnipresence of certain cultural icons, such as McDonald's Golden Arches, leads to an unconscious state of mind that eludes the perception of change or alteration in the dimension of space that surrounds the individual. "The following advertisement appeared on September 17, 1991, in the Washington Post (and The New York Times): 'Where else at 35,000 feet can you get a McDonald's meal like this'..." (Ritzer, 1993: 6). Rationalization and the accompanying conformity in the architecture of both the physical presence of, say, a McDonald's restaurant and, perhaps more importantly, the non-physical presence (i.e., the behaviorism described above as a style of service) act as an eraser upon our perception to our movement through time and space. Due to the predictable, calculated, and controlled measures of rationalized business, we can escape from the chains of chaos that fettered our forefathers; however, we make this getaway only to run into the mouth of an even greater threat to our emancipation as individuals and historical actors - the emergence of mass society. Arendt writes that with the emergence of mass society, the realm of the social has finally, after several centuries of development, reached the point where it embraces and controls all members of a given community equally and with equal strength. But society equalizes under all circumstances, and the victory of equality in the modern world is only the political and legal recognition of the fact that society has conquered the public realm, and that distinction and difference have become private matters of the individual. This modern equality, based on the conformism inherent in society and possible only because behavior has replaced action as the foremost mode of human relationship, is in every respect different from equality in antiquity, and notably in the Greek city-states...The public realm, in other words, was reserved for individuality; it was the only place where men could show who they really and inexchangeably were. It is the same conformism, the assumption that men behave and do not act with respect to each other, that lies at the root of the modern science of economics [the same science that guides the businessmen in their actions], whose birth coincided with the rise of society and which together with its chief technical tool, statistics, became the social science par excellence. The unfortunate truth about behaviorism and the validity of its 'laws' is that the more people there are, the more likely they are to behave and the less likely they are to tolerate non-behavior. Statistically, this will be shown in the leveling out of fluctuation [regression to the mean]. In reality, deeds will have less and less chance to stem the tide of behavior, and events will more and more lose their significance, that is, their capacity to illuminate historical time. Statistical uniformity is by no means a harmless scientific ideal; it is the no longer secret political ideal of a society which, entirely submerged in the routine of everyday living, is at peace with the scientific outlook inherent in its very existence (1959: 41-42; my emphasis). It is this behavioral uniformity, as fostered by today's corporate culture, that seems to be isolating people into narrowly privatized expressions of their own values and beliefs. This behaviorism hides from view the existence of a reflection (based upon past historical events) and stifles the existence of imagination (based upon future historical possibilities), rather than connecting people in a genuine, contemplative fashion. It is, quite remarkably, the very same mainstream corporate culture fostering this behaviorism (through rationalization) that justifies huge economic inequalities among individuals by saying that they are the result of meritocratic procedures (e.g., Hilbert earned his enormous compensation). However, such a justification cannot be valid, given the following argument: "Excellence," according to Arendt, "itself has always been assigned to the public realm where one could excel, could distinguish oneself from all others. Every activity performed in public can attain excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required, and this presence needs the formality of one's peers, it cannot be the casual, familiar presence of one's equals or inferiors" (1959: 48-49). The existence of this public realm where excellence can exist, however, has been overtaken by a new mode of social reality. The irrational processes of rationalization have led to the arrival in modern societies of what Arendt calls the "social realm." "The phenomenon of conformism is characteristic of this modern development" (Arendt: 1959, 40). And it is this social realm that contemporary capitalists (i.e. those who posit that they have accumulated all that they can safely possess by the virtue of their excellent character) helped to create, using modern economic science as their guide. The premise that great wealth is justified by the fact that the wealthy earned their keep is bad, for "the social realm...made excellence anonymous, emphasized the progress of mankind rather than the achievements of men, and changed the content of the public realm beyond recognition" (Arendt: 1959: 49). So it can be seen that as we have striven to eliminate chaos from our lives using the process of rationalization, the alternative to which we have turned (a conformist mass society) is both ultimately destructive to the variety of individuality (the so-called "private" realm) that emerged during the Renaissance and leads to vast economic inequalities. Is there, then, any other way out of this "iron cage" that has increasingly encapsulated our society from the time of the industrial revolution? Is there any hope for non-rationalized business to appear on the horizon? Ritzer, in fact, names several businesses that make an attempt to stray from the path of formal rationality and the conformity of contemporary capitalism. Included among them is, not surprisingly, Ben & Jerry's Homemade, Inc.
C.H. Cooley: the reflected self, the mirrored self
Cooley is one of the founders of the interactionist perspective, which seeks to explain society by looking at the everyday forms of interaction between individuals. Cooley's theory of self is one in which we learn who we are through our interactions with others. This is known as the looking glass self. This basically means that our self-image comes from our own self-reflection and from what others think of us. Cooley believed that it is through these interactions that one begins to develop an idea of who they are; therefore, the self is a product of our social interactions. There are three phases to the development of self, according to the looking glass self theory: 1. We imagine how we present ourselves to others. 2. We imagine how others evaluate us. 3. We develop some sort of feeling about ourselves based upon our perception of what we think others have of us.
