SOC 202: Principles of Sociology

Instructor: Thomas-Winfield, M.S. | Semester: Fall 2019

Table of Contents

# Administrivia

# Terms

## Sociological Concepts

It is important to realize society changes people and people change society.

### Societal Concepts

### Individual Concepts

# People

See page 19 of "Sociology: The Essentials, 9th ed." for a table. All people here discussed American society.

# Sociological Research

Broadly research involves a puzzle and idea.

Sociologists generally don't replicate a study unless a previous research study had questionable practices. (This is rationalized because of peer review) If there is replication, there tends to be a "twist" and researches themselves will recommend twists.

Sociological research tends to be split between quantitative and qualitative. Here's a broad overview:

It is important to note that sociological research tends to have values that can impact their research (see positionality). This positionality is more impactful for qualitative research.

To try to combat positionality, sociologists (especially qualitative) tend to be very reflective, describing their position and history and how that may impact their research.

## Quantitative Research

Quantitative research seeks to create associations/correlations and uses hypotheses. Actual numbers and counts (of groups) are used; numbers are often hard to get, so we can be pretty liberal.

To show causality, sociologists only must only show the following to a reasonable person.

As you can see, sociologists are pretty liberal. Their requirements are sound in theory, but it's hard to prove non-spuriousness in practice without experiments, which we can't (normally) do because of ethics.

Quantitative research normally uses surveys, polls, structured questionnaires, experiments (i.e., numerical data).

Quantitative research tends to be easy to generalize.

### Examples

Does critical thinking ability relate to student achievement?

Is there a relationship between neighborhood type (e.g. residential, business district) and types of crimes committed (e.g. car theft, robbery)?

## Qualitative Research

Qualitative research seeks to understand individual people's perceptions of their experiences, what meaning people attribute to themselves, and the social processes that help form their lives.

There are no hypotheses and it is very individual and touchy-feely. It's a lot like case-studies except normal.

Qualitative research tends to be very exploratory, where people start with a central question that spawns sub-questions.

Normally works with symbolic interaction on the micro level.

Qualitative research normally uses participant observation, focus groups, in-depth interviews (i.e. text-based data)

Qualitative research tends to be hard to generalize.

### Examples

What are the experiences of minority students in predominantly white educational institutions?

How do parents discuss sex and sexuality with early adolescent girls and boys?

## Themes

## "Levels" of Study

## Ethics

Here are some examples of ethical controversies:

As a reaction, we have the following informal ethical principles.

Also, every institution that does research on humans must have an institutional review board (IRB) that reviews research proposals, that apply common ethical standards. Researches cannot begin until the IRB approves.

### Common Ethical Standards

## Peer Review

All research must go through peer review process. The peer review process is when you send your paper to a board. They give you feedback and one of the following happens:

## Finding and Parsing Research

In this class, we will only look at peer-reviewed articles from NC State's database which were published by sociological journals.

You can search for you topic, filtering for only peer-reviewed articles, and then scour for one published by a journal. Or you can search in all for sociological journals. Then, pick the one you want, and go directly to the journal's website.

You can also use Google Scholar, find what you want, and then look for it on NC State's libraries.

When reading articles, always read the abstract first.

### Research Outline

## Citations

When you summarize or paraphrase work, provide the author's names and year of publication.

Gender inequality... (West and Zimmerman 2009)

When directly quoting, include author's name, year of publication, and page numbers from work within directly after the quote.

Firebaugh argues "..." (Firebaugh 2008:50)

If you have works with several authors, you cite every author the first time and then just the first author "et al.".

# Purpose of Sociology

# Debates

## Agency vs Structure

# Theories

Sociology theory arose during the 1800s because of and with industrialization and urbanization. (A lot of things were changing!)

## Social Construction of Reality Theory (SCT)

How can you tell what is a social construction? There are examples of societies that have different social constructions or it is comprehensible that there exists a society with different social constructions.

How do we get these? Media, family, history, agriculture(!), etc.

Sociologists consider (our perception of) reality a social construction (i.e. social construction of reality theory) because we learn and comprehend a lot about reality via language and communication, which is a social construction. This is just a HOT way to say that you get biases from your culture/upbringing/society that you hold to be fundamental truths being constantly reaffirmed due to confirmation bias and self-fulfilling prophecies. (There is no reality! Hahaha.)

