You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist PDF

Publisher’s Notice Please note that this version of the ebook does not include access to any media or print supplements that are sold packaged with the printed book. RECENT SOCIOLOGY TITLES FROM W. W. NORTON The Contexts Reader, Third Edition, edited by Syed Ali and Philip N. Cohen Code of the...

Publisher’s Notice Please note that this version of the ebook does not include access to any media or print supplements that are sold packaged with the printed book. RECENT SOCIOLOGY TITLES FROM W. W. NORTON The Contexts Reader, Third Edition, edited by Syed Ali and Philip N. Cohen Code of the Street by Elijah Anderson In the Trenches: Teaching and Learning Sociology by Maxine P. Atkinson and Kathleen S. Lowney Social Problems, Fourth Edition, by Joel Best The Art and Science of Social Research, Second Edition, by Deborah Carr, Elizabeth Heger Boyle, Benjamin Cornwell, Shelley Correll, Robert Crosnoe, Jeremy Freese, and Mary C. Waters The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change, Third Edition, by Philip N. Cohen Race in America, Second Edition, by Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions, Second Edition, by Myra Marx Ferree and Lisa Wade The Real World: An Introduction to Sociology, Seventh Edition, by Kerry Ferris and Jill Stein Essentials of Sociology, Eighth Edition, by Anthony Giddens, Mitchell Duneier, Richard P. Appelbaum, and Deborah Carr Mix It Up: Popular Culture, Mass Media, and Society, Second Edition, by David Grazian Readings for Sociology, Ninth Edition, edited by Garth Massey Families as They Really Are, Second Edition, edited by Barbara J. Risman and Virginia E. Rutter Sex Matters: The Sexuality and Society Reader, Fifth Edition, edited by Mindy Stombler, Dawn M. Baunach, Wendy O. Simonds, Elroi J. Windsor, and Elisabeth O. Burgess Cultural Sociology: An Introductory Reader, edited by Matt Wray American Society: How It Really Works, Second Edition, by Erik Olin Wright and Joel Rogers To learn more about Norton Sociology, please visit: wwnorton.com/soc W. W. Norton & Company has been independent since its founding in 1923, when William Warder Norton and Mary D. Herter Norton first published lectures delivered at the People’s Institute, the adult education division of New York City’s Cooper Union. The firm soon expanded its program beyond the Institute, publishing books by celebrated academics from America and abroad. By mid-century, the two major pillars of Norton’s publishing program—trade books and college texts—were firmly established. In the 1950s, the Norton family transferred control of the company to its employees, and today—with a staff of five hundred and hundreds of trade, college, and professional titles published each year—W. W. 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All rights reserved Editor: Michael Moss Project Editor: Michael Fauver Assistant Editor: Angie Merila Managing Editor, College: Marian Johnson Managing Editor, College Digital Media: Kim Yi Production Manager: Sean Mintus Media Editor: Eileen Connell Media Project Editor: Danielle Belfiore Associate Media Editor: Ariel Eaton Media Editorial Assistant: Alexandra Park Marketing Director, Sociology: Julia Hall Book Designer: Kiss Me I’m Polish LLC, New York Design Director: Rubina Yeh Ebook Designer: Juan Paolo Francisco Ebook Production Manager: Kate Barnes Director of College Permissions: Megan Schindel Photo Editor: Melinda Patelli College Permissions Associate: Patricia Wong Composition: Six Red Marbles Cover Art and Design: Kiss Me I’m Polish ISBN: 978-0-393-42829-2 (print) ISBN: 978-0-393-53761-1 (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Conley, Dalton, 1969- author. Title: You may ask yourself : an introduction to thinking like a sociologist / Dalton Conley, Princeton University. Description: Seventh edition. | New York : W.W. Norton, | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020053655 | ISBN 9780393428292 (paperback) | ISBN 9780393537611 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Sociology—Methodology. | Sociology—Study and teaching. Classification: LCC HM511.C664 2021 | DDC 301.01—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053655 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company, Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS Ebook version: 7.1-retailer Brief Contents PREFACE xxiii PART 1 USING YOUR SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 2 Chapter 1 The Sociological Imagination: An Introduction 4 Chapter 2 Methods 48 Chapter 3 Culture and Media 82 Chapter 4 Socialization and the Construction of Reality 122 Chapter 5 Groups and Networks 164 Chapter 6 Social Control and Deviance 202 PART 2 FAULT LINES... SOCIAL DIVISION AND INEQUALITY 252 Chapter 7 Stratification 254 Chapter 8 Gender 300 Chapter 9 Race 348 Chapter 10 Poverty 404 Chapter 11 Health and Society 444 PART 3 BUILDING BLOCKS: INSTITUTIONS OF SOCIETY 498 Chapter 12 Family 500 Chapter 13 Education 548 Chapter 14 Capitalism and the Economy 596 Chapter 15 Authority and the State 636 Chapter 16 Religion 680 Chapter 17 Science, the Environment, and Society 732 Chapter 18 Collective Action, Social Movements, and Social Change 770 GLOSSARY A1 BIBLIOGRAPHY A14 CREDITS A49 INDEX A55 Contents xxiii Preface 2 PART 1: USING YOUR SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 4 CHAPTER 1: THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION: AN INTRODUCTION 6 The Sociological Imagination 8 HOW TO BE A SOCIOLOGIST ACCORDING TO QUENTIN TARANTINO: A SCENE FROM PULP FICTION 10 What Are the True Costs and Returns of College? 13 Getting That “Piece of Paper” 16 What Is a Social Institution? 19 The Sociology of Sociology 20 Auguste Comte and the Creation of Sociology 20 TWO CENTURIES OF SOCIOLOGY 23 Classical Sociological Theory 29 American Sociology 32 Modern Sociological Theories 36 Doing Theory 37 Sociology and Its Cousins 37 History 39 Anthropology 41 The Psychological and Biological Sciences 42 Economics and Political Science 43 Divisions within Sociology 44 Microsociology and Macrosociology 44 Conclusion 44 QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 46 PRACTICE: SEEING SOCIOLOGICALLY 48 CHAPTER 2: METHODS 52 Research 101 53 Causality versus Correlation 56 Variables 57 Hypothesis Testing 57 Validity, Reliability, and Generalizability 59 Role of the Researcher 63 Choosing Your Method 63 Data Collection 68 SAMPLES: THEY'RE NOT JUST THE FREE TASTES AT THE SUPERMARKET  74 Ethics of Social Research 75 POLICY: THE POLITICAL BATTLE OVER THE CITIZENSHIP QUESTION 77 Conclusion 78 QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 80 PRACTICE: SOCIOLOGY, WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? 82 CHAPTER 3: CULTURE AND MEDIA 84 Definitions of Culture 84 Culture = Human – Nature 85 Culture = (Superior) Man – (Inferior) Man 87 Culture = Man – Machine 88 Material versus Nonmaterial Culture 89 Language, Meaning, and Concepts 90 Ideology 91 Studying Culture 94 Subculture 95 Cultural Effects: Give and Take 97 Reflection Theory 99 Media 99 From the Town Crier to the Facebook Wall: A Brief History 101 Hegemony: The Mother of All Media Terms 102 The Media Life Cycle 102 Texts 102 Back to the Beginning: Cultural Production 103 Media Effects 105 Mommy, Where Do Stereotypes Come From? 106 THE RACE AND GENDER POLITICS OF MAKING OUT 108 Racism in the Media 110 Sexism in the Media 111 Political Economy of the Media 113 Consumer Culture 113 Advertising and Children 115 Culture Jams: Hey Calvin, How ’Bout Giving That Girl a Sandwich? 116 Conclusion 117 POLICY: WHAT'S IN A NAME? 119 QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 120 PRACTICE: SUBCULTURE WARS 122 CHAPTER 4: SOCIALIZATION AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY 125 Socialization: The Concept  126 Limits of Socialization 126 “Human” Nature 127 Theories of Socialization 127 Me, Myself, and I: Development of the Self and the Other 131 Agents of Socialization 131 Families 135 School 137 Peers 138 Adult Socialization 140 Total Institutions 141 Social Interaction 143 Gender Roles 146 The Social Construction of Reality 150 Dramaturgical Theory 155 Ethnomethodology 156 New Technologies: What Has the Internet Done to Interaction? 158 POLICY: ROOMMATES WITH BENEFITS 160 Conclusion 161 QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 162 PRACTICE: ROLE CONFLICT AND ROLE STRAIN 164 CHAPTER 5: GROUPS AND NETWORKS 166 Social Groups 167 Just the Two of Us 168 And Then There Were Three 171 Size Matters: Why Social Life Is Complicated 172 Let’s Get This Party Started: Small Groups, Parties, and Large Groups 174 Primary and Secondary Groups 175 Group Conformity 176 In-Groups and Out-Groups 176 Reference Groups 176 From Groups to Networks 177 Embeddedness: The Strength of Weak Ties 181 Six Degrees 182 Social Capital 186 CASE STUDY: SURVIVAL OF THE AMISH 189 Network Analysis in Practice 190 The Social Structure of Teenage Sex 193 Romantic Leftovers 194 Organizations  195 Organizational Structure and Culture 196 Institutional Isomorphism: Everybody’s Doing It 197 POLICY: RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN 198 Conclusion 199 QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 200 PRACTICE: HOW TO DISAPPEAR 202 CHAPTER 6: SOCIAL CONTROL AND DEVIANCE 205 What Is Social Deviance? 206 Functionalist Approaches to Deviance and Social Control 211 Social Control 213 A Normative Theory of Suicide 218 Social Forces and Deviance 220 Symbolic Interactionist Theories of Deviance 220 Labeling Theory 224 THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT AND ABU GHRAIB 227 Stigma 228 Broken Windows Theory of Deviance 230 Crime 230 Street Crime 231 White-Collar Crime 232 Interpreting the Crime Rate 235 Crime Reduction 235 Deterrence Theory of Crime Control 237 Goffman’s Total Institution 239 Foucault on Punishment 243 The US Criminal Justice System 246 POLICY: DOES PRISON WORK BETTER AS PUNISHMENT OR REHAB? 248 Conclusion 249 QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 250 PRACTICE: EVERYDAY DEVIANCE 252 PART 2: FAULT LINES... SOCIAL DIVISION AND INEQUALITY 254 CHAPTER 7: STRATIFICATION 257 Views of Inequality 257 Jean-Jacques Rousseau 258 The Scottish Enlightenment and Thomas Malthus 261 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 263 Modern Theories of Inequality 264 Standards of Equality 264 Equality of Opportunity  266 Equality of Condition 267 Equality of Outcome 268 Forms of Stratification 268 Estate System 269 Caste System 270 Class System 273 Status Hierarchy System 276 Elite–Mass Dichotomy System 278 INCOME VERSUS WEALTH 279 How Is America Stratified Today? 279 The Upper Class 281 The Middle Class 284 The Poor 285 Global Inequality 288 Social Reproduction versus Social Mobility 293 POLICY: CLASS-BASED AFFIRMATIVE ACTION 295 Conclusion 296 QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 298 PRACTICE: THE $5,000 TOOTHBRUSH 300 CHAPTER 8: GENDER 302 Let’s Talk About Sex Gender 303 Sex: A Process in the Making 304 Seeing Sex as Social: The Case of Nonbinary Individuals 305 Sexed Bodies in the Premodern World 305 Contemporary Concepts of Sex and the Paradoxes of Gender 306 Gender: What Does It Take to Be Feminine or Masculine? 