Sociology Chapters (1) PDF

CHAPTER 1 Sociological Perspective -Patterns of social relations that encourage or inhibit actions like suicide. There is more than the individual mind to question why someone would commit suicide -suicide rates varied because of differences in the degree of social solidarity in various ca...

CHAPTER 1 Sociological Perspective -Patterns of social relations that encourage or inhibit actions like suicide. There is more than the individual mind to question why someone would commit suicide -suicide rates varied because of differences in the degree of social solidarity in various categories of the population -Social solidarity: degree to which group members share beliefs and values and the intensity and frequency of their interaction -high-solidarity groups will have lower suicide rates than low-solidarity groups -suicide varies with the degree of integration of the social groups of which the individual forms a part - Durkheim -Strong social bonds decrease the probability that a person will die by suicide when adversity strikes. -young people in Canada today are more likely than they were at one time to take their own lives if they happen to find themselves in deep personal crisis -Patterns of social relations influences one’s thoughts and feelings, affects one’s behaviour and shape who you are -Social structure: stable patterns of social relations -Microstructure: patterns of relatively intimate social relations formed during face-to-face interaction, such as families, friendship circles, and work associations -Macrostructure: overarching patterns of social relations (including classes, bureaucracies, and power systems) that lie outside and above a person’s circle of intimates and acquaintances. Ex: most divorce are caused due to the patriarchal system -Global Structure: patterns of social relations that lie outside and above the national level, including international organisations, patterns of worldwide travel and communication, and economic relations between countries. Sociological imagination: The quality of mind that enables a person to see the connection between personal troubles and social structures. Scientific Revolution: the revolution that began about 1550 and emphasised that people should use evidence, not speculation, to draw conclusions about how society works. Democratic revolution: period of history that began around 1750 that suggested that people are responsible for organizing society and that human intervention can therefore solve social problems. Industrial revolution: historical period of rapid economic transformation that began in Britain in the 1780s and involved large-scale application of science and technology to industrial processes, the creation of factories, and the formation of a working class. -Due to Auguste comte conservative thinking and strong opposition to rapid change scientific methods of research and a vision of the ideal society were evident in sociology at its origins. -Spencer’s ideas justified social inequality starting the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’. He is still of interest in sociology as he asserted that society operates according to scientific laws Theories: tentative explanations of some aspect of social life that state how and why certain facts are related. Research: the process of systematically observing reality to assess the validity of a theory Values: ideas about what is good and bad, right and wrong. Functionalism: theory that stresses that human behaviour is governed by relatively stable social structures, underlines how social structures maintain or undermine social stability, emphasises that social structures are based mainly on shared values or preferences, and suggests that re-establishing equilibrium can best solve most social problems  -Talcott Parsons: identifying how various institutions must work to ensure the smooth operation of society as a whole. societies function best when families effectively raise new generations, the military successfully defends society against external threats, schools teach students the skills and values they need to become productive adults, and religions help people share a moral code -Robert merton: social structures may have different consequences for different groups of people and that some consequences may be disruptive or dysfunctional -dysfunctional consequences: effects of social structures that create social instability -Manifest function: obvious and intended effects of social structures. Latent: non-obvious and unintended effects of social structures. -Conflict theory: theory that focuses on macro level or global structures and shows how major patterns of inequality in society produce social stability in some circumstances and social change in others. -Conflict theory originated in Marx works. He proposed a sweeping argument about the way societies develop. Centre of ideas; class conflict: the struggle between classes to resist and overcome the opposition of other classes. Marx notion that capitalism would eventually fall was discredited -Max Weber: class conflict is not the only driving force of history. politics and religion are also important sources of historical change -C. Wright Mills: foundation for modern conflict theory in the 1950s. power is highly concentrated in American society, which is therefore less of a democracy than we are often led to believe -conflict theorists directed their attention to the ways in which language, music, literature, fashion, movies, advertising, and other elements of culture express domination by the powerful and resistance by others in 1960s and 70s -Antonio Gramsci: started the origins of cultural approach. ruling classes establish their dominance partly by controlling jobs, using force, and the like. Cultural hegemony: the control of a culture by dominant classes and other groups to the point when their values are universally accepted as common sense. -Micheal Foucault: the control of a culture by dominant classes and other groups to the point when their values are universally accepted as common sense. modern institutions sometimes use violence to regulate behaviour, but they more often rely on new technologies and the internalization of control mechanisms. power is exercised in every social interaction, but every social interaction is also subject to resistance by subordinates. Dominant groups and individuals must continuously renew their power relations to maintain control, but sometimes they fail, providing subordinates with the opportunity to assert their interests. -Poststructuralism: chool of thought that originated in mid-twentieth-century France that denied the stability of social relations and of cultures, their capacity to always shape how people think and act, and their neat categorization of social and cultural elements as binary opposites. -Protestant ethic: the belief that religious doubts can be reduced, and a state of grace ensured, if people work diligently and live simply, which had the unintended effect of increasing savings and investment, thus stimulating capitalist growth. -Weber emphasized the importance of empathically understanding people’s motives and the meanings they attach to things to gain a clear sense of the significance of their actions -George Mead: how a person’s sense of self is formed through interaction with other people. learn who we are by taking the role of other people as we interact with them and by seeing ourselves as they see us. He was part of the origins of symbolic interactionism  -Symbolic interactionism: theory that focuses on interaction in microlevel social settings and emphasizes that an adequate explanation of social behaviour requires understanding of the subjective meanings people attach to their social circumstances. -Erving Goffman: variety of ways individuals present themselves to others in everyday life to appear in the best possible light. social interaction as a carefully staged play -Sociologists believe that official suicide rates are about one-third lower than actual suicide rates because of minimizing the family suffering -Social constructionism: theory that argues that apparently natural or innate features of life are often sustained by social processes that vary historically and culturally. -gender is more a performance shaped by social conditions than part of a person’s essence -Queer theory: argues that people’s sexual identities and performances are so variable that such conventional labels as male, female, gay, and lesbian fail to capture the sexual instability that characterizes the lives of many people. -Harriet Martineau: first female sociologist. wrote about gender inequality and was a leading advocate of