Define relative poverty. Define absolute poverty.
Individual's economic position compared w/ the living standards of the majority in the society.
Why are oligarchy and democracy contradictory principles of organization?
Iron law of oligarchy, sociological thesis according to which all organizations, including those committed to democratic ideals and practices, will inevitably succumb to rule by an elite few (an oligarchy). The iron law of oligarchy contends that organizational democracy is an oxymoron. Although elite control makes internal democracy unsustainable, it is also said to shape the long-term development of all organizations—including the rhetorically most radical—in a conservative direction. Robert Michels spelled out the iron law of oligarchy in the first decade of the 20th century in Political Parties, a brilliant comparative study of European socialist parties that drew extensively on his own experiences in the German Socialist Party. Influenced by Max Weber's analysis of bureaucracy as well as by Vilfredo Pareto's and Gaetano Mosca's theories of elite rule, Michels argued that organizational oligarchy resulted, most fundamentally, from the imperatives of modern organization: competent leadership, centralized authority, and the division of tasks within a professional bureaucracy. These organizational imperatives necessarily gave rise to a caste of leaders whose superior knowledge, skills, and status, when combined with their hierarchical control of key organizational resources such as internal communication and training, would allow them to dominate the broader membership and to domesticate dissenting groups. Michels supplemented this institutional analysis of internal power consolidation with psychological arguments drawn from Gustave Le Bon's crowd theory. From this perspective, Michels particularly emphasized the idea that elite domination also flowed from the way rank-and-file members craved guidance by and worshipped their leaders. Michels insisted that the chasm separating elite leaders from rank-and-file members would also steer organizations toward strategic moderation, as key organizational decisions would ultimately be taken more in accordance with leaders' self-serving priorities of organizational survival and stability than with members' preferences and demands. The iron law became a central theme in the study of organized labour, political parties, and pluralist democracy in the postwar era. Although much of this scholarship basically confirmed Michels's arguments, a number of prominent works began to identify important anomalies and limitations to the iron law framework. Seymour Lipset, Martin Trow, and James Coleman's analysis of the International Typographical Union (ITU), for example, showed that sustained union democracy was possible given printers' relative equality of income and status, mastery of communication skills, and generalized political competence, which underpinned the ITU's unusual history of enduring two-party competition (Independents and Progressives), which mirrored the American two-party system. In the party literature, Samuel Eldersveld argued that the power of organizational elites in Detroit was not nearly as concentrated as the iron law would suggest. He found party power relatively dispersed among different sectors and levels, in a "stratarchy" of shifting coalitions among component groups representing different social strata. Subsequent studies of parties and unions, and of other organizations such as voluntary associations and social movements, further qualified the iron law. These studies examined a broad range of factors—such as factional competition, purposive activism, interorganizational ties, and external opportunities and constraints—that highlighted both the contingent nature of organizational power and Michels's relative neglect of environmental context. After the turn of the 21st century, although work on the changing role of social institutions frequently revisited organizational dynamics and dilemmas examined by Michels, it generally did so from a more global perspective. Along these lines, scholars began to explore the strategic and internal-democratic implications of transnational resource flows, of state-sanctioned decentralized policy networks, of cross-border political identities, and of the Internet as an internal communication tool. The iron law of oligarchy therefore remains a salient axis in the analysis of the internal politics of differentiated polities' societal associations, transnational advocacy networks, and multinational corporations, as well as of the broader nature of democratic politics in the globalizing Information Age.