307 Making Gender 309 Gender Differences over Time 310 WELCOME TO ZE COLLEGE, ZE 313 Theories of Gender Inequality 313 Rubin’s Sex/Gender System 315 Parsons’s Sex Role Theory 316 Psychoanalytic Theories 317 Conflict Theories 318 “Doing Gender”: Interactionist Theories 319 Black Feminism and Intersectionality 320 Postmodern and Global Perspectives 321 Growing Up, Getting Ahead, and Falling Behind 322 Growing Up with Gender  323 Inequality at Work 330 Sociology in the Bedroom 330 Sex: From Plato to NATO 331 The Social Construction of Sexuality 335 Contemporary Sexualities: The Q Word 337 “Hey”: Teen Sex, from Hooking Up to Virginity Pledges 340 Sex and Aging 342 POLICY: #METHREE 343 Conclusion 344 QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 346 PRACTICE: MEASURING MANSPLAINING 348 CHAPTER 9: RACE 350 The Myth of Race 353 The Concept of Race from the Ancients to Alleles 354 Race in the Early Modern World 357 Eugenics 359 Twentieth-Century Concepts of Race 361 Racial Realities 364 Race versus Ethnicity 367 Racial Groups in the United States 367 Native Americans 369 African Americans 370 Latinxs 372 Asian Americans 374 Middle Eastern Americans 374 The Importance of Being White 377 Inter-Group Relations 378 Pluralism 380 Segregation and Discrimination 385 Racial Conflict 386 Group Responses to Domination 386 Withdrawal 387 Passing 388 Acceptance versus Resistance 388 Prejudice, Discrimination, and the New Racism 391 How Race Matters: The Case of Wealth 393 Institutional Racism 395 The Future of Race 399 POLICY: DNA DATABASES 400 Conclusion 401 QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 402 PRACTICE: HOW SEGREGATED ARE YOU? 404 CHAPTER 10: POVERTY 408 The Culture of Poverty 408 Negative Income Tax 412 The Underclass 417 The Bell Curve Thesis 418 Moving to Opportunity 423 The War on Poverty Today 427 Poverty amid Plenty 428 Absolute and Relative Poverty 432 The Effects of Poverty on Children’s Life Chances 434 Why Is the United States So Different? 438 POLICY: SEEKING SWF 439 Conclusion 440 QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 442 PRACTICE: KNOWN UNKNOWNS 444 CHAPTER 11: HEALTH AND SOCIETY 448 The Rise (and Fall?) of the Medical Profession 448 Why We Think Doctors Are Special 451 The Rise of the Biomedical Culture 453 Doctors’ Denouement? 455 What Does It Mean to Be Sick? 455 The Sick Role 455 Social Construction of Illness 456 The US Health Care System 457 Health Care in the United States: Who’s Got You Covered? 459 The Social Determinants of Health and Illness 461 We’re Not All Born Equal: Prenatal and Early Life Determinants 465 Postnatal Health Inequalities 474 Aging and Health 477 Health Care for Older Americans 479 COVID-19 and Health Inequalities 481 The Sociology of Mental Health 481 Rise of Diagnostic Psychiatry 484 The Power of a Pill? 485 Global Health 486 Global Poverty and Health: Cause versus Effect 489 H2O TO GO 490 The Age of AIDS 492 POLICY: HOUSING FOR HEALTH 494 Conclusion  494 QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 496 PRACTICE: I'LL GO TO THE GYM TOMORROW 498 PART 3: BUILDING BLOCKS: INSTITUTIONS OF SOCIETY 500 CHAPTER 12: FAMILY 503 Family Forms and Changes 504 Malinowski and the Traditional Family 508 The Family in the Western World Today 511 Keeping It in the Family: The Historical Divide between Public and Private 511 Premodern Families 513 The Emergence of the Male Breadwinner Family 514 Families after World War II 516 Family and Work: A Not-So-Subtle Revolution 517 A Feminist “Rethinking of the Family” 519 When Home Is No Haven: Domestic Abuse 520 The Chore Wars: Supermom Does It All 526 Swimming and Sinking: Inequality and American Families 526 African American Families 528 Latinx Families 529 Flat Broke with Children 533 The Pecking Order: Inequality Starts at Home 535 The Future of Families, and There Goes the Nation! 535 Divorce 538 Blended Families 538 Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Families 540 Multiracial Families 541 Immigrant Families 542 POLICY: EXPANDING MARRIAGE 544 Conclusion 544 QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 546 PRACTICE: MAKING INVISIBLE LABOR VISIBLE 548 CHAPTER 13: EDUCATION 550 Learning to Learn or Learning to Labor? Functions of Schooling 551 Socialization 555 Do Schools Matter? 556 The Coleman Report 557 Class Size 558 Private Schools versus Public Schools 560 What’s Going On Inside Schools? 560 The Sorting Machine Revisited: Tracking  564 The Classroom Pressure Cooker 568 Higher Education 568 The Rise and Rise of Higher Education: Credentialism 570 The SAT: Meritocracy and the Big Test 573 Affirmative Action: Myths and Reality 575 Intelligence or IQ? 576 Adult Learning 577 Inequalities in Schooling 577 Class 581 Race 586 Ethnicity 587 Impending Crisis: The Boy–Girl Achievement Gap 588 All in the Family 590 POLICY: VOUCHERS 592 Conclusion 593 QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 594 PRACTICE: THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM OF COLLEGE 596 CHAPTER 14: CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMY 598 A Brief History of Capitalism 601 Theorizing the Transition to Capitalism 601 Adam Smith 603 Georg Simmel 605 Karl Marx 608 Max Weber 609 Recent Changes in Capitalism 609 You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby (or Have You?): Work, Gender, and Family 616 The Service Sector 617 Globalization 620 The Reign of the Corporation 621 The Corporate Psychopath? 629 An Aging Economy 630 POLICY: THE GIG ECONOMY 632 Conclusion 633 QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 634 PRACTICE: UNBANK YOURSELF! 636 CHAPTER 15: AUTHORITY AND THE STATE 639 Types of Legitimate Authority 639 Charismatic Authority 641 Traditional Authority 641 Legal-Rational Authority 645 Obedience to Authority  645 The Milgram Experiment 646 Authority, Legitimacy, and the State 649 The International System of States 650 THE CASE OF SOMALILAND 653 New State Functions: The Welfare State 657 Radical Power and Persuasion 660 Power and International Relations 661 Dictatorship or Democracy? States of Nature and Social Contracts 667 Who Rules in the United States? 669 Beyond Strawberry and Vanilla: Political Participation in Modern Democracies 674 POLICY: AGE AND VOTING 676 Conclusion 676 QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 678 PRACTICE: GET SH*T DONE 680 CHAPTER 16: RELIGION 683 What Is Religion? 688 Theory: Marx, Weber, and Durkheim 688 Karl Marx 689 Max Weber 692 Émile Durkheim 695 Secularization or Speculation? 696 Religious Pluralism in the United States 699 Religious Attendance in the United States 702 At the Micro Level: Is It a Great Big Delusion? 704 The Power of Religion: Social Movements 707 Religion and the Social Landscape 708 Families 708 Race 709 Gender 710 Class 712 Geography and Politics 713 Selling God and Shopping for Faith: The Commercialization of Religious Life 716 Lesson 1: If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Join ’Em 716 Lesson 2: Bigger Is Better 717 Lesson 3: Speed Pleases 718 Lesson 4: Sex Sells 719 The Paradox of Popularity 719 The Sect–Church Cycle 723 Why Are Conservative Churches Growing?  726 POLICY: TEACHING THE BIBLE IN SCHOOL 728 Conclusion 728 QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 730 PRACTICE: THE CULT OF YOU 732 CHAPTER 17: SCIENCE, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND SOCIETY 735 Science and Society 735 Thomas Kuhn and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions 736 Is Science a Social and Political Endeavor? 739 The Pursuit of Truth and the Boundaries of Science 742 The Laboratory as a Site for Knowledge 744 The Matthew Effect 745 Agriculture and the Environment 745 Global Warming and Climate Change 748 Organic Foods and Genetically Modified Organisms 753 The Green Revolution 755 Biotechnology and the Human Genome 757 GATTACA: GENETICS AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY 761 Race and Genetics 764 POLICY: FRANKENFOOD VERSUS CRISPR VERSUS ABORTION POLITICS 766 Conclusion 767 QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 768 PRACTICE: SUSTAINABLE CHOICES 770 CHAPTER 18: COLLECTIVE ACTION, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, AND SOCIAL CHANGE 773 Collective Action: What Is It Good For? 774 Theories of Collective Action 777 Identity and Collective Action 779 Social Movements 780 Types of Social Movements 784 I’ve Been Framed! 791 Models of Social Movements: How Do They Arise? 794 Three Stages of Social Movements 796 EMERGENCE, COALESCENCE, AND ROUTINIZATION IN THE HIV/AIDS MOVEMENT 798 Social Movement Organizations 801 Social Movements and Social Change 804 Premodern, Modern, and Postmodern Societies 805 Premodern Societies 805 Modernity 807 Postmodernism  809 The Causes of Social Change 809 Technology and Innovation 810 New Ideas and Identities 811 Social Change and Conflict 811 POLICY: DOES ACTIVISM ACTUALLY WORK? 813 Conclusion 815 QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW 816 PRACTICE: AIN'T GONNA TAKE IT NO MORE A1 GLOSSARY A14 BIBLIOGRAPHY A49 CREDITS A55 INDEX Preface I came to sociology by accident, so to speak. During the 1980s, there were no sociology courses at the high-school level, so I entered college with only the vaguest notion of what sociology—or even social science—was. Instead, I headed straight for the pre-med courses. But there was no such thing as a pre-med major, so I ended up specializing in the now defunct “humanities field major.” This un- major major was really the result of my becoming a junior and realizing that I was not any closer to a declared field of study than I had been when arriving two years earlier. So I scanned a list of all the electives I had taken until then—philosophy of aesthetics, history of technology, and so on—and marched right into my adviser’s office, declaring that it had always been my lifelong dream to study “art and technology in the twentieth century.” I wrote this up convincingly enough, apparently, because the college allowed me to write a senior thesis about how the evolution of Warner Brothers’ cartoon characters—from the stuttering, insecure Porky Pig to the militant Daffy Duck to the cool, collected, and confident Bugs Bunny —reflected the self-image of the United States on the world stage during the Depression, World War II, and the postwar period, respectively. Little did I know, I was already becoming a sociologist. After college, I worked as a journalist but then decided that I wanted to continue my schooling. I was drawn to the critical stance and reflexivity that I had learned in my humanities classes, but I knew that I didn’t want to devote my life to arcane texts. What I wanted to do was take those skills—that critical stance—and apply them to everyday life, to the here and now. I also was rather skeptical of the methods that humanists used. What texts they chose to analyze always seemed so arbitrary. I wanted to systematize the inquiry a bit more; I found myself trying to apply the scientific method that I had gotten a taste of in my biology classes. But I didn’t want to do science in a lab. I wanted to be out in the proverbial real world. So when I flipped through a course catalog with these latent preferences somewhere in the back of my head, my finger landed on the sociology courses. Once I became a card-carrying sociologist, the very first course I taught was Introduction to Sociology. I had big shoes to fill in teaching this course at Yale. Kai Erikson, the world-renowned author of Wayward Puritans and Everything in Its Path and the son of psychologist Erik Erikson, was stepping down from his popular course, The Human Universe, and I, a first-year assistant professor, was expected to replace him. I had a lot of sociology to learn. After all, graduate training in sociology is spotty at best. And there is no single theory of society to study in the same way that one might learn, for example, the biochemistry of DNA transcription and translation as the central