voting rights and higher education for women, as well as gender equality in the family -Jane Addams: fought for social reform and provided an opportunity for sociologists from the University of Chicago to conduct research at Hull House by interviewing clients -feminist theory: claims patriarchy is at least as important as class inequality in determining opportunities in life, holds that male domination and female subordination are determined by structures of power and social convention, examines the operation of patriarchy in both micro and macro settings, and contends that existing patterns of gender inequality can and should be changed for the benefit of all members of society. The growth of hookup culture -hookup is sometimes lauded as a practice that, unconstrained by social convention, increases people’s freedom and independence -reinforcing the notion that men are entitled to sexual gratification and that women who show interest in men are obliged to do what men want, hookup culture put women at risk for sexual assault and rape -marginalizing students who felt uncomfortable participating in it -Core principles of symbolic interactionism: people see themselves as they are reflected in the eyes of others, and new interactions can result in people revising their self-conceptions -it enables anonymity, the Web allows people to manipulate the way they present themselves to others. It allows them to interact with fewer inhibitions than face-to-face interaction allows. And while it connects people over physical distance, it allows them to build trust and meet face to face if they want -Functionalist theorist see the web as a good thing as it allows all races to interact without the barriers in society allowing for a mixed-race future -Conflict theorist see the web as a way for the same race to interact and reinforce the social barriers - research suggests that online dating is a site of sexual racism. This finding calls into question the validity of the functionalist theory. It supports the conflict theorists’ claim that online dating reinforces racial differences, doing little or nothing to lessen racial animosity and conflict in the larger society. -Postindustrial Revolution: technology-driven shift from manufacturing to service industries and the consequences of that shift for virtually all human activities. -Globalization: process by which formerly separate economies, states, and cultures become tied together and people become increasingly aware of their growing interdependence. -Equality in opportunity does not seem palpable with the society that we live in -postindustrial and global era allows people to break free from traditional constraints by encouraging the growth of global communication, international migration, sexual diversity, a range of family forms, and ethnically and racially diverse cities -downside of postindustrialism and globalization. push to uniformity counters the trend toward growing social diversity. Postindustrialism and globalization may make us freer in some ways, but they also place new constraints on us CHAPTER 2 Levels of experience -Distinguishing concrete from abstract levels of experience -Concrete experience: experience obtained by seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing. Meaningless by itself -If life is experienced exclusively at the concrete level, it would be full of sensations but devoid of meaning. -Abstract level saves from a state of confusion. Abstract experience: imaginary world of the mind. Allows one to find meaning in things. It is composed of concepts -Concepts: abstract terms used to organise concrete experiences. One’s mind is full of concepts that enable you to organize and give meaning to your concrete experience -Propositions: ideas that result from finding the relationship between concepts. -Ideas about social life are like all propositions: They reside in the abstract world of people’s minds -feature of sociological ideas is that sociologists conduct research -science, seeing is believing, but in everyday life, believing is seeing -Observations are influenced by bias. Bias: tendency to favour one person, thing, or idea over another. Often leads to incorrect conclusions about what we see -scientists, including sociologists, develop ways of collecting, observing, and thinking about evidence that minimize their chance of drawing biased conclusions -3 basic of knowing that humans use: -Casual observation: ordinary human inquiry performed during day-to-day lives. Cause and effect understanding of events to help us predict and control what happens to us. Humans can be careless observers and memories of events are rarely accurate as we think -Tradition: traditional knowledge most of the time is valid and some is not. science helps to separate valid from invalid knowledge -Authority: think something is true because we hear it from an expert but that is not the case. Scientists are taught not to rely on authority, and progress in science is sometimes possible only because a scientist refuses to do so -Recent years, celebrities have been treated like experts on different topics Errors in inquiry -Overgeneralization occurs when we treat an exception as the rule -Selective observation occurs when we unconsciously ignore evidence that challenges firmly held beliefs and pay attention to evidence that confirms them -Illogical reasoning is another source of error -Harm in these inquiry are that the consequences of unscientific thinking can be deadly, such as when parents deny a gravely ill child antibiotics in favour of dandelion tea -Pseudoscience and conspiracy theories prey on human tendencies toward selective observation and illogical reasoning Reality Construction and Confirmation -Imaginary, abstract experience differs from concrete, empirical experience. process of linking abstract understanding to concrete sensations, we construct social realities -1 goal of scientific research is to produce objective results. Objective: degree of consistency between the observations of independent observers. Inter-subjective reliability Insider and outsider -When lacking the insider’s experience, navigating the maze can be exciting but also bewildering and isolating. sociological terms, an insider’s position and unique experience provide intimate sensitivities and understandings that are difficult for outsiders to access. Outsider gives different perspective -our social position shapes our perspective and what we know. No person or group has a monopoly on knowledge Positivist -Positivism: assumption that social realities are objective and are best studied through quantitative research methods. Positivists assume that social realities exist independent of observers and are “out there” waiting to be discovered -Interpretivism: assumption that social realities are subjectively constructed and are best studied through qualitative research methods. does not believe in a universal social reality. all understanding is contingent and meaningfully constructed based on historical, cultural, and social experience. key drivers of human conduct (meanings and motives) cannot be observed directly -Deductive Reasoning: approach that begins with general ideas and proceeds to test their validity on specific cases. original propositions used in deduction come from theoretical reasoning that occurs at the abstract level. Empirical research: comparing the results of past and current surveys that measure student empathy—can test the proposition -Inductive reasoning: approach that begins with concrete cases and proceeds to identify general patterns and themes. begins when observations are made of specific empirical instances. goal is not quantitative measurement but interpretive understanding -Research Act: Connecting ideas to observable evidence -Qualitative research: inductive -Quantitative: deductive Ethical consideration -Collecting evidence from people can disrupt the lives of participants -sociological research is guided by a code of ethics. The code determines whether research procedures are admissible or inadmissible -Voluntary participation, harm minimization, privacy, and authenticity -Quantitative methods: used by sociologists who seek an understanding of social phenomena by using the deductive approaches modelled after natural science -Begins at abstract level and proceed to test theoretical ideas against empirical experience -example, a researcher may have theoretical reasons for proposing that people with more education earn higher incomes. This abstract proposition states the relationship between the concepts education and income  -abstract concepts and propositions are imaginary; translate abstract propositions into testable forms