What is a Role
Set of expectations - rights, obligations, behaviors duties associated with a particular status. Example is the obligations i play as a mother, my role as mother
George Ritzer: McDonaldizaiton (characteristics)
In our modern society, trends and technology become such a large part of everyday life that people start to use them as verbs and adjectives. For example, when's the last time you 'Googled' something, 'blogged' about a recent trip, or saw that a new game had been 'Facebookized?' George Ritzer basically did the same thing with the fast-food restaurant McDonald's in his best-selling book, The McDonaldization of Society. He defines McDonaldization as the process by which principles of fast food restaurants have come to dominate virtually every aspect of society. McDonald's and other fast food restaurants offer an alternative to labor-intensive, home-cooked meals that have been attractive to busy families since the 1950s. Two of their most appealing qualities are convenience and affordability. These qualities and similar principles are becoming increasingly important in all aspects of our modern society. Rationalization of Society The building block of McDonaldization is Max Weber's concept of rationalization, which is the process of replacing traditional and emotional thought with reason and efficiency. Weber believed that most societies throughout history were governed by tradition and that the most significant trend in modern sociology is an increasing rationalization of every part of our daily lives. He also believed that rationalization would continue until our society would become an iron cage, dehumanizing everyone and creating an extreme level of uniformity. Likewise, Ritzer uses McDonald's as a metaphor for the over-rationalization of society. The popularity of the restaurant itself is a perfect example of rationalization because traditional, home-cooked family meals have been replaced with meals of practicality and convenience. Continued rationalization has led to sectors beyond the fast food industry becoming increasingly uniform and automated. Principles of McDonaldization Ritzer identifies four main principles of McDonaldization: predictability, calculability, efficiency, and control. These are all characteristics of McDonald's and other fast-food restaurants. However, they continue to be characteristics of other changing industries, such as shopping districts, education, healthcare, and more. Let's look at an example of each principle. Predictability First is predictability. Customers of McDonald's can predict the food menu: you'll find the same Big Mac in California as you would in New York. The building, the decorations, and the uniforms are also usually the same. Likewise, other industries are becoming increasingly predictable. Most of the shopping malls across the country have the same stores. Popular fiction is 'rebooted' over and over again in all kinds of media. Many popular websites even have the same basic layout. Consumers seem to love predictability. They like knowing what to expect and what to do in any situation. Calculability The second principle of McDonaldization is calculability, which can be seen at McDonald's in several ways. First, there's an emphasis of quantity over quality. The size and weight of a burger that you buy is the exact same as the size and weight of a burger someone else buys - and the bigger, the better. Second, the cost of that burger is a big selling point. The appeal of low prices is obvious in their Dollar Menu. Third, speed is also considered extremely important and sometimes comes at the cost of quality. Likewise, quantity is increasingly important everywhere you go. Consumers often use price and number of items sold to gauge the appeal of a business. Many stores are now open 24 hours a day in order to stay competitive. Efficiency The optimal method for accomplishing a task. In this context, Ritzer has a very specific meaning of "efficiency". In the example of McDonald's customers, it is the fastest way to get from being hungry to being full. Efficiency in McDonaldization means that every aspect of the organization is geared toward the minimization of time
What is Identity
Essential aspect of who we are, consisting of our sense of self, gender, race, ethnicity, and religion
What is Ethnicity
Perceived differences in culture, national origin, and historical experience by which groups of people are distinguished from others in the same social environment
Cog in a Wheel
Someone or something that is functionally necessary but of small significance or importance within a larger operation or organization
What is sociological perspective
A perspective on human behavior and its connection to society as a whole. It invites us to look for the connections between the behavior of individual people and the structures of the society in which they live.
What is a Society
A population of people living in the same geographical area who share a common identity and whose members are subject to the same political authority
What are Status
Any named social positions that people can occupy
What is consensus
Consensus is an agreement by everyone and has everyone's interest
What is a Culture
Language, values, beliefs, rules, behaviors and artifacts that characterizes a society
What is Cultural relativism
Principle that people's belief's and activities should be interpreted in terms of their culture
What is Gender
Psychological, social and culture aspects of maleness and femaleness
What is meant by the idea of the "irrationality of rationality"?
The ideas of Predictability Calculabilty Efficiecy Are all dehumanizing people not just the employees as at McDobals but do the customers who are limited to a small collections and are predicted to perform certain tasks
Self-fulfilling prophecy
an expectation that causes you to act in ways that make that expectation come true
What is meant by "politically created inequality"?
Political resources are viewed as a demension of stratification, including ability to influence gov. and politcal parties
What is Symbolic Interaction
Theoretical perspective that explains society and social structure through an examination of the microlevel, personal, day-to-day exchanges of people as individuals, pairs, or groups
What is Language and communication
This the 2nd most important aspects of realizing the self. We learn these from agents of society Language develops self by allowing individuals to respond to each other through symbols, gestures, words, and sounds. Language conveys others' attitudes and opinions toward a subject or the person. Emotions, such as anger, happiness, and confusion, are conveyed through language.
Presentation of Self: Impression management
Act of presenting a favorable public image of oneself so that others will form positive judgements
What is a Norm
Culturally defined standard or rule of conduct
What are groups
Set of people to which we belong more or less regular and who are conscious of their identity as a unit
What are values
Standard of judgement by which people decide on desirable goals and outcomes
What is ethnocentrism
Tendency to judge other cultures using ones own as a standard
What is Socialization
The process through which people learn to be proficient and functional members of society, lifelong process, people learn the attitudes, values and beliefs that are reinforced by a particular culture We come to be who we are This is considered to the process of learning
Who Emile Durkheim
Emile Durkheim was a well-known sociologist famous for his views on the structure of society. His work focused on how traditional and modern societies evolved and function. Durkheim's theories were founded on the concept of social facts, defined as the norms, values, and structures of a society. This perspective of society differed from other sociologists of his era as Durkheim's theories were founded on things external in nature, as opposed to those internal in nature, such as the motivations and desires of individuals. According to Durkheim, collective consciousness, values, and rules are critical to a functional society. In this lesson, we will focus on Durkheim's theories of functionalism, anomie, and division of labor.