dogma of molecular biology. We talk about the sociological imagination as an organizing principle. But even that is almost a poetic notion, not so easily articulated. Think of sociology as more like driving a car than learning calculus. You can read the manual all you want, but that isn’t going to teach you how to do it. Only by seeing sociology in action and then trying it yourself will you eventually say, “Hey, I’ve got the hang of this!” The great Chinese philosopher Confucius said about learning: “By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.” Hopefully you can skip the bitterness, but you get the general idea. For example, by trying to fix a local problem through appealing to your elected officials, you might better grasp sociological theories of the state. Hence the title of this book. In You May Ask Yourself, I show readers how sociologists question what most others take for granted about society, and I give readers opportunities to apply sociological ways of thinking to their own experiences. I’ve tried to jettison the arcane academic debates that become the guiding light of so many intro books in favor of a series of contemporary empirical (gold) nuggets that show off sociology (and empirical social science more generally) in its finest hour. Most students who take an introductory sociology class in college will not end up being sociology majors, let alone professional sociologists. Yet I aim to speak to both the aspiring major and the student who is merely fulfilling a requirement. So rather than having pages filled with statistics and theories that will go out of date rather quickly, You May Ask Yourself tries to instill in the reader a way of thinking—a scientific approach to human affairs that is portable, one that students will find useful when they study anything else, whether history or medicine. To achieve this ambitious goal, I tried to write a book that was as “un-textbook”-like as possible, while covering all the material that a student in sociology needs to know. In this vein, each chapter is organized around a motivating paradox, meant to serve as the first chilling line of a mystery novel that motivates the reader to read on to find out (or rather, figure out, because this book is not about spoon- feeding facts) the nugget, the debate, the fundamentally new way of looking at the world that illuminates the paradox. Along with a paradox, each chapter begins with a profile of a relevant person who speaks to the core theme of the chapter. These range from myself to Angelina Jolie to a guy who wore a rainbow-colored clown wig to try and get media attention to share his Christian message. In addition, to show the usefulness of sociological knowledge in shaping the world around us, each chapter culminates in a Policy discussion and a Practice activity for students. What's New in the Seventh Edition Higher education is in rapid transition, with online instruction expanding in traditional institutions, in the expanding for-profit sector, and in the new open-courseware movement. The industry is still very much in flux, with massive open online courses (MOOCs) failing to displace traditional classroom education (so far). With these changes, textbooks must also reinvent and reorient themselves. Students now expect, I believe, an entire multimedia experience when they purchase a textbook. To that end, the Third Edition included animations of the associated chapter Paradoxes. For the Fourth Edition, in addition to a new round of interviews with sociologists, we filmed Sociology on the Street assignment videos. To illustrate a “breaching experiment,” for example, I went on camera to perform one myself. It has been years since I have been as nervous speaking on camera as I was the day I walked—barefoot but dressed in a suit—into W. W. Norton’s conference room filled with unsuspecting volunteers and proceeded to clip my toenails while I explained the plan for the day and we surreptitiously filmed their (surprisingly unflinching) response. In the Fifth Edition, we brought the streets into the classroom. Along with new Q&A videos with professional sociologists, we added videos (and text) from folks outside the ivory tower who are doing sociology in their work. These interviews help students understand the real- world relevance of sociology and reflect the applied turn in the field. Further reflecting the increasing emphasis on applications within the discipline, the Sixth Edition featured a revamping of the fourth “P” in each chapter (the first three being the Paradox, Person, and Policy). Rather than just answering review questions, Practice activities send students out into the proverbial “streets” (sometimes just metaphorically), where they get to learn by doing—whether that’s discovering the true price of unpaid labor in our personal economies, analyzing the structural forces that contribute to one’s own carbon emissions, better managing competing roles and statuses in one’s life, or, failing that, figuring out how to completely disappear in today’s totally connected society. The other major change to the Sixth Edition was an overhaul of the Gender chapter. Perhaps no domain of social life in US society has changed more dramatically in the past few years than that of gender. So with extensive help from experts in the fields of sex, gender, and sexuality, I really tried to dig into the concept of gender, turning it inside out, in the service of conveying an understanding of gender and the sex–gender system as something processual and fluid. The graying of America is of increasing social importance, so the Seventh Edition features new coverage of aging-related topics throughout the book. Several new interviews with sociologists and gerontologists focus on inequalities in the aging experience and the social determinants of health and aging. Other new “sociological conversation” interviews explore intergroup race relations, immigration, and indoctrination in public education. While working on the Seventh Edition, we witnessed the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic as well as the widespread protests for racial justice that followed the killing of George Floyd. These events get covered in multiple chapters, including an expanded treatment of the Black Lives Matter movement in the Collective Action, Social Movements, and Social Change chapter, a new section on COVID-19 health inequalities in the Health and Society chapter, and my own experience contracting the coronavirus disease as the Person example in the opener to the Health and Society chapter. Finally, we have changed the conventions regarding capitalization of racial/ethnic categories. Specifically, in this edition, racial and ethnic categorizations are considered proper nouns and thus are capitalized. As Temple University journalism professor Lori Tharps notes, “Black with a capital B refers to people of the African diaspora. Lowercase black is simply a color” (Tharps, 2014). In the same way, “White” as a racial category acknowledges the functions of this label in society. Racial designations are not neutral markers of skin tone, but socially constructed categories whose meanings and boundaries shift over time and place. Treating these categories as proper nouns recognizes them as such (Appiah, 2020). There is an alternative school of thought that claims that capitalization leads to reification of those somewhat arbitrary and historically contingent categories and thus argues for capitalizing neither label. Indeed, some languages do not even capitalize nationalities. Yet another line of reasoning says that Black should be capitalized but white should not be on the grounds that there is a common experience of structural racism among the African diaspora while there is no unifying experience of white people and that capitalizing it only lends legitimacy to those who seek a “white nationalism.” But this, in turn, denies the commonness of White privilege, for example, as a shared referent. Of course, it also denies the folk usage of White as a socially constructed term that conveys a tacit understanding of membership in a particular identity group. To those who say the White experience is too diverse to deserve such a label, the same can be said for the Black experience. Then there is the issue of how to call those who might be referred to as Hispanic or of Hispanic origin or Latino. Over the last couple of decades, Latino has become a preferred way to reference the diverse category of people that includes those of Cuban, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Guatemalan, and Colombian descent—to name a few. It also includes those from Latin America who hail from non- Spanish-speaking countries, such as people of Brazilian descent (who typically speak Portuguese) or those from Belize (where English is an official language). Meanwhile, the term Hispanic is a language-based category that also included people from Spain but excluded those whose origin was in Latin American countries that were not Spanish-speaking (e.g., Brazil). Never mind that significant populations from some “Spanish-speaking” countries speak indigenous languages (and not Spanish) such as Quechua. While most people who would fit into either of these categories actually prefer to use their specific national origin to denote their identity (such as Mexican or Mexican American), the terms remain in common usage for a variety of reasons—not least of which is that Hispanic has been an official US government category since 1977 (a development that was pursued thanks to the wishes of some [pro- assimilationist, conservative] Mexican American political groups). The term Latino, meanwhile, gained usage currency starting in the 1990s. Today, however, there is increasing recognition that—as for terms in other Latin-derived languages—the male designation stands in for a mixed-gendered category. Some activists see its assimilation into English as an opportunity to change that gender dynamic and prefer to use the term Latinx—the “x” removing any gendered connotation from the group. This is the term that is used in the present edition. Some readers may object to this choice on the basis that strong majorities of Latinx individuals, when surveyed, reject the term. However, linguistic innovations often start among a highly engaged, highly informed minority to whom the issue is of paramount importance. Such is the case with Latinx. Of course, like all terms for social groups, this one may fade or further evolve, in which case, look out for new usage in the future editions! (This is, of course, true for all the categories discussed herein.) All of these decisions are highly political and sociological, and my own subject position as a cis-White male should be acknowledged in my role as the author who has had to make these decisions (in conjunction with, of course, the editor/publisher and in consideration of reviewer/reader feedback). In addition, we revised every chapter in the book to include updated data, research, and examples. Here are some of the highlights: WHAT'S NEW CHAPTER BY CHAPTER CHAPTER 1: THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION: AN INTRODUCTION By reviewer request, the discussion of the merits of a college degree has been condensed and edited for clarity. It also includes updated data on the cost of college and earnings by degree holders. The discussion of the history of sociology now includes the key terms positivism and interpretive sociology. The section on modern sociological theories has been reorganized to group together the theories of functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism to make it easier for students to understand these foundational theories in relation to one another. A completely new section, Doing Theory, addresses how sociologists use theory in practice. It also includes a new table that shows how different theory perspectives approach the same topic, in this case using household division of labor as the example. CHAPTER 2: METHODS To help illustrate how sociologists conduct research, a more detailed discussion of how danah boyd uses both qualitative and quantitative methods in her research has been added. A new Policy feature addresses the 2020 Census and the controversy over the attempt by Wilbur Ross (secretary of commerce under President Trump) to add a question about citizenship to the census questionnaire. CHAPTER 3: CULTURE AND MEDIA By reviewer request, the discussion on Goth culture now references Peter Hodkinson’s historical overview of the subculture. The section on the history of media includes updated data on the percentage of Americans with broadband internet access at home as well as those who use smartphones as their main source of internet access. The section on stereotypes features new coverage of the underrepresentation of Black professionals in the media and publishing industries. In the section on the political economy of the media, a new discussion concerning how and why the internet often reinforces prejudices has been added. CHAPTER 4: SOCIALIZATION AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY The section on family socialization features research from Amy Hsin on whether the amount of time parents spend at home with their children affects children’s cognitive outcomes. This section also features new research that Thomas Laidley and I conducted on how weather patterns affect children’s performance in school. The section on peer socialization has been updated with a newer study on where adolescents learn about dating and sex. The section on adult socialization has been thoroughly revised and now covers Erik Erikson’s eight stages of human development as well as agents of socialization for older adults. The section on social interaction has a new discussion of gender reveal parties and expanded coverage of adolescent socialization and gender roles. CHAPTER 5: GROUPS AND NETWORKS The section on networks includes a new “sociological conversation” interview with Stacy Torres that introduces the concept of elastic social ties, which she developed while researching aging in place among older adults living in cities. A video of the interview is embedded in the ebook. The section on social capital has been condensed and edited for clarity. CHAPTER 6: SOCIAL CONTROL AND DEVIANCE The section on the US criminal justice system includes a new analysis of explanations for the declining crime rate that began in the 1990s. It also covers the First Step Act of 2018 in the discussion of federal prison reforms. A new “sociological conversation” interview with Jacqueline Stevens addresses controversial ICE detention practices of undocumented immigrants. A video of the interview is embedded in the ebook. Figures and data throughout the chapter have been updated with the most recently available information about crime and homicide rates, prison population and demographics, executions, and death row exonerations. CHAPTER 7: STRATIFICATION A new section on modern theories of inequality has been added. This new section discusses the emergence of structural functionalism and conflict theory as interpretive lenses through which to view inequality. The section on the elite–mass stratification dichotomy includes new data on financial elites in high-ranking political positions. The chapter includes updated data on how much CEOs of America’s largest companies make compared to the average worker, the proportion of high-school graduates who attend college, and the poverty line for a family of four in 2020. In the section on global inequality, a new figure has been added that shows GDP per capita for countries around the world. CHAPTER 8: GENDER In the section on conflict theories, Marilyn Frye’s metaphor of a birdcage has been added to illustrate the concepts of intersectionality and gender inequality. The overall discussion of theory has also been simplified and edited for clarity. By reviewer request, the section on inequality at work features a new discussion of holistic approaches to harassment and includes findings from a recent National Academies of Science report. The section on sociology in the bedroom features recent research from Lisa Wade in her book, American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. A new subsection on sex and aging has been added that covers research on relationships and sexual activity among the 65+ population. Data and figures throughout the chapter have been updated with the most recently available information, including the percentage of US children living in households with married parents, college enrollment numbers by gender, the prevalence of violent crime victimization by gender, gender- and race-based pay disparities, the average age of marriage, and sexual activity among high-school students. CHAPTER 9: RACE This chapter includes a new “sociological conversation” interview with Maria Abascal on the declining White majority in the United States and how that affects inter-group relations. To help students understand the concepts of race and ethnicity, I’ve added a story about the personal experience of an individual who is Korean-born, Italian-raised, and now living in the United States. The section that was previously called “Ethnic Groups in the United States” has been reframed around racial groups to help clarify the distinctions between race and ethnicity. Throughout the racial groups section, US population data by group have been updated with the most recently available information. Data on unemployment rates by race and racial wealth disparities have also been updated. Near the end of the chapter, a new “sociological conversation” interview with Kevin Lewis discusses his research on dating apps and how racial barriers can be either reinforced or broken down in an online dating environment. CHAPTER 10: POVERTY By reviewer request, the section on the culture of poverty has been condensed and edited for clarity. A discussion about universal basic income and its recent appearance in American politics has been added. The section on the war on poverty has an extended treatment of evictions in the United States, including a more detailed look at Matthew Desmond’s research. The section on absolute and relative poverty features a more thorough explanation of income inequality and relative poverty. Figures and data have been updated throughout the chapter with the most recently available information, including the US poverty rate, cost of living, median net worth of Americans, and global poverty rates by country. CHAPTER 11: HEALTH AND SOCIETY A new chapter opener tells the story of my own experience contracting the coronavirus disease. The section on the social determinants of health and illness features a new “sociological conversation” interview with Morgan Levine on how our social environments age us in uneven ways. To make room for new content, the section on the relationship between height and health has been removed. The section on postnatal health inequalities includes a new discussion of my own research on health outcome disparities among siblings with different skin colors. This section also features a new “sociological conversation” interview with Daniel Belsky about sex differences in health and mortality rates. A new section on aging and health continues the discussion of Daniel Belsky’s research on aging and inequality and analyzes various methods for determining a person’s health level and biological age. A new section on health care for older Americans includes a discussion of the aging US population and long-term care for older adults, and a new “sociological conversation” interview with Corey Abramson concerning his research on inequality in the aging experience. Following this, a new section explores the “Black–White mortality crossover” concept, in which it is thought that even though Black Americans live shorter lives on average than White Americans, Black Americans who make it to a certain age then tend to live longer than their White American counterparts. A new section on the COVID-19 pandemic and health inequalities related to it has been added. It also includes a new figure on infection and mortality rates by race. Throughout the chapter, data and figures have been updated with the most recently available information. CHAPTER 12: FAMILY A new chapter opener explores changing family patters through my own experience becoming a new parent again two decades after having my first child. The section on Malinowski and the traditional family has a new discussion of the creation and dominance of the nuclear family model as a norm in post–World War II America. The discussion of cross-cultural variations in family structure has been expanded to help clarify that the nuclear family as a norm is far from universal. This section also expands its coverage of the Na people in southwestern China and how family structures there impact gendered behavior. Data and figures throughout the chapter have been updated with the most recently available information, including marriage and divorce rates, median age for marriage, birthrate and adoption rates, labor force participation among women, family structure variations by race and socioeconomic status, and opinions on same-sex marriage. CHAPTER 13: EDUCATION A new “sociological conversation” interview with Tamara Pavasovic´ Trošt discusses the “hidden curriculum” in the United States and abroad. Amanda Lewis and John Diamond’s research from their book, Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools, has been added. A new section on adult learning covers the impact of lifelong learning on older adults, citing research from Slovenia, Finland, and England. The section on class-based inequalities in schooling now addresses how the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated socioeconomic disparities. The section on race-based inequalities in schooling offers new research on how the differential between punishment of Black and White students may account for Black-White test score gaps. This section also now features research from Patrick Sharkey on how neighborhood violence has negatively impacted Black children’s test scores relative to their White peers. The section on the gene movement has been expanded to cover and critique Charles Murray’s 2020 book, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class. Data and figure updates include more recent information on functional illiteracy and mathematical illiteracy, the percentage of the US population with a college degree, educational attainment and poverty rates by race and ethnicity, and the gender pay gap. CHAPTER 14: CAPITALISM AND THE ECONOMY The section on the service sector now discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted service sector workers. A new section on how the aging population and workforce impacts the economy has been added. It also introduces the Horndal effect and how research in Sweden has shown that older workforces can be quite productive. The feature on the gig economy has been updated to address how gig workers have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The section on globalization has been updated to include the 