through operationalization -Operationalization: process of translating concepts into variables and propositions into hypotheses. -Variable: measure of a concept that has more than one value or score -Hypothesis: testable form of a proposition Experiment: carefully controlled artificial situation that allows researchers to isolate hypothesized causes and measure their effects precisely. begin with a hypothesis about how one variable affects another. -Independent variable: presumed cause in a cause-and-effect relationship -Dependent variable: presumed effect in a cause-and-effect relationship -Randomization: process of assigning experimental subjects to the experimental or control group by chance processes, which ensures that the two groups are alike in all respects -Experimental group: group that is exposed to the independent variable in an experiment -Control Group: group that is not exposed to the independent variable in an experiment -Validity: degree to which results reflect reality. -Reliability: degree to which procedures yield consistent results -Survey: method sociologists use to ask respondents questions about their knowledge, attitudes, or behaviour, either in a face-to-face or telephone interview, online, or in a paper-and-pencil format -sample: part of the population of research interest that is selected for analysis -Probability sample: every member of a population has a known and nonzero chance of being selected -Population: entire group about which the researcher wants to generalize -Control variable: variable that identifies the context of the relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable -Spuriousness: relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable is inauthentic when a control variable causes change in both the independent and dependent variables at the same time. -Official statistics: data that are collected and analyzed by government agencies, such as unemployment records and the census -Qualitative Approaches: qualitative research methods and inductive reasoning when they seek a subjective understanding of social phenomena -key distinction between qualitative and quantitative research is their approach to sampling -Purposive sampling: researchers use their best judgement to locate members of the population of interest. -Snowballing: existing participants are relied upon to suggest additional subjects who might be willing to participate. -Participant observation: researchers participate in the activities of the social group being studied and, while part of the action, systematically observe what occurs and interpret why it occurs. Ethnography. experience and understand what it is like to be a member of a community -Reactivity: the presence of a researcher causes the observed people to conceal certain things or act artificially to impress the researcher -Key informants: community members who are willing and able to provide credible information about an organization’s culture, issues, and activities. -structured interviews: carefully crafted protocols designed to acquire the respondent’s view on predetermined subjects -unstructured or semi-structured interviews: interviews resembling conversations with predefined themes and topics that allow respondents to answer questions in their own words. Used by qualitative researches -exploratory research: research that seeks to formulate theories about the subject of interest rather than test theories in the rigorous manner of quantitative research -focus group: group interviews in which a small number of individuals discuss a specific issue under the guidance of a moderator. -Authenticity: used by qualitative. extent to which qualitative investigation captures social realities as experienced by insiders -Positivist or interpretive traditions -Mixed methods: methods that combine qualitative and quantitative methods in a single study -social desirability bias: error that results from respondents’ tendencies to answer in ways that will make them look favourable to the researcher -Digital sociology: approaches that use digital technology as both a tool and a subject of research -nonreactive: social life studied without affecting the behaviour of the people involved CHAPTER 3 Culture -Superstitions translate particular experiences into meaningful observations that are useful insofar as they enable people to cope with specific life challenges. As you will now learn, superstitions share these features with all elements of culture -distinction between concrete and abstract levels of experience. concrete level is composed of your empirical sensations of touch, taste, smell, sound, and sight -power of culture is that it makes our sensory experiences meaningful. Once your cultural experience conditions you to interpret concrete experiences in a certain way, this perspective becomes your reality -High culture: culture enjoyed mainly by upper classes. appreciating the fine points of high culture requires a certain type of education or training that takes considerable time and money to achieve. popular culture: culture enjoyed by all classes; also called mass culture. -dominant culture: culture that helps rich and powerful categories of people exercise control : over others. subordinate culture: culture that contests dominant culture to varying degrees. - many members of lower classes are skeptical about this belief because they work hard but experience social constraints that prevent them and their offspring from becoming rich -idiosyncratic symbol: one thing for a particular person -abstraction: the ability to create general concepts that meaningfully organize sensory experience. -concepts that result from abstraction are the most pervasive type of symbols in human cultures -Concepts allow humans to organize, classify, interpret, and generalize their experiences -Cultural concepts provide the foundation for beliefs -Cooperation: the capacity to create a complex social life by establishing generally accepted ways of doing things and ideas about what is right and wrong. -Production: the human capacity to make and use the tools and technology that improve our ability to take what we want from nature. -minority claim that biological factors play a much more important role in shaping human behaviour than cultural forces do. Evolutionary psychologists make a three-step argument when they offer purely biological arguments to explain human behaviour and social arrangements. they identify a supposedly universal human behavioural trait. offer an explanation for why the behaviour in question increases the survival chances of the human species. -Sapir-Whorf thesis: theory that we experience certain things in our environment, form concepts about those things, develop language to express our concepts, and that language itself influences how we see the world. -language obliges people to think in certain ways -people take their own culture for granted; it seems so sensible and natural that they rarely think about it -culture as a dependent variable. Other sociologists think of culture as an independent variable -rights revolution: the process by which socially excluded groups struggled to win equal rights under the law and in practice beginning in the second half of the twentieth century. -postmodernism: era characterized by an eclectic mix of cultural elements, the erosion of authority, and the decline of consensus around core values. -Half a century ago, people’s values remained relatively stable during their adult lives, and many values were widely accepted. In the twenty-first century, value shifts are more rapid, and consensus has broken down on many issues -rationalization: the application of the most efficient means to achieve given goals and the unintended, negative consequences of doing so. Max weber. rationalization constrains all aspects of life, making it seem increasingly as if we are living in an “iron cage.” -consumerism: the tendency to define ourselves in terms of the goods we purchase -subculture: a set of distinctive values, norms, and practices within a larger culture -Cultural capital: the beliefs, tastes, norms, and values that people draw on in their everyday life. -concrete experience is meaningless. Experience must be interpreted to be meaningful. Interpretations require applying cultural concepts and ideas to concrete experiences. -Functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and conflict theory teach us that the character and operation of culture in everyday life are multi-faceted. - CHAPTER 4 - Jean Marc Itard, expressed a different view. He hypothesized that the boy’s strangeness might be due to having been raised in extreme isolation. -Freud: infants begin to form a self-image