What is Institutionalization of emotions
Expected norms allowed in a society such as how long a widow should grieve, how to hold back emotions as expected by society
Who was G. H. Mead
George Herbert Mead, a sociologist from the late 1800s, is well known for his theory of the social self, which includes the concepts of 'self,' 'me,' and 'I.' In this lesson, we will explore Mead's theory and gain a better understanding of what is meant by the terms 'me' and 'I.' We will also discuss the concept, derived out of Mead's work, of the looking-glass self. Mead's work focuses on the way in which the self is developed. Mead's theory of the social self is based on the perspective that the self emerges from social interactions, such as observing and interacting with others, responding to others' opinions about oneself, and internalizing external opinions and internal feelings about oneself. The social aspect of self is an important distinction because other sociologists and psychologists of Mead's time felt that the self was based on biological factors and inherited traits. According to Mead, the self is not there from birth, but it is developed over time from social experiences and activities.
Who was Karl Marx
Marx and fellow German thinker Friedrich Engels published "The Communist Manifesto," which introduced their concept of socialism as a natural result of the conflicts inherent in the capitalist system. Marx later moved to London, where he would live for the rest of his life. In 1867, he published the first volume of "Capital" (Das Kapital), in which he laid out his vision of capitalism and its inevitable tendencies toward self-destruction, and took part in a growing international workers' movement based on his revolutionary theories.
Who was Stanley Milgram
One of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology was carried out by Stanley Milgram (1963). Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. He examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on "obedience" - that they were just following orders from their superiors. The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" (Milgram, 1974). Milgram (1963) wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.
What is the difference between myth and reality
Reality is what one perceives to be true mostly due to the immediate culture and time period one is living Myth is a "fictious" thing or story which one culture can perceive to be a lie and another takes greats value in it.
"library of scripts"
The content of of communication in a role playing
What are Agents of socialization
The learning process is carried out by the various individuals, gThe 'me' is considered the socialized aspect of the individual. The 'me' represents learned behaviors, attitudes, and expectations of others and of society. This is sometimes referred to as the generalized other. The 'me' is considered a phase of the self that is in the past. The 'me' has been developed by the knowledge of society and social interactions that the individual has gained.
Genie, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, Anna, Isabell, study of orphans
The most well-documented case of a language-deprived child was that of Genie. Genie was discovered in 1971 in the family home, where she recognized as highly abnormal. A social welfare agency took her into custody and admitted Genie into a hospital. Before discovery, Genie had lived strapped and harnessed into a chair. Genie, 13 years of age upon discovery, was malnourished, insensitive to tactile senses, and silent even upon being evoked; however she had proper social skills and she was able to maintain eye contact with caregivers, giving the impression that she understood instruction. After being discharged from the hospital she was put in foster care where she received "informal" training. The first tests of language were taken three years after her discovery. She was given a variety of language test measures to test her sound skills, comprehension skills, and grammatical skills. She was able to discriminate between initial and final consonants. However, she lacked pitch and volume control, her speech was described as high pitched and breathy with sound distortions, consonant clusters, neutralizing vowels, dropping final consonants, and reducing consonants. She was able to comprehend instructions but was dependent on pantomime and gesture. Genie was capable of discriminating affirmation from negative, comparative adjectives, and colour words. After four years of language stimulation, her linguistic performance was similar to that of a normal 2-year-old infant. She had poor performance in complex sentences, interchangeably used the pronouns "you" and "me", and lacked the question form of sentence structure. Further studies were conducted focusing on the physiological state of Genie. She was right-handed but neurological tests showed that she processed her language in the right hemisphere. Normally right-handed people process language in the left hemisphere. She excelled in right-hemisphere processed tasks, such as face perception, holistic recall of unrelated objects, and number perception. Genie's language skills were deemed as poor, and this was linked to the notion that she began to learn language when she was 13 ½. Kaspar Hauser Another case of language deprivation was of Kaspar Hauser, who was kept in a dungeon in Germany until the age of 17. He did have some contact with humans during his isolation. Sources stated that he had a small amount of language; other sources state that upon discovery he spoke a garbled sentence. He was able to learn enough language to attempt to write an autobiography and to also become a legal clerk. However, five years after discovery he was stabbed to death. Anna Anna was born March 6, 1932 and was an illegitimate child. She was put in isolation by her mother because of this. Anna was kept tied to a chair and was malnourished due to being fed milk only. Upon discovery on February 6, 1938, she was sent to a county home. Further examination of Anna determined that she was very poor physiologically but that her senses were intact. During her stay at the county, she regained some body weight and began to build muscle in her body. She lived at the county home for 9 months until she was moved to a foster home. Upon leaving she was still very unsocial, because there was no predetermined caregiver in the county home, which consisted of over 300 inmates and one nurse; often she was taken care of by inmates. The caregiver at the foster home used the same method to talk to Anna by which a mother would talk to their infant. During her tenure at the foster home she became more human, and was similar to a one-year-old. After a year at the foster home she was sent to a school for defective children. Although she could not speak at the time, she had a comprehension of instructions.