The concept of a shared social reality is said to be the commonly held social constructions in a group that helps form the basis of a society and hold them together.

### Examples

A poorer, more crime-heavy neighborhood gets randomly frisked and high levels of police surveillance. This neighborhood things police are a good thing. A richer, less crime-heavy neighborhood rarely gets bothered by police and only sees them when there is a severe issue. This neighborhood thinks police are a good thing.

We assume there are only two genders that are completely linked with sex. (Wait, I thought sex and gender are the same? Exactly! Sex is a physical thing; gender is a social thing.)

## Functionalism (Macro)

They are optimistic about inequality and believe it helps us.

The core assumption is that society is like a living organism. Each part has a function and purpose and society needs all parts to survive.

Belief that inequality/stratification is inevitable and functional for society because social inequality motivates people to fill different positions in society that are necessary.

### People

## Conflict Theory (Macro)

They are pessimistic about inequality and believe it is inevitable and harms us. Basically, "If we could just solve inequality...".

This theory was brought around mostly because of capitalism and is focused mostly on the economy and capitalism. Focuses heavily on class struggle.

The belief that struggle over scare resources leads to inequality. Inequality leads to conflict and unequal power distribution, some dominating others.

Why wasn't Marx (and conflict theory) right?

### People

### Symbolic Interactionism (Micro)

Assumes that interaction and communication is extremely important.

Focuses on how people interact, the meaning of certain symbols/statements, and how those symbols/statements affect people.

## Dramaturgy (Instance of SCT)

Created by Goffman. Models social interaction as a drama/theater, with a front stage and a back stage. Where, during the front stage, we try to manage and manipulate others' impressions of us, while, during the back stage, we don't care.

This is similar to the looking glass self theory, where we always consider other people's impressions of you, which impacts your behavior.

# Socialization

Socialization is split into childhood / primary and adult socialization.

Primary socialization is how newborns and young children acquire language, identities, and culture (routines, norms, and values). This is chiefly responsible for transforming children into prepared adults (called anticipatory socialization). Parents and the family unit are responsible for this.

For the longest time, primary socialization was assumed to be one-direction, from parent to child. Recent research shows that this is two-directional. This is most easily seen by children of immigrants teaching and exposing their parents to the language and culture of their new home. Additionally with technology. This backflow is called reverse socialization.

Adult socialization occurs with peers (and also children). Generally, this is people slowly evolving in a changing society. The most common change is changing your "presentation of self". Adult socialization can also occur with resocialization, where people have to unlearn their old behaviors, norms, and culture and learn new ones. This occurs most in total institutions, which are closed off enclaves of culture (e.g. military and prison).

## Nature vs Nurture

Sociologists tend to believe nurture plays a very large role. They don't believe in "human nature" in general (i.e. women want to have children). They believe most human behavior is shaped strongly by socialization and the environment.

## Agents of Socialization

There are many things that socialize you. Here's a quick breakdown:

## Theories of Socialization

Here's a quick breakdown:

### Symbolic Interaction (SI) Theories

# Culture

Culture refers to

There are non-material parts of culture: norms, laws, customs, ideas, and beliefs. There are material parts of culture: money, technology, and houses.

Culture is learned, shared, common, and taken for granted.

Culture is made up of a few fundamental elements:

## Norms

Norms are reinforced with sanctions, which can be either punishments, when norms are violated, or rewards, when norms are followed.

Mores are extremely important, heavily punished norms (tend to be laws). Folkways are unimportant norms that are not heavily punished.

## Different Culture within a Society

There can be many different cultures within a society! There is the dominant or mainstream culture, which is the culture of the most powerful group (also tends to be the largest). This mainstream culture tends to be considered the "most correct" or "most legitimate" that other subcultures do not have. Subcultures are any cultures within a society that are not the mainstream culture. They have to different from mainstream culture in some significant way, but they don't have to be totally incompatible. Any extreme, far-leaning political or religious groups can be categorized as subcultures. Some examples are Amish, LGTBQ+, and polyamorists. Counter-culture is similar to subculture except their culture tends to actively and vocally reject mainstream cultures and they can often impact/change mainstream culture. Examples include Alt-Right, Antifa, (old) LGBTQ+, and the civil rights movement.