when their demands are not immediately met. Infants also begin to realize that their needs are different from those of their parents, they exist independently of others, and they must balance their needs with the realities of life. -Mead called the impulsive aspect of the self the I, and the objective, social component of the self the me -subjective age: the extent to which people might experience themselves as younger or older than their actual age. -cohort: a group of people who share a specific characteristic such as age or birth year -People rarely accept the norms, values, and practices of their society passively. They often alter what they are supposed to learn and sometimes even reject it -hidden curriculum: the unwritten, unofficial, and often unintended norms, values, and perspectives that students learn in school -peer group: a group of individuals that share similar characteristics with one another, such as age, education, and so on, and acts as an agent of socialization Chapter 5 -social environment: real or imagined others to whom a person is connected -New entrants into any social scene experience disorientation. For the same reasons that a road map is useful, a map of the social space surrounding us is helpful for figuring out where we want to go. Sociology seeks to understand the social space in which actions unfold. This section introduces some of the fundamental sociological building blocks for understanding social space. -people occupy statuses but a person is not a status. You are not reducible to the status of a student, a lover, a son, or a daughter. You are a unique human being. Finally, note that organizations exist independently of individuals. If you withdraw from your sociology course, the course endures. If your instructor leaves, a replacement will be found. The organizational pattern persists. -Interaction involves communication, the sending and receiving of messages, either instrumental or expressive. Instrumental communication involves sending messages that are a means to an end. When a student raises their hand in class and asks a question, it is instrumental; they are asking the question with the purpose of getting a clear answer. Expressive communication involves sending messages that are ends in themselves. The student who pumps their arm and shouts “Yes!” after receiving a top grade on a term paper is communicating expressively. The act is its own end; it expresses the relief and joy of excellent performance. - Marshall McLuhan emphasized, the medium of transmission strongly influences the message sent -mediated interaction: communication that uses technologies to send and receive messages -technological determinism: an assumption that the adoption of technologies leads to inevitable and sometimes undesirable effects. -Two factors are held chiefly responsible for the decline in empathy. First, while face-to-face communication exposes people to the full range of human emotion, social media often remove nuance like facial expressions. second reason why social media presumably kill empathy is that they involve remote and often anonymous communication. - laughter and other emotions are like the common cold in that they are involuntary reactions to external disturbances. -feminist sociologists were the first to develop the idea that emotional responses are not involuntary and don’t just happen to us. -emotion management: obeying “feeling rules” and responding appropriately to the situations in which we find ourselves. -emotion labour: emotion management that many people do as part of their job and for which they are paid. While everyone manages their emotions according to cultural scripts in everyday life, many people are paid to do emotion labour as part of their job. -conflict theorists of social interaction emphasize that when people interact, their statuses are often arranged in a hierarchy. People on top enjoy more power than those on the bottom—that is, they are “in a position to carry out [their] own will despite resistance” -Domination: a mode of interaction in which nearly all power is concentrated in the hands of people of high status; fear is the main emotion involved. -cooperation: a basis for social interaction in which power is more or less equally distributed between people of different status; trust is the main emotion involved -competition a mode of interaction in which power is unequally distributed but the degree of inequality is less than in systems of domination; envy is an important emotion. -competition: a mode of interaction in which power is unequally distributed but the degree of inequality is less than in systems of domination; envy is an important emotion. -Power is exercised in all modes of interaction. It is not simply a reflection of personality but is mostly a product of social circumstances. Power is embedded in the statuses that people occupy and in the relationships they form. -Cultural scaffolding is the set of cultural values and beliefs that legitimate existing power arrangements, making them seem reasonable and giving them a natural, taken-for-granted quality -Dramaturgical analysis therefore implies there is no single self, just the ensemble of roles we play in different social contexts. Servers in restaurants also play many roles when they are not working, such as playing on a baseball team, singing in a choir, and hanging out with friends on a patio. Each of these roles has its own norms about what kinds of “costumes” to wear, what topics of conversation to engage in, and so on. portrays people as being inauthentic or constantly playing roles but never really being themselves. stability of social life depends on our adherence to norms, roles, and statuses. If that adherence broke down, social life would become chaotic. -Role distancing: giving the impression of just “going through the motions” but actually lacking serious commitment to a role. -Geoffrey Hinton popularized the idea that computers could be fed vast amounts of data, including real-world text in multiple languages, and learn to recognize patterns much like the human brain does. Although his idea was first greeted with skepticism, Hinton’s work and that of his students eventually resulted in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of ChatGPT, Bard, and so on -Norms of solidarity demand conformity. Friends, lovers, spouses, teammates, and comrades-in-arms develop shared ideas or norms of solidarity about how to behave toward each other in order to maintain their relationships. However, we sometimes end up paying more attention to these norms of solidarity than to the morality of our actions because these relationships are emotionally important to us. -Structures of authority tend to render people obedient. Most people find it difficult to disobey authorities because they fear being ridiculed, ostracized, or punished -Bureaucracies are highly effective structures of authority. The Nazi genocide machine was so effective because it was a well-organized bureaucracy. According to Max Weber (1978), a bureaucracy is a large, impersonal organization made up of many clearly defined positions with a permanent, salaried staff of qualified experts arranged in a hierarchy. -social networK : a bounded set of individuals who think of themselves as network members, who are linked by the exchange of material or emotional resources, whose patterns of exchange determine the boundaries of the network, and who exchange resources more frequently with one another than with non-members; may be formal (defined in writing) but is more often informal (defined only in practice). -live in a small world because our social networks are made up of overlapping sets of social relations. Although an individual may be acquainted with only a few hundred people, their family members, friends, co-workers, and other acquaintances know many more people who extend far beyond that individual’s personal network -Granovetter found that acquaintances are more likely to provide useful information. That is because people who are close to you typically share overlapping networks. Therefore, the information they can provide about job opportunities is often redundant -virtual communities bounded patterns of interaction and exchange that exist online, independently of time and space. -elementary network form is the dyad, a social relationship between two nodes or social units (e.g., people, firms, organizations, countries). A triad is a social relationship among three nodes. -Conformity is an integral part of group life, and primary groups generate more pressure to conform than do secondary groups. Strong social ties create emotional intimacy. They also ensure that primary group members