[5] Isabelle Another case of a child deprived at a young age is one of Isabelle. Confined to a room with a deaf and mute mother, she spent 6 ½ years in silence without any language stimulation. Upon discovery she was sent to a hospital where she was monitored for her apathetic behaviour. Now in a ward with children, she began to imitate other children in the ward to request attention. She had also begun language training. Eighteen months into her training her repertoire of words was estimated to be 1500-2500 words; she was also able to produce complex sentence structures. Throughout her training she began to use correct inflectional morphology, pronouns, and prepositions.[6] Feral children Feral children are children discovered by society to be living in the wild with the assumption that they were raised by animals. It is stated that such children are deprived of human associations and are too strongly conditioned with animal behaviours, such that the human development are permanently inhibited and the animal inhibitions are never lost throughout life. There are several known cases of feral children relearning language, the most well-known is Victor.[7] Victor was found at the age of 13 and was given to Dr. Itard, who "experimented" on the child. Victor was also known as the "wild boy of Aveyron". He was characterized to be insensitive to temperature, uncivilized and to run on all fours. Dr. Itard conducted training over a period of 5 years, during which time Victor was able to recover some speech.[8]
What is Structural-functionalism
Theoretical perspective that posits that social institutions are structure to maintain stability and order in society. All groups in society work together to maintain order
What is Social stratification
society's categorization of people into socioeconomic strata, based upon their occupation and income, wealth and social status, or derived power (social and political). As such, stratification is the relative social position of persons within a social group, category, geographic region, or social unit. In modern Western societies, social stratification typically is distinguished as three social classes: (i) the upper class, (ii) the middle class, and (iii) the lower class; in turn, each class can be subdivided into strata, e.g. the upper-stratum, the middle-stratum, and the lower stratum.[1] Moreover, a social stratum can be formed upon the bases of kinship or caste, or both. The categorization of people by social strata occurs in all societies, ranging from the complex, state-based societies to tribal and feudal societies, which are based upon socio-economic relations among classes of nobility and classes of peasants. Historically, whether or not hunter-gatherer societies can be defined as socially stratified or if social stratification began with agriculture and common acts of social exchange, remains a debated matter in the social sciences. Determining the structures of social stratification arises from inequalities of status among persons, therefore, the degree of social inequality determines a person's social stratum. Generally, the greater the social complexity of a society, the more social strata exist, by way of social differentiation.
Define absolute poverty.
Inability to afford the bare minimum for sustaining a reasonably health existence
Who was Phillip Zimbardo
Philip Zimbardo is perhaps best known for the Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department in 1971. The participants in the study were 24 male college students who were randomly assigned to act either as "guards" or "prisoners" in the mock prison. The study was initially slated to last two weeks, but had to be terminated after just six days because of the extreme reactions and behaviors of the participants. The guards began displaying cruel and sadistic behavior toward the prisoners, while the prisoners became depressed and hopeless. Since the famous prison experiment, Zimbardo has continued to conduct research on a variety of topics including shyness, cult behavior and heroism. He has a authored and co-authored numerous books, including some that are widely used in university level psychology courses. Some people may recognize him as the host of the Discovering Psychology video series, which has aired on PBS and is often used in high school and college psychology classes. In 2002, Zimbardo was elected president of the American Psychological Association. After more than 50 years of teaching, Zimbardo retired from Stanford in 2003 but gave his last "Exploring Human Nature" lecture on March 7, 2007. Today, he continues to work as the director of the organization he founded called the Heroic Imagination Project. The organization promotes research, education and media initiatives designed to inspire ordinary people to act as heroes and agents of social change. Contributions to Psychology: Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment remains an important study in our understanding of how situational forces can influence human behavior. The study became a topic of interest recently after the reports of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses in Iraq became public knowledge. Many people, Zimbardo included, suggested that the abuses at Abu Ghraib might be real-world examples of the same results observed in Zimbardo's experiment. Zimbardo has also served as an influential figure in psychology through his writings as well as his long teaching career.
What is Class
Social classes consist of people who occupy similar positions of power, previlege, and prestige.
What is Sociological Imagination
The ability to see the impact of social forces on our private life
Why does the U. S. have the largest inequality gap than any of the other industrialized nations?
Before accounting for taxes and transfers, the U.S. ranked 10th in income inequality; among the countries with more unequal income distributions were France, the U.K. and Ireland. But after taking taxes and transfers into account, the U.S. had the second-highest level of inequality, behind only Chile. (Mexico and Brazil had higher after-tax/transfer Gini scores, but no "before" scores with which to compare them; including them would push the U.S. down to fourth place.) It's not that taxes and social-insurance policies in the U.S. have no redistributive effect. Before taxes and transfers, according to a new Congressional Budget Office report, the bottom 20% of Americans had 2.3% of all income, while the top 20% had 57.9%. After taxes and transfers, the bottom 20%'s share rose to 9.3%, while the top 20%'s share fell to 47.2%. (Thanks to The New York Times' Economix blog for the chart below).