2020 USMCA trade agreement between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Data and figures throughout the chapter have been updated with the most recently available information, including gender pay gap data, the proportion of US married families that are either single- or dual-income, paid family leave trends, global wealth disparities, global hunger rates, and unionization rates. CHAPTER 15: AUTHORITY AND THE STATE The section on authority, legitimacy, and the state has been updated to discuss the killing of George Floyd. In the section on the international system of states, the discussion of African states has been revised and expanded to address how European colonial powers created borders as a proxy struggle against other European powers rather than taking into consideration local populations. A new Policy feature prompts students to think critically about how age relates to voting power, including the overrepresentation of older adults in American politics and arguments for lowering the voting age. CHAPTER 16: RELIGION This chapter includes a new discussion about the changing global composition of Christianity. The section on social solidarity includes a new example about millennials’ health outcomes and religious affiliation rates. The section on secularization has been updated with recent data on religious affiliation and participation trends among Americans. The section on the commercialization of religious life has been updated to include the use of social media in religious marketing. The Policy feature on teaching the Bible in schools now includes Indiana representative Dennis Kruse’s 2019 bill to teach alternative theories of the origin of life. CHAPTER 17: SCIENCE, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND SOCIETY The section on science and politics now includes a discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic and funding for the massive research endeavors to study and battle it. The section on global warming and climate change includes updated data on global greenhouse gas emissions, variations over time in the surface temperate of the earth, and the contributions of air travel to global warming. The section on biotechnology and the human genome now discusses the use of DNA fingerprinting by law enforcement and considers the example of the Golden State Killer’s capture via identification by a distant relative’s DNA. CHAPTER 18: COLLECTIVE ACTION, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, AND SOCIAL CHANGE This chapter includes a new key term, value-added theory. In the section on types of social movements, the discussion of #NeverAgain has been updated to consider how political resistance and lobbying pressure have resulted in the group being less successful than similar type groups facing less political resistance. This section also discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic has given the Critical Mass movement the political opportunity to advance its agenda for increased protection of cyclists on city streets. A new section on frame alignment has been added. It discusses the George Floyd killing and the Black Lives Matter movement’s recent success in reframing the issues concerning policing and racial injustice. It also considers how the movement has impacted other reforms, such as the recent name change of the Washington football team. The discussion of Black Lives Matter also addresses the rise of counterprotest movements. The section on causes of social change now includes a discussion of mask wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Acknowledgments You May Ask Yourself originated in the Introduction to Sociology course that I have taught on and off since the mid-1990s at New York University, Yale University, and Columbia University. However, the process of writing it made me feel as if I were learning to be a sociologist all over again. For example, I never taught religion, methodology, or the sociology of education. But instructors who reviewed the manuscript requested that these topics be covered, so with the assistance of an army of graduate students who really ought to be recognized as coauthors, I got to work. The experience was invaluable, and in a way, I finally feel like a card-carrying sociologist, having acquired at last a bird’s-eye view of my colleagues’ work. I consider it a great honor to be able to put my little spin (or filter) on the field in this way, to be able not just to influence the few hundred intro students I teach each year, but to excite (I hope) and instill the enthusiasm I didn’t get to experience until graduate school in students who may be just a few months out of high school (if that). I mentioned that the graduate students who helped me create this book were really more like coauthors, ghostwriters, or perhaps law clerks. Law clerks do much of the writing of legal opinions for judges, but only a judge’s name graces a decision. I asked Norton to allow more coauthors, but they declined—perhaps understandably, given how long such a list would be—so I will take this opportunity to thank my students and hope that you are still reading this preface. The original transcription of my lectures that formed the basis of this text was completed by Carse Ramos, who also worked on assembling the glossary and drafted some parts of various chapters, such as sections in the economic sociology chapter, as well as some text in the chapters on authority and deviance. She also served as an all-around editor. Ashley Mears did the heavy lifting on the race, gender, family, and religion chapters. Amy LeClair took the lead on methods, culture, groups and networks, socialization, and health. Jennifer Heerwig cobbled together the chapter on authority and the state and deviance (a nice combo), while her officemate Brian McCabe whipped up the chapter on science, technology, and the environment and the one on social movements. Melissa Velez wrote the first draft of the education chapter (and a fine one at that). Michael McCarthy did the same for the stratification chapter. Devyani Prabhat helped revise the social movements chapter. My administrative assistant, Amelia Branigan, served as fact-checker, editor, and box drafter while running a department, taking the GREs, and writing and submitting her own graduate applications. When Amelia had to decamp for Northwestern University to pursue her own doctorate, Lauren Marten took over the job of chasing down obscure references, fact-checking, and proofreading. Alexandre Frenette drafted the questions and activities in the practice sections at the end of each chapter. For the Second Edition, much of the work to integrate the interview transcripts and update material based on reviewer feedback fell to a great extent on the shoulders of Laura Norén, a fantastic New York University graduate student who has worked on topics as far-ranging as public toilets (with my colleague Harvey Molotch) and how symphonies and designers collaborate (as part of her dissertation). I hope Laura will find her crash-course overview of sociology useful at some point in what promises to be a productive and exciting scholarly career. When it was time to begin the Third Edition, the updating of all the statistics, fact-checking, and so on that is the bread and butter of a revision fell upon the capable shoulders of Emi Nakazato who, although trained as a social worker in graduate school, adeptly pivoted to that field’s cousin, sociology. For the Fourth and Fifth Editions, Laura Norén returned as the research assistant. With her prior experience she picked up the task ably without dropping a beat. Finally, for the Sixth and Seventh Editions, I turned to then–graduate student Thomas Laidley, who did a more-than-thorough job of not only updating facts and figures but questioning them as well. In addition to the students who have worked with me on the book, I need to give shout-outs to all the top-notch scholars who found time in their busy schedules to sit down with me and do on-camera interviews: Julia Adams, Andy Bichlbaum, danah boyd, Andrew Cherlin, Nitsan Chorev, Susan Crawford, Adam Davidson, Matthew Desmond, Stephen Duncombe, Mitchell Duneier, Paula England, John Evans, Michael Gaddis, David Grusky, Fadi Haddad, Michael Hout, Jennifer Jacquet, Shamus Khan, Annette Lareau, Jennifer Lee, Ka Liu, Amos Mac, Douglas McAdam, Ashley Mears, Steven Morgan, Alondra Nelson, Devah Pager, Nathan Palmer, C. J. Pascoe, Frances Fox Piven, Allison Pugh, Adeel Qalbani, Marc Ramirez, Asha Rangappa, Jen’nan Read, Victor Rios, Jeffrey Sachs, Jennifer Senior, Mario Luis Small, Zephyr Teachout, Duncan Watts, and Robb Willer. For the interview videos, the filmmaking, editing, and postproduction were done in earlier editions by Erica Rothman at Nightlight Productions with the assistance of Jim Haverkamp, Kevin Wells, Saul Rouda, Dimitriy Khavin, and Arkadiy Ugorskiy, and then in this new Seventh Edition by Elizabeth Audley and Ragnar Freidank. This was no easy task, because we wanted a bunch of cuts ranging from 30-second sound bites to television-show-length segments of 22 minutes. Although a bunch of interviews with academic social scientists on topics ranging from estimating the effects of Catholic schools on student outcomes to the political economy of global trade to the social contagion of autism are not likely to win any Emmys or rock the Nielsens (with the possible exception of the one on college sex), it has certainly been one of the most exciting highlights in my sociological career to host this makeshift talk show on such a wide range of interesting topics. (If only more of our public discourse would dig into issues in the way that we did in these interviews, our society and governance would be in better shape—if I do say so myself!) When I began work on the Seventh Edition’s updates and revisions, I knew I could use some expert help. I relied on a number of scholars who generously read chapters of this book and offered valuable feedback, criticisms, and suggestions: Reviewers for the Seventh Edition Edward Avery-Natale, Mercer County Community College Brandi M. Barnes, The University of Memphis Sherri Chandler, Muskegon Community College Brittany Chozinski, Our Lady of the Lake University Patricia Neff Claster, Edinboro University Vy T. Dao, Columbus State University Corina Diaz, Cerritos College Cindy Epperson, St. Louis Community College–Meramec Campus Mary Beth Finch, Northwestern University Christopher Hamilton, St. Louis University Devin A. Heyward, Saint Peter’s University Rachel Howard, East Central College Marla H. Kohlman, Kenyon College Molly Monahan Lang, Penn State Erie, The Behrend College Bridget Cowan Longoria, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Hayley Pierce, Brigham Young University Derek Roberts, Monroe County Community College Sandra M. Rogers, North Carolina Central University Teal Rothschild, Roger Williams University Jeffrey O. Sacha, American River College Sahar Sadeghi, Muhlenberg College Kevin Shafer, Brigham Young University Beth Simmert, Adrian College Jeremy N. Thomas, Idaho State University Mark Tromans, Broward College Adria Welcher, Morehouse College Elena Windsong, Colorado State University As you can see, it took a village to raise this child. But that’s not all. At Norton, I need to thank, first and foremost, Michael Moss, the editor into whose lap this project landed (after having passed through the hands of Justin Cahill, Steve Dunn, Melea Seward, and most notably Karl Bakeman, who got promoted onward and upward). Michael deserves great credit for bringing a fresh set of