share similar attitudes, beliefs, and information. -groupthink: group pressure to conform despite individual misgivings. -bystander apathy: effect that occurs when people observe someone in an emergency but offer no help. -Group exists, it follows that some people must not belong to it. Accordingly, sociologists distinguish in-group members (those who belong) from out-group members (those who do not). Members of an in-group typically draw a boundary separating themselves from members of the out-group and they try to keep out-group members from crossing the line. - reference groups, which are composed of people against whom individuals evaluate their own situation or conduct. Members of a reference group function as role models -Formal organizations are secondary groups created to achieve particular objectives. The most common and influential formal organizations are bureaucracies. WEBER BEAUCRACIES -bureaucratic inertia: the tendency of large, rigid bureaucracies to continue their policies even when their clients’ needs change. -societies: collectivities of interacting people who share a culture and, usually, a territory -foraging societies: a type of society that predominated until about 10 000 years ago and whose members survived by searching for wild plants and hunting wild animals; inequality, the division of labour, productivity, and settlement size were very low. -Over the past 100 000 years, the growing human domination of nature has increased the supply and dependability of food and finished goods, productivity, the division of labour, and the size and permanence of human settlements. Class and gender inequality increased until the nineteenth century and then began to decline. Class inequality began to increase in some societies in the last decades of the twentieth century and may continue to increase in the future. -postindustrial societies: a type of society in which most workers are employed in the service sector and computers spur substantial increases in the division of labour and productivity; after World War II, the United States became the first postindustrial society -postnatural society: a type of society in which genetic engineering enables people to create new life forms. In the preceding pages, we sought to explain various types of human behaviour by focusing on the social psychology of networks, groups, and bureaucracies. Now, we add that these forms of social organization are embedded in societies, large collectivities of interacting people who share a culture and, usually, a territory. Like the smaller collectivities we have analyzed so far, societies help shape human action. They influence the kind of work we do and how productively we work. They mould patterns of class, gender, racial, and ethnic inequality. -relationship between people and nature is the most basic determinant of how societies are structured and therefore how people’s choices are constrained. Accordingly, researchers have identified six stages of human evolution, each characterized by a shift in the relationship between people and nature. -foraging societies: a type of society that predominated until about 10 000 years ago and whose members survived by searching for wild plants and hunting wild animals; inequality, the division of labour, productivity, and settlement size were very low. Most foragers lived in temporary encampments, and when food was scarce, they migrated to more bountiful regions. Harsh environments could support one person per 25 to 130 square kilometres. Rich environments could support 25 to 80 people per square kilometre. Foraging communities or bands averaged about 25 to 30 people but could be as large as 100 people. -horticultural societies: a type of society that first emerged about 10 000 years ago in which people domesticate plants and use simple hand tools to garden. -pastoral societies: a type of society that first emerged about 10 000 years ago in which people domesticate cattle, camels, pigs, goats, sheep, horses, and reindeer. -agricultural societies: a type of society that first emerged about 5000 years ago in which ploughs and animal power are used to substantially increase food supply and dependability as compared with horticultural and pastoral societies. -industrial societies: a type of society that first emerged in Great Britain in the last decades of the eighteenth century and uses machines and fuel to greatly increase the supply and dependability of food and finished goods. -postindustrial societies: a type of society in which most workers are employed in the service sector and computers spur substantial increases in the division of labour and productivity; after World War II, the United States became the first postindustrial society. CHAPTER 7 -Deviance: an act in which a person violates a norm and others define the violation as deviance. -laws: a norm stipulated and enforced by government bodies. -Crime: deviance that is against the law. -Deviance occurs when a norm is violated and others define the violation as deviance. Norms vary widely, and behaviour that is considered normal in one context may be considered deviant in another one. Societies establish some norms as laws, which are norms that are specified and enforced by government bodies. Crime is deviance that breaks a law. -sociological perspective, everyone is deviant in one social context or another -More serious acts of deviance are noticed, they are punished, either informally or formally. Informal punishment: a mild sanction that is imposed during face-to-face interaction, not by the judicial system. stigmatized: a negative evaluation because of a marker that distinguishes a person from others and that is labelled as socially unacceptable. Formal punishment: the judicial system’s penalty against someone for breaking a law -Deviance and crime vary in terms of three criteria. First, as we have seen, they vary in terms of the severity of the social response, which ranges from mild disapproval to capital punishment (Hagan, 1994). Second, types of deviance and crime vary in terms of perceived harmfulness. Both actual and perceived harmfulness play a role here. Third, deviance and crime vary in terms of the degree of public agreement about whether an act should be considered deviant or criminal. Thus, the social definition of murder can change over time and differs across societies. -Social diversions: minor acts of deviance that are generally perceived as relatively harmless; evoking, at most, a mild societal reaction, such as amusement or disdain. -Social deviations: noncriminal departures from norms that are nonetheless subject to official control because some people see them as harmful while others do not. -Conflict crimes: illegal acts that many (but not all) people consider harmful to society and are punishable by the state. -consensus crimes: illegal acts that nearly all people agree are bad in themselves and harm society greatly, and are subject to severe punishment by the state. -victimless crimes: violations of the law in which no victim steps forward and is identified. second main shortcoming of official statistics is that authorities and the wider public decide which criminal acts to report and which to ignore. -Self-report surveys: respondents are asked to report their involvement in criminal activities, either as perpetrators or as victims. victimization surveys: surveys in which people are asked whether they have been victims of crime. -UCR data are used to generate two official estimates of crime in Canada that track the volume of crime: the traditional, police-reported crime rate and the crime severity index. Traditional crime rate accounts can be strongly affected by changes in commonly occurring events that are of low severity -Watching too much true crime and horror movies moral panic: an extreme overresponse that occurs when many people fervently believe that some form of deviance or crime poses a profound threat to society’s well-being. second downside of the frequent portrayal of violent crime in the mass media is that it often exploits and harms victims’ families -frequent portrayal of violent crime in the mass media may glamourize and even eroticize violence against less powerful groups -Several social statuses are correlated with criminal behaviour, including sex, age, and race. - First, a disproportionately large number of Indigenous people live in poverty. Although the great majority of people living in poverty are law-abiding, poverty and its handicaps are associated with elevated crime rates. Second, Indigenous people tend to commit so-called street crimes—breaking and entering, robbery, assault, and the like—that are more detectable than white-collar crimes