Understanding Social Status and Interactions

• The presentation focuses on interrogating social positions and interactions
• The emergence of cultural orientation and socialization processes are explored

Introduction: Status

• Sociologists investigate the impact of individuals' locations/positions on their interactions
• Status is a recognized social position that an individual occupies
• Status contributes to a person's social identity
• Status imposes responsibilities and expectations that defines a person's relationships to others
• Status Set is a collection of statuses people have over a lifetime, like daughter, mother, and wife
• Statuses and status sets change as people age

Ascribed and Achieved Status

• Achieved status is a status entered at some stage of life but were not born into, such as academic standings or professional positions
• Ascribed status is a status one is born into or enters involuntarily, for example, daughter, son, teenager, cancer survivor
• Some statuses are both ascribed and achieved, for example, citizenship

Social Mobility

• Social mobility determines the degree to which status is achieved or ascribed, for instance, the caste system in South Asia
• It is the extent to which people's social and economic statuses can change

Sexual Orientation and Status: A Problem Area

• Sexual orientation is primarily an ascribed status, for example, heterosexuality, homosexuality, asexual, bisexual, demisexual, or sapiosexual
• Sexual orientation is more complicated than being seen as either an achieved or an ascribed status
• It relates to the way one's sexuality is recognized by others
• Status, then, lies in what you do, not in what you feel

Master Status

• Everett C. Hughes (1897-1983) developed the concept of master status in 1945
• Master status dominates all an individual's statuses in most social contexts
• Master status plays the greatest role in the formation of an individual's social identity
• Examples of master status are "race," ethnicity, gender, and occupation

Status Hierarchy

• Statuses can be ranked from high to low based on prestige and power
• For social categories such as gender, "race,” ethnicity, age, class, sexual orientation, and physical ability, one status tends to be valued above others, such as male over female

Status Inconsistency

• Status consistency is the condition experienced when all statuses fall in the same range in the social hierarchy; for example, male, white, of British heritage, rich, heterosexual, and able-bodied
• Status inconsistency is the result of marginalization
• It occurs when a person holds social statuses that are ranked differently and do not align
• Groups are assigned categories that set them at or beyond the margins of dominant society, for example, Indigenous cabinet minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, Olivia Chow

Social Roles

• Role is a set of behaviours and attitudes associated with a particular status
• Roles attached to a status may differ across cultures
• A status may be associated with more than one role
• Role set, according to Robert Merton (1968), refers to all the roles that are attached to a particular status
• Professors play the role of teachers, colleagues, and employees

Role Strain and Role Conflict

• Role strain develops when there is a conflict between roles within the role set of a particular status, e.g., a student catching a classmate cheating
• Role conflict occurs when a person is forced to reconcile incompatible expectations generated from two or more statuses they hold, e.g., conflicting demands of being a mother and a student

Role Exit

• Role exit is the process of disengaging from a role that has been central to one's identity and attempting to establish a new role
• It involves shifting one's master status (Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh, 1988)
• Examples of role exit are divorce and death
• Role exit is experienced by everyone throughout their lives

Small Group and Social Relations

• Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe (1920) introduced the pecking order
• In small-group settings, statuses can establish the pecking order, or who is in charge
• Criminal gangs have hierarchies of statuses, ranging from president to associate, soldier, and wannabe
• George Simmel (1858-1918) was a microsociologist and symbolic interactionist
• Simmel was one of the first sociologists to study daily, one-on-one interactions of individuals
• Charles Cooley (1864–1929) studied identity formation through the looking-glass self
• Frederic M. Thrasher (1892-1962) studied gangs as small clusters of intense interaction separated from the larger world
• William I. Thomas (1963-1947) was a symbolic interactionist
• Thomas coined the concept definition of the situation
• Individuals define situations based on their subjective experiences and respond accordingly
• These definitions must be studied to understand individual action
• Interpretations and definitions produce reality, a process also known as Thomas theorem
• "Situations defined as real become real in their consequences"