eyes and a powerful brain to help me sociologically question my own assumptions about the book, which, in turn, led to this edition’s overhaul. In addition, I am grateful to assistant editor Angie Merila, project editor Michael Fauver, and production manager Sean Mintus, who handled every stage of the manuscript and managed to keep the innumerable pieces of the book moving through production. Agnieszka Gasparska and her team at Kiss Me I’m Polish are responsible for the terrific book design. I also must thank Norton’s sociology marketing director Julia Hall and the social science sales and market development specialists Julie Sindel, Courtney Brandt, and Janise Turso. Much of You May Ask Yourself’s success is due to their boundless energy and enthusiasm. Finally, I owe a special thanks to Eileen Connell, Ariel Eaton, and Alexandra Park. They are responsible for putting together all of the video and electronic resources that accompany You May Ask Yourself. Those who develop new digital products to help instructors teach in the classroom or teach online are the most creative and resourceful folks working in college publishing today. Correlation with Psychological, Social, and Biological Foundations of Behavior Section of the MCAT® In 2015, the Association of American Medical Colleges revised the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) to include fundamental concepts from sociology. To help students prepare for the test, here is a correlation guide for You May Ask Yourself, Seventh Edition. FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPT 7 Biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors influence behavior and behavior change. CHAPTER HEADING/DESCRIPTION PAGE 3 Cultural Effects: Give and Take 95 4 Agents of Socialization 131 4 Peers 137 5 Group Conformity 175 6 What Is Social Deviance? 205 CHAPTER HEADING/DESCRIPTION PAGE Functionalist Approaches to Deviance and 6 206 Social Control 6 Social Control 211 6 A Normative Theory of Suicide 213 6 Symbolic Interactionist Theories of Deviance 220 15 Obedience to Authority 645 FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPT 8 Psychological, sociocultural, and biological factors influence the way we think about ourselves and others as well as how we interact with others. CHAPTER HEADING/DESCRIPTION PAGE 3 Ethnocentrism 86 3 Cultural relativism 92 CHAPTER HEADING/DESCRIPTION PAGE Me, Myself, and I: Development of the Self 4 127 and the Other 4 Agents of Socialization 131 4 Social Interaction 141 4 Dramaturgical Theory 150 5 Social Groups 166 5 From Groups to Networks 176 5 Network Analysis in Practice 189 5 Organizations 194 6 Stigma 227 9 Inter-Group Relations 377 CHAPTER HEADING/DESCRIPTION PAGE Prejudice, Discrimination, and the New 9 388 Racism 9 Institutional Racism 393 13 Stereotypes 584 15 Legal-Rational Authority 641 15 Characteristics of Bureaucracies 643 FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPT 9 Cultural and social differences influence well-being. CHAPTER HEADING/DESCRIPTION PAGE 1 Functionalism 32 1 Conflict Theory 33 CHAPTER HEADING/DESCRIPTION PAGE 1 Symbolic Interactionism 33 1 Feminist Theory 36 1 Microsociology and Macrosociology 44 3 Definitions of Culture 84 3 Material versus Nonmaterial Culture 88 3 Media 99 4 The Social Construction of Reality 146 8 Sex: A Process in the Making 303 Gender: What Does It Take to Be Feminine 8 306 or Masculine? 8 Theories of Gender Inequality 313 CHAPTER HEADING/DESCRIPTION PAGE Growing Up, Getting Ahead, and Falling 8 321 Behind 9 The Myth of Race 350 9 Racial Realities 361 9 Race versus Ethnicity 364 9 Racial Groups in the United States 367 9 Inter-Group Relations 377 Prejudice, Discrimination, and the New 9 388 Racism The Rise (and Fall?) of the Medical 11 448 Profession 11 What Does It Mean to Be Sick? 455 CHAPTER HEADING/DESCRIPTION PAGE 11 The US Health Care System 456 12 Family Forms and Changes 503 12 When Home Is No Haven: Domestic Abuse 519 12 Divorce 535 Learning to Learn or Learning to Labor? 13 550 Functions of Schooling 13 What’s Going On Inside Schools? 560 13 Inequalities in Schooling 577 14 Theorizing the Transition to Capitalism 601 14 Globalization 617 15 Types of Legitimate Authority 639 CHAPTER HEADING/DESCRIPTION PAGE 15 Authority, Legitimacy, and the State 646 15 Power and International Relations 660 Dictatorship or Democracy? States of 15 661 Nature and Social Contracts 16 What Is Religion? 683 16 Secularization or Speculation? 695 16 The Sect–Church Cycle 719 18 Social Movements 779 FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPT 10 Social stratification and access to resources influence well-being. CHAPTER HEADING/DESCRIPTION PAGE CHAPTER HEADING/DESCRIPTION PAGE 6 Crime 230 7 Class System 270 7 Status Hierarchy System 273 7 Elite–Mass Dichotomy System 276 7 How Is America Stratified Today? 279 7 Global Inequality 285 7 Social Reproduction versus Social Mobility 288 9 Inter-Group Relations 377 10 The Culture of Poverty 408 10 Absolute and Relative Poverty 428 CHAPTER HEADING/DESCRIPTION PAGE 10 Why Is the United States So Different? 434 The Social Determinants of Health and 11 459 Illness Swimming and Sinking: Inequality and 12 526 American Families 13 Inequalities in Schooling 577 13 Cultural Capital 579 You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby (or Have 14 609 You?): Work, Gender, and Family Glossary POSITIVISM the approach to sociology that emphasizes the scientific method as an approach to studying the objectively observable behavior of individuals irrespective of the meanings those actions have for the subjects themselves. INTERPRETIVE SOCIOLOGY  a type of scholarship in which researchers imagine themselves experiencing the life positions of the social actors they want to understand rather than treating those people as objects to be examined. VALUE-ADDED THEORY theory of collective action claiming that certain conditions are required for a social movement to coalesce and achieve a successful outcome. Part 1 USING YOUR SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION Every January, the group Improv Everywhere organizes the No Pants Subway Ride in New York and cities around the world. In this picture who is violating social norms: the people with pants, or those without? 1 The Sociological Imagination: An Introduction PARADOX A SUCCESSFUL SOCIOLOGIST MAKES THE FAMILIAR STRANGE. If you want to understand sociology, why don’t we start with you. Why are you taking this class and reading this textbook? It’s as good a place to start as any—after all, sociology is the study of human society, and there is the sociology of sports, of religion, of music, of medicine, even a sociology of sociologists. So why not start, by way of example, with the sociology of an introduction to sociology? For example, why are you bent over this page? Take a moment to write down the reasons. Maybe you have heard of sociology and want to learn about it. Maybe you are merely following the suggestion of a parent, guidance counselor, or academic adviser. The course syllabus probably indicates that for the first week of class, you are required to read this chapter. So there are at least two good reasons to be reading this introduction to sociology text. Let’s take the first response, “I want to educate myself about sociology.” That’s a fairly good reason, but may I then ask why you are taking the class rather than simply reading the book on your own? Furthermore, assuming that you’re paying tuition, why are you doing so? If you really are here for the education, let me suggest an alternative: Grab one of the course schedules at your college, decide which courses to take, and just show up! Most introductory classes are so large that nobody notices if an extra student attends. If it is a smaller, more advanced seminar, ask the professor if you can audit it. I have never known a faculty member who checks that all class attendees are legitimate students at the college—in fact, we’re happy when students do show up to class. An auditor, someone who is there for the sake of pure learning, and who won’t be grade grubbing or submitting papers to be marked, is pure gold to any professor interested in imparting knowledge for learning’s sake. You know the rest of the drill: Do all the reading (you can usually access the required texts for free at the library), do your homework, and participate in class discussion. About the only thing you won’t get at the end of the course is a grade. So give yourself one. As a matter of fact, once you have compiled enough credits and written a senior thesis, award yourself a diploma. Why not? You will probably have received a better education than most students—certainly better than I did in college. But what are you going to do with a homemade diploma? You are not here just to learn; you wish to obtain an actual college degree. Why exactly do you want a college degree? Students typically answer that they have to get one in order to earn more money. Others may say that they need credentials to get the job they want. And some students are in college because they don’t know what else to do. Whatever your answer, the fact that you asked yourself a question about something you may have previously taken for granted is the first step in thinking like a sociologist. “Thinking like a sociologist” means applying analytical tools to something you have always done without much conscious thought—like opening this book or taking this class. It requires you to reconsider your assumptions about society and question what you have taken for granted in order to better understand the world around you. In other words, thinking like a sociologist means making the familiar strange. This chapter introduces you to the sociological approach to the world. Specifically, you will learn about the sociological imagination, a term coined by C. Wright Mills. We’ll return to the question “Why go to college?” and apply our sociological imaginations to it. You will also learn what a social institution is. The chapter concludes by looking at the sociology of sociology—that is, the history of sociology and where it fits within the social sciences. Glossary SOCIOLOGY the study of human society. The Sociological Imagination Sociologist C. Wright Mills smoking his pipe in his office at Columbia University. How does Mills’s concept of sociological imagination help us make the familiar strange? More than 50 years ago, sociologist C. Wright Mills argued that in the effort to think critically about the social world around us, we need to use our sociological imagination, the ability to see the connections between our personal experience and the larger forces of history. This is just what we are doing when we question this textbook, this course, and college in general. In The Sociological Imagination (1959), Mills describes it this way: “The first fruit of this imagination—and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it—is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one.” The terrible part of the lesson is to make our own lives ordinary—that is, to see our intensely personal, private experience of life as typical of the period and place in which we live. This can also serve as a source of comfort, however, helping us realize we are not alone in our experiences, whether they involve our alienation from the increasingly dog-eat-dog capitalism of modern America, the peculiar combination of intimacy and dissociation that we may experience on the internet, or the ways that nationality or geography affect our life choices. The sociological imagination does not just