In America, rich, politicians, and celebrities "define" the mainstream culture. This also tends to be white, upper-middle class culture in America.

## Analyzing Other Cultures

# Social Structure & Interaction

People try to study society at two levels: macro and micro. Macro level studies an entire society, looking for large patterns, often simplifying certain things. Micro level focuses on individuals, analyzing patterns within a single person's life.

Why do we form a society? Well, there's a lot of reasons, but broadly we say it is necessary because of solidarity.

## (Durkheim's) Social Solidarity

## Interaction

Interaction occurs between a collection of interconnected social groups. In these groups, people communicate, have common goals/norms, and has a subject sense of "we".

Note: Categories, people with some common features, aren't necessarily social groups.

## Formal Organizations

There are broadly 3 categories

Often, social organizations become a bureaucracy, which is an example of rationalization. Bureaucracies organize individuals to be more efficient and are large and impersonal and large, but organize individuals.

### Ideal Type Bureaucracy

An ideal type bureaucracy is the ideal bureaucracy that satisfies the following; it would be the "most efficient" social organization/bureaucracy:

### Informal Structure of Bureaucracies

However, real bureaucracies are never ideal type because we're humans and we can't really be impersonal. This means bureaucracies have an informal structure, which are activities which violate/bypass the formal structure of the bureaucracy. For example, people preferring their friends or people from a certain group. This is what we call corruption.

### Problems with Bureaucracies

# Social Networks

Society is generally organized as a graph of "bubbles", where the bubbles have weak ties between then and strong ties within them.

For job searching, weak ties are more important because they are far more expansive and often have access to unique information and contacts.

## Network Exclusion

Often, particular groups of people are excluded, either intentionally or unintentionally. (This is called nepotism.) Why?

This can be due to intentional/explicit segregation or subconscious bias. However, most common is people in the network are similar, so they are more likely to have opportunities for networking (through people wanting to hang out). Additionally, if people don't already have a connection to a network, it is difficult to make those initial connections because no one knows you and you are likely to not have significant things in common, making it harder to make those connections and network.

Another difficulty is people don't always notice they're being excluded, so what can they do?

# Conformity

Generally, people conform to authority and group influences because they either want to fit in or feel less responsible for their actions because they are in a group. The responsibility issue is easiest seen with the Kitty Genovese case and the bystander effect.

Conformity can be both good and bad. We mostly talk about bad thought.

## Milgram Experiment

You should remember this from AP psychology. This is the experiment where the researcher commanded people to shock an individual. The people could "hear" the other person being shocked, but they couldn't see them (because they were recordings). The purpose of the experiment was to see how people will react/listen to authority. It was inspired by Nazi Germany.

85% of people gave the maximum voltage.

## Asch Conformity Experiment

There was a group of 5 people. Only one person (the final one) was an actual subject. They had to judge the length of lines. On certain questions, every confederate would give an incorrect answer vocally and then the subject answered vocally. Another variation was every confederate except one would give an incorrect answer vocally and then the subject answered vocally. Another variation was where every confederate gave an incorrect answer vocally and the subject answered on paper.

There were two main reasons people changed their answer: conflict avoidance or affecting their actual beliefs/views.

37% of the people gave the incorrect answer when every confederate gave the incorrect answer.

5% of the people gave the incorrect answer when every confederate gave the right answer but one gave the right answer.

## Kitty Genovese / Bystander Effect / Diffusion of Responsibility

You should remember Kitty Genovese from AP psychology. She was murdered and several people were aware of her being murder, but no one called the police. This was due to the bystander effect and also a fear of danger, from the murderer.

The bystander effect is the more people that witness an event, the less responsible each person feels. This means people are less likely to take action.

## Examples

# Inequality and Stratification

## Causes of Poverty

There are two main arguments for the cause of poverty: cultural and structural.

### Cultural

The culture of poverty argument or blaming the victim argument attributes the causes of poverty to the personal work values / irresponsibility of the poor. Broadly denounced.

### Structural

There are multiple parts, but broadly it attributes poverty to the forces in an economy and society. There are a 3 main parts.

## Stratification

Stratification is a fixed, hierarchical arrangement/ranking in society where people have different access to resources/power/perceived worth. Structured inequality. There are a variety of stratification systems:

Social class is the social position of groups relative to the cultural, economic, and social resources. Essentially, a group of your life changes.