Who was Harriet Martineau
Born in 1802, Harriet Martineau is considered the first woman sociologist. In 1853, she was the first to translate August Comte's work from French to English. It is through this translation that English-speaking scholars could begin to learn the works of Comte, who is known as the father of sociology. Prior to this translation, Martineau was already clearing a path in her own right with becoming active in observing social practices and their effects on society. Even before the works of Marx, Engels or Weber, Martineau examined social class, religion, suicide, national character, domestic relations and how these elements affected social problems and individuals. Martineau was also very active in women's rights, the fight against slavery, the struggle of the common worker and religious tolerance. Martineau had a career full of writing for various journals, newspapers and, of course, her own books. Beginning in 1831, she began writing a series of stories, called Illustrations of Political Economy. Using the utilitarian principles of gaining happiness and the teaching of Adam Smith on free trade, she hoped to teach ordinary people how to better understand things such as tariffs, taxes and the state budget. This series gained her national notoriety and funded her opportunity to travel to the United States for two years in 1834-1836.
Who was Charles Cooley
Charles Horton Cooley was a sociologist who wanted to better understand why human beings behave the way they do. One of Cooley's most important contributions to sociology was his idea that by studying everyday social interactions between people, one could begin to better understand why people behave as they do. This is the basis of the interactionist perspective of sociology. Cooley stated that to understand behavior, we must first understand the meanings humans attach to certain situations and, thus, the behavior that is taught to go along with that situation. He believed that societies shape the lives of the people who live within them. Cooley's major contribution to sociology was the study of primary groups. Cooley coined the term 'primary group,' meaning that this is the first group one is introduced to and is the most influential on our learning of ideas, beliefs and ideals. When observing society, Cooley noticed that the more a society became industrialized, the more individualistic the members became. He saw that the people became more distant from each other, more competitive and were losing the connection to traditional family values and that of community. It was through his study of primary groups that Cooley hoped to instill more social unity and cohesiveness. While society has continued to evolve and change even at a more rapid pace, many of the social problems Cooley was concerned with still exists today. However, with Cooley's research, we better understand the importance of social unity and society's influence upon individuals.
How do conflict theorists explain inequality based on social class?
Conflict theorists argue that stratification is dysfunctional and harmful in society. According to conflict theory, social stratification benefits the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor. Thus, it creates a system of winners and losers that is maintained by those who are on the top. The people who are losers do not get a fair chance to compete, and thus are stuck on the bottom. For example, many wealthy families pay low wages to nannies to care for their children, to gardeners to attend to their rose gardens, and to maids to pick up their dirty socks. These low wage workers do not make enough to move beyond a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle, and have no means to move ahead. Therefore, conflict theorists believe that this competitive system, together with the way the game is "fixed", ends up creating and perpetuating stratification systems. According to conflict theory, capitalism, an economic system based on free-market competition, particularly benefits the rich by assuming that the "trickle down" mechanism is the best way to spread the benefits of wealth across society. Governments that promote capitalism often establish corporate welfare through direct subsidies, tax breaks, and other support that benefit big businesses. They assume that the market will allow these benefits to the rich to make their way to the poor through competition. For example, the Walton family, the owners of Wal-Mart, receives enormous tax breaks. Whether the benefits of these tax breaks have made their way down to ordinary people through better business practices or better working conditions for Wal-Mart employees is questionable. Conflict theorists would argue that they haven't, but rather have been used by the Walton family to solidify the patterns of stratification that keep the family rich. Functionalists criticize this approach by arguing that people do not always act largely out of economic self-interest. For example, Chuck Feeney, the creator of Duty Free Shoppers, has given $4 billion to charities. Bill Gates has given 58% of his wealth to charity. Functionalists also argue that conflict theorists underestimate people's ability to move upward in society. They argue that if people really want to succeed, they can do so through hard work.
Who was Erving Goffman
Erving Goffman, a Canadian-American sociologist, who is known most for his study and analysis of everyday human interactions. He did not rely on any formal type of scientific method to gather his data; instead he used the act of simple observation to explain society. Goffman's research is fundamental in understanding society's ideas, values, and beliefs through the behavior of the individual. It is through his findings that we can better understand situational behavior. The ideas, values and beliefs of a society can be understood through the behavior of individuals Individual Behavior Goffman was a sociologist who viewed society through the symbolic interaction perspective; this perspective looks at the everyday behavior and interactions between people to help explain society. Some examples of everyday interaction would be meeting various people in the grocery store, workers interacting on the job, meetings of a small group (such as a PTA), or children playing in a park. These interactions catch the attention of an interactionist and through these interactions, Goffman and other sociologists learn why people behave as they do in given situations. Interactionism views society as a framework of people living in a world full of meaningful objects. These objects may be physical, tangible objects, actions, relationships, or symbols. Interactionists believe that humans place a meaning on all things to understand it. For example, if you were shown an object that you have never seen before, you would not know what to do with it, what it does, if it would hurt you or even how to interact with it. It wouldn't be until someone explained to you the meaning of the object (what it is used for, how to use it, and what to expect from it) that you would know how to interact with it.