such as embezzlement, fraud, copyright infringement, false advertising, and other acts associated with business ownership and professional occupations, which are less common among Indigenous peoples. Third, the police, the courts, and other institutions may discriminate against Indigenous peoples. Consequently, Indigenous people may be more likely to be apprehended, prosecuted, and convicted. Fourth, contact with Western culture has disrupted social life in many Indigenous communities -Some people think that certain “races” are inherently more law-abiding than others, but they are able to hold such an opinion only by ignoring the powerful social forces that cause so many Black and Indigenous people to be incarcerated in Canada -Howard S. Becker’s classic study of marijuana users was instrumental in establishing the idea that becoming a habitual deviant or criminal is a learning process that occurs in a social context -increased exposure to experienced deviants and criminals increases the likelihood that an individual will learn to value a deviant or criminal lifestyle and consider it normal -Labelling theory: a theory based on the argument that deviance results not so much from the actions of the deviant as from the response of others, who label the rule breaker a deviant. -Aaron Cicourel (1968) demonstrated the important role that labelling plays in defining the criminal behaviour of adolescents. He found that rule-breaking adolescents tended to be labelled as juvenile delinquents if they came from families in which the parents were divorced. he labelling process acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy. -functionalists emphasize the social dysfunctions that lead to deviant and criminal behaviour. -Durkheim (1938) initiated functionalist thinking on deviance and crime by making the controversial claim that society benefits from deviance and crime. He argued that when someone breaks a rule, it gives others an opportunity to condemn and punish the misbehaviour, reminding them of their common values. In other words, social solidarity is reinforced by clarifying the moral boundaries of the group. -Robert Merton (1938) expanded Durkheim’s theory by highlighting the dysfunctions of deviance and crime. Merton argued that although cultures often teach people to value material success, societies rarely provide enough legitimate opportunities for everyone to succeed. According to Merton’s strain theory, a discrepancy between cultural ideals and structural realities leads to strain, which increases a person’s likelihood of turning to deviance, which is dysfunctional. -One of the main problems with functionalist explanations for criminal behaviour is that they overstate the connection between crime and social class. -it is important to keep in mind that official statistics usually exaggerate class differences because they are more accurate barometers of street crime than “suite crime.” For instance, more police surveillance occurs in poorer neighbourhoods than in upper class boardrooms, and widely reported police statistics do not include some white-collar crimes because they are handled by different agencies. -Conflict theorists maintain that rich and powerful members of society impose deviant and criminal labels on others, particularly those who attempt to defy the existing social order. Meanwhile, the rich and powerful are often able to escape punishment for their own misdeeds by using their money and influence. -control theory: the theory that because rewards of deviance and crime are ample, nearly everyone would engage in deviance and crime if they could get away with it, so the degree to which people are prevented from violating norms and laws accounts for variations in the level of deviance and crime. -intersectionality: the way in which gender and/or race, social class, and sexuality interact to produce unique outcomes with respect to health, education, income, and other aspects of life. -social control: the ways in which a social system attempts to regulate people’s thoughts, feelings, appearance, and behaviour. -Internal social control: the regulation of people through socialization, which shapes their minds so they come to regard deviant actions as undesirable. -external social control: the regulation of people by imposing punishments and offering rewards. -social theorist Michel Foucault demonstrated in detail, institutions linked to the growth of the modern state—armies, police forces, public schools, healthcare systems, and other bureaucracies—also demanded strict work regimes, curricula, and procedures. These institutions existed on a much smaller scale in preindustrial times or did not exist at all. Today, such institutions penetrate our lives and sustain strong norms of belief and conduct -panopticon: a prison design that allows inmates to be constantly observed without their knowledge. -growth of modern surveillance, social control, and associated discipline is metaphorically captured in an idea introduced by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham -The key to the design is that guards can observe prisoners at all times but the inmates do not know when they are being watched. The effect is “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility” (Foucault -surveillance society: a society that uses all-encompassing surveillance technology to optimize social control. -In postindustrial societies, digital surveillance technology is almost everywhere—exemplified by cookies, spyware, clickstream, fingerprinting, in-store video surveillance, closed-circuit television, credit cards, metal detectors, drug and DNA testing, health records, highway toll passes, and searchable databases. -medicalization of deviance refers to the fact that “human problems or experiences become defined as medical problems, usually in terms of illnesses, diseases, or syndromes”. definitions of deviance changed, deviance increasingly came under the sway of the medical and psychiatric establishments -many possible reasons why the number of mental disorders and the incidence of such disorders in the population has grown. People are living longer than they used to so they have more time to develop a mental disorder. They may be experiencing more stress than they used to. The weakening authority of religious institutions and families over the lives of individual leaves the treatment of mental health problems more open to the medical and psychiatric establishments. -preindustrial societies, criminals were publicly humiliated, tortured, or put to death, depending on the severity of their transgressions. In the industrial era, depriving criminals of their freedom by putting them in prison seemed less harsh, more “civilized” (Durkheim -people still take a benign view of prisons, seeing them as opportunities for rehabilitation. They believe that prisoners, while serving time, can be taught how to be productive citizens on release -Canada, the rehabilitative ethos predominated from the 1950s to the early 1970s, when many prisons sought to reform criminals by offering them psychological counselling, drug therapy, skills training, education, and other programs that would help at least the less violent offenders reintegrate into society -Canadians scoff at the idea that prisons can rehabilitate criminals. Some people see prison as a means of deterrence. In this view, people will be less inclined to commit crimes if they know they are likely to be caught and serve long and unpleasant prison terms. Others think of prisons as institutions of revenge. They believe that depriving criminals of their freedom and forcing them to live in poor conditions is fair retribution for their illegal acts -2021, an average of nearly 40 000 Canadians were in prison on any given day -Canada, capital punishment (execution) has not been used since 1962, and was formally abolished in 1976 -recidivism rate: the percentage of previously imprisoned people who commit another crime, usually within two years after release from prison -reform to our prison regime involves the decriminalization or legalization of certain actions. (Decriminalization allows for fines or other non-prison penalties; legalization does not. -One approach is that of harm reduction, which recommends that illegal drug users be regarded as patients, not criminals. The intent of harm reduction programs is to reduce the damage caused by substance use -Criminalization: the process by which an activity is turned into an illegal act -Restorative justice: an approach to justice that focuses not on punishment but on rehabilitating offenders through reconciliation with victims and the larger community. -diversion: third reform to tough prison