leave us hanging with these feelings of recognition, however. Mills writes that it also “enables [us] to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions.” The sociological imagination thus allows us to see the veneer of social life for what it is and to step outside the “trap” of rapid historical change in order to comprehend what is occurring in our world and the social foundations that may be shifting right under our feet. As Mills wrote after World War II, a time of enormous political, social, and technological change, “The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst.” Mills offered his readers a way to stop and take stock of their lives in light of all that had happened in the previous decade. Of course, we almost always feel that social change is fairly rapid and continually getting ahead of us. Think of the 1960s or even today, with the rise of the internet and global terror threats. In retrospect, we consider the 1950s, the decade when Mills wrote his seminal work, to be a relatively placid time, when Americans experienced some relief from the change and strife of World War II and the Great Depression. But Mills believed the profound sense of alienation experienced by many during the postwar period was a result of the change that had immediately preceded it. HOW TO BE A SOCIOLOGIST ACCORDING TO QUENTIN TARANTINO: A SCENE FROM PULP FICTION Have you ever been to a foreign country, noticed how many little things were different, and wondered why? Have you ever been to a church of a different denomination—or a different religion altogether—from your own? Or have you been a fish out of water in some other way? The only guy attending a social event for women, perhaps? Or the only person from out of state in your dorm? If you have experienced that fish-out-of-water feeling, then you have, however briefly, engaged your sociological imagination. By shifting your social environment enough to be in a position where you are not able to take everything for granted, you are forced to see the connections between particular historical paths taken (and not taken) and how you live your daily life. You may, for instance, wonder why there are bidets in most European bathrooms and not in American ones. Or why people waiting in lines in the Middle East typically stand closer to each other than they do in Europe or America. Or why, in some rural Chinese societies, many generations of a family sleep in the same bed. If you are able to resist your initial impulses toward xenophobia (feelings that may result from the discomfort of facing a different reality), then you are halfway to understanding other people’s lifestyles as no more or less sensible than your own. Once you have truly adopted the sociological imagination, you can start questioning the links between your personal experience and the particulars of a given society without ever leaving home. In the following excerpt of dialogue from Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction, the character Vincent tells Jules about the “little differences” between life in the United States and life in Europe. VINCENT: It’s the little differences. A lotta the same shit we got here, they got there, but there they’re a little different. JULES: Example? VINCENT: Well, in Amsterdam, you can buy beer in a movie theater. And I don’t mean in a paper cup either. They give you a glass of beer, like in a bar. In Paris, you can buy beer at McDonald’s. Also, you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris? JULES: They don’t call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese? VINCENT: No, they got the metric system there, they wouldn’t know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is. JULES: What’d they call it? VINCENT: Royale with Cheese. VINCENT: [Y]ou know what they put on french fries in Holland instead of ketchup? JULES: What? VINCENT: Mayonnaise. [...] And I don’t mean a little bit on the side of the plate, they fuckin’ drown ’em in it. JULES: Uuccch! Vincent Vega (John Travolta) describes his visit to a McDonald’s in Amsterdam to Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson). Your job as a sociologist is to get into the mind-set that mayonnaise on french fries, though it might seem disgusting at first, is not strange after all, certainly no more so than ketchup. Another way to think about the sociological imagination is to ask ourselves what we take to be natural that actually isn’t. For example, let’s return to the question “Why go to college?” Sociologists and economists have shown that the financial benefits of education—particularly higher education—appear to be increasing. They refer to this as the “returns to schooling.” In today’s economy, the median (i.e., typical) annual income for full-time workers ages 25 to 37 with a high-school degree is $31,000; for those with a bachelor’s degree, it is $56,000 (Pew Research, 2019). That $25,000 annual advantage seems like a good deal, but is it really? Let’s shift gears and do a little math. WHAT ARE THE TRUE COSTS AND RETURNS OF COLLEGE? Now that you are thinking like a sociologist, let’s compare the true cost of going to college for four or five years to calling the whole thing off and taking a full-time job right after high school. First, there is the tuition to consider. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that you are paying $10,116 per year for tuition (Powell & Kerr, 2019). That’s a lot less than what most private four-year colleges cost, but about average for in-state tuition at a state school. Using a standard formula to adjust for inflation and bring future amounts into current dollars, we can determine that paying out $10,116 this year and slightly higher amounts over the next three years (assuming a 3.3 percent annual rise in tuition and a corresponding discount rate) is equivalent to paying about $40,500 in one lump sum today; this would be the direct cost of attending college. Indirect costs—so-called opportunity costs—exist as well, such as the costs associated with the amount of time you are devoting to school. Taking into account the typical wage for a high-school graduate, we can calculate that if you worked full-time instead of going to college, you would make $30,000 this year. Thus we find that the present value of the total wages lost over the next four years by choosing full-time school over full-time work is about $144,000. Add these opportunity costs to the direct costs of tuition, and we get $184,500. Next we need to calculate the “returns to schooling.” For the sake of simplicity, we will regard the $56,000 annual earnings figure for recent college graduates as fixed for the first 10 years past college graduation. We will use a higher estimate for annual earnings after that, to take into account the fact that mid-career workers make more. But remember, those who start working right out of high school begin earning about five years earlier than those who spend that time in college (the average time it takes to complete a bachelor’s degree at a public university is 5.2 years [Shapiro et al., 2016]). Assuming you retire at age 65, you will have worked 42 years (high-school grads will be in the workforce for 47 years because of that 5-year head start). However, given your higher average earnings per year of work, when we compare your lifetime earnings to the lifetime earnings of someone who has only a high-school education, we find that with a college degree you will make about $1,500,000 more than someone who went straight to work after high school (Figure 1.1). On top of this substantial financial return to schooling, research also shows that earning a high-school and/or college degree makes us healthier and less likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors like smoking, even after accounting for other factors like income (Heckman et al., 2016).  Two famous college dropouts. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (left) attended Harvard but dropped out before graduating. Oprah Winfrey (right) left Tennessee State University as a sophomore to begin a career in media. But wait a minute: How do we know for sure that college really mattered in the equation? Individuals who finish college might earn more because they actually learned something and obtained a degree, or—a big OR— they might earn more regardless of the college experience because people who stay in school (1) are innately smarter, (2) know how to work the system, (3) come from wealthier families, (4) can delay gratification, (5) are more efficient at managing their time, or (6) all of the above—take your pick. In other words, State U. graduates might not have needed to go to college to earn higher wages; they might have been successful anyway. Maybe, then, the success stories of Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Lady Gaga, and other college dropouts don’t cut against the grain so sharply after all. Maybe they were the savvy ones: Convinced of their ability to make it on their own, thanks to the social cues they received (including the fact that they had been admitted to college), they decided that they wouldn’t wait four years to try to achieve success. They opted to just go for it right then and there. College’s “value added,” they might have concluded, was marginal at best. Figure 1.1 Returns to Schooling *This set of hypothetical women—Annie and Bonnie—live in a world that is not quite like reality. We did not flatten Annie’s trajectory to account for the fact that high-school diploma holders are more likely to  experience periods of forced part-time work and/or unemployment. We also assumed the same rate of income increase over time (i.e., raises) for these two, although high-school diploma holders are more likely to experience wage stagnation than college diploma holders. SOURCE: Carnevale et al., 2014. GETTING THAT "PIECE OF PAPER" Even if college turns out to matter in the end, does it make a difference because of the learning that takes place there or because of our credentialist society that it aids and abets? The answer to this question has enormous implications for what education means in our society. Imagine, for example, a society in which people become doctors not by doing well on the SATs, going to college, taking premed courses, acing the MCATs, and then spending more time in the classroom. Instead, the route to becoming a doctor—among the most prestigious and highly paid occupations in our society—starts with emptying bedpans as a nurse’s aide and working your way up through the ranks of registered nurse, apprentice physician, and so forth; finally, after years of on-the-job training, you achieve the title of doctor. Social theorist Randall Collins has proposed just such a medical education system in the controversial The Credential Society: A Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification (1979), which argues that the expansion of higher education has merely resulted in a ratcheting up of credentialism and expenditures on formal education rather than reflecting any true societal need for more formal education or opening up opportunities to more people.  