Who was Max Weber
He was an analyst of power politics who examined constitutional problems in the spirit of political engineering, yet he was deeply concerned with ethical problems and with the cultural significance of the power struggle. And there are further contradictions: he was a monarchist who openly denounced the Kaiser; later, a liberal with a pessimistic view of the masses and an awareness of the need for personal leadership; and a passionate individualist faced with the rising forces of collectivism. These tensions prevented Weber from finding outlets for his drive to act decisively and led him instead to pour his great energies into his scholarly work. But even in his scholarly work tensions prevailed. Every sentence of Weber's seems a precarious victory over the complexity of facts; despite their massive scope, his writings are fragments. Substantively, his work bristles with an awareness of the unresolved paradoxes of the human condition, which Weber sought to understand on the basis of his extraordinary historical knowledge and to conceptualize at a level between historical description and a theory of sociological universals.
cog in a wheel" and alienation
Karl Marx critiqued capitlist economic and social organization a century and a half ago. Time has proven his social predictions wrong, but that even a small part of his analysis has relevance for us today is indicative of how deep a social analysis he produced. Most popular social critics are old and moldy after just a very few years, often much less than a decade. Anybody heard of Christopher Lasch recently? (Of course not -- chalk one up for me.) Marx believed that religion is always and everywhere a barrier to social change and social justice. He asserted that "religion is the opiate of the people." The key problem in our capitalistic society is "alienation from the means of production." That is, we are merely cogs in the wheels of capitalistic production, and we get in the unthinking habit of seeing each other in terms of power relationships, always either more or less powerful than ourselves. As we do, we become alienated from each other, too, and our lives become impoverished. Especially in capitalist societies, Marx believes, we use people or we are used by people; we see people as means, not ends in themselves. NOW, religion arises out of this social sickness of alienation to fill the void. Religion promises you "pie in the sky after you die." Life may be hard now, it will tell you, but things will be reversed after you die. Capitalist ruling classes exploit this message by allying with religion to legitimate their own control of society are being God's will.
What are Institutionalized norm
Pattern of behavior within existing social institutions that is widely accepted asa society e.g. smoking policy at TTU
Imitation, play, games
Play develops self by allowing individuals to take on different roles, pretend, and express expectation of others. Play develops one's self-consciousness through role-playing. During role-play, a person is able to internalize the perspective of others and develop an understanding of how others feel about themselves and others in a variety of social situations. Games develop self by allowing individuals to understand and adhere to the rules of the activity. Self is developed by understanding that there are rules in which one must abide by in order to win the game or be successful at an activity.
G. H. Mead: the Self I/Me Reflexivity
Play develops self by allowing individuals to take on different roles, pretend, and express expectation of others. Play develops one's self-consciousness through role-playing. During role-play, a person is able to internalize the perspective of others and develop an understanding of how others feel about themselves and others in a variety of social situations. The 'I', therefore, can be considered the present and future phase of the self. The 'I' represents the individual's identity based on response to the 'me.' The 'I' says, 'Okay. Society says I should behave and socially interact one way, and I think I should act the same (or perhaps different),' and that notion becomes self. The 'me' and the 'I' have a didactic relationship, like a system of checks and balances. The 'me' exercises societal control over one's self. The 'me' is what prevents someone from breaking the rules or boundaries of societal expectations. The 'I' allows the individual to still express creativity and individualism and understand when to possibly bend and stretch the rules that govern social interactions. The 'I' and the 'me' make up the self.roups, organizations and institutions a person comes into contact with during the course of his/her life. e.g. family friends peers, teammates teachers, religious institutions etc
What region of the U. S. has the highest rate of poverty?
Rural areas and most likely deep in the south
What did Marx mean by "false consciousness"?
Situation in which people in the lower class come to accept a belief system that harms them; powerful classes in society prevent protest and revolution
Define social class. Define life chances. What is the connection between the two?
Social science theory of the opportunities each individual has to improve his or her quality of life. The concept was introduced by German sociologist Max Weber. It is a probabilistic concept, describing how likely it is, given certain factors, that an individual's life will turn out a certain way. According to this theory, life chances are positively correlated with one's socioeconomic status. Social class (or simply "class"), as in a class society, is a set of concepts in the social sciences and political theory centered on models of social stratification in which people are grouped into a set of hierarchical social categories, the most common being the upper, middle, and lower classes.