regimes that has been proposed in recent years involves reducing the number of incarcerated offenders by diverting them from the court and prison systems. Chapter 17 -postmodern world, the media are pervasive -Today’s media are multi-platformed. A consumer might spend half an hour viewing a televised talent show and another half hour on the network’s website to view follow-up commentary, post their own comments about the show, or vote for a dance contestant. -functionalist theory of media effects was developed before social media existed and therefore focuses on the mass media. It hinges on the idea that, because of the sheer scale of modern society, face-to-face interaction is less viable as a means of communication than it was in earlier days. -mass media perform an important function by coordinating the operation of society. However, according to functionalist theorists, their significance does not stop there. Mass media are also important agents of socialization -third function of the mass media involves social control; to a degree, mass media help to ensure conformity. mass media’s fourth and final function is to provide entertainment - notion that the media facilitate social cohesion became less convincing once the Internet entered the picture -Conflict theorists argue that dominant classes and political groups benefit disproportionately from the media in two ways. First, for the most part, the media broadcast beliefs, values, and ideas that create widespread acceptance of the basic structure of society, including its injustices and inequalities. Second, ownership of the media is highly concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies and is highly profitable for them. Thus, the mass media are a source of economic inequality. Let’s consider these issues in detail. -just four multimedia giants control over 80 percent of the broadcasting and telecommunications industry: Bell Canada, Rogers (which recently merged with Shaw), Telus, and Québecor. Control of the newspaper industry is also concentrated -Media bias: advertising, flak, sourcing -ome governments conduct digital censorship and surveillance of citizens on a mass scale and energetically protect their ability to do so. Some people don’t mind much if the government restricts what they can access on the Internet and looks into their private affairs. They strongly support government values and say they have nothing to hide. Others value their privacy on principle and also worry that digital surveillance leads to more restrictive forms of social control that impinge on basic human rights -Young people have come to see influencing as a career option. A 2022 survey found that over one in four American members of Generation Z planned on becoming a social media influencer -Attention capital: the capacity to gain, hold onto, and spread attention -cultural studies: popular interdisciplinary area of research which focuses not just on the cultural meanings that mass media producers try to transmit, but also on the way audiences filter and interpret mass media messages in the context of their own interests, experiences, and values -Stuart Hall (1980), one of the foremost proponents of this approach, emphasizes that people are not empty vessels into which the mass media pour a defined assortment of beliefs, values, and ideas. Rather, audience members take an active role in consuming the products of the mass media -insights offered by an interpretive perspective is the way we define internet privacy - found that in TV dramas, women tended to be cast as homemakers and secretaries, and in other subordinate roles, while men tended to be cast as professionals and authority figures. Women usually appeared in domestic settings, men in public settings. Advertising targeted only women as purchasers of household products and appliances. -stereotypical portrayals of Indigenous peoples have predominated since the advent of mass media -social media, marginalized communities with fast Internet access have more opportunities for artistic and cultural expression than they have in the mass media, which are still dominated by White Canadians -social relations and what people think they know about them are in a state of flux. Multiple realities exist, each with its unique criteria for truth. For poststructuralists, the media, especially social media, play a major role in creating these multiple realities. -interaction between audiences and the traditional mass media (television, radio, and newspapers) is generally weighted in favour of the media. Audience members do not mindlessly absorb messages from these sources. However, they exercise little control over content. -contrast, the Internet, especially its social media applications, offers users more creative opportunities than do traditional mass media. By partially blurring the distinction between producer and consumer, the Internet has the potential to make media somewhat more democratic. -media imperialism: the domination of a mass medium by a single national culture and the undermining of other national cultures -Advertising is a prime example of top-down influence. It is by far the main source of revenue for most big Internet companies. Advertising seeks to influence (some would say “manipulate”) consumers to buy products and services -People write algorithms—the rules that computers follow to solve problems—to drive the Internet and social media -Some forms of Internet control are resisted by countertrends. Another example of resistance is opposition to user-based billing (the more you use and the faster you download it, the more you pay). -net neutrality: the principle that Internet service providers should not restrict access to any online content. -Social media offer people opportunities to manipulate the way they present themselves to others and explore aspects of their selves that they may suppress in embodied social interaction. -some analysts expected the Internet to isolate people, creating private worlds that would lead to the decline of family and community life. Others held the opposite opinion—that the Internet would create opportunities for people to form new communities based not on geographical proximity or blood ties but on common interests. -social media open up new ways of engaging in social change. People advocate and spread awareness of a wide variety of environmental issues, human rights, and other causes Chapter 18 -Privileged people and disadvantaged people have always struggled against each other. Often, the struggle takes an individual form -Sometimes, struggles for justice, freedom, and equality take a collective form; people band together to fight more effectively than any individual—or many individuals acting separately—could ever hope to do. -Collective action: people acting together to bring about or resist social, political, and economic change -routine collective action: collective action that follows a well-established repertoire of behaviour and is nonviolent. -non-routine collective action: collective action that ignores convention and may be violent. -Social movements: enduring, institutionalized forms of collective action aimed at changing or resisting change to the social, political, and/or economic order. -Counter-movements: social movements that seek to undermine the goals of social movements that are formed by disadvantaged people -#MeToo movement had been initiated a decade earlier by Black feminist activist Tarana Burke. However, the 2017 outcry was initiated by a message that actor Alyssa Milano posted on her Twitter (now known as X) account. It called on victims of sexual assault and harassment to post #MeToo as an update. -rise of feminism and the women’s movement in the 1960s attracted many male supporters. However, it also incited some men to create a counter-movement aimed at publicizing what its members regarded as the excesses of feminism. The men’s counter-movement sought to limit the rights and privileges of women while protecting and advancing the rights and privileges of men - Governments throughout the world were controlled by royal families and their representatives or, in the best case, by political parties elected by men who owned a substantial amount of property and were White members of the majority religious group. -breakdown theory: a theory claiming that social movements emerge when major disruptions in traditional norms, expectations, and patterns of behaviour occur. -absolute deprivation: a condition involving the extreme lack of valued social rewards such as income or prestige. -relative deprivation: a condition involving the development of an intolerable gap between the social rewards people feel they deserve and