Test Notes for SOC

How is Stability Maintained in Society?

A. Definition of Institution

Social structure includes social institutions, organizations, groups, statuses and role, values, and norms that add order and predictability to our private lives.

Institutions are fairly stable clusters of morns, values, statuses and roles centered around fulfilling some social need.

1) Institutions make up subsets of social structure, subsets that focus on certain functions of exist within other social parameters.(Economy, family, education, religion)

2) Differs from organizations, which is thought of more as an administrative structure.

Ideology and Social Structure

Ideology involves a set of cultural beliefs, values, and attitudes that underlie and thereby to some degree justify and legitimate either the status quo or movements to change it.(what an ideal family is)

1) The culture of every social system includes an ideology that serves to explain and justify its own existence as a way of life.

a. A family ideology defines the nature of purpose of family life.

b. A religious ideology anchors and affirms a way of life in relation to sacred forces.

2) Ideology can also underlie movements for social change.

D. What kids of groups and organizations exist in our society?

Primary group consists of a small number of members who have direct contact over a relatively long period of time. Emotional ties are high. Ex. Family

Secondary group is more formal and impersonal than the primary. Group is established for a specific task, such as production or sale of consumer goods and members are less emotionally committed to another.

Definitions of Groups and Collectivities

A group is a social system involving:

1) Regular interaction among members guided by shared expectations of one another’s’ behavior.

2) A sense of common group identity.

Differs from aggregates or categories of people.

1) Aggregate: a collection of people that can be thought of as a whole simply because they happen to be in the same place at the same time. Also called a “mass”.

2) Category: a collection of people within a particular population that share a common trait.

3) Public: a collection of people who are interested in a particular issue. People who are interested in a certain issue in society.

Importance of groups:

1) Social identity

2) Socialization

3) Social conformity

Group Processes

Conformity: the practice of obeying the norms salient in a particular group setting.

1) Typically, the level of conformity is large in small groups due to monitoring and sanction distribution.

2) But large groups like the crowd at a football game, produces behavior that individuals might not normally do.

Boundaries: the group identity serves to delineate members from non-members, “in-groups” from “out-group”. (Ultimately builds cohesion)

Intimacy and stability: dyads vs. triads

Dyads and Triads:

Formal Organizations and Bureaucracy

Formal Organizations are large social groups that are rationally designed to achieve specific objectives. (McDonald’s, UT)

1) Voluntary: a group with a purpose designed by its members and whose members may join and leave relatively freely. (political orientation)

2) Coercive: organizations wherein member participation is mandatory. (Prison)

3) Utilitarian: groups that offer a rational benefit from joining. (Churches)

Trends in formal organizations.

1) Michel’s Iron Law of Oligarchy (1940): in organizations, no matter how democratic will always boil down to an oligarchic system over time.

2) Bureaucracy

a. Trend toward rationalization and an emphasis on efficiency.

b. Ideal-Type Bureaucracy:

i. Clear-cut division of labor

ii. Hierarchy of authority.

iii. Clearly defined rules of behavior/procedures with respect to their tasks. (swipe card after hours, no cheating)

iv. Generally impersonal treatment of people (both employees and customers).

v. Specialized management and documentation.

vi. Careers in advancing positions in the hierarchy.

Authority and Formal organizations

1) Authority involves the possession of some status of quality that compels others to obey ones’ directives of commands.

2) Types of Authority

a. Traditional authority involves a longstanding and often uncodified sense that those with authority have legitimate claims to their position based on social traditions. (inheritance in medieval times)

b. Charismatic authority results when an individual is perceived to hold extraordinary personal characteristics of abilities. (Martin Luther King)

c. Legal-rational authority is based on statuses and norms that emerge from the structure of a formal organization and are typically codified in written form. (CEO of organization, have power to make certain decisions and apply them)

E. Medicine as an institution

Institution: fairly stable clusters of norms, values, statuses and role centered around some social need.

Medicine is an institution that is centered around the use and production of certain kinds of knowledge, those centered around the need of providing health to the population.

Sociology of Knowledge: the sociological investigation into how knowledge is created validated and utilized. Assumes that “truth” is not jus out there, but is created.

Statuses and Roles in Medicine

Disease is considered and adverse physical state, consisting of a physiological dysfunction within an individual.

An illness is a subjective state, pertaining to an individual’s psychological awareness of having a disease and usually causing that person to modify his or her behavior.

Sickness is a social stat signifying an impaired social role for those who are ill.

The sick role is the set of socially defined rights and responsibilities held by a persona who is designated at sick.

Parson’s Sick Role

1. The sick person is exempt from “normal” social roles.
2. The sick person is not responsible for his or her condition.
3. The sick person should try to get well.
4. The sick person should seek technically competent help and cooperate with the physician.

Approaches to Medical Knowledge

Experimentation and the medical model

1) “Normal science” is interested in puzzle solving.

a. Innovation occurs at a small scale.

b. It occurs within a shared paradigm (shared set of concepts, methods and assumptions about the discipline’s subject matter.)

c. Events that cannot be explained by the dominant paradigm are explained away as anomalies.

2) Radical innovation: discoveries that occur outside of the dominant scientific paradigms are often treated with suspicion until proven through scientific methods.

3) Implications.

a. Social forces influence science.

b. Reification: the process by which social relations seem to be beyond human control because they become socially defined as fixed and immutable qualities – as if features of the natural world. (Knowing to stop at a red light in the middle of the night)

c. Real innovators are labeled deviant. (AIDS Doctor who said the treatment was killing AIDS victims)

Medical Industry and Bureaucracy

1) American medicine is corporatist.