Interaction Process Analysis

• Robert F. Bales (1916–2004) developed a system of coding interactions in small groupscalled interaction process analysis (IPA)
• IPA Identifies patterns of behaviour such as dominant/submissive, friendly/unfriendly, etc

Studying Social Interaction in Large Groups

• Social organization involves social and cultural principles around which people and things are structured, ordered, and categorized
• Cultures, institutions, or corporations are socially organized around egalitarianism or hierarchy
• Organizational structure is comprised of the principles that are upheld by shared cultural beliefs and maintained through a network of social relations
• Organizations are based on understandings and knowledge of the world, which are shaped by their cosmology, an account of the origin and ruling principles of the universe
• The study of organizations started with Max Weber's work on bureaucracy
• In the 1980s, there was a shift from the examination of social institutions to that of business corporations in search of effective and efficient management practices
• This brought about a surge in studies in the fields of organizational theory and organizational behaviour
• Since the 1990s, there has been an interdisciplinary focus on organizational culture, such as organizational rituals and symbolic acts
• Organizational ritual is a form of social action where a group's values and identity are publicly demonstrated (Islam & Zyphur, 2009), such as the comic strip Dilbert
• Critiques of traditional theories of management led to the rise of critical management studies
• The focus is challenging the dominant assumptions of organizations, such as issues of race, ethnicity, class, or gender
• Female organizational structures are different from traditional male organizational structures
• Central tenets in feminist coalitions include issues like the internal distribution of power and responsibility
• Carol Mueller (1995) identified three models of feminist organizations: Formal social movement organizations, Small groups or collectives, and Service-provider organizations
• Formal social movement organizations are professionalized, bureaucratic, inclusive with few demands made on members (e.g., women's rights groups)
• Small groups or collectives are organized informally and require time, loyalty, and material resources from their members (e.g., women's publishing houses)
• Service-provider organizations combine elements of both formal and small-group organizations (e.g., domestic violence shelters)
• Bureaucracy arose out of the formation of states and writing systems 5,000 years ago
• As empires emerged, administrative bureaucracies expanded alongside imperial expansion
• The term bureaucracy originated in 18th century France, meaning “writing desk"
• According to Max Weber (1864-1920), bureaucracy is marked by formal rationalization and its four elements: Efficiency, Quantification, Predictability, and Control
• Substantive rationalization focuses on values and ethics
• Formal rationalization leads to disenchantment and alienation
• The development of formal rationality began during the Industrial Revolution (late 18th and early 19th centuries)
• Frederick W. Taylor (1856–1915) developed practice of scientific management
• Practice based on "time-and-motion" studies designed to discover one way of doing the job
• Efficiency standards limit work processes to single set of repetitive actions, undermining skill development
• George Ritzer (2004) coined the concept of McDonaldization
• Defined as "the process by which the [rationalizing] 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"
• Ritzer (2004) applied the four fundamental elements of Weber's formal rationalization: Efficiency, Quantification, Predicability, and Control
• Efficiency is the streamlined movement in time and effort of people and things through small, repeated tasks
• Quantification is that success is measured by completion of large number of quantifiable tasks
• Predictability involves the “uniformity of rules" and clear expectations
• Control involves the hierarchal division of labour and supervision
• The internet allows for formal rationalization
• Weber warned about the "iron cage of rationality,” yet accepted into daily lives, e.g., online shopping and raising funds for the needy
• Foundational principles and forms of organizations profoundly affect society and individuals, requiring critical examination and questioning
• Organizational structure promotes social order (social cohesion and organizations/systems held together)
• However, bureaucratized organizations dictate values and interactions and lose sight of a greater good

Conclusion

• Social positions are constructed and continuously renegotiated through interactions
• An individual's social identity is shaped by class, race, gender, education, and other determinants
• Social positions can shift, becoming more or less favourable based on proximity to power/control