College bulletin boards are covered with advertisements like this one promoting websites that generate diplomas. Why are these fake diplomas not worth it? If Collins is correct and credentials are what matter most, then isn’t there a cheaper, faster way to get them? In fact, all you need are $29.95 and a little guts, and you can receive a diploma from one of the many online sites that promise either legitimate degrees from nonaccredited colleges or a faux college diploma from any school of your choosing. Thus why not save four years and lots of money and obtain your credentials immediately? Obviously, universities have incentives to prevent such websites from undermining their exclusive authority over conferring degrees. They rely on a number of other social institutions, ranging from copyright law to magazines that publish rankings to protect their status. Despite universities’ interest in protecting their reputations, I had never had a university employer verify my education claims when applying to teach until 2015 when I moved to Princeton. Every other employer, including NYU, accepted my résumé without calling my graduate or undergraduate universities. NYU does check to make sure student applicants have completed high school, however. Are universities too lazy to care? Probably not. Table 1.1 Overcredentialed? Workers with Bachelor’s Degrees in 1970 and 2015 PERCENTAGE OF WORKFORCE, AGES 25– 64, WITH BACHELOR'S DEGREE JOB Title 1970 2015 % CHANGE Bartenders 3% 20% 567%  PERCENTAGE OF WORKFORCE, AGES 25– 64, WITH BACHELOR'S DEGREE JOB Title 1970 2015 % CHANGE Photographers 10% 50% 400% Electricians 2% 7% 250% Accountants and 42% 78% 86% auditors Actors, directors, 41% 74% 80% and producers Writers and 47% 84% 79% authors Military personnel 24% 37% 54%  PERCENTAGE OF WORKFORCE, AGES 25– 64, WITH BACHELOR'S DEGREE JOB Title 1970 2015 % CHANGE Dental hygienists 29% 36% 24% Primary-school 84% 94% 12% teachers Doctors 96% 99% 3% Preschool 53% 48% –9% teachers Human-resource 40% 29% –28% clerks Machine 27% 7% –74% programmers A recent article in The Economist found that since the 1970s, more American workers in most professions have earned a bachelor’s degree. In half of these professions, the authors found that real wages have actually fallen. Do these examples support Collins’s argument about overcredentialism? Have these jobs gotten more demanding or technologically complex over time, or are there just more people doing them with a diploma? SOURCES: University of Minnesota IPUMS; The Economist (2018a). There are strong informal mechanisms by which universities protect their status. First, there is the university’s alumni network. Potential employers rarely call a university’s registrar to make sure you graduated, but they will expect you to talk a bit about your college experience. If your interviewer is an alumnus/alumna or otherwise familiar with the institution, you might also be expected to talk about what dorm you lived in, reminisce about a particularly dramatic homecoming game, or gripe about an especially unreasonable professor. If you slip up on any of this information, suspicions will grow, and then people might call to check on your graduation status. Perhaps there are some good reasons not to opt for that $29.95 degree and to pay the costs of college after all. On a more serious note, the role of credentialism in our society means that getting in—especially to a wealthy school with plenty of need-based aid available—can make a huge difference for lower-income students. I sat down with Asha Rangappa, the dean of admissions at Yale Law School (and former FBI agent), who explained that by the time students are old enough to apply to law school, middle-class and upper-class students have already been granted all sorts of opportunities that make them appear to be stronger candidates even if they do not have better moral character or a stronger aptitude for law than their less affluent counterparts in the same applicant pool: I read anywhere from three thousand, four thousand applications a year, and I do a kind of character and personality assessment. I decide who gets in.... I think that there’s a meritocracy at the point where I’m doing it, but I think accessing the good opportunities that allow you to take advantage of the meritocracy is limited. I think that’s the problem, I think that’s what somebody like me in my position works very hard to correct for. When twenty-two to twenty-five years of someone’s life are behind them, it is too late to correct the disparity in access that really needed to have been corrected from like zero to five years, zero to ten years. Do I think that people who have had access to more resources and opportunities and money are going to do better in the admissions process? Yeah. Because they’re just going to have the richer background. And [admissions counselors] have to be able to be in a  position where [we] can afford to account for that and take the risk. (Conley, 2015a) What’s more, law schools’ rankings in magazines like US News and World Report are impacted by the average LSAT scores of their incoming classes. Rangappa’s school, Yale, is so elite that it is able to maintain its ranking even if its average LSAT score drops a little. But for other schools, a drop in LSAT scores will cause their ranking to drop, leading to a decline in high-quality applicants and a further drop in rankings. From Rangappa’s perspective: I’ve now read over ten years, over thirty thousand admission files. To me, the LSAT is one number, and I can look at the rest of the file. There may very well be somebody who has a crappy LSAT score, but... I can tell in the totality of the application that the applicant is going to be a better person at the school. I have the luxury of taking that person because it’s Yale Law School and the way the US News formula is created, we’re not going to suffer a consequence if our median LSAT drops one point. Rangappa’s account shows that elite educational institutions perform a balancing act whereby they often seek to broaden the population who gains from the opportunities and status they provide while at the same time maintaining their own rank in the hierarchy of similar institutions. That is, even when such institutions do want to level the playing field, they themselves are trapped in a highly competitive environment that does not allow them to fully counteract preexisting inequalities. Social institutions thus have a tendency to reinforce existing social structures and the inequalities therein. College (and graduate school) is no exception. Glossary SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION the ability to connect the most basic, intimate aspects of an individual’s life to seemingly impersonal and remote historical forces. What Is a Social Institution? The university, then, is more than just a printing press that churns out diplomas, and, for that matter, it does not merely impart formal knowledge. It fulfills a variety of roles and provides links to many other societal institutions. For example, a college is an institution that acts as a gatekeeper to what are considered legitimate forms of educational advantage by certifying what is legitimate knowledge. It is an institution that segregates great swaths of the population by age. (You won’t find a more age-segregated environment than a four-year college; it even beats a retirement home in having the smallest amount of age variation in its client population.) A college is a proprietary brand that is marketed on sweatshirts and mugs and through televised sporting events. Last but not least, it is an informal set of stories told within a social network of students, faculty, administrators, alumni, and other relevant individuals. This last part of the definition is key to understanding one of sociology’s most important concepts, the social institution. A social institution is a complex group of interdependent positions that, together, perform a social role and reproduce themselves over time. A way to think of these social positions is as a set of stories we tell ourselves: Social relations are a network of ties, and the social role is a grand narrative that unifies these stories within the network. In order to think sociologically about social institutions, you need to think of them not as monolithic, uniform, stable entities—things that “just are”—but as institutions constructed within a dense network of other social institutions and meanings. Sound confusing? Bear with me as I provide an example: I teach at Princeton University. What exactly is the social institution known as Princeton? It is not the collection of buildings I frequent. It certainly cannot be the people who work there, or even the students, because they change over time, shifting in and out through recruitment and retirement, admission and graduation. We might thus conclude that a social institution is just a name. However, an institution can change its name and still retain its social identity. Duke University was once called Normal College and then Trinity College, yet it remains the same institution.  Tobacco company Philip Morris changed its name to Altria at a stockholders’ meeting in January 2003. Of course, all such transitions involving a change of name, location, mission, and so on require a great deal of effort and agreement among interested parties. In some cases, changes in personnel, function, or location may be too much for a social institution to sustain, causing it to die out and be replaced by something that is considered new. Sometimes institutions even try to rupture their identity intentionally. Tobacco company Philip Morris had received such bad press as a cigarette manufacturer for so long that it changed its name to Altria, hoping to start fresh and shake off the negative connotations of its previous embodiment. For that effort to succeed, the narrative of Philip Morris circulating in social networks had to die out without being connected to Altria. This grand narrative that constitutes social identity is nothing more than the sum of individual stories told between pairs of individuals. Think about your relationship to your parents. You have a particular story that you tell if asked to describe your relationship with your mother. She also has a story. Your story may change slightly, depending on whom you are talking to; you may add some details or leave out others. Your other relatives have stories about your mother and her relationship to you. So do her friends and yours. Anyone who knows her contributes to her social identity. The sum total of stories about your mom is the grand narrative of who she is. All of this may seem like a fairly flimsy notion of how things operate in the social world, but even though any social identity boils down to a set of stories within a social network, that narrative is still hearty and robust. Imagine what it would take to change an identity. Let’s say your mom is 50 years old. You want to make her 40 instead. You would not only have to convince her to refer constantly to herself as 10 years younger; you would also have to get your other relatives and her friends to abide by this change. And it wouldn’t stop there. You’d have to change official documents as well—her driver’s license, passport, and so on. This is not so easily done. Even though your mother’s identity (in this case her age, although the same logic can be extended to her name, ethnicity, and many other aspects of her identity) could be described as nothing more than an understanding among her, everyone who knows her, and the formal authorities, the matter is a fairly complicated one. Just think about trying to change the identity of a major institution such as your university. You’d have to convince the board of directors, alumni, faculty, students, and everyone else who has a relationship to the school of the need for a change. Altering an identity is fairly difficult, even though it is ultimately nothing more than an idea. I mentioned that if you wanted to change your mother’s age, n