2) Bureaucratic nature

3) Creation of authorities

F. Structures of Power: Politics and Economics

Elite Theory

Mills identifies a pattern of interaction between institutions that are particularly powerful in US society. (Political Government, Military, Economics and Business, Media all work together)

1) Mills’ three centers of power: the military, politics and economics.

2) Other centers of power

a. Media elite

b. Altruistic or social activist elite

Mills is produces an image of a network of societal elites.

1) Benefits to elites (Prep school, owning a company by family, connecting with other elites)

2) Self-policing (Nixon failed at it and he was shunned)

Types of Elite Networks

Disunified

1) Emerge from unstable elite network regimes (if an Army general doesn’t like the way the government is ran, he would want to take over)

2) Historically, disunified elite networks can be found by looking at countries that have political structures highly susceptible to seizures by force.

3) Usually results from violent stats formation

Consensual unified

1) Characterized by an unspoken acceptance of rules

2) Found in stable representative regimes, ones that are not subject to period revolutions and the politics are thought to be representative.

3) Results from one of two processes: settlement or colonial tutelage. (Magna Carta)

Ideological unified

1) Occurs when an elite leadership group forms around a strong ideological position.

2) Characterized by stable unrepresentative regimes, ones that are not subject to other throws but no attempt is made to be representative

3) Usually the result of revolution or struggle for liberation.

Economic democracy

1) Attempts to create economic democracy have often highlighted governmental attempts at socialism or communism.

2) Free-market attempts to foster economic democracy have also occurred in the form of cooperative business. Business that are owned by the workers. Ben Franklin was the first to have this kind of business.

a. Open, voluntary membership

b. Democratic control

c. Limited return, if any on equity capital

d. Net surplus belongs to the user-owners

e. Education

f. Cooperation among cooperatives (businesses are not to put any other co-op business out)

g. Concern for community

How Does Change Occur Within Society?

A. Religion and Social Change

Macro (Institutions) – social change, takes long time (evolutionary)

Meso – social movements. Create social change through collective behavior

Micro (Individual) – collective behavior, brief

B. The Family and Religion

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Protestantism

-Predestination (Use wealth as confirmation of being one of God’s chosen one)

-Calling from God (apportioning)

-Asceticism (refusing worldly pleasure to keep from distracting God)

The rich would give a little to the poor but invest more of their wealth but wouldn’t spend it on self. Capitalism came up when the three above line up culturally.

Secularization Theory

1) The belief that as modernization increases religiosity declines. (No more religious answers, instead scientific answers

a. Inherent to these theories is the idea that belief and sacrifice are erroneous.

b. Theories for religious beliefs

I. Psychopathological reasons. (sky is a human boundary when you stare into the sky instead of thinking it is an infinite direction just like how we made religion)

II. Rational choice theory

2) The idea is that as the science of sociology increases the functional elements of religion will be overtaken but the social structure.

3) U.S. modernization and secularization

Features of Religion in the United States

1) Disestablished

2) Pluralistic across sub-groups

3) Structurally adaptable (secularized operation, not content)

4) Empowering (for social change)

Psychoanalytic – Freud

Id – I

Ego – me

Superego – perceives the moral standards of the community

III. The Ego and Democracy

a. Herbert Marcuse

b. Declining role of the father

c. Impact on the ego

d. Result for democratic participation.

C. Collective Behavior

Macro à Social Change

Micro à Collective behavior

1) Institutions and Social Change

2) Components of Collective Behavior

A. Definition

I) Collective behavior involves those forms of social behavior in which the usual conventions cease to guide social action and people collectively bypass or subvert established institutional patterns and structures.

II) What does this look like?

a. Extraordinary crowd or public behavior

b. Occurs spontaneously at unexpected time and places

B. Kinds of Crowds and Collectivities

I) Compact collectivities vs. diffuse collectivities

II) Acting crowds (members want to make some kind of change external to themselves) vs. expressive crowds (no change but for expression, gathering for Princess Diana)

III) Individualistic crowd (No common grounds in crowd, out for themselves) vs. solidaristic crowds(Unity and common trait among the crowd)

a. Characteristics of solidaristic crowds

1) Unifying and empowering symbols.

2) Sense of righteousness

3) Division of labor

4) Leadership

5) Keynoting: providing suggestions that aim to resolve feelings of ambiguity and apathy among crowd members. (Jesse Jackson speaking at UT)

3) Theories of Collective Behavior.

A. Basic theories of crowd behavior

I) Convergence is the simultaneous release of predispositions which a number of people share as a latent tendency. (seeing a man beating a dog would act as a trigger and when people converge together to stop this man)

II) Contagion is the diffusion of emotion which acts to unify a crowd. (People gathering around a fight)

B. Emergent norm theory (Blumer)

New norms in new behavior when crowd dissipates so does new norms.

1) Uncertainty over norms, expectations, etc.

2) Sense of urgency

3) Communication of mood and imagery

4) Overcoming constraint

5) Selective individual suggestibility (Mardi Gras)

6) Selective permissiveness

C. Smelser’s Value Added Explanation of Collective Behavior

1) Structural conduciveness

2) Structural strain

3) Generalized belief

4) Precipitating event

5) Mobilization for action

6) Action of social control agents (Police).

D. Social Movements

Social Movements

1. Definition
1. Collectivity of persons unified over a common issue
2. Continuity exists due to the sustained activity over time.
3. The purpose is to promote social change
4. Movement boundaries are not precise and leadership is informal
5. Organization are involved

F. Mutable Self

Coping with change

a. Typically, a crisis in B mode roles leads to the reflective c mode.

b. But C mode is unstable and marked by perpetual anxiety, so the self must shift to A., B or D.