We cannot directly measure social class, instead we use some indicators:

Note: These do not strictly define class.

Status attainment is the process by which people gain a specific position in a stratification system. Socioeconomic status (SES) is commonly how we describe status, and it includes the above measures.

# Gender and Sexuality

In society, gender and sexuality are incredibly linked.

Recall that sociologists discuss the social construction of gender, where they draw a significant difference between sex and gender:

## Theories of Gender

### Gender Performance

This theory is similar to the dramaturgy theory of social interaction applied to gender and sexuality.

This was created by West and Zimmerman in 1987 and onward.They argue that gender is interaction, a routine and standard of interaction which is shaped and evaluated by everyday interactions.

Basically, gender performance is about doing gender and receiving recognition of that gender. When you do gender, you reproduce the existing social order.

### Intersectionality

Intersectionality attempts to look at overlapping/intersecting social identities and how they create unique specific systems of oppression and discrimination. Essentially, you can't create overlapping buckets and expect the overlap to behave the same as the non-overlap.

This was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989.

The biggest example is analyzing the discrimination against women of color. You can get a more full analysis if you analyze the discrimination of women and the discrimination of people of color. Then, you synthesize this discrimination to understand discrimination against women of color.

### Hegemonic Masculinity

Hegemonic comes from hegemony.

This was created by R. W. Connell in 1995.

Hegemonic masculinity argues that there is a hegemonic masculinity that is the ideal vision of masculinity. This ideal vision of masculinity justifies the dominant position of men. Many men attempt to achieve hegemonic masculinity, but are disqualified for some reason. Men who cannot achieve this instead achieve subordinate masculinity. Examples of subordinate masculinity are gay men or men of color.

Hegemonic masculinity also argues that there is an emphasized femininity that is the ideal vision of femininity. It justifies the subordinate position of women. Likewise, women try to achieve emphasized femininity. Women who don't achieve these ideals are likewise seen as lesser than those who do.

Hegemonic masculinity says that, even if you have subordinate masculinity, you still benefit from it because of the subordination of women. It also argues that you can only analyze femininity and masculinity in relation to each other.

# Racial Inequality

Overall, race, ethnicity, and everything can be changed and are normally defined by the group in power. In other words, they are socially constructed.

## Mass Incarceration

Prisoners and felons become second-class citizens because they lose the right to vote, can no longer serve jury duty, and are legally discriminated against in employment and housing.

Mass incarceration is a race issue 1.5 million black men are "missing".

Michelle Alexander (2014) argues that mass incarceration is a system of racial and social control, which has ushered in the Negro problem of poverty. She argues prisons has been used a "solution" to this problem. She also argues that prison privatization has caused additional issues, where people profit off of imprisonment of people.

## Colorblind Racism

Bonilla-Silva (2009) attempted to explore the intent, methods, and analysis for current racial inequality. Basically, he argues that colorblindness is a new form of racism, where people ignore/fail to acknowledge real racial inequality. This causes people to not address the actual institutional racism. It also discounts the affect race has on people's lives.

This is often called the new Jim-Crow.

He split his analysis into four main causes for the modern racial inequality.

# Fighting Inequality

Why don't people resist inequality?

# Family

## Divorce

Crude Divorce Rate

Refined Divorce Rate

Note: Several states stopped keeping track of marriage rates from 1998 to

As you can see, by in large divorce is more common than it used to be because of

However, the divorce rate has decreased in recent years because of

# Work & the Economy

## Industrial Revolution

In the 1800s, the industrial revolution occurred. It has the following effects:

## Deindustrialization

Deindustrialization is the decline in manufacturing and the rise in service jobs. It was brought about by

## Dual Labor Market Theory

The market's jobs can be broadly split into two markets:

## Types of Capitalism

Capitalism is a fuzzy system that has a bunch of different effects and facets. Competitive capitalism is the ideal, but it leads to monopoly capitalism because the most competitive firm often purchases the less competitive firm or the less competitive firm goes out of business (and the less competitive firm's workers and customer often head to the more competitive firm).

## Applications to the United States

C. Wright Mill' power elite theory says there there exists a power elite that controls a large amount of wealth, privilege, and political power. This power stretches across institutions: government, military, and economy. They are largely unified on their desire to maintain power, although they have some disagreements.