the social rewards they expect to receive. -solidarity theory: a theory claiming that social movements emerge when potential members can (1) mobilize resources, (2) take advantage of new political opportunities, and (3) avoid a high level of social control by authorities. -Resource mobilization: the process by which social movements crystallize because of the increasing organizational, material, and other resources of movement members. -Political opportunities: conditions that promote social movement growth, occurring during election campaigns, when influential allies offer support to insurgents, when ruling political alignments become unstable, and when elite groups become divided and conflict with one another. -Social control: methods that authorities use to contain collective action, including co-optation, concessions, and coercion. -union density: the number of union members in a given location as a percentage of non-agricultural workers, which measures the organizational power of unions. -frame alignment: the process by which individual interests, beliefs, and values are made congruent or complementary with the activities, goals, and ideology of a social movement. -repertoires of contention: historically specific forms of protest that include what people know how to do when they protest, what others expect them to do when they protest, and the actual form of protest they engage in. -civil citizenship: recognizes the right to free speech, freedom of religion, and justice before the law -political citizenship: recognizes the right to run for office and vote. -Social citizenship: recognizes the right to a certain level of economic security and full participation in the social life of the country. -new social movements: became prominent in the 1970s. They attract a disproportionately large number of highly educated people in the social, educational, and cultural fields, universalize the struggle for citizenship, and adopt new repertoires of action. -universal citizenship: recognizes the right of marginal groups and of humanity as a whole to full citizenship rights. -Some new social movements, such as the peace movement, the environmental movement, and the human rights movement promote the rights not of specific groups but of humanity as a whole, to peace, security, and a clean environment -New social movements are also novel in that they attract a disproportionately large number of well-educated and well-to-do people from the social, educational, and cultural fields: teachers, college and university professors, journalists, social workers, artists, actors, writers, and student apprentices to these occupations. new social movements are new in that they have more potential for globalization than did previous social movements. globalisation of social movements was facilitated by the ease with which people in various national movements could travel and communicate with like-minded activists from other countries Chapter 19 -some people likened population growth to an explosion from a bomb (Ehrlich, 1968). They viewed population growth with alarm, foreseeing environmental catastrophe and mass starvation. Their dramatic solution was to encourage and, if necessary, coerce people into having fewer children. Hence, environmental awareness grew alongside transnational family planning and population control projects -those who focused only on the devastating impact of population growth missed another way that the analogy of a bomb is applicable. An explosion is a short-term event. The same turned out to be true of population growth -Malthus proposed his theory, the amount of food produced for each person on the planet has increased rapidly through technological advances (Lam, 2011). This result is the opposite of the slow growth Malthus predicted. Malthus believed that positive checks would come into play if the population in late-eighteenth-century Western Europe grew much larger. Yet the Western European population increased from 187 million people in 1801 to 321 million in 1900 -Demographic transition theory: charts how societies progress from a pre-modern regime of high fertility and high mortality to a postmodern regime of low fertility and low mortality -crude death rate: annual number of deaths per 1000 people in a population. crude birth rate: the annual number of live births per 1000 people in a population. -During the second stage of population growth, the early industrial period, the crude death rate dropped and life expectancy, or average lifespan, increased because of improved nutrition and better hygiene. However, the crude birth rate remained high. The population grew rapidly as a result of people living longer and women having nearly as many babies as in the preindustrial era. -third stage of population growth, the mature industrial period, the crude death rate continues to fall, albeit less steeply than before. -replacement level: the number of children that each woman must have on average for population size to remain stable, ignoring migration (2.1 children). -immigration: the inflow of people into one country from one or more other countries and their settlement in the destination country. -emigration: the outflow of people from one country and their settlement in one or more other countries. -Second demographic transition theory: a theory that suggests that modern societies are undergoing a transition characterized by sustained below-replacement fertility, with no return to a stationary population (where births are balanced by deaths). -post-materialism: a theory proposed by Inglehart that suggests once societies are able to meet survival-based needs, their priorities turn toward higher-order needs such as autonomy and self-expression. -Any country that experiences prolonged below-replacement fertility must inevitably confront reductions to the size of its population -population decline is not the only consequence of sustained sub-replacement fertility. Another is population aging. That is, with fewer children being born into a population, the age structure of the population pyramid becomes narrower at its base. -low-fertility trap: occurs when a prolonged period of below-replacement fertility becomes selfreinforcing as a result of demographic, economic, and social change, preventing a country from raising its fertility rate. -Urbanization: the growth of towns and cities, often at the expense of rural areas, as people move from the countryside to urban areas. -Urban centres: settlements with a minimum of 50 000 inhabitants plus a population density of at least 1500 people per square kilometre. -Urban clusters: settlements with at least 5000 inhabitants and a population density of at least 300 people per square kilometre. -Rural areas: areas with less than 5000 people. -mega-cities: a city with a population of 10 million or more people -green spaces: an area of grass, trees, or other vegetation in an otherwise urban environment, such as parks, community woodlands and wetlands, and rooftop gardens. -global trend of urbanization may have lulled some people into viewing ever larger cities as inevitable. History, however, serves as a constant reminder that wars, epidemics, and natural catastrophe can quickly empty a city of its residents -demographic change is clearly a factor in urban shrinkage. second reason for urban shrinkage is the shift away from industrialization. Urbanization and industrialization once grew hand in hand -global warming: the gradual worldwide increase in average surface temperature. -Climate change: a long-term change in the average condition of the atmosphere, which encompasses temperature, precipitation, humidity, and wind. -urban heat island effect: occurs when the temperature in urban areas is higher than it is in outlying areas. -Industrial pollution is the emission of various impurities into the air, water, and soil through industrial processes. It is a second major form of environmental threat -biodiversity: the enormous variety of plant and animal species inhabiting Earth. -Biotechnology: the modification of biological processes, organisms, or systems for human purposes. -green technology: any technology whose use is intended to mitigate or reverse the effects of human activity on the environment. -environmental racism: environmental policies and practices that result in disproportionate exposure among communities with a large racialized population. -environmental justice: advocating the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people—regardless of class, race, gender, age, and so on—with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. -Cultural lag: occurs when people’s values change more slowly than their technologies do. -