What is Social institution
Stable set of roles, statues, groups and organizations such as the institution of Education, family, politics , religion, health care, or the economy - that provides a foundation for behavior in some major area of social life
Significant other, Generalization other; taking the role of the other person
The ability to use other peoples perpestive and expectations in formulating one's own behavior is called role taking George Herbert Mead's concept of the Generalized Other is that in their behavior and social interaction individuals react to the expectations of others, orienting themselves to the norms and values of their community or group. The term Generalized Other was used by George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) to refer to an individual's recognition that other members of their society hold specific values and expectations about behavior. Mead' s concept of the Generalized Other gives an account of the social origin of self-consciousness while retaining the transforming function of the personal. Contextualized in Mead's theory of intersubjectivity, the Generalized Other is a special case of role-taking in which the individual responds to social gestures, and takes up and adjusts common attitudes. By role-taking people adjust and adapt in exchanges based on social gesture-response action sequences. Self-consciousness is developed through action in the social domain that is completed in personal reflection. The Personal and the Social, George Herbert Mead's Theory of the Generalized Other, traces the development of the Generalized Other concept in Mead's published and unpublished work, locating it within the framework of intersubjectivity and role-taking. A theoretically and historically embedded interpretation of the Generalized Other reveals that both the personal and the social evolve and each is open to activities that bring about change.
What is the difference between time and space
The normal will change depending on when where and when we are in the society
How do we come to be who we are
The society plays an important role in the self as well as the genes that we posses
How do we account for extraordinary circumstances of violence? authority, routinization, dehumanization Phillip Zimbardo, Stanley Milgram
The study was conducted this way: College students from all over the United States who answered a city newspaper ad for participants in a study of prison life were personally interviewed, given a battery of personality tests, and completed background surveys that enabled the researchers to pre-select only those who were mentally and physically healthy, normal and well adjusted. They were randomly assigned to role-play either prisoners or guards in the simulated prison setting constructed in the basement of Stanford University's Psychology Department. The prison setting was designed as functional simulation of the central features present in the psychology of imprisonment (Zimbardo, Maslach, & Haney, 1999). Read a full description of the methodology, chronology of daily events and transformations of human character that were revealed. The major results of the study can be summarized as: many of the normal, healthy mock prisoners suffered such intense emotional stress reactions that they had to be released in a matter of days; most of the other prisoners acted like zombies totally obeying the demeaning orders of the guards; the distress of the prisoners was caused by their sense of powerlessness induced by the guards who began acting in cruel, dehumanizing and even sadistic ways. The study was terminated prematurely because it was getting out of control in the extent of degrading actions being perpetrated by the guards against the prisoners - all of whom had been normal, healthy, ordinary young college students less than a week before. Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities for example, Germans in WWII.
What is Conflict Theory
Theoretical perspective that views the structure of society as a source of inequality that always benefits sone groups at the expense of another
What is The social nature of the self: self-other and society
These are the values and basics things we learn as children to live in a society. The self is the basic of me and how I am supposed to respond to the society
What is Surface manifestation
This is when we try to influence manifested in physical reality by "making" things happen in our lives. We assume that if we take A Step, we will get B Result. Surface manifestation flows mostly from our conditioned minds. Family, society and community tell us, essentially, what's possible to create and what we deserve, and then we try to attain society-approved perks (like a house/mansion, job/reputation/popularity, money/things/stuff, right mate/right roles, etc.).
Goffman: drama as metaphor
We are ll playing a drama role where three is a script to what our answer should be and how things are supposed to response There is a front stage that people an can see and there is a back stage where we hid the stuff that cannot be presented to the audience who is the society Props are the instruments that we use to portray this image we want others to see of us
What did Weber mean by the idea that society could become an "iron cage"? Has it?
What exactly is the "iron cage"? The iron cage is a concept from Max Weber that deals with the uprising rationalization in society. Weber saw the 'rationalization' of life as the key distinction between pre modern and modern life. For one instance, it brought the basis for a more equal, fair and effective society. By our culture and benefits of the increasing rational society, Weber saw this as being provided through having everything processed through bureaucracies/organizations rather than religions and spirit. Overall, the problem is the bureaucracies being rational and impersonal. We are becoming trapped by a heartless and not sentiment 'iron cage' in today's society such as: hospitals, work places, schools, supermarkets, etc. According to Weber, we are experiencing loss of humanity in our 'iron cage'. Bouncing back to Karl Marx, he had a concept called the 'commodity fetish' that is similar to Weber's concept, 'iron cage'. Marx believed that when people really try to understand the world that we live in, they immediately fixate on money (who has it, how is it spent, etc.) or products/commodities. People try to understand what are the costs to sell and make a product in economics today. In Marx's concept, he truly believed that products and money are fetishes that stop people from seeing the truth about society. Overall, one class of people is utilizing another class of people. Both of their concepts are very similar in the way of showing that our society only focuses on the monetary value of things, instead of focusing on human kind. We are so fixated on money that we forget about everything else. Making us as a whole, all about "me, me, me" and money. Both concepts focus on making an effective society.
What is Conformity
changing one's behavior or beliefs to match those of others, generally as a result of real or imagined, though unspoken group pressure
Who was W. E.B. DuBois
civil rights activist, founder of the NAACP, big part of racially quality. First African American Sociologist