## Occupational Sex Segregation

This is a bit of gender and a bit of economy. Occupational sex segregation is where, in the same job, there are differences in how men and women are treated. There's a few explanations for this:

One of the biggest effects of occupational sex segregation is in terms of pay and the gender wage gap. The pay gap comes from women generally being in lower paying jobs and women being paid less within the same job. Interestingly, previously female dominated jobs tend to be higher paid when they become male dominated.

This has led to the devaluation hypothesis which says that female dominated jobs are paid less because society devalues women's labor.

There's also the glass ceiling for women, which describes how women who enter male dominated fields tend to eventually hit a "ceiling" in their promotion, where they eventually are no longer promoted. There's also the glass escalator for men, which describes how men who enter female dominated fields tend to be more readily promoted into management.

Theres a concept of emotional labor, which is the management of your feelings and emotions for job. This puts a lot of stress on the individual and increases rate of depression and mental illness. Service and secondary labor market labor tends to be more emotional labor heavy. Women tend to have more service jobs, meaning they have a higher rate of depression and mental illness because of their jobs.

# Education

America strives to be a meritocracy. However, it is unequal with the following failures

## Coleman Report

James Coleman (1966) estimated how much schools differ in equality and found that achievement was most related to teacher quality, family background, and racial composition. He found that black children in integrated schools did better than those in non-integrated schools.

Coleman's report was against school redlining or segregation.

## Gender in Education

Women are more likely to be more educated. However, they receive less rewards. What gives?

# Lareau (2011) - Unequal Childhoods

In most cases of child care, social class trumps race, since race is something other people interpret while social class is something you feel.

## Parenting

You can sum up the difference in that broadly poor parents see their children as kids to provide for while rich parents see their children as growing adults to nurture. To use her terms:

Although this divide makes rich/middle-class parents sound strictly better, there are economic differences. Middle class parents don't have to worry about food, basic medicine, or how to keep your child healthy and alive as much.

Concerted cultivation tends to better prepare children for being adults but is more stressful.

Accomplishment of natural growth tends to lead to more relaxed children who are more capable of creating activities by themselves. The nature of poor parents also tends to make the children less trusting of and more apprehensive around authority.

This does cause issues though because schools encourage concerted cultivation, which causes dissonance or something for poor kids.

Our dominant set of cultural repertoires (or the way we think about something) for children tends to be that it is best to treat them like adults and to reason with them, but these change all the time. Rich parents also tend to change more quickly. Since rich parents adopt more quickly, they tend to be more in-line with the common body of education thought (i.e. schools). This gives the children and parents an advantage of being considered "better" by the school.

## Children

Rich children tend to have a sense of entitlement, where they believe that they deserve to manage their own time and have their opinions be heard. They tend to be better at expressing their wishes and manipulating adults to give them what they want. They tend to be worse about organizing their time and being considered subordinate to adults.

Poor children tend to have a sense of constrain, where they are unlikely to make special requests, tend to not resist authority figures (as much), and tend to disregard rules (e.g. encouraging/being proud of your kid "beating up" another kid).

Poor children tend to see their parents fail to change institutions / have them listen, while rich children tend to see their parents succeed.

# Rank (2011) - Rethinking American Poverty

Generally, America has viewed poverty as a personal failure. This means we broadly don't feel socially obligated to help them. This is seen by our lack of sympathy for working-age poor, but large(r) sympathy for old poor.

This refusal of reality allows us to reinforce our ideals: individualism and self-reliance, hard work pays off, and there are economic opportunities for all. This has also led to hyper-competitiveness, as people try to "improve" the system by just making everyone better. However, the real problem is lack of opportunity.

Additionally, things have been getting worse. Jobs are not as stable, health care benefits are worse, wages are stagnated, and many social welfare programs are being cut.

## Necessary Changes to Solve Poverty

## Stats

# Rist (1970)

Her takeaways in kindergarten were that the teacher divided the class into three tables. Table 1, table 2, and table 3, with the following behaviors.

For 1st and 2nd grade, the same division occurred, where students were unlikely to change their group. In 1st grade, these tables became tables A, B, and C respectively. In 2nd grade, these tables became the Tigers, Cardinals, and Clowns.